Down in New Orleans, which corporate reformers treat as a model for the nation, there’s trouble.
One of the charter groups, called the Algiers Charter Schools Association, is in hot water with parents. Algiers has eight charters, enrolling over 5,000 students. It recently lost its CEO and hired an interim chief academic officer, Aamir Raza, from New York City to implement changes. Raza is a management consultant (not an educator, needless to say) who had worked for the New York City Department of Education charter office.
Algiers has this problem: Some of its charters are high-flying (a 93-97% pass rate on the state tests) and some do very poorly (a 7% pass rate on the same test). Critics in New Orleans attribute the disparity to a conscious policy by the Algiers leadership to use certain schools as “dumping grounds” for low-performing students so the others look like miracle schools.
Raza, who is on a 90-day contract at $16,000 a month, decided to shake things up. He fired the central office staff and announced his intention to move the principals from the high-performing schools to the low-performing schools. This caused a ruckus.
Parents were furious. They held meetings to express their rage; they did not want to lose their principal, and they were outraged by the lack of transparency of Raza’s decisions.
When the Algiers association held its board meeting, the parents turned out by the hundreds to express their anger. The president of the Algiers Neighborhood Presidents’ Council said, “”I am unfortunately going to advise you that in the opinion of all 16 neighborhood presidents, Mr. Raza exhibited the utmost lack of respect, extreme arrogance and uncompromising demeanor.” Of course, Raza was doing only what he saw school leaders in New York City do for the past ten years, that is, whatever they wanted.
But this time, for once, maybe for the first time ever in charter school history, the voices of the parents were heard. The board backed down. The board put a hold on Raza’s proposal.
Perhaps the most outrageous idea from Raza never got past the memo phase.
A leaked memo from Raza’s office revealed details of a plan to shame the administrators and teachers at one of the lowest performing schools. The head of the Algiers association told a reporter from the New Orleans Times-Picayune that this idea would not be implemented.
But here it is:
“The document, with a heading from Raza’s firm, the Raza Consulting Group, includes a list of suggested motivational methods, including “Order Eisenhower Charter School shirts for all teachers and administrators with Eisenhower Charter School on the back and Grade D on the front.”
“It is recommended that the principal wear the Grade D shirt every day as a reminder to the school staff after enrollment drive is over,” the document continues. “Declare Friday as dress down day only for those teachers and administrators who will wear the D grade shirt.”
Referring to the state-issued school performance scores based largely on standardized test scores, the Raza report also calls to, “Display the school’s current letter grade (as determined by SPS scores) in teacher lounge and all other areas of the school once the enrollment drive is over.”
And it says, “Place the Grade D in large font on top of each internal communication and memos to the school staff.”
Really, you can’t make this stuff up.
This confirms my belief that the corporate reform agenda is not 21st century thinking. It is actually 19th century thinking, taking us back to the days when children were told to wear a dunce cap and sit in the corner. Only now it is the teachers who will wear the dunce cap and a big letter D.
I wonder if Raza, whose group consults for business, has made similar proposals to major corporations to motivate their employees? Can you imagine a corporate headquarters where every employee is required to wear a D on his or her suit?
I thought I read the Commissioner in Louisiana was also sent from NYC. Bloomberg sent John White to Jindal who somehow manipulated getting him appointed. White is another TFA education expert after a very short teaching career. Evidently Rahmn Emanuel just met with Bloomberg to get some union busting tips. They are working together to destroy the public schools and the unions and they rationalize this as being all for the children. You’re correct Diane. You can’t make this up.
I read this on another blog (http://jonathanpelto.com/2012/07/02/this-is-what-were-paying-for/), so I won’t take credit. However, I think this applies. Just because you have power and money, it does not make you the smartest guy in the room.
Could this be a part of the reformers’ problem?
The Dunning–Kruger effect is a cognitive bias in which unskilled people make poor decisions and reach erroneous conclusions, but their incompetence denies them the metacognitive ability to recognize their mistakes. The unskilled therefore suffer from illusory superiority, rating their ability as above average, much higher than it actually is, while the highly skilled underrate their own abilities, suffering from illusory inferiority. Actual competence may weaken self-confidence, as competent individuals may falsely assume that others have an equivalent understanding.
Kruger and Dunning proposed that, for a given skill, incompetent people will:
1.tend to overestimate their own level of skill;
2.fail to recognize genuine skill in others;
3.fail to recognize the extremity of their inadequacy;
4.recognize and acknowledge their own previous lack of skill, if they can be trained to substantially improve
How do we force #4?
# 4 is what Socrates was up to, and look what happened to him!
I hate to say it, but I think it will probably take a school tragedy before this country wakes up. So much shifting of children to hastily decided charter school rooms added to the arrogance of charter officials can not end well. Experienced elected officials should be accountable also…they have no excuse other than irresponsible allegiance to grossly flawed policies. These are precious children, not cattle in a barn.
Unfortunately Jojo, I am afraid the tragedy is occurring as we speak. We will reap the devastating results of our abuse of our greatest resource in the years to come.
ReTired Tucson Teacher / TucsonCitizen.com
Tragedy? As if that doesn’t happen in the public schools?
The comment of the D shirt made me cry. I think this thinking has roots prior to the 19th century….The Crucible comes to mind
From a poster: The flogging will continue until morale improves.
The problem with education is all the standardized testing. Let teachers do what they do best. TEACH. In New York the State makes future teacher take three tests to become certified if they don’t pass, they don’t get certified. Stop making teachers teach to test. Have teachers teach. They constantly compare the US to other countries. When they make comparisons, they forget that in the US everyone is entitled to a free and appropriate education. When our students get to 6th or 8th grade they are not tested and then weeded out where only the brightest go onto college bound programs while the other children go to trade school. Let our teachers teach without interference from the corporate world and you will see improvement. Stop giving students standardize test and teach the whole curriculum, not just the test. In the long run we will have brighter, more complete individuals.
Well that does it. Teachers (nearly) officially wearing a scarlett letter. Look for teachers in the center of town in the stocks soon with signs about their transgressions hung around their necks. But I think that’s more like the 17th century.
Raza should be required to read the Scarlet Letter and write a 15-page research paper on the comparative effectiveness of shame as a punishment in both the 18th and the 21st centuries.
I’m sure they can find someone with ideas that are less stupid who will do the job for only $15,000 a month.
Charters are nothing but another public school. I don’t mind the competition, but I’m not fooled into thinking a charter school is the best fix for eduction. Many make the same mistakes as public schools by embracing the failed fads Progressive push.
However I have no problem with anyone jumping in the mix and trying to find the right recipe to make a school successful. Obviously the Core Knowledge Charters are ones I’d put my own children in and I have never considered public education for them.
As I often say about my home state of Arizona, “Marching steadfastly back into the 19th century!”
I read the “D” idea in the Picayune when it was first published. I was absolutely outraged. What an absolutely stupid inhumane idea. Imagine getting up and getting dressed to go to school and your choice….put the shirt on with the big D on it, knowing it doesn’t mean Dallas! It would certainly not fit with a New Orleans nickname, “The Big Easy! The state of education in the city as well as the whole state is indeed not easy these days. I don’t have any idea where the folks found Raza but I’m sure he won’t get a glowing recommendation from the Algiers Charters and their parents for the next place that is looking for a reformer. I wouldn’t recommend John White or Bobby Jindal for any future jobs, either.
Understand well people, the next economic frontier is education. They’ve derailed housing with the whole mortgage bond/CDO thing and transferred a lot of wealth to the 1%. Now Fox, Washington Post, University of Phoenix and many others are investing HEAVILY in education [online software because teachers aren’t really necessary, high stakes testing, and charters]. This is not about education, or children, it’s about MONEY! There’s a lot of it, and they want it. All you need is to set up a sophisticated lobbying network to sell it. Ask any parent and they will tell you that the public school system has problems – not that they know what to do about it. They’ve been sold that line because that’s the simplest solution. No consultant or politician is going to cite poverty as an issue.
I would contend that if the solutions that the politicians and consultants are marketing are so warranted and necessary, they should put their faith/power where their voice is: send their children to the public schools. There is rarely, if ever, data to support any of their methodology for change. Let’s get down to it. Throw the political and consultant children into the frey.
This is another one of those moments where life seems to imitate a Dilbert comic strip. What’s interesting is that if you peruse current business journals about strategy and so on, all this simplistic and heavy-handed “motivation” stuff is precisely what they are advising against. I wonder how successful Mr. Raza’s business consulting clients have been.
Why bring an awful person like Raza to New Orleans? Was there no one in the entire state of La. To step in and help failing schools? What about treating people with dignity? He certainly demands respect or else. To me the schools should go back NOPS. I don’t see where Charter has made a huge difference in New Orleans.
They haven’t, Morgan.
I was an employee at Eisenhower School where we were told to wear the “D” shirts. As much as Raza is to blame for insisting that we wear this humiliation daily, the principal, Deanna Rogers, from Kansas City, Kansas, is to blame also. She had an instrumental part in getting Raza down here. Deanna Rogers is not a principal, she is a person who as she has said, “tear down schools, not build them up.” She fired thirteen people this year, half who spoke up professionally and calmly about Raza insisting we clean the building to make it look pristine one month before the statewide criterion and norm referenced tests. Rogers is sneaky, cowardly, intimidated, and ultimately the worst principal I have ever come across. Eisenhower was a school that was doing great! Since she came the teacher turnover rate has doubled and the student enrollment has dropped tremendously.
Aamir Raza must leave Algiers Schools and Deanna Rogers must leave Eisenhower.
Diane please do not forget the identical memo sent to McDonogh 32 where the principal, teachers and staff were instructed to place an “F” on all correspondence and on their shirts as well. Also, my question to Raza is what outcome did he anticipate from the obvious degrading of those schools and the ACSA Board did not see anything wrong with it.
There is NO school in ACSA with a 7% passing rate on LEAP, iLEAP, or EOC state-standardized tests. (that must have been a typo, right?) There is NO school in ACSA with selective admissions. (these charters do have very few vacancies each year due to a high retention rate)…
There are, however, only TWO schools which have enjoyed steady improvement which can be directly attributed to three things: stable school administration, a mostly veteran teaching staff, and a non-transient student body.
No miracle- just the best principals leading the best teachers to facilitate student success AND retention! Stable schools ARE successful schools in NOLA!
The two schools that ACSA is poised to lose charters for have had too much transience in leadership and teaching staff: Recipe for failure. They should be trying to establish some sense of stability (not threats or shame tacticts) for administrators, teachers, and students…and those scores will go up!
Diane is absolutely right that some Algiers Charter School Associaton (ACSA) schools “do very poorly (a 7% pass rate on the same test).” Here’s the link to the first reported scores in 2007 for 4th grade LEAP (the high-stakes progression test). Any score below “basic” is a failing score:
http://bit.ly/MLEQzn
Go to the last page and you will find ACSA school Martin Behrman with a 98% pass rate in math and McDonogh 32 with a 7% pass rate in math! How is that possible: same charter operator for both schools that determines curriculum, leadership, and faculty at both schools which are ostensibly open-admission lottery schools and are approximately five blocks apart. Critics argue that ACSA is sorting students–sending the best students to Behrman (then representing it’s performance as the norm) and sending the low-performing students to it’s other schools. If students are chosen randomly, then why does did the application for the schools require parents submit previous LEAP scores and report cards? For what purpose could that information serve if students were chosen by random lottery?
But let’s not stop there. ACSA also operated Tubman (28% pass rate in math); Eisenhower (31% pass rate); and Fischer (28% pass rate).
Things have not changed much over the last five years; Behrman is always above 90% and most of the other elementary schools struggle. Performance was so bad at Tubman that the state eventually took the school away from ACSA. The disparities in school performances cannot be attributed to school leadership since the schools all have the same leadership.
Lance Hill
That stat referred to 4th grade Math results the very FIRST year for Mc32 after the storm (2006-2007 WHICH WAS BEHRMAN’S SECOND YEAR). Not a fair comparison. Obviously, there were start up issues at 32 that first year. (Didn’t realize we were going back that far to the very lowest scores ever for 32.) Better to look at the data from the past 5 years (’08-’12 test results, LEAP and iLEAP all grades).
District leadership/district staffing has constanly changed over the past few years at ACSA. When I speak of stability, I refer to the fact that Walker and Behrman have had the same “SCHOOL-LEVEL” leaders despite changes at the district level. Tubman, Fischer, the others have ALL had major changes in administration and staffing, and a high-turnover of students, the other two have not.
Let me clarifiy my point in more detail : “Higher stability of school-level staffing and higher student retention rates are positively correlated to higher student achievement in ACSA schools”. (time to collect the data to support this point- anyone need a research topic?)
The question was whether or not there were profound disparities in the scores of schools operated by ACSA, to the extent that in the same year one school could post a 98% pass rate while another posted a 7% pass rate. I think the data sheets I posted prove that point. Now, is the comparison valid? Behrman started operation in January 2006 and McDonogh 32 started in September 2006–so both schools had their first full year of operation and their first year of testing in 2006-2007. I think the comparison is valid for that year and you will see the same disparities regardless of what year we look at. If one needs more evidence they only need to look at subsequent years. Did the disparities continue? Is there evidence of skimming the best students into one school at the expense of other schools? The answer is yes–the huge test score disparities persisted for years. You can compare all the Behrman and McDonogh 32 scores for 2007-2012 along with the other ACSA elementary schools at :
http://doe.louisiana.gov/topics/leap_results.html
We are asked to believe that a charter management organization could only successfully manage one out of five schools and for unexplained reasons failed to successfully manage rest of its elementary schools. I suppose that’s possible, but is it not a more plausible explanation that ACSA created their own failures by skimming off the best students to produce one high-performing school at the expense of their other schools–and then marketed their one high-performing school as representative of all their schools? In either case, charter schools don’t appear to be succeeding with most of their students–either because of mismanagement or skimming and dumping students.
Lance Hill
It is my understanding that one cannot skim and/or dump at OPEN enrollment schools. That would be impossible and illegal. Yes, you are RIGHT. There have been disparities all over our fair city and for years. Within NOPS, ACSA, and other groups. In our efforts to explain them, we should not make claims and post them as facts when the real explanation for such disparities is looking us right in the face. I offered an explanation fir tge disparites. My explanation can be proven easily. The data on student, teacher, and admin retention post-Katrina in NOLA would speak volumes. It would substantiate my claims. Perhaps you might conduct a survey or focus group or study.
Ask the school level leaders why the disparities exist. Ask the teacher leaders. Ask the parents. It’s no miracle, its no scam or cover-up.
And when you ask, dont forget to ask THEM for possible solutions to closing the gap.
Yes, legally open charters are not supposed to skim the best students and force out low-scoring students, but skimming and forcing out low-performing students is a widespread problem in New Orleans and has never been punished by the state. In fact, some “open enrollment schools can refuse to re-enroll students scoring below a “C” (selective retention). Read Newsweek’s coverage of the systematic exclusion of special needs students in New Orleans: some charters expelled more than 50% of special needs students:
. http://bit.ly/NewsweekOnNewOrleans
This year the Recovery School District (RSD), the state agency that oversees all the take-over schools, implemented a district-wide application process designed, in part, to prevent charter skimming. If you consult the “number of test takers” from year to year at the link I provided, you will find a correlation between rising test scores and shrinking class size at many schools.
In interviews with teachers in 2009, several teachers at charter schools told us that their schools systematically counseled out low-performing students, in some cases threatening to expel students if they did not voluntarily withdraw so the action would not be reported as an expulsion We don’t need “focus groups” to prove what state officials by their own actions have already confirmed is a problem: we need a federal investigation of violation of open enrollment requirements tied to federal funding. .
Lance Hill
How about comments on the ongoing scandal of quasi-private public schools that are allowed to screen out students via admissions test and auditions? New Orleans has had some, as have cities all over the country. Personally, I think NO public k-12 school should be allowed to have an admissions test. The NY Times points out one of the best known has had cheating scandals for years: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/10/nyregion/70-students-at-stuyvesant-to-retake-exams-after-cheating-case.html?_r=1&hpw
Does this bother you, or are you ok with quasi private “magnets”?
Joe Nathan, parent of 3 children who attended and graduated from St. Paul, Minnesota public schools open to all, k-12.
There are many dissenters and very little solid recommendations by faculty who have been fired, outraged parents and even older students whose opinions are still warranted to be heard. Instead of personal attacks on the character of Aamir Raza, groups should be mobilizing and constructing a better solution to present at these town hall style meetings. I have found that those who scream the loudest or in this case, blog the most, are not always the ones who know what they would do if presented with a troubled educational system. I would like to hear a more constructive conversation at these meetings and less personal attacks. I was under the impression that this was about the children and as an outsider looking in it is hard to find that point from the commentary I have heard and read. Good Luck to all involved.
If you have been following the debate on New Orleans schools for the last seven years, you know that critics of the two-tiered unequal school system that charter organizations like ACSA have created have, for years, offered constructive solutions to remedy the problems that the market-model creates: it’s inherent market-force tendency to sort and segregate students for profitability. The solution, the critics have been saying, is to take the charters back from private self-appointed boards who disregard the will of the people and return them to local democratic control as was the promise of Act 35, the original school take-over law.
We have an elected reform school board in New Orleans that has operated with far greater efficiency, integrity, and accountability than any charter board for the last 8 years. Democracy is self-correcting unlike private boards (think Enron). The market-based competitive models of education can not reform itself any more than the market-based health care industry could reform itself: the both stay afloat by excluding high-cost customers. Schools should not be modeled on competing “factories as innovators” turning out the cheapest products possible to drive the less efficient out of business.
No outside consultant can fix a system that financially rewards schools that reject high-needs, high-cost students in order to maintain a profit or surplus. The consultants have no real solutions so they rely on command style, gimmicks, and shaming the students and faculty for problems created by an inherently flawed system. The passion and anger of the parents comes from frustration with seven years of elite and imposed hierarchical control of schools.