The Texas Tribune is beginning a series of reports about how consultants and tutoring companies are ripping off millions of dollars in Texas, thanks to NCLB.
Race to the Top will empower many more scams and legitimate frauds, as companies proliferate that claim to know how to “turnaround” schools, how to train teachers, how to train leaders, how to do everything that schools should know how to do for themselves. And don’t forget the data portals! don’t forget the data mining! don’t forget the vendors!
This is the Age of the Golden Rip-Off, sponsored by the U.S. Department of Education and the U.S. Congress.
I can’t help but remember my own schooling. In retrospect, it seems like the kind of thing you now find only in private schools. There was a principal and an assistant principal. There was a guidance counselor to help you think about whether to go to college and where. There were teachers. There were no consultants. There was no data mining. There were no elaborate statistical schemes from headquarters on how to measure teacher quality. There was….human judgment. There were real people teaching children. How quaint!
No more of that. There is an industry to care, feed, and enrich with our taxpayer dollars.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
I have an email from a superintendent that states that children in an elementary school are “safe (physically, mentally, emotionally, and intellectually) because they are “monitored” in their learning”. It’s a great thing the government is providing money for CTE programs to include public safety careers as schools are now seemingly pipelines to area Department of Corrections and we are going to need to beef up our prison system. How sad for all of these budding artists, scientists, musicians, and great thinkers.
CTE???
CTE – Career and Technology Education … barbering, cosmetology, IT, health care occupations (CNA training), etc. It’s the new acronym for industrial tech classes, we like our acronyms in education.
Thanks, Michelle!
And yes we do like acronyms. Joanna has let me know that I get an LTP or BB in acronyms-ha ha!!
I think the acronym has rubbed off on me in many ways. For example, every year we have a New Year’s Day hair of the dog party and last year I had napkins printed that read “HOTDNYDDI”–Hair of the Dog New Year’s Day Drop In.
I never really thought about what school teacher move that was.
I’m such a dork.
Maybe you are not dorky enough, Duane, to get the whole acronym part. I don’t know, though, the Wilson list is pretty darn dorky (but good stuff).
I D T T R A (I digress; time to read another post)
Part of the reason I don’t always get acronyms is that I don’t text nor tweet where brevity in letters, and perhaps shallowness in thought dominate.
And I don’t know that I would classify Wilson’s thoughts/works as “dorky” but perhaps “geeky” in the sense that yes, it is a very fine dissection of the practices that most people have no clue as to the existence of the problems, errors and falsehoods associated with those practices and that is a very “specialized” way of examining practices. I try to take the “geekyness” aspect out of it and put it in more common language so that more can understand.
And that’s part of the problem of unaffiliated/unascribed acronyms, it makes edutalk “geeky”.
The acronyms do get annoying, but I think every field has them. Like for real estate there’s the HUD and the DOT and even Freddie and Frannie Mac are acronyms, I think.
Good practice is spelling it out the first time with the acronym in parenthesis, and afterwards just the acronym. But I forget to do that on blogs.
I do remember in Quiz Bowl (I was a dork and a geek) in middle and high school acronyms were a HUGE part of the information we studied. I think the problem in education is that they change so often and there are far too many of them.
However, that does not make me wish for a national curriculum, national way of evaluating students and teachers or anything anymore national about our schools. I’ll take a hodgpodge of acronyms over that any day.
I like the Wilson, list. Just giving you a hard time. 🙂
One school system for which I worked recognized the acronym issue and printed a glossary for each incoming teacher. I still asked on several occasions to have an acronym explained. The first time I felt very daring for admitting my ignorance. I was so ignorant that I didn’t realize that the acronyms frequently changed by school district. I didn’t know that I wasn’t as ignorant as I thought I was!
I consult for private schools, and increasing many of the schools are adding multiple layers of red-tape and administration. I just spoke to a school headmaster with 230 students and 3 principals, and 6 secretaries (2 for each principal). It’s not just public schools with these problems.
I agree wholeheartedly with the premise of this post.
However, I have to say that we teachers have complacently allowed these “managers” to take over with only the ineffectual bleating on our blogs.
If this wholesale disrespect of teachers and the societal good that teachers do is to be effectively addressed, then we teachers must stand and demonstrate our true worth.
Otherwise, I am not optimistic about the future.
Quite correct Brutus 2011, quite correct.
You’ve hit on something I have been wondering about too. Why teachers? And why has it all happened so quickly? (It seems to me, anyway. I know there has a been a push since 1983 or earlier, but it seems most of the damage has been pretty recent). ?
Republican governors and state legislatures, an aversion to things paid for by taxes, a belief that public schools create Democrats.
The Bad Ass Teachers Association (BATS) are planning a March on Washington on July 28th next year. This is a time and place where we can “stand and demonstrate our truth.”
“There was a principal and an assistant principal. There was a guidance counselor to help you think about whether to go to college and where. There were teachers. There were no consultants.”
The scarey thing is I can’t remember one K-8 administrator and only have a vague recollection of a principal in high school. I know I went to a college counselor, but I have no recollection of him/her. I do remember almost all of my teachers’ faces even if their names have disappeared into the mist. I guess perspective changes with age. I remember the principals at my children’s schools. Fortunately, they graduated before most of the nonsense with consultants.
In LA these consultants are hired to do the jobs the overpaid incompetent suits do not want to be bothered with. In the last ten years, LAUSD ‘s administrative personnel have grown a whopping 25%,! And this district was already notoriously bloated. The cost of consultants is staggering. To make matters worse, the lure of vendors has been more about kickbacks and careerist agendas than sensible yet progressive pedagogy. These scams have us buying new editions with small changes every other year and providing two huge, poorly organized text books to students so they can keep one at home and one in class. For a HS student carrying home books would require a wagon. Now the iPad is supposed to remedy that, and it can, but the district has not even begun to plan or prepare for what could literally revitalize our schools and save us so much money and heartache. But those goals are never in their minds . Or PEARSON LEARNING’s . These EducRAT$ cannot even articulate anything that lofty, so consultants do it for them at $80k a pop.
I admit these people could sell ice cubes to Eskimos. However, they do not see their “vison” through and it never truly becomes the mission of LAUSD. Teachers will do what they can to realize these goals but every time we get going and things start to work, LAUSD suits hire some new consultants with a new program to push upon us and implement just long enough to reinvent their excuses for existing. It is a very unfortunate and ugly set of circumstances for schools, but what a boon for the education industry and these white chalk criminals
“Teachers will do what they can to realize these goals”
Yes, and they are disparagingly (at least in my mind) known as sheeple being led to the slaughter.
Consultants are ripping off taxpayers, for-profit testing and tutoring companies are ripping off taxpayers, and government-funded programs like AmeriCorps and City Year are ripping off taxpayers.
I just learned about City Year, a program where new high school graduates become tutors in inner-city schools for one year, in exchange for a stipend of $12,100 and scholarship money. What ever happened to teaching and tutoring as professions that take training and experience to master, and as careers that deserve dignity and decent pay?
The New York Times just ran an article about gap years between high school and college (“Bridging the Gap Between High School and College, at a Price” by Alina Tugend, October 4): http://www.nytimes.com/2013/10/05/your-money/an-often-costly-year-to-bridge-the-gap-between-high-school-and-college.html?pagewanted=all
Here’s the portion on City Year:
**********
[Recent high school graduate Ben Moss] found City Year, which places people ages 17 to 24 in schools in 25 locations around the country in an intense effort to stem the dropout rate in lower-income areas.
“I went to a large, diverse school and I’ve seen the achievement gap firsthand,” said Mr. Moss, who is now working full time at Isaac Newton Middle School for Math and Science in East Harlem. And the fact that he is paid an annual salary of $12,100 helps.
“I’m not in it for the money, but it gave me the impression they needed us,” he said.
In addition, if he works 1,700 hours or more, he will receive a $5,500 academic scholarship, which many colleges and universities match.
Mr. Moss says he does not intend to go into education but feels the skills he is learning, like teamwork, time management and working through tough situations, will help him in any job.
*************
No offense to Ben Moss, whose heart seems to be in the right place, but is this ridiculous. Students in high-needs schools deserve so much better than a constant churn of fresh high school grads working as tutors for one year (City Year) and college grads working for two years as teachers (TFA) while they pad their resumes. This is NOT how they do things at the University of Chicago Lab School, Sidwell Friends, Lakeside, or in Finland.
This is everywhere – we taxpayers need ombudsmen or watchdogs!! In Colorado a for-profit company (Sopris West) is getting rich thanks to the friends it has in the State DOE (the new director of Literacy for CDE is a Sopris author who was recruited by CDE!!). Sopris consultants are paid almost $3,000 a day and recently schools that were awarded grant $ to help children learn to read were actually REQUIRED to hire Sopris consultants or lose their grant $. Each school in the state getting grant $ HAD to schedule 8 days with a Sopris Consultant whether they wanted those days or not ($22,000 per school). There were over 50 schools affected (50 x $22,000 = $1,100,000). This is another example of the danger of letting the wolves (for profit companies) into the henhouse to make sure the hens are laying their eggs properly. The wolves got (at least partially) uncovered back in the NCLB Reading First boondoggle:
See “Billions for an Inside Game on Reading”
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/09/29/AR2006092901333_pf.html
Thanks for posting – I am a Colorado teacher and I had no idea -Now I will think twice about ordering from Sopris West
Here is what I don’t like about RttT (and I think it was just this type situation that sent me googling about year ago to see what the heck was going on in education). Our data room lady (I don’t know her actual title—curriculum coach, I guess, but everything is about state mandates which come from RttT). Anyway, today was my 2nd grade musical (dress rehearsal, open for the school and my performance is tonight with a PTO dinner after). Great excitement for the children. . .a good time. When I delivered the program and stage layout to the teachers this morning (so they will know where their children stand) they asked, “are we supposed to come to this? It is at our plan time. So we have to ask Data Room lady (I won’t use her name).” OK, well the principal advised me to put the rehearsal during their plan block (when the children usually have music) so that nothing would be disrupted with everyone else’s schedule (makes sense) and so the teachers could be there (plus with 125 kids in the program, I do need the support of the teachers there, what with playing piano, guitar, running the microphones, helping the soloists, stage directing, etc). But their concern was that data room lady was OK with them missing a meeting with her.
So I told the principal they were asking questions about it and data room lady was there and she snarled and scowled and shook her head that they really needed to meet because the state PDP (Professional Development Plan, Duane) norms had changed (from Raleigh) and they needed to tend to it.
OK. The grade level musical has been on the calendar since August and it is the only performance those children will do this year. Why is it even a question as to whether or not their classroom teachers will come to their music program?
I remained calm and smiled. My principal, however, was clearly embarrassed because she can see how silly that is, particularly with art music and PE having to spend an entire day making a plan about how we can best support classroom curricula (read, CCSS), but I did say (because I was frustrated), “this is why I don’t like Race to the Top. I feel like we live in the Soviet Union.” That’s all I said.
Later, she came to me and she had arranged for the teachers to be there and has declared that she wants classroom teachers to be more involved in the next musical (I don’t push that, usually, I try to keep it easy on them). BUT I expect them to be there.
So, the data room lady is the paid enforcer of all things RttT. And the fact that there was even a question about teachers attending their students’ musicals is what I don’t like about RttT (that is where it hits me). What about the personal connection with those children when they are on the stage singing, dancing and playing instruments. What about the teacher being there to show she/he supports them? We are forgetting about the children. Too often. RttT is not about the children.
oh boy – in my district we have data room ladies, and the supervisors of the data room ladies coming out the wazoo thanks to gobs of grant funding for “innovation” – BTW – most of the grant $ can’t be used for teachers to help small groups of kids because that wouldn’t be “innovation”
A note to Colorado voters – ask if the 100 million dollars earmarked (but seldom mentioned) for “innovation” in Amendment 66 (School Finance) can be used by districts (without any strings attached by CDE) to hire teachers…
my version of innovation is turning orange juice cans upside down and having the kids write rhythm patterns to play on them with chopsticks. It will be part of our Chinese New Year program and it doesn’t cost a dime.
It’s a nice timbre, chopsticks on the metal of the juice concentrate cans (thoroughly washed). Put 60 of ’em going at the same time—it’s really cool.
I can compile data on that too. Like how many smiles I see, how many lasting impressions it made, how many compliments we got on our performance, and how fun it is to play chopsticks on an orange juice can and how much money we did not spend doing so. (A roll of festive wrapping paper turns those puppies into good-looking percussion instruments).
I feel as though I have read this story before. Oh… that’s probably because I have.
http://www.tampabay.com/news/education/public-schools-lose-millions-to-crooks-and-cheaters/1274614
A sickening thing about the Florida tutoring scandal is that the one-on-one tutoring program that, according to the DOE’s own site – What Works Clearing House (WWC) – had the most evidence of success with young children – Reading Recovery – was blackballed during the NCLB handouts and probably didn’t “qualify” for ANY of the FL tutoring money. In CO our State Department “experts” decided Reading Recovery is “unscientific” and therefore can’t be funded with grants (our tax dollars).
Qualitatively,
I have used Reading Recovery and it was successful
but that was 2-3 students and probably not “cost effective”
plus I don’t know how they did on standardized tests (and don’t really care)
Reading Recovery is only one-on-one and the training is very intense. It sounds like you did something like SER or CLIP which are like LLI (another very successful program that also got a thumbs down from our state’s experts). The lower the child the more help he needs and, true, that can cost a lot.
Yes, $30 million/year is bad, but, just the iPads at LAUSD, one school district, can be $169 million/year. We need to stop all the fraud and theft. Triage calls for stopping the largest and worse first. At LAUSD if they buy the $200 dollar with the 5 year guarantee instead of the $1,000 iPad with only 32GB of memory with the 3 year guarantee we go from a positive extra/year of $26 million to a negative of $169 million. Which one do you want today? This is the same game of consultants. How is it that no one knew about the keyboards until the mess up in N.Y. All the district staff, outside consultants and Apple wizards did not have a clue until it blew up in their face. These are the type of consultants you are talking about. In facilities at LAUSD they have given away through construction costs 2-3 times the average in the county according to the state study. Figure that out on $27 billion, yes billion the largest construction project on the planet. Those wizard consultants put internet into every classroom for up to $30,000/classroom. Now they want $500,000,000 for infrastructure for the iPads. Didn’t we just spend millions on internet connection? What happened to it? Consultants and district staff again with the help of the totally corrupt Citizens Bond Oversight Committee. Corruption is rampant today.
The business wolves have literally overrun the school system here is Florida where I teach. After hiring an ex-military superintendent with no public school experience we got to watch him tout every business “leadership” fad coming down the pike. He fired around 200 highly experienced people from the district office who had spent their entire careers here so we lost collectively a few hundred years of experience and institutional memory. Millions of dollars for consultants though. Of course.
Everyone was replaced with outside business-type people. Now we hear every day how terrible our district is, how everything we’ve done in the past is awful, and that’s about it. There doesn’t seem to be any room for or desire for anything positive anymore.
On top of that 13 of our schools have been taken over by the state due to “F” grades on last year’s FCAT test. The people who the state has hired are about as grim and sadistic as you can find. I haven’t seen a smile out of one of them yet. Again, we are told constantly that based upon the “data” they collected in 2 or 3 10 minute walk-throughs during the first 2 weeks of school that we are incompetent, untrained, have no vision of what good teaching looks like, and we are headed for closure. It was clearly a done deal before they ever arrived.
We are not helped in any way. Our budgets have been severely cut. We do not have the materials we need. We are short-staffed. We are given no encouragement of any kind. It’s clear they want to get rid of us ASAP.
We all wake up in the middle of the night with nightmares and constant worry. We feel sick in the morning knowing we have to go to work. We are cranky, tired, and fearful all the time. It’s like living a nightmare day after day. Last Friday one teacher had to be taken to the hospital in an ambulance after collapsing from the stress.
Why won’t teachers rise up and say “ENOUGH!” and walk out and protest this horrible system? I’m nearing the end of my rope myself and I feel helpless and alone.
You-are not alone. When I read your post, the horrors of it all came back to me. I watched these people destroy my school, ruin careers, send teachers to early graves and drive students back into streets, which are less brutal. 11 died in 2012alone. I worked in the hood no one wants to live or visit much less work in. I loved it, but I do not take crap from anybody. And I had to protect these kids.
They put me in teacher jail. The worst thing was knowing school went on with out me as I sat in a cold dead office among suits who bad mouthed teachers and called. inmates criminals . i missed my kids, who facebooked me and still do, , but had I been allowed to stay , it could have ended even worse. Many teachers in the jail or rubber rooms are happy to be liberated from administrative torture. They all think they will be exonerated when someone reads the ridiculous charges.,
But no one reads any of it, they have so many teachers in 8 huge offices across LA they make the “bad” teachers come in shifts. It is humiliating and stressful too but at some point, one accepts that they are just waiting until the suits fire her.
I keep waiting for someone to go postal, but aas an earlier comment in tis thread noted, teachers can be sheeplike,
Our union betrayed us in the school, when we got in trouble and before we knew what was going on at all l this is called teacher cleansing. Attrition is cultivated and cleansing is now a trend; to save money the suits replace us with TFA and subs any way they can.
The union is responsible for some of this mess, and more ruthless than educRAT$ if you ask me . It is not being broken as folks say. Indeed, Eli Broad quips that unions are necessary. He and the Waltons along with Gates buy union leaders off.
Randi Weingarten accepted millions and aome charter schools. On camera!. A few months ago, she told “bad” teachers to beat it.
She was very clear about affording no support to undesirables but unclear about what is “bad”. Teaching. Sadly, the CBA, codes & policy suffer from the same disability.
We have to come together as teachers, not our unions And it is happening. Check out teachersolidarity.com, a global hub where everyone but Finland is going to these days.
Please also visit http://www.hemlockontherocks,com
We have a nice community of casualties coming together from
all over….
We are so much less without each other.
Boy – these posts are making me think we’ve got it good in CO. But, wait, we had a CO delegation of legislators travel to FL to check out all the wonderful things they’re doing and our own Senator Johnston is listed as a “reformer” with Jeb Bush’s Foundation for Excellence in Education (so is our assistant to the State Commissioner of Education!!). Never mind, we’re headed down the same rabbit hole.
Colorado is one of the hot spots for the corporate reformers.
July 28, 2014
March on Washington by BATS (Bad Ass Teachers Association) on July 28
Try to hang in there and then converge on Washington DC where we can show the corporate reformers that we are ENRAGED, POWERFUL and WE ARE NOT GOING AWAY!!!
Oh, sure, and you’re going to call for the President’s resignation, I’ll bet too.
Diane is right – Colorado is one of the hot spots for corporate reformers. After all, Denver Public Schools Superintendent Tom Boasberg is a BROAD graduate – we have a School Board Election coming up that could “upset” the corporate reformer agenda.
With tenacity, perseverance, facts and TRUTH- community, neighborhoods, parents and students WILL PREVAIL!