Michigan Governor Rick Snyder’s pet project is the Educational Achievement Authority, where the lowest-performing districts are clustered in a single entity managed by Superintendent John Covington, a Broad Academy graduate. The EAA has been funded not only by taxpayers but by the Broad Foundation and many Detroit philanthropists.
For reasons documented amply by Eclectablog, the EAA has failed to help the state’s neediest children.
Now comes the state testing data, and the evidence is clear about the failure of the EAA.
How about research-based interventions, like reduced class sizes, wraparound services, the arts, medical care, and a sustained effort to reduce poverty and segregation?
Diane Ravitch's blog 
What worries me about the EAA is that they’re using it to push “blended learning”. That was the point of the experiment. It was an experiment in blended learning. The thing revolves around Buzz, which is a product.
Snyder is claiming success. Although I don’t think the public inside Michigan believes Snyder, high profile ed reformers in government and the private sector promoted the blended learning plan in Michigan (Arne Duncan, Michelle Rhee).
If Snyder continues to claim success, they will expand this cheap, experimental computer-based model to other public schools, because Arne Duncan and Michelle Rhee don’t have a clue what’s going on in those schools.
This is ed tech investor Vander Ark promoting the Detroit EAA:
http://gettingsmart.com/2013/09/building-buzz-detroit/
It’s a big country. When this is promoted outside of Detroit as a big success, it will be adopted in other states and cities. They are never, ever going to admit this experiment failed. Too many high profile and prestigious people backed it uncritically before they had any idea if it had any value. Heck, they were desperately trying to expand it to 150 public schools until they were quite literally STOPPED. They were pushing legislation to expand this right up to the wire.
They don’t care it it “works”. They are bound and determined to “scale up”. These “experiments” aren’t really experiments. If they were, the people inside the EAA and the people who promoted it would never have pushed to expand it. They would have called it off themselves. They didn’t.
Our kids live in a blended world. Why should school not reflect the real world students live in?
The EAA maintains the same student-teacher ratio as other demographically similar schools in Michigan. The difference? Teachers work with students with real-world technology tools rather than out of date and expensive text books.
Rather than arguing through rhetoric, visit the schools and observe the student engagement. It is quite impressive.
Also, if anyone in other states wants to see how completely the Broad Foundation is running this “public” school district in Detroit, thanks to a FOIA you can read the emails between the EAA (state actors) and the private foundation.
There’s no separation at all between the state actors and the foundation. This is a real problem for me. I did not elect Eli Broad to run my public schools. I object to that. It’s a complete dereliction of duty for Rick Snyder to “relinquish” Detroit public schools to a foundation. There’s no transparency and accountability as far as the foundation. That’s not “public”.
When these elected reformers outsource public schools to private foundations, they are not doing their job. If Eli Broad wants to run public schools, he can run for office, and if Rick Snyder DOESN’T want to run public schools, he can go back to the private sector.
http://campaign.r20.constantcontact.com/render?ca=8405c248-6e39-419a-8539-d3a1e96bc3ae&c=7dc899a0-9406-11e3-82cf-d4ae527b8c41&ch=7e1a6320-9406-11e3-8345-d4ae527b8c41
What’s amazing about ed reform to me is the disconnect with the public. This is some polling on Rick Snyder and public education:
“Just 8 percent of respondents said the financial condition of their local school district led to increased education quality in the last three years, 45 percent said it remained “about the same” and 35 percent said it got worse. Twenty-six percent gave Snyder positive overall marks for K-12 education, while 62 percent gave him a negative rating.
“It is clearly a story that is a serious problem for the governor,” EPIC-MRA pollster Bernie Porn told Gongwer. “It should be of major concern to him especially that he is making claims about education that clearly given these numbers are not messages or claims that are washing with voters.”
They’ve NOTICED public ed hasn’t “improved” under Snyder’s ed reforms. Their kids go to these schools. The national narrative on the huge success of market-based ed reform doesn’t “trickle down” to these states. They want their schools funded and supported, instead of bashed and gutted. The only people who approve of Rick Snyder’s Milton Friedman ed agenda are his political base, which is about 30%, and they’d “approve” if he closed public schools completely.
http://www.mlive.com/politics/index.ssf/2014/02/michigan_political_points_gov.html
The shameful truth is that to truly help the neediest students, to make a real difference in their lives, requires a significant investment in time, expertise, and re$ources.
There is very little profit in this authentic change paradigm. That is why our neediest students continue to flounder and this is the awful truth about our national “edu-reform” efforts.
We think that we are living in “modern” times where exploitation of the “innocent” no longer would be possible but think again!
Your last paragraph is the crucial point. Those things can’t be done for profit …because the money is spent ON the kids.
The EAA is an interesting case because the profit motive (from vendors, etc) is only part of the picture. The people who set this up are true believers – they are absolutely sure that they have a better mousetrap, using both technology and a rigid rejection of “traditional” methods. They also firmly believed that if they could just get rid of the “old school” teachers and administrators – and the unions – things would just blossom.
It’s what they have done to keep this fantasy alive that is frightening. The rights of special education students have been grossly violated in many cases, according to compiled reports; teachers intimidated when they try to cope with the fact that the technology is not working and the system is an empty shell anyway; ‘troublesome’ students have been conveniently pushed out with 180 day suspensions, and so on. This in a “district” which not only gets regular state support but also receives huge amounts in private donations: the Broad Foundation’s $10 million grant provided more than $1,000 extra per pupil, and millions more came in from other foundations.
Perhaps significantly, it is also a system where no one is accountable to the local community; even the official appointed board which controls the EAA seems to be driven entirely by the wishes of the Governor. I did some of the early analysis of the FOIA documents pried out of the EAA, and was shocked at the extent to which Broad Foundation officials were consulted and included on even everyday matters. (The occasional message about flying in from Los Angeles was a startling reminder that these people did not all work together in the same building.) EAA officials, close advisers to the Governor, and Broad officials all cooperated intimately in the lobbying effort to have legislation passed which would make the EAA a permanent part of state government (still stalled, by the way).
Just a couple of days ago, Gov. Snyder penned an op-ed piece in which he called the EAA a “worthy experiment.” In truth, it is an experiment gone horribly wrong. The first rule of education should be, as it is in medicine, “first, do no harm.” When medical experiments are possibly causing harm, they are stopped as quickly as possible. The EAA is an experiment, poorly conceived from the beginning, that is incontrovertibly causing harm to students. This must end.
Steven Norton
Michigan Parents for Schools
The EAA is a complete joke. Why don’t the local nightly news channels expose how horrible it has become? If this was controlled by DPS it would be on the news EVERY night.
As Elena Herrada brilliantly says, our local media is also under emergency management. Great comments Steve!
A new teacher in my building taught in an EAA school last year. He describes horrible working and learning conditions with constant threats of being fired.
Reblogged this on McBlog.
Diane, please consider your source. Pedroni has publicly stated he is “a sworn enemy” of the EAA. As a “researcher”, he has never visited an EAA school, never looked to primary sources for evidence in his critiques, and even accuses EAA leadership of being “non-Detroiters” when he is himself a non-Detroiter.
In your analysis, you provide no comparative data to DPS and demographically similar groups. And you have never visited the schools nor talked to currently working EAA leaders and teachers yourself. Visit the EAA. Walk the halls of the schools. Observe classrooms. Talk to students and parents. And then cast your research-based judgment.
The research based interventions you mention are evident within the EAA schools, along with many other research-based programs and initiatives. Much effort is being applied to increase their reach.
Educational reform is hard enough as it is without creating competing camps of opponents.
Curtis, are his facts wrong? Don’t they come from the state education department?
Hi Diane!
My name is Joanna Rizzotto and I love your work! I want to thank you for being a source of inspiration through information in these troubling times. As a parent, teacher, and professional association president…I literally go to your blog for sanity!!!
Back in November, you were scheduled to speak in Madison, WI and cancelled due to illness. I had reached out to you via your blog and invited you to South Milwaukee to visit my school and/or just to have a cup of coffee and chat. You kindly declined recognizing you couldn’t do it all.
Last Wednesday, when I was at my community organizing (yes! around public education) meeting, I learned that you will be coming to Milwaukee on April 30th.
I am extending another invitation! I’d love for you to visit my small alternative school where I have been able to truly be responsive to student needs in a public school. We use an Inquiry-Based learning model and it would be great for my students to see the expert I seek out for information about my work 🙂 And/or just a cup of coffee and conversation is good to.
I hope you’ll sincerely consider it!
*Sorry unrelated to this particular post…just trying to get through to you!
~Joanna Rizzotto
Here is why Curtis Linton is so upset about the MEAP data on the Michigan Department of Education website– he is the co-owner of the School Improvement Network, and, according to EAA employee and researcher Mary Wood, “The EAA has a contract for over $1 million/year that covers PD training with SIN.” So I understand why he feels compelled to make stuff up about me. He can’t refute the Michigan Department of Education’s facts, and he is worried that this put at risk what appears to be a hefty sum his organization has been pulling in. For the kids, of course. Here he is at SIN: “http://www.schoolimprovement.com/experts/curtis-linton/”
Anyone who wants to see Curtis Linton’s company’s $1.1 million annual contract with the EAA can find it here, beginning on p. 34 of the pdf. http://www.michigan.gov/documents/eaa/EAA_Board_of_Directors_-_Executive_Meeting_Meeting_Packet_-_August_15-2013_Part2_431152_7.pdf
Mr. Linton, Dr. Pedroni is a professor at Wayne State Univ. in Detroit, one of the state’s three large research universities, and so deserves not to be described with researcher in quotes. Yes, he strongly opposes the EAA, for very good and well-documented reasons.
I believe as co-owner of School Improvement Network you are an important vendor to the EAA?
All the data presented in his report can be found using the tool constructed by the Michigan Department of Education which can be found here: http://www.michigan.gov/documents/mde/Fall2013MEAPAllStudentsProgress_449079_7.zip
At MIPFS, we have compared the performance of students in Detroit Public Schools to those in the EAA, and students in the EAA who were tested both this year and last was uniformly worse than than those in DPS.
I honestly don’t know if Dr. Pedroni has visited EAA schools, though I suspect he has. I do know many people, including state legislators, who have visited the EAA – both in the carefully staged official visits for lawmakers and less formally. What they see in the informal visits, and what they hear from students and teachers in the EAA, belies all the official claims and is – to be blunt – frightening.
Finally, as to using “reasearch-based” techniques, I wonder how that is possible. The software-centered curriculum EAA uses was still under development when the EAA started classes, and had never been offered to any other district. Precisely where was the “research” performed which supposedly supports the broken and haphazard system used in the EAA? This wasn’t education – it was a bunch of kids sitting in front of netbooks which often didn’t work, using software which was mostly empty of content, with a newly-minted Teach for America teacher watching a dashboard on his or her own netbook monitoring student “mastery.”
With the serious claims of violations of state and federal laws on disabled students, hair-raising testimony by people who do and did work in the EAA, and the state test results, can there be any question that this “experiment” is doing more harm than good?
Curtis, who are you?? How do you know whether I’ve been to EAA schools or not? I have been and have talked with many many EAA teachers! Furthermore, I have never said I am a sworn enemy of the EAA! I am most definitely a sworn enemy of those who profit off of stealing the educational futures of our children though. Liar liar pants on fire!!
Oh… And I have never made any accusations about non-Detroiters or claim that I was a Detroiter! That you represent SIN (interesting acronym) and that you are so dishonest – no, let me be direct– that you are lying (!!!) says so much to me and the readers of this blog! Thank you for the role you played in helping to make our case!
Hey Curtis, someone knows who you are and why you are coloring the truth to protect EAA
http://www.eclectablog.com/2014/03/eaa-vendor-uses-lies-to-go-on-the-attack-against-university-professor-who-analyzed-meap-data.html