Here is the latest from New Orleans, as locals try to tell “the other side of the story” from what you see in the national media. Dr. Raynard Sanders is an educator who is affiliated with Research on Reforms. Phoebe Ferguson is a co-founder of the Plessy & Ferguson Foundation for Education, Preservation, and Outreach.
“Dear Friends and Colleagues,
“For the past two years Phoebe Ferguson and I have been working on a documentary that tells the “real’ story about the education reforms forcefully implemented in New Orleans post Hurricane Katrina. The upcoming documentary will be a response to the well financed narrative that reformers$ have been cheerleading across the country for more than nine years claiming unprecedented academic gains in the historically failing schools New Orleans.
“With that we collaborated with The New Orleans Education Equity Roundtable and the Schott Foundation to produce a series of videos that focus on the major components of the corporate reforms in New Orleans.
“Today we are releasing our first video publicly, below is a URL that directs you to the video for viewing:
Here is the URL for the video: bit.ly/nolastrm
“As friends and colleagues I am asking you kindly share this video throughout your network, for those of you’ll who that have web sites and blogs I am asking you to post it on your site.
“We will be forwarding to you the upcoming videos in this series as they are completed…….. THANKS
Raynard Sanders, Ed.D.”
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Where is the URL for the video?
Rebecca Miller
>
bit.ly/nolastrm Try this link for the video
Here is the URL for the video: bit.ly/nolastrm
You can also click the title of the video to get to the page that plays the video.
Thanks for the URL to Karran and others
I found it and was able to bookmark it; will read it through thoroughly
TFA models many things:
– dishonesty, invariably served up with smarmy, fatuous rhetoric.
– insufferable self-importance and arrogance.
– race and class entitlement.
– extreme patronizing of the children and communities they claim to want to “save.”
– union busting and scabbing.
– opportunism, greed and will-to-power, masked by claims of altruism.
– predation, whether preying upon the gullibility of idealistic young people, upon
the unmet needs of children in poor and working class communities,and upon the
livelihoods of career teachers.
This should be a source of widespread outrage. This is the plan for the rest of the country. It’s well under way in New York State.
To all the viewers of this blog who are in favor of a “better education for all”:
You are doing yourself wrong if you don’t watch this video.
I look forward to the rest.
😎
What New Orleans suffered at the hands of these vulture philanthropist-disaster capitalists is unconscionable.
The approach detailed in the video is being touted by the Gates-LUMINA, etc-funded Education Trust in its report, “Tough Love: Bottom-Line Quality Standards for Colleges.” http://www.edtrust.org/sites/edtrust.org/files/ToughLove.pdf
Reminiscent of the way the N.O. school district became charterized via Act 35, the proposal makes a call to: “Draw a line based on where the fifth percentile of institutional performance currently rests and make that the minimum standard all institutions should strive to surpass over the next several years.”
I’m convinced this is a way of legislating campuses such as City College of San Francisco into submission. (http://adjunkedprofessor.wordpress.com/2014/06/19/message-sent-on-behalf-of-chancellors-cindy-miles-and-constance-carroll/)
I’ve been working on spreading the word in higher ed that we need to work together at all levels of education if we’re to uproot the education-industrial complex that’s all but decimated our education system. I was amazed that even the higher ed news publications didn’t view the Vergara ruling as newsworthy when it happened, but I have high hopes for them. Meanwhile, grass roots it is!
OK. There is a lesson to be learned here.
The underlying problems were not addressed.
I would like to push beyond this issue about charter versus traditional public schools and address those underlying issues.
In the first few years of a child’s life, some really important things happen that establish conditions for latter learning.
Linguistic science has shown definitively that we are all born with a mechanism in our heads for intuiting, automatically, based on our ambient linguistic environments, the grammar of our native tongue. The rules for that grammar–the phonetic, morphological, syntactic, and semantic rules–are extraordinarily complex. ALMOST NONE OF THOSE RULES ARE CONSCIOUSLY TAUGHT AND LEARNED. By the time a child is six years old, he or she has intuited a system of the grammar of his or her native tongue that is of such complexity that even though this system has been the subject of study of a legion of linguists for many decades, we are still far from having a complete scientific description of what that six year old knows–of his or her intuited competence.
For example, you know that
the great, green dragon
sounds fine and that
the green, great dragon sounds odd.
That’s because there are complex rules governing the proper order of precedence of adjectives in English. You learned these rules WITHOUT BEING AWARE THAT YOU DID SO.
When an adult who has been blind from birth undergoes an operation that allows him or her to see for the first time, the ability to judge depth is not immediately present. It has to be learned. There are neural mechanisms for doing this. The person does not undergo explicit training in depth perception. But he or she acquires the ability.
Similarly, if you don goggles that invert your visual field so that what is up is down and what is down is up, the world will look upside down to you for a time, but your brain will adjust to its inputs and in no time at all, you will start to “see” the world rightside up again, and then, weirdly, when you take off those goggles, the world seen by your unaided eyes will appear upside down until your mind adjusts again.
What does all this have to do with the failure of these turnaround districts?
Well, Hart and Risley showed that kids from low-SES homes come into school having heard 30 MILLION FEWER WORDS than do kids from middle-class homes. But that’s just one indicator. Those kids also have engaged in far less CONVERSATION WITH ADULTS using THE FULL RANGE OF SYNTACTIC FORMS OF THE LANGUAGE.
In other words, at the time when the brain is busy creating the functional mechanism that instantiates the structure of the language, those kids are deprived of ambient spoken linguistic environments of the requisite richness for them to be able to create relative complete internalized grammars of their native tongues.
Furthermore, it has been shown that parts of the brain that are not used by children often DISAPPEAR COMPLETELY. They are REABSORBED. There is an enormous amount of PRUNING of neural connections that kids are born with during the first few years of their lives. So, for example, the Russian language has a liquid l sound that English does not have. In Russian, this is a distinctive feature–one that distinguishes words, as voicing distinguishes, in English, bat from pat.
Now, if a child hears the liquid l sound before the age of six, then he or she will be able to hear it as an adult. But if he or she does not, NO AMOUNT OF TRAINING WILL ENABLE THE PERSON TO LEARN TO HEAR THAT SOUND!!!! In other words, the neural mechanism that enabled that perception DISAPPEARS WITH DISUSE.
And what is true of language is true of many other cognitive abilities and, importantly, of world knowledge–familiarity with facts about the world that are taken for granted by writers and speakers and are therefore essential for comprehension.
The low-SES kid comes into school with ENORMOUS DEFICITS due to having lived in an environment that does not provide the necessary stimulation for the neural development that will be necessary for later learning.
In his brilliant Intelligence and How to Get It, Richard Nisbett writes of increases in IQ scores of ONE AND A HALF STANDARD DEVIATIONS!!!!!! that researchers got simply by having low-SES kids do lots of pattern recognition activities on computers. Unfortunately, once the studies concluded, after a very short time, the kids’ scores reverted to their pretraining levels.
SO, a couple of lessons here:
1. By school age, it’s too late.
2. What the child needs before entering school is not more rigorous, explicit instruction but, rather, stimulating engaging environments that include spoken language containing the entire range of richness of syntactic and morphological forms of the adult language.
And if the child does not get these, he or she is lost before he or she even starts. The end, as they say, is in the beginning.
Until this issue is addressed with extraordinarily high-quality care for children of the poor FROM BIRTH ON, no dramatic changes will be seen.
Now, people might say, that’s insane. That would be incredibly expensive.
It costs $66K a year to keep a person in prison in the state of New York and about that in Connecticut.
You think providing outstanding baby and toddler care for the poorest among us is costly? IT’S NOTHING compared to the costs of failing those kids.
You speak my “early childhood education is key” language. I wish more people did!
It has been demonstrated that children start constructing their mental “grammars”–the internalized rules for their native tongues–even before birth!!!
It will often be observed by parents of babies and toddlers that their linguistic milestones seem to come all at once, a sudden floods. Suddenly, the babbling becomes words. And then the words come fast and furious.
But here is what is happening: the brain is building an internal mechanism for that part of the grammar. At some point, the mechanism is functional. Think, for example, of the building of a bridge. One day, there is traffic flooding across a completed bridge. But the bridge took time to build. So it is with the construction of the mental grammar based upon the ambient spoken language environment.
And parental correction of the grammar is miniscule compared to what is intuited automatically, and at any rate, such correction has little effect. In fact, it is pretty much ignored. The grammar works as it does given its current level of construction.
Where did bird go?
He goed home.
He went home?
Yes, he goed home.
Say, he.
He.
Say went.
Went.
Say he went.
He went.
And where to bird go?
He went. And he goed home.
One of the things that happens in high-SES homes is that kids are, early on, engaged in conversations. In the course of these, they are exposed to a wide range of syntactic constructions, and neural pathways corresponding to these are laid down. The same happens with mental maps of the world and its parts and their properties and relations.
Miss these windows of opportunity for this sort of mental development, and there will be severe repercussions.
Think of it this way. It’s as though our schools were woodshops and some come to school with the entire woodworking kit–planes and scrapers and fine Japanese saws and hammers and mallets and dowels and glue and so on–and with experience using these. And some come with nothing but but a butter knife. And then they are set to identical tasks–build a guitar or a doll house. Of course, the kids with the tools fly ahead. The kids without them struggle and lose motivation and give up. The Matthew Effect sets in, so named after the phrase from the Gospel of Matthew:
For unto every one that hath shall be given, and he shall have abundance: but from him that hath not shall be taken even that which he hath.
—Matthew 25:29, King James Version.
UNTIL WE COMMIT, AS A COUNTRY, TO DOING SOMETHING ABOUT CHILD POVERTY AND ABOUT THE POVERTY OF THE STIMULUS IN THE EARLY ENVIRONMENTS OF OUR POOREST KIDS, WE WILL MAKE ALMOST NO HEADWAY IN ERASING THE ACHIEVEMENT GAP. No amount of getting tougher with kids and teachers, no amount of testing, no magical instructional method, will fix what is not addressed at its root.
Safe, nurturing, interactive, rich preschool environments for the poorest children are essential. We can invest in extraordinary early childhood care or we can continue to build more prisons.
Really addressing the problem will require that, and it will be very, very, very costly.
The richest country on Earth–the one that spent SIX TRILLION DOLLARS on conducting the phoney wars in Afghanistan and Iraq–can afford that.
You refer to people supposedly not able as adults to hear various sounds not occuring in their native language. This is rarely true. If adults are carefully instructed by phonectically trained teachers and they are willing to put in some effort nearly all adults can be trained to enuciate and “hear” virtually any sound in any language.
A glottal stop may be an exotic sound to most native speakers of English but glottal stops are easy to enunciate and hear. Learning to produce voiceless as distinguished from voiced laterals is easy for nearly all native English speakers even though this is not a phonemic distinction in English.
Jim, it simply is not the case that any distinctive feature in any language can be taught to any adult. There is research on this.
And that research is part of the confirmation of the LAD hypothesis.
Bob – What is an example of a sound used in a human language which cannot be enunciated by almost any person if they are instructed in how to enunciate it.
The example that I gave is of the liquid l in Russian. I took that example from Akmajian et al., Linguistics: An Introduction to Language and Communication.
It’s not a matter of not being able to produce the sound but of having the neural mechanism for reading it–for recognizing it as a distinctive feature. According to Akmajian, people can’t be taught to hear this if they did not hear it during a critical period.
Regarding parental verbal stimulation –
Hearing children of deaf parents show no reduction whatever in IQ
or verbal ability. Verbal stimulation from sources other than the parents appears to be adequate for normal development.
Totally deaf children do tend to have IQ’s about one standard deviation below normal. Such children of course receive zero verbal stimulation from any source.
Regarding parental verbal stimulation –
Hearing children of deaf parents show no reduction whatever in either IQ or verbal ability compared to average. Apparently verbal stimulation from sources other than the parents is adequate for normal developmnet.
Totally deaf children do show a reduction in IQ of about one standard deviation. Such children of course receive zero verbal stimulation from any source whatever.
Hearing children of deaf parents who also have other exposure to rich linguistic environments do not show deficits. But children not exposed to language during a critical period are unable, forever, to form a complete grammar. See Jackendof, Patterns of Language, for much discussion of this.
The thing that it is important for people to understand, and this is not understood by a lot of educators, is that just as “color” doesn’t exist in the world but is a creation of particular perceptual and cognitive mechanisms, so the grammar of a language is an internal structure, part of which is innate and part of which is acquired based upon the particular language or languages to which a child is exposed. The part that is acquired is acquired almost entirely by unconscious processes, not via explicit instruction, and those unconscious processes cause physical changes–rewiring–of the brain. So, for example, we have innate hardwiring for language that constitutes universals across all languages (including sign languages developed independently) that include distinctive features for word types, the construction of phrases from morphologically distinct elements, distinct heads for those phrases, and other universals. Then, based on the language that the child hears, he or she constructs and internal grammar that builds upon the innate endowment. So, for example, if a child is born into a Japanese-speaking family, he or she will create an internal grammar in which the head of a phrase comes last, whereas a child born into an English-speaking family will construct one in which the head of the phrase comes first. This isn’t taught. The construction of the internal grammar is automatic. But it needs the rich spoken language ambient environment from which to do its work.
There is no reason to believe that verbal stimulation of the children of deaf parents from sources other than the parents has to be particularly “rich”.
Inability to acquire normal linguistic abilities reduces biological fitness enormously in even the most primitive cultures. So biological selection for rapid and easy acquisition of language has been intense.
As a result human linguistic abilities are extremally robust. In all human societies virtually all children rapidly and easily acquire competence in their native language without the slightest need for assistance from Head Start. Bob – its like learning to walk. If you need Head Start to teach you how to walk your doomed anyway.
It is indeed the case, Jim, that the innate language learning equipment that humans have is extremely robust. However, I have read a number of studies over the years that did counts of grammatical constructions used in verbal interactions between parents and children in low-SES and high-SES environments. The low-SES kids are exposed to a much more narrow range of grammatical constructions of much less complexity, and this happens at a critical time for the brain’s acquiring the structures of the language.
And Jim, just what do you mean by “primitive” cultures? There are no “primitive” languages. All natural human languages are extraordinarily robust.
As usual Bob, you are right on target. I spent 9 years of my career working with high poverty, at risk young children, ages birth to 3 years old. I did weekly home visits working with both parent and child on early child development skills, called Early Intervention. I also taught 3-5 year olds in a preschool class whose parents were working on their GED. Parents were required to spend parent time in my classroom each week to learn how to help their children in school. Both programs were great experiences, mainly because I built relationships with parents that boosted their self esteem as teachers of their own children. Until we recognize that early development is the key to later success, we will keep spinning our wheels and blaming people in high poverty for being poor. Thanks for taking the time to educate us on linguistics. I always learn something from your posts.
Also, check out the Research on Reforms latest research paper that shows the sham of New Orleans RSD charter school data. They close failing schools so the scores disappear and open them under a different name. Who says numbers don’t lie???
Click to access RSDClosingOpeningChangingCodes.pdf
There have been cases of children raised in extreme isolation. Such children when first discovered are often extremally deficent in verbal ability. However in almost all cases such children rapidily deveope normal verbal abilities when placed in normal environments.
Again, not true, Jim. See Jackendoff, Ray. Patterns In The Mind: Language And Human Nature. NY: Basic Books, 1995 for a discussion of the irremediable language deficits of feral children beyond the critical period for formation of the internalized grammar.
This is perhaps the most famous case, that of Genie, who never developed a normal grammar:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genie_%28feral_child%29
The evidence is that there are strong critical period effects for the phonology, morphology, and syntax of a language and less strong effects for the semantic components. So, those lacking critical period exposure can often easily learn new words but often never master the grammar.
And we compound this problem by taking kids from low-SES environments and giving them, in school, steady diets of INTENTIONALLY SYNTACTICALLY IMPOVERISHED language in the form of leveled materials.
Here’s an extended discussion of the case of Genie:
Click to access linguistic.pdf
But this “child” was almost 14 when discovered! With other isolated children found in childhood they generally become pretty normal in a few years in a normal environment. Of course in all these cases the lack of verbal stimulation was extreme. Whether or not it
is the case that parents of lower SES talk to their children less than upper SES parents the difference is nothing like the few known cases of extreme isolation or like the case of totally deaf children.
With total deafness we see about a one standard deviation reduction on IQ. That is about the IQ difference in the US between whites and blacks. But the idea that some possible minor diifference in how frequently black and white parents talk to their children produces the same effect in black children as total deafness is absurd.
Human beings have been babbling to one another for many tens of thousands of years without any need for asistance from Head Start.
Jim, contemporary schooling puts a high premium on use of extremely sophisticated syntax that follows a particular “standard” model. We know that there is a critical period during which the internal model of the syntax of a language is formed automatically based upon the spoken language environment. We also know that low-SES parents engage their children in conversation much less and use much less sophisticated syntax in those conversations. If a child is not exposed to a grammatical construction, it will not become part of his or her internalized grammar. Furthermore, children who internalize a grammar that is not the dominant (preferred) one in school is also at a disadvantage. So, the ignorant teacher, hearing a student say “He be working” may not recognize that the student is using a grammar of the language that has a habitual aspect missing in Standard American English and think, simply, that the child is using “bad grammar.” No, the child is using the DIFFERENT grammar that his or her innate language acquisition device acquired from his or her ambient spoken language environment.
So, for example, very soon into a child’s school career, being able to parse sentences that contain a lot of recursion becomes essential. But studies have shown that parents and caretakers in low-SES environments tend to use a lot fewer sentences containing embeddings–ones of significant syntactic complexity.
I am walking through a department store. There is a middle-class mother with her child. She is saying,
Which one do you think you like the best?
The pink one.
But isn’t it a little too big? Why don’t we try it on to see if it fits.
Another mother is saying,
Stop that.
Come here!
You listen to me!
The child of the first mother is building an internalized grammar of the kind that will be prized in school. That child is also learning about properties of objects–color, size–and relations (fits, doesn’t fit).
And then we expect to treat both children the same when they get to school.
It’s easy to predict what the outcomes will be for these kids ten years on. But switch them in the cradle, and the outcomes will be exactly reversed.
I know that you don’t believe that, Jim, because you are a huge proponent of genetic determinism. You and I disagree about this.
“The other side of the story” that needs to be told is the side that Diane Ravitch is apparently not aware from where she sits in Washington, DC, and that is the SUCCESS that some charters have had in turning around public education in New Orleans, that before Katrina when they were run by the Orleans Parish School Board were probably the worst administered and most corrupt school system in the U.S. (Ask inmate and former Congressman Bill Jefferson.) I am not talking about the commercial charters who are an abomination, but the not-for-profit charters that are NOT populated only with Teach for America transplants, but are raising standardized test scores and teaching kids well every day. I am a liberal, pro-union Democrat who moved here before Katrina, but I can tell you that calling what has happened to the schools in New Orleans “The Death of Public Education” is a gross characterization done by those who are totally ignorant of what is happening down here, or have another political agenda. Now Diane, if you would ever like to talk about THAT other side of the story, let us know.
All right, musicman. First of all, if you’re going to knock Ravitch, get her locale correct: New York.
Second, how about giving me some names of those New Orleans Wonder schools? Be sure that you do not mistakenly include the selective admissions charters (the magnet schools that became cream charters). Note that I expect lots of school names to justify your not promoting the idea that you are “totally ignorant of what is happening down here.” How about 30 names? That’s less than half of all RSD and OPSB schools combined.
As for “not those commercial charters,” if you believe that “not for profit” doesn’t turn a profit, you need to read about Eva Moskowitz in NY. Running her hedge-funded,”not for profit” schools has her just shy of pulling a half-million-dollar salary:
As to your implication that since “old” OPSB” is gone, so is corruption, then please explain to me why Paul Vallas and Paul Pastorek had to call in the National Guard to open schools in 2006 even though the per-pupil expenditure was a whopping $23,000 per student and Alvarez and Marsal– the firm supposed to open those schools– left town with $50 million in their pockets:
Then there’s John McDonough, John White’s advertised Miracle Renovation school in 2012– the one that is being closed this year– and the $35 million allotted for the renovation– unaccounted for:
Then there is “too white” Lycee Francais, which appers to be protected by a La. State Board to which it belongs. New Orleans is demographically 60% black…
Click to access lycee_article_for_tribune_.pdf
…but Lycee Francais is 14% black:
http://laschoolfinder.com/schools/detail/94/Lycee-Francais-de-la-Nouvelle-Orleans
The president of that state board is the brother of the president of La Public Charter School Assn.
Hmmm.
So, musicman, looks like Diane Ravitch– who lives not in DC but NY– is not showing her ignorance here– but someone is.
Musicman are you serious? Anybody who knows anything about statistics knows that you can’t compare pre Katrina to Post Katrina data when talking about the reforms in New Orleans. Let’s get it straight, the reforms are the Recovery School District. The RSD actually was created in 2003, before Hurricane Katrina. The first school taken into that district and converted to a charter was Capdau Junior High. That school became a K-8 school and today sits as an F rated charter school today. That’s about all you can compare to pre and post Katrina, and even with that, all the data has changed as far as what goes into computing a performance score, so I wouldn’t really go so far as to compare even that school’s pre and post Katrina performance. What I will say is that charter network, the New Beginnings Charter Network is missing some money for it’s high school, Lake Area New Tech Early College High School. So much for corruption. Shall list all of the charter schools post Katrina that has had money stolen by charter school employees? Maybe not in this post, I’ll stick to looking at the district you call a success.
The Recovery School District has had it’s chance at running schools in New Orleans for the last 11 years, 9 of those being after Hurricane Katrina when the state placed 107 of the 122 Orleans Parish Schools into the RSD. The Orleans Parish School Board over the last 9 years has operated 6 open admissions traditional schools, while it chartered 14 others. The RSD has also directly operated a host of traditional public schools. Over this 9 year period, the OPSB operated open admissions schools operated at about a B level, with the exception of 1 school. The RSD open admissions direct operated schools have scored an F, so much so the RSD has closed them all, although that is not a solution. How is it that given the freedom to innovate, no pesky teachers union or locally elected school board, an additional influx of federal money, that the RSD could not transform not 1 traditional school? Have you ever asked yourself why hasn’t the RSD learned the miracle strategies of it’s charter schools that it likes to claim are so successful? Why did all of the RSD traditional schools operate at the F level? After 9 years post Katrina the RSD is at the 17 percentile rank in our state. That’s pretty pathetic. I suppose you’ll want to say that all of the success is in the RSD charter schools, but if that’s the case, maybe the charter schools skimmed all of the higher performing students from the traditional schools, and left the low performing students in those F rated schools. That’s a real possibility.
If the RSD is such a success, why is it that the composite score for seniors graduating for each of it’s charters won’t even get a student into a Louisiana State University? If New Orleans schools were the failure, and the RSD is the solution, why every year on the NAEP, Louisiana is still hanging out at the bottom of the rankings nationally? Why is it that Louisiana continues to earn an F for academic achievement on the Education Week Report Cards for states. Where exactly is that success you speak of? Oh, you are speaking of some charter schools. Either you are talking about selective admissions charter schools, or the handful of RSD charter schools that have managed to get B ratings. Don’t work to hard counting those, you only need your 10 fingers to count them. That’s how few RSD charters there are that manage to score a B. Shall we discuss how some of those schools push out students? We can go there if you like? Let’s stop splitting hairs and admit that the RSD has been a failure. I’m not willing to give John White and company until 2025 to get these kids to mastery. It’s not going to happen given the performance of the RSD for the last 9 years. I remember when the state told us that all of our kids would be at the Proficiency level by 2014. We’re in 2014 and we are no where near 100% being at proficiency. This is a farce and as a NOLA resident who spent the last 23 years as a public school parent, I know inside and out how bad this is. It would help if you and others would stop drinking the Kool-aid and tell the truth about this farce of a reform. It doesn’t help children to misrepresent data to make things look better than they are.
Reblogged this on Writings of a College Kid and commented:
Something that is really quite close to my heart. I can’t wait for the rest of the documentary.