Gary Rubinstein knows Michael Johnston from his days in Teach for America. He wishes Mike would stop telling tall tales about the school he briefly ran.
Mike said that the school he ran had a 100% graduation rate and college acceptance rate. Gary points out that 44 seniors graduated and got accepted to college, but there were 73 students in tenth grade two years earlier. That’s a 60% graduation rate, not 100%.
Now Mike Johnston is running for Governor of Colorado. He has built a reputation in the state as an education “reformer.” After graduating from Yale, he taught in Mississippi as a member of Teach for America, earned a degree at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, then a law degree, then was principal of a small school in Colorado where he claimed the school had a graduation rate of 100% and all were accepted into college. Based on this record, he ran for and was elected to the State Senate at the age of 35.
I met Mike Johnston in 2010, when I visited Denver to talk about my then-new book “The Death and Life of the Great American School System: How Testing and Choice Are Undermining Education.” I was scheduled to debate Johnston at a luncheon before about 100 of Denver’s civic leaders. At the very moment I was in Denver, the Legislature was debating Johnston’s legislation to evaluate teachers and principals by the test scores of their students. Johnston called his law, SB 10-191, the “Great Teachers, Great Principals Act.” It required that test scores would count for 50% of every teacher and principal’s evaluation.
On the day we were to debate, Johnston was late. I spoke. Minutes later, Johnston arrived, not having heard anything I said about choice and testing. He spoke with great excitement about how his new legislation would weed out all the bad and ineffective teachers in the state and would lead to a new era of great teachers, great principals, and great schools.
Johnston, as Gary Rubinstein points out, is very much an Obama Democrat. Arne Duncan, whose Race to the Top squandered $5 Billion, has endorsed Johnston’s candidacy for governor.
Seven years later, even Colorado reformers acknowledge that Mike Johnston’s grandiose promises fell flat. In an article in Education Week, Colorado reformer Van Schoales admitted that the punitive SB 10-191 didn’t have much, if any effect.
He wrote:
“Implementation did not live up to the promises.
“Colorado Department of Education data released in February show that the distribution of teacher effectiveness in the state looks much as it did before passage of the bill. Eighty-eight percent of Colorado teachers were rated effective or highly effective, 4 percent were partially effective, 7.8 percent of teachers were not rated, and less than 1 percent were deemed ineffective. In other words, we leveraged everything we could and not only didn’t advance teacher effectiveness, we created a massive bureaucracy and alienated many in the field.
“What happened?
“It was wrong to force everyone in a state to have one ‘best’ evaluation system.”
“First, the data. We built a policy on growth data that only partially existed. The majority of teachers teach in states’ untested subject areas. This meant processes for measuring student growth outside of literacy or math were often thoughtlessly slapped together to meet the new evaluation law. For example, some elementary school art-teacher evaluations were linked to student performance on multiple-choice district art tests, while Spanish-teacher evaluations were tied to how the school did on the state’s math and literacy tests. Even for those who teach the grades and subjects with state tests, some debate remains on how much growth should be weighted for high-stakes decisions on teacher ratings. And we knew that few teachers accepted having their evaluations heavily weighted on student growth.
“Second, there has been little embrace of the state’s new teacher-evaluation system even from administrators frustrated with the former system. There were exceptions, namely the districts of Denver and Harrison, which had far fewer highly effective teachers than elsewhere in the state. Both districts invested time and resources in the development of a system that more accurately reflects a teacher’s impact on student learning. Yet most Colorado districts were forced to create new evaluation systems in alignment with the new law or adopt the state system, and most did the latter. This meant that these districts focused on compliance (and checking off evaluation boxes), rather than using the law to support teacher improvement.
“Third, we continue to have a leadership problem. Research shows that teacher evaluators are still not likely to give direct and honest feedback to teachers. A Brown University study on teacher evaluators in these new systems shows that the evaluators are three times more likely to rate teachers higher than they should be rated. This is a problem of school and district culture, not a fault with the evaluation rubric.
“Fourth, all of Colorado’s 238 charter schools waived out of the system.
“We wanted a new system to help professionalize teaching and address the real disparities in teacher quality. Instead, we got an 18-page state rubric and 345-page user guide for teacher evaluation.
“We didn’t understand how most school systems would respond to these teacher-evaluation laws. We failed to track implementation and didn’t check our assumptions along the way.”
Unfortunately, when the time came to change the law, Sen. Mike Johnston joined with five Republicans on the State Senate Education Committee to defeat a proposal to fix his failed law.
The rejected proposal, “originally introduced with bipartisan sponsorship, would have allowed school districts to drop the use of student academic growth data in teacher evaluations. It also would have eliminated the annual evaluation requirement for effective and highly effective teachers.”
But Johnston preferred to keep his law in place, despite its failure. It remains today as the most regressive teacher evaluation law in the nation. And it has had seven years to demonstrate its ineffectiveness.
Gary Rubinstein calls on Mike Johnston to stop making the false claim in his campaign literature that his high school’s graduation rate was 100%.
I call on him to renounce and denounce SB 10-191.
Make a clean break of it, Mike. Set things right. Show you are man enough to admit you were wrong.
Johnston is a political opportunist, so he might very well renounce SB-191. But I don’t care if he does. The bill he pushed and got passed tells us everything we need to know about his influences, his character, his logic, and his world view. They tell us what kind of governor he’d be, and I’m going to fight against him (and Jared Polis, too, who’s also running) with all I’ve got. Who am I going to support? I have to do some more research on a few likely candidates, but they’ll have an uphill battle against flood of neoliberal “reform” money from outside the state for Johnston and Polis’ own bank account.
Polis, a member of Congress, is Gaga for charters. He is one of the richest members of Congress. Worth hundreds of millions.
POLIS is a very scary “I love kids” DFER who has zero actual experience with poor-student educational issues. He embodies all that is wrong with the top-down “progressive” approach to invasively “fixing” schools.
I had a very unfortunate experience with Polis. I was invited to talk to a group of Democrats on the House Education Committee about my “Death and Life of the Great American School System” book in 2010, explaining how testing and choice were undermining education. Polis was at the meeting. About 12 people. He threw my book across the large table and said it was the “worst” book he had ever read and he wanted his money back. Another Congressman gave him $20. He is rude and demeaning and a know it all.
Is he the guy who actually used the word ‘evil’ in describing your work?
The politics and marketing of ed reform is really fascinating. They pulled Rhee and Johnson off the A list and replaced them with kinder, gentler versions.
The kinder gentler versions have an identical agenda to Rhee and Johnson, but they use words like “empowerment” and “community buy-in” more.
I actually prefer Rhee. More honest.
I don’t care how “nice” these so-called reformers sometimes are to certain people; the policies they promote are vicious and destructive, and they should be called out on their viciousness everywhere they go.
Rhee was bad for the political optics of so-called reform because her sociopathy was on display, and they realized it would only take them so far; it also didn’t help that she’s married to a pedophile and thief.
The big money behind so-called reform is trying to soften its well-earned reputation for nastiness, but, in the end, someone promoting and implementing vicious bastard policies is still a vicious bastard, and should be identified as such, whatever their manners.
so sadly true; this “kinder, gentler” hands-off top-down upper-middle-class-to-very-wealthy model of school reformer is actually a good descriptor for what is rotting the political party of the left
Two quick add ons (and I am not one to send links). 1) Johnston was the author of the failed constitutional amendment 63 or 66 -I can’t remember/- that would have ciphoned more public money into charters and 2) republicans meg Whitman and the Texas Arnolds (John and Laura) are holding a fundraiser for him in Aspen. Now you tell me there is any difference between dems and reps in Colorado when it comes to public Education
The newest ed reform marketing push is rebranding privatization as “portfolio”- that’s where people who have spent their entire careers lobbying for charter schools insist they are “agnostics”
Can someone point me to a district school any ed reformer anywhere has “improved”?
They don’t even invite public school leaders or families to the planning sessions. At the very least we should be informed if our child’s public school is being gutted to make way for ed reform’s preferred (privatized) model. Surely we deserve that.
I wish they’d just admit they’re abandoning public schools. Using public school families and students as the unfashionable and disfavored “back up” to charter/voucher schools during a privatization transition process isn’t fair to us.
“Portfolio management “ is actually not so new. It is what has been happening in Denver for at least 8 years. It was what Denver is continuously praised for. All the other STUFF going on fits into portfolio management. I wrote about it. Center on reinventing public Education CRPE out of u of Washington, funded by Gates. Paul Hill et al. Google it. Disgusting
YES.
Here’s a typical ed reform plan for charter expansion:
“Charter schools are an important part of a city’s improvement strategies, yet the growth of high-quality charters is often constrained. When promising charter schools don’t have access to buildings and district-owned buildings sit idle or are underenrolled, the array of public school options for families becomes limited”
No concern at all for the public school families in the existing schools. None. No effort to support or improve their schools. Ed reformers see public schools as tangible assets that should be handed over to charter operators. Our schools have no value to them outside the real estate.
I feel sorry for public school families in Indianapolis. Their political leaders neglected to tell them they’re phasing out the schools their children attend. There won’t be a public school left in that city in a decade and this is BY DELIBERATE DESIGN.
Shouldn’t public school families be informed that the Best and Brightest have determined their schools have no value so they could at least move or switch to a charter or private school?
Trump — a serial liar, a conman-fraud, a repeatedly failed businessman, an alleged sexual abuser of women — never admits he’s wrong.
Moore, a racist and an alleged pedophile, never admits he’s wrong.
When does anyone in the GOP ever admit they are wrong?
When has a neo-liberal ever admitted they are wrong?
When has a neo-conservative ever admitted they are wrong?
When has a Koch, ALEC branded libertarian ever admitted they are wrong?
What about the Democrats? Well, Senator Al Franken, who never dated girls that were not legally adults and who never has been accused of raping a woman, but only gropping and kissing them said, “I’m not going to make any excuses. I am embarrassed and ashamed of some of what has come out,” Franken told CBS Minnesota on Sunday.
And the NY Times reports, “Al Franken to Resign From Senate Amid Harassment Allegations”
Allegations are not a guilty verdict.
I just read this morning that the number of women accusing President Trump of sexually molesting them has reached SEVENTEEN!
NINE women have accused Roy Moore of sexual misconduct. “Moore has denied all of the accusations. With the exception of two women, one who was 18 and one who was 22 at the time, all of the accusers were underage when the misconduct allegedly occurred. The youngest was only 14 years old.”
Al Franken only faced EIGHT accusations of sexual misconduct and he has announced he will resign as a U.S. Senator.
Only eight. Well, then, he’s practically a Boy Scout. And, heck, even better, he only groped and kissed. Well then, Nobel Prize for him!
When are people going to realize that it doesn’t matter that “they” are worse? If your kid is wandering around the restaurant being vaguely annoying, while someone else’s kid is running around throwing food and tripping the waiters, you don’t let your kid off the hook because the other kid is worse. You deal with your kid because he’s the only one you can deal with, his behavior reflects on you and, presumably, you care about him.
Let the Republicans be the party of gross deviancy. There’s nothing we can do about it and their behavior doesn’t reflect on us. But our behavior does reflect on us and we should care about our fellow liberals/progressive enough to call out and condemn their behavior, put a stop to it and make it clear that it was not and is not acceptable.
“Al Franken only faced EIGHT accusations of sexual misconduct”
[Spit-take]
This has to be one of the worst articles on education that I’ve ever read.
……………
The Charter-School Crusader..Eva Moskowitz in The Atlantic
The combative Eva Moskowitz has created the nation’s most impressive school system—and made lots of enemies in the process.
…Personally, I draw the line at evil, but Moskowitz is undeniably scary….Which is just one reason I am more than a little terrified by the conclusion I’ve reached: Moskowitz has created the most impressive education system I’ve ever seen. And as she announces in her memoir, 46 schools is just the beginning. “We need to reach more students,” she writes.
How big should Success get? She doesn’t specify, but says that “maybe a public school system consisting principally of charter schools would be an improvement.” A proud product of public schools herself, Moskowitz did not reach this conclusion lightly. Imagining the end of public education as we know it—or at least its significant diminution—at first felt “almost disloyal,” she writes. But that was before she lost faith in schools run by the government…
(Last November, the president-elect paraded Moskowitz into Trump Tower during his auditions for secretary of education; after she took herself out of the running, he selected Betsy DeVos.) Today, charter schools educate 94 percent of students in one city, New Orleans, and more than 30 percent of students in 19 other cities. If a determined group of philanthropists have their way, charters will take a leading role in more cities soon. Many of these schools are part of ambitious and fast-growing networks like Success…
Because of the difference in governance, charter-school teachers are less likely to be represented by unions. Thus, depending on whom you talk to, charters are either union-busters or mercifully free from union strictures that put teachers before students… Traditional public schools must follow suspension and expulsion policies written by the school district; charter schools write their own rules, and many have a no-excuses style that mandates good posture, precisely folded arms and legs, and silent hallways—injunctions some hail as essential to a strong school culture and others skewer as paternalistic and inhumane…
Neighborhood schools, they argue, institutionalize housing segregation, making a child’s zip code his educational destiny. Charter schools, by contrast, hand the power of choice to parents who can’t afford to exercise it through real estate…Charter boards, designed to sidestep the unwieldy directives of democratic school governance and focus ruthlessly on leading good schools, are the main reason charter networks operate so well…
Read More:
http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2018/01/success-academy-charter-schools-eva-moskowitz/546554/?utm_source=eb
I have posted theee critiques of that article.
I hope there is a decent candidate running against Johston, and I hope that candidate’s campaign staff knows about the 100% graduation false claim. There’s — usually –nothing voters hate more that dishonesty.
I would like to believe that any candidate who understands how very, very frustrated the public has become with educational idiocy could take on the mess Johnston has made and win many voters with that one subject alone.
Here is the thing that few people understand. Other than flowery rhetoric, most politicians don’t care about education. They don’t care about policy or its consequences. People who are hurting and angry have to shout very loud, or they won’t be heard. Politicians can talk nonsense about “innovation” and “results” and neither they nor the public have a clue what they mean.
saddest, most depressing truth