Archives for the month of: May, 2012
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The Itty Bitty Voucher Plan

By dianeravitch
May 27, 2012 //
6

According to a story in today’s Alexandria (La.) “Daily Town Talk,” large parts of Louisiana have no private schools taking part in the voucher program. They prefer to wait and see or just keep their distance. Some say they have no seats available; in one case, a school principal said her board members were “philosophically opposed” to using government money to pay for private school tuition.

With so few seats available for voucher applicants in Louisiana, I am beginning to wonder whether the voucher proposal was a diversion.

Maybe the point all along was to create hundreds of new charter schools across the state, which could siphon away public school students and cut the funding for public schools.

The unfolding of the voucher story is pretty intriguing, because this one is the big demonstration of vouchers, the one that voucher advocates have been longing for many decades.

And since Romney is out on the campaign trail flogging vouchers, this story has national significance.

Here are the problems:

1. Not that many seats available.

2. Some of the schools most eager to accept voucher students do not have a strong academic program, so the children might be leaving their struggling public school to enroll in a low-quality private or religious school.

3. The sorting of students into voucher and charter schools seems likely to intensify racial segregation, as students choose to go where they feel welcome.

4. The program may create demand by families who already pay for religious school to pay for their children too.

5. It’s hard to figure out how a program that allows 1% of eligible students (about 5,000 of 400,000 eligibles) to enter a private or religious school of unknown quality will end up transforming American education for the better or even helping sizable numbers of children.

Stay tuned for Gannett series that promises to “follow the money” in the Louisiana plan and to see how closely the Louisiana plan matches the language in ALEC model voucher legislation.

Governor Bobby Jindal may have discovered a way to revive racial segregation while calling it “reform.”

Diane

Categories ALEC, Jindal, Bobby, Louisiana, Vouchers

Keep an Eye on Jindal’s Reforms

By dianeravitch
May 27, 2012 //
8

I just came across an interesting statistic about Louisiana that puts the Jindal education reform plan into context.*

The majority of white children in Louisiana do not go to public school. The majority of white children go to private schools.

Black children are the majority in the public schools of Louisiana.

According to Census data, 17% of Louisiana children enrolled in grades K-12 attended a private school in 2007. By comparison, 11% of U.S. children enrolled in grades K-12 attended a private school in 2007.1

Enrollment in nonpublic schools varies widely among Louisiana’s parishes, from zero children in 14 parishes to over 22,000 children in Jefferson Parish.

White children are a majority of school-age children (55%) in the state, but are 82% of the private school enrollment.

Black children are 39% of the school-age children, but only 13% are in private schools.

This suggests an interesting and politically complicated scenario.

Vouchers and charters appeal to those already in private schools, if those schools can get additional state funding and if the conditions for getting them are not too onerous. Some Roman Catholic schools are offering seats, but the numbers are small. The early response suggests that the prime beneficiaries are likely to be schools run by evangelical denominations.

Let’s see how many of the all-white private schools (some of which had their origins as “segregation academies”) open their doors to black children from D or F schools.

About 400,000 students are eligible for vouchers, but only about 5,000 seats are available across the state.http://www.louisianaschools.net/topics/scholarships_availability.html. In nearly half the parishes in the state, no private school is participating (accepting new voucher students).

It will be interesting to see the reaction of parents now paying full tuition as their school starts accepting students whose tuition is paid with tax dollars. Will they react magnanimously or will they be angry and demand that the state pay some or all of their tuition?

Before the Jindal “reforms” were passed, the state commissioner John White said that students could get a voucher only if they had been in a D or F school for a year. Let’s watch and see if the one-year requirement is maintained, and whether some parents move their children to a low-rated school for a year to save tens of thousands of dollars in the future.

Let’s also watch to see whether the legislation encourages further racial segregation, as blacks and whites go to segregated charter schools.

And let’s see if there is any oversight of these issues from the U.S. Department of Education’s Office of Civil Rights.

The Louisiana “reforms” are intended to encourage pupils to transfer out of public education. There is nothing in them to improve public schools, just to promote alternatives so that students can “escape.”

The Jindal “reforms” are a template for the Romney education program. Romney, who went to elite private schools and sent his own children to elite private schools,  views public education as a disaster. Given his Bain background, he may see public education as a business that should be shut down, with its component parts sold off. From his perspective, privatization makes sense.

Romney’s pronouncements to date mirror Jindal’s. It’s not because they chatted up the subject, but because they both work from the old songbook of Milton Friedmanites. The free market cures all ills. Break the regulatory controls of governments, give everyone a voucher, and let the market work its magic. Charters are added to the mix because they too provide an “escape” route for those who hate public schools.

It does seem odd for an advanced society to start giving away and dismantling an essential public service. It takes a certain kind of detached and cold policy wonk to engage in this sort of exercise. The sort of person who has no sense of living in community, the sort who sees a certain beauty in “creative destruction.” The sort who can look at people and institutions from afar and rearrange their lives without thinking of the repercussions.

Strictly from an educational point of view, I suspect that the charters (whose teachers need not be certified) and the religious schools will have lower standards than the public schools from which students are “escaping.”

Keep an eye on Louisiana.

Diane

*Here is the source for enrollment data: http://www.agendaforchildren.org/2009databook/Education/nonpublicschoolenrollment.pdf

White children are overrepresented in private schools in comparison to black children. White children represent 55% of the school-age child population in Louisiana, but they represent 82% of the private school population in Louisiana. By contrast, black children comprise 39% of the school-age child population in the state, but just 13% of children attending private school.

Data collected by the National Center for Education Statistics shows similar over- and under-representation at the national level as well. Nationally, white students make up 75% of the private school population, but just 57% of the public school population. Black students make up just 10% of the nation’s private school enrollment, but 17% of its public school enrollment.2

Black students in Louisiana are more likely than their white counterparts to attend a public school. While 39% of the child population in Louisiana is black, 46% of public school students are black. By contrast, 55% of the child population is Louisiana is white, but only 49% of the public school population is white. While a majority of public school students are black in 22 parishes, black students are not the majority at nonpublic schools in any parish. About half of Louisiana’s parishes have public school populations that are majority-white, but white students represent the overwhelming majority of students in nonpublic schools in each of the 50 parishes that have nonpublic schools.

Categories Jindal, Bobby, Louisiana, Vouchers

School Reform in Louisiana, As If

By dianeravitch
May 26, 2012 //
15

The State Education Department in Louisiana has given approval to the New Living Word School in Ruston, Louisiana, to accept 315 voucher students. The school currently has 122 students, so if it can enroll its full complement of voucher students, it will nearly quadruple in size.

The New Living Word School will accept the largest number of voucher students in the state’s voucher program. The second largest number of seats is offered by the Upperroom Bible Church Academy in Orleans.

The New Living Word School does not have the facilities or the teachers for an additional 315 students, but that doesn’t matter to the state. The Rev. Jerry Baldwin, the school’s principal and chief pastor said the school would move forward “on faith” and would build new classrooms during the summer.

Instruction in the school is offered for 20-30 minutes each class on DVD, while “the classroom teacher is on hand to manage the class, review homework, answer questions and give assignments.” This is Governor Bobby Jindal’s plan to reform education, remember?

The state education department doesn’t do site visits. All that is required for a school to gain acceptance to get public money is that it has state approval and does not discriminate by race.

And the money to enroll students in the New Living Word School and the Upperroom Bible Church Academy will be subtracted from the Minimum Foundation funding for public schools.

But there’s another problem, other than the loss of funds for public schools. Rev. Baldwin said that tuition would go up for existing students from its current $8,500.

But wouldn’t the families now paying $8,500 wonder why they should pay tuition at all if the state is willing to pay tuition for the new students? Maybe they should drop out of New Living Word, enroll in a public school for a year rated “D” or “F,” return to the religious school, and have the state pay their tuition. Why pay for a religious education if the state will pay for it? For a family with two children, that’s a huge saving, possibly $18,000 a year.

Diane

Categories Jindal, Bobby, Louisiana, Vouchers

Calling All Parents!

By dianeravitch
May 26, 2012 //
12

In an earlier post, I described how a parent organization called out Scantron, the testing company, for inserting a blatantly propagandistic item into its standardized tests. The reading passage was about the alleged superiority of charters as education reform and named a fictitious “multi-millionaire” who sends his own children to a charter. Public school students in Chicago were shown this advertising for charters, with no critical views included.

The parent group is called PURE, or Parents United for Responsible Education. They are watchdogs for public education in Chicago, and they are fearless. Every city should have a group like PURE. This parent group is an affiliate of Parents Across America, and Julie Woesterhoff–its leader–was a co-founder of PAA.

One important lesson to be learned from this episode is that parents can be powerful. Parents have the freedom that teachers don’t have to call out bad test items like this one, which was blatantly untrue. If a teacher called a press conference or put out a statement blasting a test item, the teacher might be fired for revealing what was on the test. Parents are not bound to remain silent.

And parents should not remain silent.

The best parent organization in the United States today is Parents Across America. Unlike the national PTA, which has taken sizable contributions from the Gates Foundation, PAA fights for children and public education. Like PURE in Chicago, PAA is fearless. Google it, and if you like what you see, join them. (I was disappointed, but not surprised, to see that the National PTA–which should be staunch defenders of public schools–had a showing of “Waiting for ‘Superman'” at its 2011 national convention in Orlando.)

Or better yet, start a chapter of PAA in your town or city.

Diane

Categories Parent Groups

Undermining Special Education?

By dianeravitch
May 26, 2012 //
18

I thought I was done with blogging for the day but then I read a comment on an earlier post. It was very disturbing. If true, it’s frightening to think that the Obama administration plans to “monitor” special education by test scores and to reduce the number of people on the ground.

“For-profit higher education is a $30 billion industry, and it has the wherewithal to call off the regulators.” Exactly. DoEd will reform (translation: eliminate) OSEP’s compliance procedures assuring IDEA and special education IEPs are effectively working for children with disabilities. OSEP director Melodie Musgrove told us at the Council for Exceptional Children’s international convention (CEC) in April, 2012 that they will be monitoring “achievement data” (translation: standardized test scores) from Washington and cutting back on state compliance officers (translation: firing). Her “vision” for OSEP  is “results driven accountability” and to “reward teachers who work with sped students.” (translation: TfA exploiting the SPED teacher shortage).

OSEP’s shift from compliance to monitoring sets back 40 years of special education progress in assuring all schools provide a free appropriate public education for children with disabilities.

Musgrove signaled that DoEd and OSEP would essentially ignore IEP violations.
This is a huge gift to the for-profits. Shifting away from school compliance on IEPs  means schools will not be accountable to parents or teachers for providing individualized educational services. You know, all those expensive services like smaller class groupings, collaborative teaching, inclusion, transportation, psychological support, speech therapy, OT, PT, etc. that the profiteers don’t want to pay for.

Musgrove said we could call her anytime a 205-245-8020 or e-mail her at melody.musgrove@ed.gov. She added, we might not like what we hear…

If you are the parent or child of a child with special needs, or if you care about children with special needs, you should get in touch with Musgrove.

Diane

Categories Education Industry, Special Education, U.S. Department of Education

The Most Important Story of the Week

By dianeravitch
May 26, 2012 //
6

Wisconsin has a recall election on June 5. On that date, the voters of the state will decide whether they want Scott Walker to finish out his term or to leave Madison. There are also four Republican state senators on the same ballot.

This article in the New York Times magazine explains the issues and sets them into context. It shows that Scott Walker is an ideologue of the worst stripe. He has rammed through an extremist agenda. He is uncompromising. He wants to get rid of collective bargaining and privatize public education. In his rush to open the state for business, he wants to roll back environmental regulation. And that’s not all. Read the article and see just how far these guys will go to take American society back a century and to abandon any public responsibility for anything.

Scott Walker has the financing of the most reactionary elements in American politics. His policies seek to make corporate greed respectable.

As the article shows, the Wisconsin Idea once meant that legislation should help as many people as possible. The Scott Walker idea is that legislation should help corporations get richer.

For the first time in my life, I wish I were a resident of Wisconsin so I could cast my ballot on June 5 for anyone but Walker.

Diane

Categories Walker, Scott, Wisconsin

The Philadelphia Story

By dianeravitch
May 26, 2012 //
2

These days, U.S. education is beginning to look like a slow-motion train wreck. In some places, it is fast motion, not slow motion.

One of the places where the train seems to be speeding rapidly towards a wreck is Philadelphia. The wreck will

There, the schools have been under state control for a decade, and the state legislature has underfunded the public schools to the extent possible, even though (or because) the school system has a large proportion of poor black and Hispanic students.

The city leaders, in their wisdom (or lack thereof), brought in one of those ubiquitous management consulting firms, Boston Consulting Group, to devise a “turnaround” plan for the public schools. Of course, this is treating public schools as if they were just any old business, selling auto parts or paper products, which they are not. Public education is not a product; it is not even a service. It is an essential part of our social fabric, a democratic institution that must be preserved and strengthened.

Business consultants don’t understand this. They look at public schools, and they don’t see teachers and children. They see an investment opportunity. They see a cash flow. They make calculations about return on investment. They see a deficit, and they think bankruptcy, reorganization, sell off the healthy parts, and kill the weak ones.

When you bring in business consultants, you can count on them to recommend that the “business” should be downsized and right-sized. It should be privatized. That’s the way they think. When you have a superintendent who was trained by the Broad Superintendents’ Academy, you can expect to get the same perspective.

The irony in Philadelphia is that the district tried privatization on a large scale a decade ago and it failed. The district has a sizable number of charters, a number of which are under investigation for corruption and financial malfeasance.

I guess the moral of the story is: If at first you fail, do the same thing over and over and over until public education has been completely eliminated.

I just came across this excellent summary of privatization in Philadelphia, which contains excellent links to sources: http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/2012/05/2012521114853681761.html

The article says: “As in other cities, public money was extensively abused in real estate profiteering schemes, as charter school operators used schools as tenants, paying money to themselves to rent their own property. In one particularly classy instance, the charter operator was running a private parking lot on school property. Exorbitant salaries were common for the charter school operators, and some implausibly held fully salaried jobs in multiple schools, billing the city for more than 365 days in a year.”

This is what Philadelphia’s leaders want more of.

And for anyone wanting another story about the dismantling of public education in Philadelphia:

http://www.citypaper.net/cover_story/2012-05-03-whos-killing-philly-public-schools.html?viewAll=y

I cited this story before. It deserves to be cited whenever the Philadelphia situation is up for discussion.

Diane

Categories Boston Consulting Group, Broad Foundation, Philadelphia

A New Low in Standardized Testing

By dianeravitch
May 26, 2012 //
14

Scantron, the test publishing company, was compelled to delete a reading passage that was highly propagandistic after parent activists learned about it and called attention to it. The item was brought to the attention of the media by Parents United for Responsible Education.

The Chicago Sun-Time wrote: “PURE executive director Julie Woestehoff said the passage, titled “Reforming Education: Charter Schooling,’’ is so one-sidedly pro-charter that its use amounts to an attempt to “brainwash” children ‘with propaganda about charter schools.’'” Julie Woesterhoff is a co-founder of the national parent organization Parents Across America.

The reading passage on the test was a paean to charter schools, with pie charts and bullet points, all intended to show that charters were decidedly superior to the public schools in which the test-taking students were enrolled. It even had the nerve to identify a presumably fictional “multimillionaire” who enrolled his own children in a charter school. It would be interesting to know if there are any real-life multi-millionaires who have done so. I guess that the folks who wrote the test passage didn’t know that charters are supposed to be “saving” poor kids from failing schools, although not many of them do that.

The test question was presented as “non-fiction,” but Scantron initially responded by saying it was fiction intended to test reading comprehension. Even Scantron eventually realized that the question was inappropriate. That is putting it mildly. The question was charter propaganda, intended to misinform students and persuade them that charters were proven better than public schools. That’s not inappropriate, that’s lies.

It may not be coincidental, but it’s worth noting that Scantron was a corporate sponsor of ALEC. When the publicity about ALEC’s role in the Trayvon Martin affair got too hot, Scantron was one of the corporations that withdrew from ALEC.

The fake charters-are-best question is an even bigger scandal than Pearson’s pineapple question. The pineapple story (which by the way was given to Illinois students in the past) was at worst idiotic, not insidious. It was in some way typical of the sanitized, vacuous reading passages that often appear on standardized tests, which explains how it got past the test review panels that approve test content.

The charter question is far worse than the pineapple question. The pineapple question wasn’t selling pineapples. It was not an advertisement for Dole or another corporation. The charter question was taking a one-sided stance on a matter of public policy. It was dishonest propaganda. It advanced a political cause and, in today’s reality, it advanced the commercial interests of for-profit charter operators.

Do these people have no shame?

Diane

Categories ALEC, Parent Groups, Testing

In Praise of Linda Darling-Hammond

By dianeravitch
May 26, 2012 //
7

One of the wisest and sanest voices in the nation on the subject of teacher quality, teaching quality and teacher evaluation is Linda Darling-Hammond of Stanford University. Linda has been involved for many years in studying these issues and working directly with teachers to improve practice. During the presidential campaign of 2008, she was Barack Obama’s spokesman and chief adviser on education, but was elbowed aside by supporters of Arne Duncan when the campaign ended. The Wall Street hedge fund managers who call themselves Democrats for Education Reform (they use the term “Democrats” to disguise the reactionary quality of their goals) recommended Duncan to the newly elected president, and you know who emerged on top.

Linda, being the diligent scholar that she is, continued her work and continued to write thoughtful studies about how to improve teaching.

After the 2008 election, the issue that predominated all public discussion was how to evaluate teachers. This was no accident. Consider that in the fall of 2008, the Gates Foundation revealed its decision to drop its program of breaking up large high schools. Recall that the foundation had invested $2 billion in breaking up big schools into small schools, had persuaded some 2,500 high schools to do so, and then its researchers told the foundation that the students in the small high schools were not getting any better test scores than those in the large high schools.

Gates needed another big idea. He decided that teacher quality was the big idea. So he invested hundreds of millions of dollars in a tiny number of districts to learn how to evaluate teachers, including thousands of hours of videotapes. Where Gates went, Arne Duncan followed. The new Obama administration put teacher quality at the center of the $5 billion Race to the Top. If states wanted to be eligible for the money, they had to agree to judge teachers–to some considerable degree–by the test scores of their students. That is, they had to use value-added assessment, a still unformed methodology, in evaluating teachers.

In response to Race to the Top and Arne (“What’s there to hide?”) Duncan’s advocacy, many states have now passed laws–some extreme and punitive–directly tying teachers’ tenure, pay, and longevity to test scores.

No other nation in the world is doing this, at least none that I know of.

The unions have negotiated to reduce the impact of value-added systems but have not directly confronted their legitimacy.

After much study and deliberation, Linda Darling-Hammond decided that value-added did not work and would not work, and would ultimately say more about who was being taught than about the quality of the teacher.

The briefest summary of her work appears in an article in Education Week here.

She recently published a full research report. Here is a capsule summary of her team’s findings about the limitations of value-added assessment:

“Measuring Student Learning

There is agreement that new teacher evaluation systems should look at teaching in light of student learning. One currently popular approach is to incorporate teacher ratings from value-added models (VAM) that use statistical methods to examine changes in student test scores over time. Unfortunately, researchers have found that:

1. Value-Added Models of Teacher Effectiveness Are Highly Unstable:

Teachers’ ratings differ substantially from class to class and from year to year, as well as from one test to the next.

2. Teachers’ Value-Added Ratings Are Significantly Affected by Differences in the Students Assigned to Them: Even when models try to control for prior achievement and student demographic variables, teachers are ad- vantaged or disadvantaged based on the students they teach. In particular, teachers with large numbers of new English learners and students with special needs have been found to show lower gains than the same teachers when they are teaching other students. Students who teach low-income stu- dents are disadvantaged by the summer learning loss their children experi- ence between spring-to-spring tests.

3. Value-Added Ratings Cannot Disentangle the Many Influences on Student Progress: –––Many other home, school, and student factors influence student learning gains, and these matter more than the individual teacher in explaining changes in scores.”

The application of misleading, inaccurate and unstable measures serves mainly to demoralize teachers. Many excellent teachers will leave the profession in frustration. There will be churn, as teachers come and go, some mislabeled, some just disgusted by the utter lack of professionalism of these methods.

The tabloids will yelp and howl as they seek the raw data to publish and humiliate teachers. Even those rated at the top (knowing that next year they might be at the bottom) will feel humiliated to see their scores in the paper and online.

This is no way to improve education.

Diane

http://www.edweek.org/ew/articles/2012/03/01/kappan_hammond.html

 http://edpolicy.stanford.edu/sites/default/files/publications/creating-comprehensive-system-evaluating-and-supporting-effective-teaching_1.pdf
Categories Darling-Hammond, Linda, Duncan, Arne, Gates Foundation, Bill Gates, Honor Roll

What Is Campbell’s Law?

By dianeravitch
May 25, 2012 //
9

Everyone interested in understanding how the ceaseless pressure to raise test scores can corrupt the tests should be familiar with Campbell’s Law.

This is an adage written by social scientist Donald T. Campbell in a 1976 paper. It says:

“The more any quantitative social indicator is used for social decision-making, the more subject it will be to corruption pressures and the more apt it will be to distort and corrupt the social processes it is intended to monitor.” (You can google the paper, or find it linked on Wikipedia: Campbell, Donald T., Assessing the Impact of Planned Social Change The Public Affairs Center, Dartmouth College, Hanover New Hampshire, USA. December, 1976.)

Campbell’s Law explains why high-stakes testing promotes cheating, narrowing the curriculum, teaching to the test, and other negative behaviors..

In his 1976 paper, Campbell also wrote that  “achievement tests may well be valuable indicators of general school achievement under conditions of normal teaching aimed at general competence. But when test scores become the goal of the teaching process, they both lose their value as indicators of educational status and distort the educational process in undesirable ways. (Similar biases of course surround the use of objective tests in courses or as entrance examinations.)”

Campbell’s Law helps us understand why No Child Left Behind and Race to the Top are harmful to education. They put pressure on teachers and principals and school districts and states to get higher and higher test scores. As we saw in Atlanta and in Washington, D.C., this kind of pressure may cause educators to betray their ethical duty by changing test scores. As we saw in New York state, this kind of pressure may cause a state education department to lower the passing mark on state tests so as to boost proficiency rates.

As high-stakes testing has become the main driver of our nation’s education policy, we will see more cheating, more narrowing of the curriculum, more gaming of the system. None of this produces better education. And even the test scores–on which so much public policy now firmly rests–will be corrupted, by making them so important.

 Diane
Categories Campbell's Law, Testing
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