Archives for the month of: June, 2012
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A Major Charter School Scandal

By dianeravitch
June 15, 2012 //
9

Over the past few years, the American Indian Charter School in Oakland, California, was celebrated again and again for its achievements.

Journalists, pundits, and television commentators fawned over its founder Ben Chavis. His school (he actually has three schools, but the middle school is the one that gets the plaudits) became the poster school for the charter movement in California and even a national model.

Chavis, said his admirers, had accomplished the impossible. His no-excuses school enrolled poor kids and they got very high test scores. The secret to his success, he claimed and his admirers agreed, was tough rules and harsh discipline.

True, the school has very few American Indian students; true, the largest group is Asian-American (86%, according to this article). But it was also true that its test scores made it one of the highest performing middle schools in the state, perhaps the highest performing in the state.

Conservative commentators saw the Chavis model as the antidote to the ills of a too-permissive public school system. It was the ultimate vindication of the no-frills, tough-minded approach to schooling. It was proof positive that a school that cracked down on students and teachers could overcome all obstacles to get high test scores, which after all, is the only measure of success these days.

The Los Angeles Times reported in 2009:

Not many schools in California recruit teachers with language like this: “We are looking for hard working people who believe in free market capitalism. . . . Multicultural specialists, ultra liberal zealots and college-tainted oppression liberators need not apply.”

That, it turns out, is just the beginning of the ways in which American Indian Public Charter and its two sibling schools spit in the eye of mainstream education. These small, no-frills, independent public schools in the hardscrabble flats of Oakland sometimes seem like creations of television’s “Colbert Report.” They mock liberal orthodoxy with such zeal that it can seem like a parody.

School administrators take pride in their record of frequently firing teachers they consider to be underperforming. Unions are embraced with the same warmth accorded “self-esteem experts, panhandlers, drug dealers and those snapping turtles who refuse to put forth their best effort,” to quote the school’s website.

Students, almost all poor, wear uniforms and are subject to disciplinary procedures redolent of military school. One local school district official was horrified to learn that a girl was forced to clean the boys’ restroom as punishment.

But, whoa, everything came crashing down this week.

In response to whistle-blower complaints  by parents and former teachers, the Oakland school board launched an independent audit of the charter’s finances. The audit reported that $3.7 million dollars were wrongly spent on businesses owned by Chavis and his wife. The audit, reported here, was bad news for Chavis’ reputation and for all those who hailed the magic of unregulated charters. Wrote the San Francisco Chronicle, “The founder and governing board of three controversial Oakland charter schools could face a criminal investigation into allegations of fraud, misappropriation of funds and other illegal activities outlined in an official audit report released Wednesday.”

With full knowledge that the audit was underway and was likely to raise questions about financial mismanagement, the Oakland Unified school board renewed Chavis’s charter only two months ago, by a vote of 4-3. The schools’ superintendent recommended against renewal, but the board majority decided that the ethical and financial issues of the school’s leaders should not prevent the school from getting a renewal, in light of its stellar test scores.

The preliminary findings reported:

— $350,000 to Chavis’ wife, who was paid wages as the school’s financial administrator as well as additional fees to her private accounting firm.

— $355,000 to Chavis for administering a summer school program, one that violated state law by requiring students to attend and pay the charter school $50 for each day missed.

— $348,000 in payments to companies owned by Chavis for unauthorized construction projects.

None of this was known to the many journalists and pundits who lionized Chavis and his school.

Chavis was interviewed by Jonathan Alter, then at Newsweek, on MSNBC, where Chavis recommended the elimination of school boards. Now we know why. School boards are responsible for oversight and audits. When I looked for the interview, it had been taken down by Youtube (the description remains, but the video was gone). But keep trying, you never know. (Addendum: A reader informs me that the interview is back, please watch.)

In another interview, Chavis said that he preferred the Ku Klux Klan to teachers’ unions. Now we know why. It’s easier to fire compliant teachers when they have no representation.

NBC, the home of Education Nation, featured the strict discipline of the school. It showed how quickly students were subject to harsh measures and kicked out if they did not conform.

The audit left a lot of journalists with egg on their collective faces.

With so many questions raised about the mismanagement of money, how could anyone trust the schools’ test scores?

Diane

Categories California, Charter Schools, Education Reform

Questions for the Candidates

By dianeravitch
June 15, 2012 //
2

As I watch President Obama and Mitt Romney compete, I am appalled by the absence of any substantive analysis of education issues.

When Romney released his education agenda, it was reported with impartiality, as it should have been. But no one asked questions about his claims.

I reviewed his proposals in the New York Review of Books, but I have seen no other effort to analyze his plan and check his assertions. Maybe that happens later. I hope so.

Take the issue of vouchers. Kudos to Trip Gabriel of the New York Times for noticing that Romney avoids using the V word even as he advocates loudly for vouchers. Clearly, his pollsters must have told him that the American public has questions about the wisdom of sending their  tax dollars to support religious schools.

The general public is uninformed about the ongoing debacle of vouchers in Louisiana or about the weak evidence for privately managed charters or about the high cost of returning control of federal student loans to commercial banks, which Romney wants to do.

Here is an example of a fact that might easily have been checked but so far has not been. When Romney first addressed education issues, he claimed  that the D.C. Opportunity Scholarship Program (aka, the federally-funded voucher program) should be considered a national model. He made the ludicrous claim that students in the program gained “19 months” in reading after only three months in the program. That was untrue, but no journalist pointed that out. As I said in my article on the blog of the New York Review of Books, the federal evaluation found no gain in achievement for students in the voucher program. Romney also exaggerated the graduation rate for students in the voucher program, but no journalist noted that either. Will any of Romney’s advisers tell him the truth about D.C.? Will any journalist check the facts on the D.C. voucher program?

President Obama should also be subject to similar journalistic scrutiny. The claims he makes for his Race to the Top program have no evidentiary basis. The main thing that his : Race seems to have accomplished is to have demoralized vast numbers of teachers, which was documented by the Metlife Survey earlier this year. Race to the Top has also generated an army of consultants and edu-entrepreneurs to soak up federal dollars with dubious claims of their ability to turn schools around. And we have yet to hear the debunking of Obama’s demand that states evaluate teachers by the test scores of their students. It’s happening in state after state, but the evidence about its positive effects does not exist, while the evidence of collateral damage accumulates. More teaching to the test, more cheating, more narrowing the curriculum, more experienced teachers leaving the profession, more attacks on the profession, more attacks on teachers’ unions, more profits for the vendors as school budgets shrink.

A few months ago, I published an article in NiemanWatch at Harvard, for journalists. These are questions that journalists and the public should be asking candidates this year. We need a national debate about what the federal government is doing to our public schools. It is not likely to happen between the candidates. It will happen only to the extent that the media is a watchdog.

Diane

Categories Education Reform, Obama, Romney, Mitt, Vouchers

How Reformers Dumb Down Education

By dianeravitch
June 15, 2012 //
24

It’s hard to count all the ways that reformers dumb down education, but here is a good example of catching them in the act.

State Superintendent Tony Bennett is a celebrated reformer. He won the Thomas B. Fordham award as the “reformiest” reformer of them all.

That means he loves vouchers and charters, he promotes privatization, he loves online learning and merit pay, and he hates collective bargaining, seniority and tenure. And of course, test scores are the most important measure of everything that schools do.

Now the education leaders of the Hoosier state have a brilliant idea to improve education: Lower the standards for becoming a teacher and an administrator.

The Indiana Department of Education wants to make it easier to become a teacher. Under its proposed Rules for Educator Preparation and Accountability (REPA II) anyone with a bachelor’s degree and at least a 3.0 grade-point average who passes a subject test can become a teacher. New teachers will not need a master’s degree.

A teacher who is licensed in any subject can be certified in special education, music or art by passing a standardized test, with no training for these fields. This is dubious in every subject, but potentially dangerous in special education where training and knowledge are required for teaching children with disabilities.

Maybe someone in the Indiana Department of Education thinks that teachers do nothing but test prep, and that you don’t need a master’s degree or any training or experience to do test prep. They may be right about that–after all, even computers are good at drilling in the right answer to standardized test questions–but they are wrong to assume that getting higher scores is the essence of teaching. That is the essence of robotic behavior, and that seems to be what the Department of Education aims for.

Under REPA II, principals need no master’s degree either. This opens the way to recruit future principals who are business leaders, sports figures, and anyone else who wants to try their hand at running a school. But given that principals are expected to evaluate teachers and to know whether they are good at their job, and given that they should be able to offer support to teachers, every principal should have been a master teacher.

Watch Indiana. Every bad reform idea tried anywhere will eventually land in Indiana, unless it started there. Or more likely, see what ALEC model legislation recommends. ALEC never did understand why educators need high standards.

Diane

Categories Education Reform

Miracle Watch: Harlem Village Academy

By dianeravitch
June 15, 2012 //
14

A year ago, I wrote an article about “miracle schools” in the New York Times.

My beef was with politicians who pointed to a school and said that it had achieved dramatic test score gains and amazing graduation rates despite the poverty in which the children live. The usual “remedy” was to fire the teachers, close the school and bring in a new staff. On closer examination, however, the “miracle” evaporated. Some of the schools held up as models by the politicians had very high attrition rates, some had very low test scores coupled with high graduation rates, none of them had met the politicians’ descriptions of them. None proved that poverty doesn’t matter or that miracles happen when you fire the entire staff and close the school.

My point in debunking the myth of miracle schools was two-fold. It was not to embarrass the schools but to try to persuade the politicians that education is hard work and that closing schools doesn’t “fix” poverty. Education is an incremental process that happens day by day, one child at a time.  The people who do this work do their best work when they are in a collegial atmosphere, when they work together as a team, collaborating to help the children in their care. And, yes, poverty does drag down students’ motivation and ability to succeed in school. Being hungry and homeless interferes with one’s focus on academic work.

It is distinctly unhelpful to go forth to national media and claim that your school is the very one that has cracked the code, especially if your success is built on high attrition rates and spin.

The latest “miracle” school is a small charter chain called Harlem Village Academy. Its founder, Deborah Kenny, has written a new book to tout the latest miracle in Harlem. She has been featured on the major television shows, telling her story. She is neither a teacher nor a principal but she is the one garnering praise (and an annual salary in excess of $400,000). Her charters get amazing test scores. President George W. Bush visited HVA. A New York Times columnist hailed her achievements, especially her passion for cultivating “great teachers.

When I was writing my article for the New York Times a year ago, I turned to Gary Rubinstein to analyze state data about the “miracle” schools. Gary is a math teacher at Stuyvesant High School. As I said when I spoke to NCTM earlier this year, math teachers and mathematicians are hard-headed. They insist on evidence. They want proof. They like theory, but they are not content with theory alone. Sentiment doesn’t count with them. Nor does spin and hype. Gary has become the nation’s pre-eminent myth buster of education “miracles.” I urge you to sign up for his blog.

Gary investigated the Harlem Village Academy data, and he concluded there was no miracle. HVA has astonishingly high attrition rates among both students and teachers. In 2009-10, a startling 61% of teachers left HVA.

Gary’s blog includes a letter from a teacher who left HVA, angry and disillusioned by the imperious and disrespectful ways that teachers were treated by Deborah Kenny. Gary notes that truly great schools are great communities. Teachers don’t want to leave great schools. Great schools do not have high teacher attrition rates every year. They love their jobs, their students, their school, their community, and their colleagues.

There is no joy, as Gary notes, in debunking a school’s claims. Like Gary, I would like to find schools that are succeeding against all odds to provide a great education for their students. I know such schools exist. I have seen them. When I have been in such schools, the leaders and teachers don’t talk about their test scores. They talk about the community spirit that brings together teachers and parents to work together on behalf of students. They talk about the accomplishments of their students and the work they proudly exhibit. They talk about the students who are meeting their own goals, despite the deck stacked against them. They celebrate small victories. They don’t boast. They exemplify the respect and concern–and well, love–that make a school successful. Not a miracle, but a beloved community institution.

Diane

Categories Charter Schools, Education Reform, NYC

Oh, No! Yet Another Arts Assessment

By dianeravitch
June 14, 2012 //
12

Oh, no! Dana Goldstein visited Memphis, where she found that arts teachers are using portfolio assessments.

I suppose that is a step up from online standardized tests and the old-fashioned machine-scored computerized tests, but it is still a very bad idea.

The whole premise of testing is that teachers cannot be trusted to reach responsible judgments about student work.

And the purpose of the assessment is not to help students but to devise a numerical rating so teachers of the arts may be evaluated and held “accountable” for student progress. If the student is drawing better pictures, the teacher must be a better teacher. If the student work does not get better, the teacher is a bad teacher. He or she will be rated ineffective and may lose tenure or compensation and may be fired.

If we cared about teacher professionalism, we would let teachers teach without tying their work to test scores or portfolios.

If we cared about creativity, we would let students engage wholeheartedly in the arts without measuring whether they are getting “better” at what they are doing. Almost no one learns to play a musical instrument and gets worse by the day; and if they do, it is because they didn’t practice, didn’t care, and didn’t try. If they try, they will improve. And any teacher of the arts will know that they are trying and improving without need for an assessment to prove it. To “prove it” to whom? To a supervisor? To the state commissioner of investigation?

Let’s face it. None of this assessment mania is about kids or education or teacher quality. It is about control and lack of respect for teachers.

Follow your instincts, Dana. Whether assessed by a machine or by a portfolio, the arts should be performed and experienced, not measured.

Diane

Categories Accountability, Arts Education, Education Reform, Teacher Evaluations

Defunding Public Education in Texas

By dianeravitch
June 14, 2012 //
14

In recent years, the governor and legislature in Texas have cut billions of dollars from the budget for public education.

They have shown their priorities. By keeping taxes low, they can grow new jobs, or so they say.

But at the same time, they are destroying the public schools that prepare the next generation for citizenship and work and innovation.

A Texas colleague sent me an article to show what the cuts are doing to one small district. The Hutto school district must cut more than $1 million from its $37 million budget. A local tax increase was turned down last November. The district will go back to the voters to ask again.

The district is imposing a fee of $200 a year for students to ride the bus to school, with no break for poor kids. The district is selling advertising on the buses and licensing the right to use its mascot symbol. In April, the district laid off arts teachers, counselors, and nurses. It increased the fee for participating in extracurricular activities to $100.

Faced with endless cuts, districts are moving back to a time in our history–now seen only in very poor nations–where access to education was limited by what families can pay.

If only education reformers were as passionate about paying for education as they are about privatizing it.

Where is “Superman” when you really need him?

Diane

Categories Budget Cuts, Education Reform, Texas

I’m Convinced

By dianeravitch
June 14, 2012 //
9

Dear Readers,

Thank you for your instant feedback. Some readers say they like having my blogs early in the morning, before they leave for work. A few said they liked the spacing. Some said do what works for you. What resonated with me was my preference for plain vanilla. Post them as you write them. Post them when you want. If readers don’t have the patience to read whatever I send out, that’s their choice.

The one thing I want to emphasize to those who enjoy this blog is that you should take the time to read some of the earliest posts. I started blogging in late April, not so long ago. The blogs I wrote six weeks ago are as timely and as relevant today as they were then.

I have been fortunate to have the help of two readers who saw that I was not good with the technology. I depended on the kindness of strangers, who helped organize the content with categories and who helped make the blog user-friendly and showed me some of the basics.

My only rule was: no advertising; no glitz; no graphics; just the words, just the ideas, just the direct communication between me and you.

I hope it works for you. It works for me.

Together we will survive these days of madness in American education. We will not let them destroy the teaching profession and privatize our public schools.

And I will post in the mornings.

Diane

Categories Education Reform

Why Test the Arts and PE?

By dianeravitch
June 14, 2012 //
24

As I read Dana Goldstein’s article about the advance of standardized testing into subjects like the arts and physical education, I began to get a queasy feeling. “This isn’t right,” I mumbled to myself. I thought of my grandchildren taking standardized tests in music and gym, and I shook my head. This isn’t right.

Race to the Top has promoted this movement to test every subject. Arne Duncan brandished $5 billion to encourage states and districts to judge teachers by the rise or fall of their students’ scores. The fact that there is no evidence for this method of judging teachers doesn’t matter. Bad ideas backed by big money have a way of catching on, no matter how mindless they are.

South Carolina has developed online tests for the arts, multiple-choice, of course. Florida is building tests of music and other pervormance arts that can be scored by machine, that is, by artificial intelligence. The vendors of these tests lobby to make them permanent, regardless of their quality.

Are they doing this at Sidwell Friends or the University of Chicago Lab School or Dalton or Exeter or Deerfield Academy? Of course not.

Is this what they do in Finland? Of course not.

What is the reason for testing the arts and physical education? It’s not to help students take joy in singing or playing a musical instrument or running fast or shooting baskets.

No, the purpose of all these tests is to collect data to evaluate the teachers! Wasting the students’ time with stupid questions and pointless activities and trivial measurements is just a way of gathering information so teachers of the arts and physical education can get a value-added score, just like teachers of reading and math.

Sometimes Americans do really foolish things. Sometimes they do these things because it is so easy to follow the crowd. Sometimes it’s because no one is thinking clearly. Sometimes they get caught up in nutty fads because someone is making a profit and buying legislators. Usually it’s because the people who launched these bad ideas have no moorings. They have lost touch with their own values. They do to other people’s children what they would never do to their own. They don’t listen to teachers. They don’t listen to parents.

History is not kind to people who do foolish, nay harmful, things and fail to exercise independent judgment. That’s why it’s best to say “no” when your conscience tells you to.

Diane

Categories Arts Education, Education Reform, Florida, Race to the Top, Teacher Evaluations, Testing

The Joys of Blogging

By dianeravitch
June 14, 2012 //
9

I have written a lot of articles for publication in newspapers and magazines. If I publish in the New York Times or the Washington Post or the New York Daily News, my writing will reach hundreds of thousands of readers. Of course, many of their readers will pass right over your article, will not read it. Don’t get me wrong, I love getting my articles published. The blog reaches thousands of readers every day, not hundreds of thousands, and I’m content to know that every one of my readers cares about the subject.

Tomorrow, as the saying goes, the newspaper will be wrapping fish, but the blog will be saved, printed out, tweeted, posted on Facebook, or sent to friends and legislators.

But there is something about blogging that is even more rewarding than being printed in the newspaper. For one thing, I can write whatever I want whenever I want. That’s self-publishing. It is a sort of vanity project, to be sure, but it has its benefits. No one edits me. At some publications, the editors are very heavy-handed. No matter what I turn in, they always think they can write it better. It’s too long. Cut 200-300 words. The ending should be the beginning, and the beginning should be the ending. You can’t say this, there’s no room for that. Sorry, as we went to press, we have to cut another 100 words.

And there is always the chance that the editor(s) will decide he doesn’t want to publish you at all. So you either have wasted your time or you have to go knock on some other publication’s doors to find an outlet. I hate to think of all the unpublished articles I have written. As everyone who writes about education knows, there are very few outlets that will publish you. So one tends to accept whatever editors say or demand as the cost of being published.

The ultimate joy of blogging, then, is freedom to write, freedom to speak, freedom to express one’s views without editing.

And there is one other joy: The ability to interact with readers. When an op-ed appears in the newspaper, there may be a few letters printed. The writer never sees all of them and never gets to respond to those whose letters were published. On my blog, I read every comment, and I respond when a response seems warranted. This interactivity is priceless. I feel that the blog has put me in touch with a large community of friends, and they support me as I support them through these difficult times.

The danger of blogging is that I am having too much fun. There are longer articles that require focus and concentration, and I am blogging instead of doing the more challenging work.

And this fall, when I start my travels and lectures, I will have less time to keep up the frenetic pace of 2-3-4-5-6-7-8 blogs a day. I will have to cut back to one a day.

Yet every time I read an article about education, I want to react. Now I can.

This is my sounding board. Thank you for listening and reading.

Diane

Categories Education Reform, Personal

Stand for Children Does Not Stand for Public Education

By dianeravitch
June 14, 2012 //
11

Stand for Children has moved its campaign for privatization and against experienced teachers  to Massachusetts. Stand’s politically savvy, well-connected, and well-funded leader Jonah Edelman threatened an anti-teacher ballot initiative unless the unions negotiated away their seniority and tenure.

Governor Deval Patrick agreed with Stand for Children that teacher evaluation (based to some extent on standardized test scores of students, which is a wholly unproven measure of teacher quality) will outweigh experience.

Stand for Children believes that experience is unnecessary in teaching. Like Michelle Rhee’s Students First, Stand for Children holds that inexperienced teachers are just as good if not better than experienced teachers. Stand threatened a ballot initiative, backed by millions of dollars in spending, to destroy teachers’ seniority and tenure. The Massachusetts Teachers Association could not match the spending of the hedge fund managers who want to destroy teacher unionism and it capitulated.

Let’s be clear: Stand for Children and its kind want to put an end not only to teachers’  unions but to the teaching profession. They want teachers to be evaluated by test scores, despite the overwhelming evidence that doing so will promote teaching to standardized tests and narrowing the curriculum, as well as cheating and gaming the system.

An underfunded group called Citizens for Public Schools tried to rally support for teachers and opposition to Edelman’s scheme. Former members of Stand for Children signed a petition against its campaign.

Since Massachusetts leads the nation on the no-stakes federal tests called the National Assessment of Educational Progress, it seems difficult to understand how Stand for Children was able to mount a campaign against the state’s teachers. But the national atmosphere is so poisonous towards teachers, that Stand must have latched onto the sentiment generated by the odious movie “Waiting for ‘Superman'” and the public relations machine of those out to belittle teachers while pretending to care about teacher quality.

This Massachusetts teacher blogger will give  you some idea of what teachers think about Stand’s campaign.

At some point in the hopefully not distant future, the “reformers” who are working so hard to remove all job protections from teachers will be held accountable for their actions. When that day arrives, they will be ashamed of what they have done to rob our children and our schools of the experienced teachers they need.

Diane

Categories Accountability, Stand for Children, Teacher Tenure, Teachers and Teaching
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