Archives for the month of: June, 2012
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Why the Federal Tutoring Program Is Failing

By dianeravitch
June 4, 2012 //
9

An expose in the Minneapolis Star-Tribune uncovered fraud, waste, and incompetence in the federal program for tutoring called Supplementary Educational Services. This program is part of No Child Left Behind, and it created the equivalent of a voucher program for after-school tutoring. Instead of encouraging schools to provide trained and certified teachers for the extra tutoring that low-performing students need, NCLB inspired the creation of a tutoring “industry.”

Ten years ago, when Congress created the tutoring program as part of No Child Left Behind, proponents believed the private market would accomplish what the public sector had failed to do.

For the first time, many parents would have a say in how their kids were educated. If they didn’t like the troubled school their children were attending, they could switch and districts would pay for transportation. If they wanted to take advantage of free tutoring, they would have plenty of options, and districts would foot the bill.

 Entrepreneurs saw their opportunity and they took it. Thousands of brand-new businesses sprung up to take advantage of the federal dollars. For-profit online corporations leapt to get into this new and lucrative market. The money for SES comes out of the district’s Title I allocation. The cost of SES soared from $375 million in 2005-06 to $970 million last year. That is quite a tempting market.
In Minnesota, more than 80 tutoring services vie for $20 million in federal funds. The most aggressive of the tutoring companies are the online for-profit operators, who pitch their wares to unwary parents. According to the article, they charge as much as $90 an hour, as compared to the nonprofits, which charge as little as $5 an hour. A lucrative business for the corporation, not so profitable for the students. At those sky-high rates, the money runs out long before the student has gained much from the “tutoring.”
The SES program has never had adequate federal or state oversight. Numerous studies concluded that the SES tutoring was ineffective. “It wasted a lot of money and a lot of people’s time,” said Steven Ross, an education professor at Johns Hopkins University who led at least 15 state studies analyzing the program. “It was inadequately funded and developed. The policies don’t work. The whole concept was a bad turn. … It turned out to be very dysfunctional.”
The article documents numerous cases of fraud, occasionally leading to termination of a company’s contract. In several instances, tutoring companies billed for sessions that never  happened; typically, they recruit aggressively, but deliver subpar services to students.
As an aside, the Romney education plan envisions turning over even more money and programs to the private sector, with minimal regulation.
Why do we keep wasting money on private vendors instead of providing our public schools with the resources they need to give students intensive tutoring? At least, we would have the assurance that the services were supplied by certified teachers rather than profit-seeking amateurs.
Diane
Categories Privatization, Testing, Tutoring

What Alabama Really Needs

By dianeravitch
June 4, 2012 //
0

Alabama is one of our poorest states. It has a large number of children living in poverty in urban areas but also in rural areas.

This past spring, there was a heavy-duty political effort to pass charter school legislation in Alabama. The effort failed, but is likely to be revived in the next session. Charter schools are supposed to raise test scores, and their promoters say that one day, with more and more charter schools and ever-higher test scores, there won’t be any poverty. Test scores are supposed to be the best antidote to poverty.

Not everyone believes that the world works that way. Not just because there are large numbers of college graduates who are unemployed and underemployed, but because poverty is a mass phenomenon in this country and will never be overcome simply by getting more students to learn how to pick the right bubble on a standardized test. Not just because the tests are normed, and half of those who take them will always be in the bottom half by design, but because far more is needed to lift up people’s lives and provide economic stability and mobility than opening charter schools, some of which will be good, some of which will not.

Larry Lee is an Alabamian who has spent many days and months and years traveling the back roads of Alabama. When he was working for the state, he and his colleagues wrote a moving report on successful schools in rural districts. Lee described impoverished schools that were closely tied to their communities, where parents and teachers worked together to meet the basic needs of children, where schools survive because of the sacrifices of teachers, principals, parents, and the community. Finding teachers for schools in rural areas is never easy, and most come from the community and feel “called to teach.” Please read this report and think of it the next time you hear someone say that we are already spending too much on our schools.

Larry Lee is no fan of charter schools. He sees them as a diversion from the state’s responsibility to support a sound, basic education for all its children. But he know that the advocates will be back next legislative session. And he knows that charters won’t help the children and the communities that are always left behind.

Diane

Categories Alabama, Charter Schools

A Courageous Teacher

By dianeravitch
June 4, 2012 //
8

Idaho is ga-ga for computers and online learning. State Superintendent Tom Luna has made online learning the centerpiece of his “reform” agenda. Tom Luna has close ties to the for-profit online industry.

Teachers welcome computers and technology in the classroom, but Luna takes it to an extreme. He views technology as a cost-saving device, so he is (paradoxically) investing heavily in hardware and software, on the assumption that in time there will be need for fewer teachers. Teachers are an old-fashioned, expensive, near obsolete technology. Teachers need health care and pensions; computers don’t. Teachers are ornery and they often have thoughts that don’t coincide with the state’s agenda; computers don’t.

A veteran teacher decided that enough is enough. She did something she never dreamed she would do. She wrote an opinion piece for the local Idaho newspaper. She disagreed with the order to devote 49% of instruction in world history to computer time. Education is not simply imbibing facts:

Successful students must learn certain values such as patience, hard work, self-discipline, honesty, respect for others, etc. Teachers instill those values, not computers. Teachers serve as positive role models and successful learning requires positive human interaction. In training we were informed by a district official that “with the incorporation of this program you will not even have to interact with your students.” For those who do not understand how such an approach to teaching can damage a student’s education, there is no reason to explain further. You will never understand.

She realizes that the changes now being imposed from the top come from people who know little about students or teaching or education:

I now see individuals taking over decision-making positions in education who have no classroom experience, implementing programs that have made the classroom critically vulnerable to their destructive impact and counterintuitive to education. There is too much noise regarding the state of education that is distracting and destroying the true nature of education, which should center on the student. Students learn best when they have caring and reputable teachers. And we have them in the Coeur d’Alene School District. However, this is changing and if left unopposed will destroy our quality of education leaving our students, our community and our state to pay for these mistakes.

This teacher put her own job at risk by speaking out. With hundreds, nay, thousands of voices like hers, the public will begin to understand what is being done to their children and to our nation’s schools.

Diane

Categories Idaho, Luna, Tom, On-Line Education

Vouchers and the Future of Public Education

By dianeravitch
June 3, 2012 //
15

I debated whether to give this blog the title you see or to call it “State Commissioner of Education John White Acknowledges That He Doesn’t Know How to Improve Schools.”

I felt a sense of outrage as I read the latest account of the Louisiana voucher program. Since Bobby Jindal is already doing what Mitt Romney promises to do, I keep a close watch on Louisiana. So should the national media. A Shreveport newspaper ran an article linking Jindal’s plan to the ALEC model of school reform.

The Reuters article skips the rhetoric about “the civil rights issue of our era” and goes to the heart of the voucher program:

“Louisiana is embarking on the nation’s boldest experiment in privatizing public education, with the state preparing to shift tens of millions in tax dollars out of the public schools to pay private industry, businesses owners and church pastors to educate children.”

The voucher program is a bold effort to privatize public education by taking money away from public schools and giving it to anyone who claims that they can offer some sort of an educational or tutoring or apprenticeship program, in person or online, regardless of its quality.

Commissioner John White defends the radical privatization scheme, saying that: “I know the governor and bill authors had the goal in mind of improving student achievement,” White said. “The importance of that has been highlighted in studies which show the economic sustainability of a state is predicated on education, and we are dead last in the number of students growing up in communities with at least one parent with a college education.” Follow the logic here. If Louisiana ranks last in parent education, is that a strong argument for choice? Or for a higher level of professionalism and quality in the public schools? You decide.

More than 400,000 students are eligible for vouchers, which is more than half the students in the state’s public schools. Only 5,000 seats are available, and some of these seats don’t even exist. There are some good seats in good schools. A highly regarded private school in Baton Rouge will accept only four students, and only in kindergarten. But it appears that many of the students will be accepted by small religious schools that have no track record of providing good education; for some, the state funding will be a windfall of millions of dollars. They may be far worse than the public schools that the students are fleeing. But parents will choose them anyway.

Next year, the state will expand the program to all students to get mini-vouchers, which can be used to pay private vendors for tutoring, apprenticeships, online courses, whatever. Given the absence of any due diligence in the rollout of this year’s voucher program, you can just imagine the private vendors that will spring up to claim millions of dollars from the state treasury.

Bear in mind that public education is level-funded, so all these millions for vouchers and charters and online schooling and tutoring will come right out of the public school budget, making classes more overcrowded, closing libraries, shutting down services for students that need them.

The Reuters article describes some of the curricular and instructional issues that any sensible person would worry about:

“The school willing to accept the most voucher students — 314 — is New Living Word in Ruston, which has a top-ranked basketball team but no library. Students spend most of the day watching TVs in bare-bones classrooms. Each lesson consists of an instructional DVD that intersperses Biblical verses with subjects such chemistry or composition.

 “The Upperroom Bible Church Academy in New Orleans, a bunker-like building with no windows or playground, also has plenty of slots open. It seeks to bring in 214 voucher students, worth up to $1.8 million in state funding.

 At Eternity Christian Academy in Westlake, pastor-turned-principal Marie Carrier hopes to secure extra space to enroll 135 voucher students, though she now has room for just a few dozen. Her first- through eighth-grade students sit in cubicles for much of the day and move at their own pace through Christian workbooks, such as a beginning science text that explains “what God made” on each of the six days of creation. They are not exposed to the theory of evolution.

 “We try to stay away from all those things that might confuse our children,” Carrier said.

 Other schools approved for state-funded vouchers use social studies texts warning that liberals threaten global prosperity; Bible-based math books that don’t cover modern concepts such as set theory; and biology texts built around refuting evolution.”

Louisiana officials have decided that it is not up to them to make any judgments about quality or curriculum or instruction. That’s the parents’ choice.

Commissioner John White told the Reuters reporter: “To me, it’s a moral outrage that the government would say, ‘We know what’s best for your child,'” White said. “Who are we to tell parents we know better?”

Let’s deconstruct that statement. The state commissioner of education said right here that he doesn’t know what’s best for children. He doesn’t know what children or schools should be doing. It is not up to him to tell schools what is best regarding curriculum and instruction. He has no responsibility to improve schools, only to close then and to provide the wherewithal so that parents can leave them and take their public money anywhere they want.

What he means is that any parent in the state of Louisiana, regardless of their own education, knows more than he does about education. Would you want a doctor who told you that it was up to you to decide which medicine you should take when you were ill? Or a lawyer who said you should write your own defense? Or a golf instructor who told you to hold the club anyway that you wanted? Why do people get degrees and become professional if they don’t know any more than people who have no professional training?

Maybe John White is right. Maybe every parent in Louisiana knows more about education than he does, even those who didn’t finish high school. Maybe he doesn’t know what good instruction and good curriculum look like. But why is he in charge of education if he doesn’t know these things?

Diane

Categories ALEC, Jindal, Bobby, Louisiana, Vouchers

Why Do We Treat the Tests As Scientific Instruments?

By dianeravitch
June 3, 2012 //
25

I posted a blog called “A Reader Wants to Know,” in which a teacher asked how he could be evaluated on test scores when the students were in the middle of the second semester. How were the scores affected by the teacher of the previous years? Other teachers have asked how they can be evaluated by scores when so many other factors affect test scores.

A reader commented on this blog with the most pertinent question of all. Why do we (and state legislatures and the U.S. Department of Education and the media) treat these tests and the scores they produce as accurate measures of what students know and can do? The reader, who clearly is a teacher, reminds us that the tests can’t do what everyone assumes they can do. They are subject to statistical error, measurement error, and random error. They are a yardstick that ranges from 30″ to 42″, sometimes more, sometimes less. Yet we treat them as infallible scientific instruments. They are not. He or she wrote:

In a way, I hate these questions. It’s in the same category as “Kid having a bad day on the day of the high stakes test”. They are all searching for explanations of why scores vary so widely, when the real answer is that all of these effects are dwarfed by the innate inaccuracy of the test. Even though these tests provide nice distinct numbers, there is a large random component to them.

To repeat: These tests are inherently inaccurate at the individual level.

Addressing anything but that just provides fodder for distraction for those who want to use them to loot our educational system.

This comment reminds me of something that has long occurred to me. The entire edifice of school-bashing and teacher-bashing relies on these shoddy tests. In the name of “accountability,” schools are being closed, people are being fired. And nothing is done to improve education. The students are shuffled from old school to new school, and in time they will be shuffled yet against from old new school to new new school.

What’s the game here and what does it have to do with improving education?

Diane

Categories Testing

For Shame, Penny Pritzker

By dianeravitch
June 3, 2012 //
26

One of the most powerful videos I have yet seen is making its rounds of the Internet.

I urge you to watch it.

Matt Farmer, a parent of children in the Chicago public schools, addresses a rally of the Chicago Teachers Union, where he “cross-examines” Penny Pritzker, the billionaire member of the Chicago Board of Education.

Farmer is a trial lawyer. He describes how he bristled when he heard an interview on the radio in which Pritzker described what Chicago students need: enough skills in reading, mathematics, and science to be productive members of the workforce. Why no mention of the arts, of music, of physical education, he wondered.

So he cross-examined Pritzker in absentia. Her own children attend the University of Chicago Lab School. Mayor Rahm Emanuel sends his children there too. Arne Duncan is a graduate.

Farmer points out that the Lab School has a rich curriculum, not preparation for the workforce. Children there get the arts and physical education there every day. The Lab School has a beautiful library, and Pritzker is raising money to make it even grander and more beautiful. He asks the absent Pritzker, “Do you know that 160 public schools in Chicago don’t have a library?”

The Lab School has seven teachers of the arts. In a high school that Pritzker voted to close, there was not a single arts teacher.

Matt Farmer goes on to quote the director of the Lab School, who opposes standardized testing and insists upon a rich curriculum. The statement by the Lab School’s director about the importance of the union bring the assembled teachers to their feet, roaring and applauding.

I hope Penny Pritzker and Rahm Emanual watch this video. People who have the good fortune to send their children to elite private schools should do whatever they can to spread the same advantages to other people’s children. When they are members of the board of education and the mayor, they have a special responsibility to do what is right for the children in their care. If they inflict policies on other people’s children that are unacceptable for their own children, they should be ashamed.

Diane

Categories Chicago, Duncan, Arne, Education Reform, Emanuel, Rahm

Drum Roll: The Bunkum Awards

By dianeravitch
June 3, 2012 //
2

Just days ago, the National Education Policy Center at the University of Colorado announced the winners of its annual Bunkum Awards.

These are awards given to the worst educational research of the previous year. Being mundane or trivial is not enough to win these awards. They go only to “prime exemplars of incompetent science.”

The Grand Prize for Bunkum, or “Cancer is Under-rated” award,” went to the Progressive Policy Institute, for its report “Going Exponential: Growing the Charter School Sector’s Best.” It achieved distinction for its “weak analysis, agenda-driven recommendations, and the most bizarre analogy we have seen in a long time.” The report compared the growth of charter schools to the growth of cancer and viruses. The citation read: “Beyond the analogy, the report suffers from an almost complete lack of acceptable scientific evidence or original research supporting the policy suggestions. It presents nine “lessons” or suggestions that are essentially common and vague aphorisms from the business world. Yet it fails to make the case that the suggestions or references are relevant to school improvement.”

The First Runner-Up –the “Mirror Image (What You Read Is Reversed) “Award was the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. It won for its Measures of Teaching analysis, which reached  a conclusion that was the exact opposite of what the evidence suggested.

The “If Bernie Madoff Worked in School Finance” Award went to the advocacy group ConnCAN for proposing a financial reform package that would be a reverse Robin Hood: Steal from the poor and give to the rich.

The “If Political Propaganda Counted as Research” award went to the Center for American Progress for its report “Charting New Territory: Tapping Charter Schools to Turn Around the Nation’s Dropout Factories.” This report is a sham. Its “citations to “research” literature about school turnarounds, for instance, consisted of four references: a blog, a consultant’s template, a non-peer reviewed case study, and an article from the Hoover Institution journal Education Next. The report also focused on the ostensibly inspiring improvements of one school that, after concentrated, intensive and skillful charter management, catapulted English Language Arts proficiency rates to 14.9% and math proficiency rates all the way to 7%.”

The “Discovering the Obvious While Obscuring the Important” award went to the Third Way for its report on middle class schools. The report determined that middle class schools do better than schools at the bottom, but not as well as schools in affluent districts. What is the point of the study? “What, then, is basis of the conversation Third Way is attempting to ignite? We’re not sure. That’s because in a normal conversation, one can understand what the other person is saying. Yet this report mixes and matches data sources and units of analysis to such an extent that it’s almost impossible for readers to figure out which analyses go with which data. Even more troubling, since the report defines “middle class” as having between 25% and 75% of students qualifying for free and reduced lunch, its analyses of district-level data include the urban schools districts in Detroit, Philadelphia, Houston and Memphis. The Third Way appears to have found a new way to address urban poverty: define it out of existence.”

The NEPC “Get a Life(time) Achievement Award” went to Matthew Ladner, advisor to former Florida Governor Jeb Bush’s Foundation for Education Excellence. As the award says, “Dr. Ladner’s body of Bunk-work is focused on his shameless hawking of what he and the Governor call the “Florida Formula” for educational success.  As our reviews have explained, they’d be less deceptive if they were selling prime Florida swampland. One cannot, however, deny Dr. Ladner’s salesmanship: gullible lawmakers throughout the nation have been pulling out their wallets and buying into his evidence-less pitch for flunking of low-scoring third graders and other policies likely to harm many more students than they help.”

To learn what put Ladner did to put him over the top in the estimation of the contests’ judges, read the full report.

Diane

Categories Charter Schools, ConnCAN, Education Reform, Gates Foundation, Bill Gates, National Education Policy Center

Newsflash: Bloomberg Backs Down on Social Promotion

By dianeravitch
June 3, 2012 //
4

The Bloomberg administration in New York City made national headlines in March 2004 when the Mayor unilaterally decided to end social promotion. He told the city’s “Panel on Educational Policy” (the successor to the once-powerful Board of Education which Bloomberg turned into a toothless group) that students should not be promoted if they scored at the lowest level on the state tests. Bloomberg controlled the eight votes on the 13-member panel, and he told his appointees to approve his new policy. Two of them expressed doubts, suggesting that more thought was needed before implementing this change, more attention to what supports the students needed. The Mayor fired them on the day of the vote, and arranged the firing of a third member of the panel appointed by another elected official. The night of the panel’s meeting was tumultuous, as protesters shouted and objected. That evening was memorialized among activists as “the Monday Night Massacre.”

Mayor Bloomberg defended his decision: “Mayoral control means mayoral control, thank you very much. They are my representatives, and they are going to vote for things that I believe in.” Never again did a mayoral appointee ever disagree with the mayor’s orders. The Panel on Education Policy officially became a rubber stamp for the Mayor, and the “chancellor” no more than his mouthpiece.

In the first year of the policy’s implementation, nearly 12, 000 kids were flunked. As time went on, implementation of the policy was spotty. High school teachers still complained about students reading at a fourth grade level. And, the remediation rate at the City University of New York remained stubbornly high as the students schooled on Bloomberg’s watch arrived. Currently, about half of all those who enter CUNY require remediation. Most tellingly, 80% of the city’s high school graduates who enter community college require remediation in reading, writing, or mathematics. So, no one believed that “no social promotion” was a reality.

All that is context to a stunning decision that appeared in the press two days ago: The mayor is changing his hard line on social promotion. He has decided that principals may now have flexibility to decide whether to hold back students a third time and whether to hold back students who are already two years older than their classmates. There is even talk of added resources for the schools with large numbers of overage students.

Bear in mind that the mayor has now been sole proprietor of the New York City public schools since June 2002. And that “no social promotion” was one of the hallmarks of his reign. And that the New York City Department of Education has issued press release after press release boasting of its unheralded triumphs. And that the Mayor is known for never acknowledging an error. And that the publicity campaign for the “historic” achievements of the New York City public schools under his leadership was in high gear throughout the past decade, winning stories in every major news outlet. And that the collapse of the city’s claims about test scores in the summer of 2010 (after the state admitted that all the state scores were vastly inflated) popped the city’s bubble. And that Mayor Bloomberg to this day has never acknowledged that the “miracle” was a mirage. And that New York City has been a model for the national “reform” movement because of the city’s undemocratic governance structure for education, its alleged achievements, and its unbridled enthusiasm for choice. Reformers especially like the Mayor’s total control of the policymaking machinery, which make it easy to ignore parent and community protests, like the one that occurred at the Monday Night Massacre. Democracy has a nasty habit of getting in the way of “reform.”

Thus, the Mayor’s decision to modify the “no social promotion” policy is huge. Granted, it is a small step, but nonetheless this may mark the first time that the city (i.e., the Mayor) has admitted, however obliquely, a problem of his own creation. That is  historic.

Diane

Categories Bloomberg, Michael, NYC

Applause for Teachers

By dianeravitch
June 2, 2012 //
4

On Saturday afternoon, I went to a matinee of the Broadway show “Godspell” with family. It is a very engaging show with a wonderful young cast. I enjoyed their boundless energy. Most of them seemed to be just a few years out of high school or college, and so very talented and attractive. If any of you are in New York City this summer, go to the TKTS booth in Times Square and buy a ticket. Every seat in the house is a good one. Corbin Bleu, the star of the show, by the way, is a graduate of the Los Angeles County High School of the Arts.

At the beginning of the second act, one of the young actors sat down at the piano on stage and began playing a medley of tunes from well-known shows. He paused, and he said he was very excited because his high school Spanish teacher was in the audience. Then he said, this next song is for all the teachers in the audience. The audience applauded vigorously, everyone applauding for teachers, not just his teachers, but for their teachers too. I was very moved. I hear so much hostility to teachers on the blogs and in letters to the editor, that it is easy to forget that the overwhelming majority of Americans love their teachers. At the drop of a hat, they will name them and thank them and tell you what each of them did that changed their life.

Ten years away from school, no one will remember who was superintendent or state commissioner of education or Secretary of Education. But they remember their teachers.

Diane

Categories Education Reform, Teachers and Teaching

Should Community Schools Survive?

By dianeravitch
June 2, 2012 //
1

Reporter Jaisal Noor has created a gripping radio documentary about the fight to save neighborhood schools.

He lets the “reformers” have their say. They want to close down the so-called failing schools and replace them with new schools that won’t be failing schools, at least not for a few years. Then they too can be closed and another new school can be opened.

The closing schools serve minority students. They are overcrowded and underresourced. They must be closed. So say the officials.

Jaisal Noor listens to students, teachers, and parents. What a novel idea.

The officials don’t hear students, teachers, or parents. They know what’s best for everyone. And what’s best is to close their school.

Diane

Categories Parents, Students, Teachers and Teaching
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