Archives for the month of: July, 2012
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Did We Learn Nothing from Penn State?

By dianeravitch
July 22, 2012 //
3

A reader writes in response to the latest wacky idea from economists who offer the reward to teachers upfront, then threaten to take it away (“loss aversion”):

Coincidentally, they are tearing down the statue of Joe Paterno right now. It occurred to me that the scandal at Penn State is largely because of the very things that we are saying are good levers to motivate children. Penn State officials were consistently rewarded with money and trophies. In order to keep their money and trophies, along with the prestige and fame that they had garnered, they resorted to turning a blind eye towards the molestation of children. This is loss aversion at its most repugnant. Yet, in a mark of divine timing, a study comes out positing that the culture of money and trophies is what’s most motivating to our students. Have they learned nothing from the scandal at Penn State?

Categories Accountability, Education Reform

This School Used Data to Help, not to Punish

By dianeravitch
July 22, 2012 //
4

A reader sent in a link to a PBS documentary about a middle school in the Bronx that faced the problems of its students and addressed them. Note that the school had guidance counselors:

Check out this 13 minute PBS documentary! This is what it is all about. Not markets. Not test scores. Do these teachers and administrators look at their students as a “customer”? Teaching is a profoundly human experience which involves engaging with students to show them things they did not know they could do!The Middle School Moment
A new PBS documentary illuminates success of a Bronx schoolhttp://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/education/dropout-nation/middle-school-moment/

 
Categories Education Reform

Public Education Is Not a Business

By dianeravitch
July 22, 2012 //
29

I have posted a number of comments on the subject of whether, when and how schools are like businesses. This reader says that public education is not a business.

Of course, it is important to understand that the purpose of the accountability measures and the choice policies is to get us all in the habit of thinking we are shoppers, consumers of education services that compete for our children and our dollars.

Parents are supposed to take the school letter grades and go shopping. They are supposed to teach the teacher evaluations and ask for a different teacher. This is supposed to reform schools and make kids smarter somehow. But the real purpose is to get us to view our public services and public goods with a consumer mentality. You can begin to see how nutty this is. Can we shop for a different police department? Can we shop to change our public parks and beaches? No, but we can turn over their management to private vendors. You see, when you start thinking like a consumer, then you forget the distinction between a public service and a business venture.

If they get enough of us to think like this, then we will acquiesce as they privatize everything so we can shop for everything. Or have the illusion of shopping, the illusion of consumer choice. Kind of like when you go to the grocery story and see fifty different cereals and then discover they were all made by the same company.

The problem with this comment is that it is incorrect about the definition of a business. In the second line of the first paragraph, the commenter states:“Schools are a business — they have employees, labor costs, capital costs, and budgets.”Having employees, labor costs, capital costs, and budgets is not the definition of a business. A well-to-do household could have all those things, and nobody would claim it’s a business. Many charities have those things, and they are not businesses. And of course, governments have those things, and they are not businesses.

The real definition of a business can be found in the last line of the first paragraph, although the commenter just casts it aside:

“The critical difference between schools and what we commonly think of as a business — Verizon or Citibank — is that the ultimate purpose of the schools is to provide the service (educate the children) while, for the conventional service business such as Verizon or Citibank, the provision of the service is simply a means to the ultimate purpose of making a profit for the business’ owners.”

Yes, businesses’ ultimate purpose is to make a profit for the business owners. That’s what makes a business a business. It’s the one integral, universal trait of all businesses. That is the definition of a business: It makes a profit for the business owners. That’s it.

Public Education does not meet the one actual requirement of what a business is.

To say it has a few things in common so it must be the same is just wrong. And to work from that premise leads to more poor logic, misguided decisions, and poor outcomes.

Public Eduction is not a business.
Categories Education Reform, For-Profit, Privatization

The Failure of Bloomberg’s New Schools Strategy

By dianeravitch
July 22, 2012 //
14

The New York Daily News (owned by billionaire Mort Zuckerman, who also owns U.S. News & World Report) often runs editorials applauding the “reforms” of the Bloomberg administration. Its editorials are anti-union, anti-teacher, and consistently supportive of the policy of closing schools that have low test scores.

But the New York Daily News has excellent reporters who don’t follow the editorial line. They just report the news. And the story today is stunning.

The headline summarizes the story: “Bloomberg’s New Schools Have Failed Thousands of City Students: Did More Poorly on State Reading Tests than Older Schools with Similar Poverty Rates.”

This analysis shows the abject failure of the policy that has been the centerpiece of the Bloomberg reforms for the past decade.

Closing schools and replacing them with new schools is also the centerpiece of the Obama-Duncan “turnaround” strategy.

Here is an excerpt from the news story. Note that the grandmother of a student in Brooklyn makes more sense than the six-figure bureaucrats who run the New York City Department of Education. Tanya King of Brooklyn for Chancellor!

…When The News examined 2012 state reading test scores for 154 public elementary and middle schools that have opened since Mayor Bloomberg took office, nearly 60% had passing rates that were lower than older schools with similar poverty rates.

The new schools also showed poor results in the city’s letter-grade rating system, which uses a complicated formula to compare schools with those that have similar demographics.

Of 133 new elementary and middle schools that got letter grades last year, 15% received D’s and F’s — far more than the city average, where just 10% of schools got the rock-bottom grades.

“It’s crazy,” said Tanya King, who helped wage a losing battle to save Brooklyn’s Academy of Business and Community Development, where her grandson was a student.

The school opened in 2005, then closed in 2012.

Instead of closing struggling schools and replacing them with something else that doesn’t work, King says, the city should help with extra resources to save the existing schools.

“You have the same children in the school,” she said. “What’s going to be the difference? Put in the services that are going to make the school better.”

Her grandson Donnovan Hicks, 11, will be transferred next fall for the seventh-grade into another Bloomberg-created school, Brooklyn’s Peace Academy, where just 13% passed the state reading exams this spring.

Read more: http://www.nydailynews.com/new-york/bloomberg-new-schools-failed-thousands-city-students-article-1.1119406#ixzz21M3o9hBP

Categories Accountability, Bloomberg, Michael, Corporate Reformers, Duncan, Arne, Education Reform, NYC, Obama

How the Attack on Public Education Is Like the Tobacco Industry

By dianeravitch
July 22, 2012 //
4

A reader read this post about FUD (Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt), a strategy intended to undermine and discredit the competition. And Bingo! The light went on. It was the same pattern on the rug.

OMG! FUD jogged my memory about a book I read 2 yrs ago by Naomi Oreskes & Erik Conway “Merchants of Doubt: How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues from Tobacco Smoke to Global Warming”. Edu-reformers are using some of the same strategies that were used by the tobacco and oil industries to advance their business agendas and preclude government regulation on their products. Oreskes is an historian of science at U Cal, San Diego. She and Conway tell an amazing story that begins in the 1980′s. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jOnXL8ob_js
From a review: “Oreskes and Conway roll back the rug on this dark corner of the American scientific community, showing how the ideology of free market fundamentalism, aided by a too-compliant media, has skewed public understanding of some of the most pressing issues of our era.”Her book chronicles how the tobacco industry and the oil industry ran effective PR campaigns to mislead the public on decades of science showing the effects of tobacco smoke on health and the effects of carbon emissions on climate. Both industries set up think tanks, hired established scientists whose credentials were stellar in their fields but whose expertise were not in health and climate. These “experts” conducted research to challenge decades of established facts. Their product was doubt. The purpose was to generate mistrust in established scientific findings. The outcome was to cloud the public’s knowledge, influence the media, and effect government policies that were moving to restrict tobacco and energy industries business practices. Their explicit strategy was “teach the controversy”. The sad reality is that doubt mongering works.

American public education is in a dark corner today. Our unquestioning media plays up the attacks on established education science and teachers. Recall Jonathan Alter & David Brooks’ articles denouncing Diane’s positions on NCLB & RttT. Think Tanks and private philanthropies have made it their business to disseminate junk science written by non-educators that, by design, bypass peer review (e.g. Gates Foundation, Center for American Progress, The Heritage Foundation, AEI, NEIT, et al.) to advance increasing class sizes, high stakes testing, merit pay, ending salary bumps for advanced degrees, charter schools, online education, vouchers, turn-arounds, ending collective bargaining, etc. Claims antithetical to actual scientific findings for efficacy. Bruce Baker (and many others) who regularly debunks the reformy arguments is virtually ignored in the national media.

Oreskes makes a provocative statement about scientists who make claims outside of their expertise: ‘The very features that lead to expertise in a particular domain leads to ignorance in many others.’ Bill Gates, Arne Duncan, Michael Milken, Joel Klien, Michael Bloomberg, Eli Broad, anyone?

A critical difference in the current edu-refomry campaign, missing from the previous campaign, is our government’s complicity with the privatizers. The private financial industry and philanthropists are using the full force of the government to advance their agendas. Capturing public money is their business model, schools are simply their vehicle. This is a story of betrayal by our elected officials. They are failing in their mission to serve the public. Indeed, our children’s future is in the hands of those who care the least about other people’s children.
Categories Accountability, Budget Cuts, Corporate Reformers, For-Profit, Privatization

School Letter Grades Are Preposterous

By dianeravitch
July 22, 2012 //
20

On this blog, we have often discussed how easy it is to get drawn into accepting an intolerable practice. When it is first introduced, no one objects because it is worth trying, and over time, as this innovation becomes standard practice, those who don’t like it are ignored because it’s too late, it’s done that way and will go on being done that way.

Take the idea of giving letter grades to schools. My best recollection is that this idea started in Florida under Governor Jeb Bush, who thinks that testing and accountability solve all problems. Then New York City copied Florida. Now other jurisdictions are doing because, well, because Florida and New York City are doing it.

In my neighborhood in Brooklyn, there is an excellent public school. One year it got an A, and everyone was happy and proud. The next year, it got an F, and no one knew why: Same principal, same teachers, same methods, same materials, same students. What was the point of the A or the F? The principal didn’t know. Neither do I.

Several readers sent me an article about how the state of Florida made a mistake in giving out letter grades and raised the grades of a number of schools in Palm Beach. Good for Palm Beach, but remember that the whole system of letter grades is stupid. Of course, there are mistakes, including many that will never be corrected. Just because you get an A doesn’t mean that the competition is valid. It is not.

One of the great things about fiction, especially science fiction, is that we see how people get trapped in a world that is not of their making, a world that offends their sense of decency. Most people accept that world as it is. A few don’t. The question is always whether the dissidents figure out a way to get others to see the world as they do or whether they die fighting an unjust system.

Giving a letter grade to a school is the height of absurdity. It’s one thing to create a report card, which informs the school about ways it can improve. Such a report card might have thirty different categories, each evaluated to show the school its strengths and weaknesses and to start a conversation about how to improve.

But a letter grade is a Scarlet Letter. It says “This is an A school” or “this is a D school,” whatever.

Imagine if we sent children home with a report card with a single letter on it. “This child is a D.” Parents would be outraged. They would immediately understand that you are branding their son or daughter, not evaluating their performance. The purpose of evaluation is to support and improve, not to stigmatize.

To change the world, which now seems so locked into bad and destructive practices, we must change our vision. We must spread our vision to others and help others to understand that schools, like children, are complex, not unidimensional. We stopped putting dunce caps on children many years ago. We should stop thinking that schools will get better if we put a dunce cap on them.

Categories Accountability, Bush, Jeb, Corporate Reformers, Education Reform, Florida, NYC

Yong Zhao on Entrepreneurship

By dianeravitch
July 22, 2012 //
4

Yong Zhao is the brilliant scholar whose ideas challenge the orthodoxy of testing, accountability, ranking, metrics, data-based decision making, and competition.

He knows the secret of Chinese test scores, and he says that if we follow their lead, we will destroy entrepreneurial thinking.

Since I discovered his work, I have been dazzled by his fresh approach to educational issues.

He recently published a book called World Class Learners, explaining why our current education policies are doomed not only to fail but to injure our country.

Read his interview in Education Week by Catharine Gewertz and his accompanying article.

Zhao argues that high test scores may actually hamper creativity. The nations with the highest test scores, he says, do not produce high levels of entrepreneurial activity. American policymakers were shocked and awed when Shanghai took the top place in the latest PISA ranking, and both President Obama and Secretary Duncan spoke about “our generation’s Sputnik moment.”  But Zhao says we should not be impressed because the Chinese have mastered the art of test-taking, but not the mindset that promotes creativity.

He writes:

China’s Shanghai took the No. 1 rank in all three areas of the 2009 PISARequires Adobe Acrobat Reader, but the scores do not have any bearing on China’s creativity capacity. In 2008, China had only 473 patent filings with or granted by leading patent offices outside China. The United States had 14,399 patent filings in the same year. Anil K. Gupta and Haiyan Wang put those figures in a broader context, writing in The Wall Street Journal last year: “Starkly put, in 2010 China accounted for 20 percent of the world’s population and 9 percent of the world’s GDP, 12 percent of the world’s [research and development] expenditure, but only 1 percent of the patent filings with or patents granted by any of the leading patent offices outside China.” And 50 percent of the China-origin patents, the writers added, were granted to subsidiaries of foreign multinationals.

Categories Accountability, Common Core, Duncan, Arne, International, Testing

Watch Out for GERM! We Are Infected!

By dianeravitch
July 22, 2012 //
6

Pasi Sahlberg is the brilliant Finnish educator who is trying to roll back the global tide of destructive education policies.

Sahlberg wrote an important book, Finnish Lessons, explaining how the Finnish education system was transformed in the past thirty years and became one of the top-performing nations in the world on PISA tests of reading, mathematics, and science.

Recently Sahlberg wrote an article summarizing his views on Valerie Strauss’s Answer Sheet blog in the Washington Post.

Sahlberg warns that there is now an infection sweeping the world which he calls GERM (the Global Education Reform Movement).

GERM is characterized by heavy emphasis on market-style reforms: testing, data, measurement of students and teachers, ranking, choice, competition.

Finland has resisted the GERM virus. Its students do not take standardized tests; they take tests made by their teachers, whose professional judgment and autonomy are deeply respected by all.

Finland has made sure that all its children are well cared for; less than 5 percent live in poverty. Our child poverty rate is close to 25 percent.

Finland became a high performer, he writes, not by seeking excellence but by seeking equity, by pursuing the goal of good schools for all.

All Finnish teachers must be well-educated in their subjects and in pedagogy, acquired at an academic university; all teachers must have a masters degree before they can teach. Interesting to note that, by contrast, a growing number of teachers in the U.S. are getting their credentials and degrees from online “universities.” Many states are lowering their requirements for teachers.

Here are the symptoms of GERM, described by Sahlberg:

The first symptom is more competition within education systems. Many reformers believe that the quality of education improves when schools compete against one another. In order to compete, schools need more autonomy, and with that autonomy comes the demand for accountability. School inspections, standardized testing of students, and evaluating teacher effectiveness are consequences of market-like competition in many school reforms today. Yet when schools compete against one another, they cooperate less.

The second symptom of GERM is increased school choice. It essentially positions parents as consumers empowering them to select schools for their children from several options and thereby promotes market-style competition into the system as schools seek to attract those parents. More than two-thirds of OECD countries have increased school choice opportunities for families with the perceptions that market mechanisms in education would allow equal access to high-quality schooling for all. Increasing numbers of charter schools in the United States, secondary school academies in England, free schools in Sweden and private schools in Australia are examples of expanding school choice policies. Yet according to the OECD, nations pursuing such choice have seen both a decline in academic results and an increase in school segregation.

The third sign of GERM is stronger accountability from schools and related standardized testing of students. Just as in the market place, many believe that holding teachers and schools accountable for students’ learning will lead to improved results. Today standardized test scores are the most common way of deciding whether schools are doing a good job. Teacher effectiveness that is measured using standardized tests is a related symptom of GERM. According to the Center for Public Education, standardized testing has increased teaching to the test, narrowed curricula to prioritize reading and mathematics, and distanced teaching from the art of pedagogy to mechanistic instruction.

We have a very bad case of GERM in the U.S. We are even exporting it to other countries, including Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. Our educational products and ideas should be quarantined at the border. We need medication to stop the virus within our own borders. Let’s recognize the “reform” movement for what it is: a bold effort to privatize public education and open it up for private investment. This is no “civil rights movement.” This is an attack on a basic democratic institution.

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Education Reform, Global Education Reform Movement (GERM), International, Privatization, US Education

The Conservative Case Against the Common Core Standards

By dianeravitch
July 22, 2012 //
15

A few days ago, I published Professor Stephen Krashen’s letter to the New York Times, in which he explained his opposition to the Common Core standards. Professor Krashen is coming from the progressive side of the spectrum.

Then Ireceived an email from Jamie Gass of the conservative Pioneer Institute in Massachusetts, which strongly opposes the Common Core standards from the opposite end of the political spectrum. Gass is especially angry that the CC standards replaced the proven and excellent Massachusetts standards. His letter is below.

As I mentioned earlier, I am neither a supporter nor an opponent of the standards. I am withholding my judgment until we learn how they work in real classrooms and what affect they have on students, teachers, and schools.

In the meanwhile, if advocates for the standards contact me and want to express support for them, I will be glad to post the other side. I am not printing Jamie Gass to express my view, but to express that of a conservative concerned about quality. Those who disagree should feel free to chime in.

Some of the references may seem like inside baseball, but this reflects the fact that so much surrounding the development of the standards occurred within the Beltway or a small corridor of the Northeast (not including the role of the Gates Foundation). Perhaps I should include a glossary to identify the players. Feel free to ask if you don’t know who the players are. The letter was originally written as a response to journalist Sol Stern, who chided the Pioneer Institute for not doing more to promote the E.D. Hirsch Core Knowledge curriculum:

Thanks for your confidence that little Pioneer Institute could have outdone over $100 million from the Gates Foundation and persuade the bluest state in the Union (and Deval Patrick in an election year) not to follow the lead of Arne Duncan on $250 million in RTTT money. In truth, an easier task would have been to change the directional flow of the Charles River. That said, we did have two-thirds of the authors of the 1993 law (Gov. Weld and Sen. Birmingham), as well as the president of the AFT-MA, two 2010 MA gubernatorial candidates, Sen. Scott Brown, and nearly every editorial board in the state, on our side against MA adopting CCSSI.

 Sadly, our good friends at Achieve and Fordham were working hand-in-glove with Gates, US ED, a pro-Deval think tank in MA (MBAE [Massachusetts Business Alliance for Education]), and MA state officials to make sure MA adopted the academically inferior CCSSI standards. If MA adopted, the CCSSIers would argue, what state could resist, right? In point of fact, MBAE’s, Fordham’s, and Achieve’s Gates-funded evals of the Gates-funded CCSSI standards (a nice lesson in independence and objectivity there) was the basis for the MA decision to adopt. MA state DOE officials made this MBAE/Achieve/Fordham eval link clear in memo after memo on CCSSI. In the blog below, Sandy Stotsky made the still unanswered charge that Fordham’s evaluation of MA vs. CCSSI was little more than a thinly veiled effort to undermine our attempts to retain the higher quality and proven MA standards: http://jaypgreene.com/2010/07/29/stotsky-on-the-common-core-vote-in-ma/

 Despite a year of empty reassurances from Mike Petrilli [Thomas B. Fordham Institute] that “not all states should adopt” and “we don’t think MA should adopt” it’s now clear that Fordham’s impulse towards bureaucratic compliance and illegal nationalization trumped their commitment to academic excellence. For example, they always laud not CCSSI’s academic quality, but the high number of states that adopted, or complied. A day before MA adopted CCSSI, Checker Finn [Thomas B. Fordham Institute] told the NYT something like, “no state should worry about adopting these standards” and their eval of CCSSI vs. MA was supposedly “too close to call.” In addition to being compromised by accepting $1 million in Gates money, via CCSSI Fordham has placed political expediency and bureaucratic adoption over excellence and proven results. Consequently, Fordham’s role in CCSSI has illustrated why after 20 years in Ohio (and even longer working with Lamar Alexander in TN) they have no results to show anyone, anywhere in terms of improved student achievement or NAEP scores. So, yes, as I said, the DC-based CCSSIers indeed “helped” Deval Patrick ruin the MA standards and reforms.

 Regarding CCSSI’s legality, or I should say illegality, perhaps you’re correct – this should end up as a lawsuit. Doesn’t this tell us something tragic about the desperate state of public education’s decline in America? That is, something has gone terribly wrong when former US ED officials like – the ones at Fordham and Achieve – are working with Arne Duncan’s people, unelected/unaccountable private DC-trade groups, and the Gates Foundation to help state and federal officials circumvent, or violate federal laws? At the end of the day, in terms of democratic and civic education does it really matter if kids are reading the Founding Documents or Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address when the adults governing public education are openly violating federal laws?

 Finally, as you know, the Framers established a mixed and complex republic that constitutionally designated certain powers to the national government and others – mostly on domestic matters – to the states and localities.  Far from improving public education over the last 40 years, the more consolidated K-12 education has become, the lousier and more bureaucratic it has become. As Diane and Jacques Barzun have carefully mapped out in their various books, we are in a era of obvious educational decline wherein academic content and the liberal arts are repeatedly subordinated to regulation, compliance, bureaucracy, and education focusing on workforce development training and content-empty skills. This is an old story and CCSSI’s major proponents like Duncan, Gates, NGA, CCSSO, Tucker, and Achieve all advance this agenda.

 Driven by ex-DC bureaucrats, CCSSI started with low expectations and never got to MA, IN, TX, MN, or CA’s level of academic quality. With David Coleman now at the College Board, aligning AP and SAT to CCSSI, those tests too will be dumbed down in a manner that will negatively impact all modes of K-12 schooling and higher education in America. In fact, CCSSI/2014 establishes a Year Zero for lower expectations in American education. Frankly, given the mediocre records of its major advocates, I see nothing in CCSSI that will reverse this trend towards decline, or any evidence that CCSSI’s one-stop-shopping-for-lower-standards won’t, in fact, dramatically accelerate a race to the middle.

Categories Common Core, Education Reform, Gates Foundation, Bill Gates

Those Wacky Economists Are at It Again

By dianeravitch
July 22, 2012 //
40

Through Twitter, I met an amazing blogger named Larry Ferlazzo. When I traveled to Sacramento earlier this year, I met the real Larry Ferlazzo. Larry is a teacher who makes amazing lists of everything you need to know. He also scours the Internet for everything interesting. I constantly learn from Larry. Once again, he hit the jackpot with this post.

As we know, many of our economists treat test scores as the best and sole measure of learning. They spend inordinate amounts of time in pursuit of the secret of raising test scores, and if they find it, they think they have struck gold.

So the name of their game is to find the right incentive that will cause teachers to teach harder and students to try harder to get those scores up.

They have repeatedly tried bonuses for both teachers and students, but that hasn’t worked.

So now they have a new idea that is beyond disgusting. It is called “loss aversion.”

What that means is that you give students or teachers a reward in advance, and if they don’t raise their scores, you take it away. You make them so fearful that they will lose the reward that they will work harder to raise their scores.

Now, to begin with, there are many reasons why test scores are not the best measure of good education.

But what about the means of inducing the results?

There is something positively disgusting about this approach to human behavior.

As Larry Ferlazzo says, citing the behavioral economist Dan Ariely, teachers and students are not rats in a cage.

There may be even better ways to raise test scores. What if you said to students, “get a higher score on this test, or we will cut off your fingers.” That might raise scores. Or, “get a higher score or you’ll never see your parents again.” Or, “get a higher score or the dean will put your eyes out.”

Once you get into behavior modification, there is no limit to the threats and punishments that can be devised.

But let’s call it what it is: Loathsome. Inhumane. Unethical. Antithetical to the values of a democratic society. Antithetical to decency.

Have these economists no shame?

Categories Accountability
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