Archives for the month of: July, 2012
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Who Should Save Detroit?

By dianeravitch
July 17, 2012 //
4

Detroit’s state-appointed emergency manager is not only increasing the number of privately managed charter schools, but has imposed a contract that will permit class sizes of 41 in grades K-3 and 61 in grades 6-12.

This is a disgrace, as the children of Detroit are being sacrificed to save money.

Frankly it is strange that the district schools will be replaced by charter schools, because charter schools in Detroit underperform in comparison to the district schools.

As the public schools are strangled and as the emergency manager literally drives children out of them and into the charter schools, the question arises as to whether public education will survive at all in Detroit. Or will the public schools be the dumping ground for the children rejected by the charters? Does the state have an obligation to maintain public education?

In Highland Park, the ACLU is suing the district and the state of Michigan for failing to meet educational standards.

A reader who identifies him/herself as “labor lawyer” answers the question.

If, as seems likely, Detroit lacks the $ to support minimal standards in its public schools, Michigan should step in with supplemental funding. The state created the city and delegated to the city the state’s obligation to educate the children. If the state’s creature (the city) cannot meet its delegated obligation, the state should be held accountable. Viewed in constitutional terms, Michigan is obligated under the 14th Amendment’d Equal Protection clause to treat each citizen more or less the same. By delegating the education responsibility to Detroit and then standing by while Detroit underfunds education (either by political choice or fiscal necessity) and other Michigan communities adequately fund education, Michigan is denying the children in Detroit equal protection.At the federal level, a “no child left behind” concept — if applied literally rather than figuratively/politically — suggests that the federal govt should step in to provide additional funding where a city/state cannot afford to adequately fund the public schools. But don’t hold your breath waiting for the Republicans (or the Obama/Duncan Dept of Ed) who love NCLB to put their $ where their mouths are and actually spend some federal $ helping the Detroit children who are being left behind.

A second comment by Labor lawyer:

The Detroit teachers union, the Detroit NAACP, and/or an adhoc group of Detroit parents (perhaps a city-wide PTA organization) would be the logical plaintiffs for such a lawsuit against the state of Michigan alleging the 14th Amendment equal protection violation. The federal obligation is political, not legal. It would be a real stretch to convince a court that the 14th Amendment’s equal protection clause requires the federal govt to insure that a state provides at least minimally-adequate funding for each student (the 14th amendment requires a state to treat its citizens equally and requires the federal govt to treat US citizens equally but does not require the federal govt to force the states to treat their citizens equally) + the amount of federal $ spent on K-12 education is such a small percentage of the total K-12 spending that differences in federal funding between Detroit and other cities would not rise to the level of a federal equal protection violation.

A third comment from same:

Unfortunately, the battle against most of the corporate education reform has to be fought politically rather than legally.

Detroit (and some other inner-city school systems) are extreme examples where the school funding is collapsing relative to funding elsewhere in the state — usually due primarily to collapsing inner-city property values/property taxes.

In other words, the equal protection violation arises due to unequal funding. If the per pupil funding is roughly equal between two school systems in a state (or, more precisely, if the two school systems each provide enough per pupil funding to meet a minimally-adequate standard), it’s extremely difficult to argue that the manner in which the $ is spent creates an equal protection violation. If School System A decides to spend its $ on charters or vouchers and School System B decides to spend its $ on neighborhood public schools, the courts will see this a policy decisions properly committed to the elected officials rather than an equal protection violation.

Always happy to get free legal advice!
Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Detroit, Education Reform, Michigan

Why NCLB and Race to the Top Fail

By dianeravitch
July 17, 2012 //
12

After my last book was published, I did some radio interviews and got some interesting feedback.

One of the most informative responses came from a distinguished professor emeritus at the University of Michigan, Harry Frank, who has written textbooks about measurement and evaluation.

His observations about testing and evaluation were brilliant. What he wrote helped me understand why NCLB had failed. As I re-read this letter, I understood better why Race to the Top will fail. For one thing, it assumes that the same tests may be used both to evaluate the teacher and to counsel the teacher. What this does, he says, is to promote cheating and teaching to the test.

And Professor Frank explains why student evaluations distort the educational process.

Professor Frank gave me his permission to reprint his letter.

.
I am by training a social psychologist, with a subspecialty and one-time consulting practice in testing and measurement.  When the Flint campus sought its first accreditation independent of the main (Ann Arbor) campus, the provost established an ad-hoc committee to develop assessment procedures.   I spent nine years on the committee, my last couple as its chair.  The procedures we developed became something of a model for the North Central Association of Schools and Colleges.  It has worked extremely well precisely because it conformed to some very fundamental principles of validation, which No Child Left Behind blatantly (if not intentionally) ignored. 

The first principle is that no assessment can be used at the same time for both counseling and for administrative decisions (retention, increment, tenure, promotion).   As you emphasized (and as every organizational psychologist with an ounce of brains wailed when No Child was first described), all this does is promote cheating and teaching to the exam (much as does the staatsexamen in Germany).   This principle is so basic that it’s often covered in the very first chapter of introductory texts on workplace performance evaluation.

Accordingly, in the very first meeting of the committee, we established an absolute firewall.  Department chairs, deans, and executive committees would never be permitted to see individual raw data; they would see only departmental pooled data.  This action did not immediately eliminate faculty resistance, but it went further in that regard than even you might imagine.  The same should apply to K-12 teachers’ unions.

Like you, I don’t think the problem is testing–any more than the problem with a badly built house is with the hammers and saws.  The problem in both cases is how potentially useful tools should be used.   Many of the current difficulties would be reduced or eliminated if it were clear that

(1)  K-12 education is a developmental process, so assessment in schools is a developmental measure not a terminal measure. The concern should be with change not simply “score.”

(2)  Assessment should be a counseling resource, not a source of extrinsic motivation, i.e., rewards and punishments for teachers, administrators, and school districts.

(3)  Student evaluations are worse than useless; they are egregiously misleading.  A 10-year study by the American Psychological Association indicated that student evaluations are correlated with only two factors:

   i.  Students’ expected course grades compared with their expected grades in other courses. 

   ii  workload (negative correlation).

For untenured faculty, course evaluations–if used for administrative decisions–therefore have the effect of motivating both grade inflation and the dumbing down of course content.

 (4)  Instruments and procedures must be national in scope and standardized in their administration and reportage (cf. your interview comments concerning the superior validity of the national examination vs. state examinations).

(5)  Data should be clustered rather than pooled.  That is, performance of mainstream students, students whose first language is not English, and developmentally disabled students should be examined separately.  It is clearly inappropriate to compare overall scores for students in, say, Birmingham, Michigan, where an overwhelming majority are native speakers of English, with students in Taos, New Mexico, where English as a first language falls behind both Spanish and Tiwa.

 (6)  Teachers should never have access in advance to test questions or even precise content.  They should be given global guidelines–general areas in which student competence is expected.

(7)  Ideally, the procedures should make no attempt to be exhaustive.  They should represent a random sampling of content, and the sample should change annually so that past tests cannot be used to prep students but can and should be used to familiarize students with the form of the questions, the level of detail expected, and so on.
Categories Accountability, Education Reform, Teacher Evaluations

This Ohio Teacher is Running for Office

By dianeravitch
July 17, 2012 //
13

Maureen Reedy, a teacher in Ohio for 29 years, was Ohio teacher of the year in 2002. Now she is running for the Ohio House of Representatives.

She deserves the support of every taxpayer, parent, and citizen in Ohio.

She is angry at the waste of taxpayer dollars for bad, deregulated charter schools. Forget what you read in The Economist about the miracle of privately managed charters. As she points out below, half the charter schools in the state are in academic emergency or academic watch, compared with only one in 11 public schools.

She is especially outraged by the rapacious cyber charters. As she points out in this article, two of Ohio’s major charter sponsors have collected nearly a billion dollars of Ohio taxpayer dollars since 1999:

Charter schools are a poor investment of Ohio’s education dollars and have a worse track record than public schools in our state; there are twice as many failing charter schools as successful ones, and one in two charter schools is either in academic emergency or academic watch, compared with only one in 11 traditional public-school buildings. Five of seven of Ohio’s largest electronic-charter-school districts’ graduation rates are lower than the state’s worst public-school system’s graduation rate, and six of seven of the electronic charter schools districts are rated less than effective.

And finally, the Electronic Classroom of Tomorrow has failed in every identified state category for eight years, a worse track record than the Cleveland City School system, which is under threat of being shut down by the state. The Electronic Classroom of Tomorrow is run by unlicensed administrators. Lager, in addition to his $3 million salary, earned an additional $12 million funneled through his software company, which sells products to his charter-school corporation. Just how much does the average teacher in the Electronic Classroom of Tomorrow earn you may ask? Approximately $34,000 per year.

Why do the Governor and the Legislature look the other way? Why are they quadrupling the number of vouchers and reducing oversight of the state’s troubled charter schools?

That’s easy:

I am appalled at the direct pipeline funneling vital state dollars for our children’s education directly into the pockets of millionaires like David L. Brennan, chief executive officer of White Hat Management ($6 million yearly salary) and William Lager, CEO of the state’s ninth-largest school district, the Electronic Classroom of Tomorrow ($3 million yearly salary).

Let’s follow the money trail of political contributions by these two for-profit charter-school CEOs to high-ranking GOP legislators. In the past decade, Brennan and Lager have donated a combined $5 million to high-ranking GOP legislators, including Gov. John Kasich, Lt. Gov. Mary Taylor, House Speaker William G. Batchelder and Sen. Kevin Bacon, chairman of the Senate Committee on Insurance, Commerce and Labor.

Why isn’t the U.S. Department of Education blowing the whistle on these scandals?

Is education reform about improving education or about lining the pockets of campaign contributors?

Not a hard question in Ohio.

Categories Charter Schools, Corporate Reformers, Education Reform, For-Profit, Ohio, On-Line Education

John White, Are You Listening?

By dianeravitch
July 17, 2012 //
9

John White, here is a school that needs your help. Don’t close it. Don’t treat it as a sinking ship whose students should just get out before it’s too late. This is a community school. Do not let it die. Do not make things worse. You are the captain of the ship. If it goes down on your watch, it’s your fault. Give these teachers support. They are trying to make a difference. Can you help them?

I am a Louisiana teacher who thanks you for your tireless advocacy of public education in general and your focus to Louisiana in particular. The past year was a difficult one for me personally and professionally. I teach students in one of the so-called “failing” schools and know first hand how hard we work and how much we are trying to educate the students we have. At my high school, we often have students who arrive in ninth grade reading below the 5th grade level. We aren’t given any solutions or ideas or help from the state department. We do our best to take them where they are and guide them where they need to be. We do this despite many who lack any parental support, some who are parents themselves, some who live in dangerous conditions, and many other challenges. Yet the message we receive from the state is that our efforts aren’t good enough.

Categories Accountability, Education Reform, Louisiana, Poverty

Another Teacher Beaten Down

By dianeravitch
July 17, 2012 //
16

 

The toxic brew called “reform” is ruining public education. But this should not be surprising. This is the intent of the reformers.

They never will say so in their public statements. They will say they want “great teachers.” But they demonize and demoralize the teachers we have now.

What plans do they offer to replenish the teaching profession after they have driven away so many who are dedicated to teaching?

Magic. Out of nowhere, these “great” teachers will appear, teach for a few years and disappear.

Let’s face it. We are confronting a major crisis in education. It’s not because our schools are failing. They are not.

The crisis is caused by the constant attacks on public education and those who teach in public schools, by the effort to micromanage everything that teachers do and turn their work into data that can be used to evaluate them.

This terrible scourge that calls itself “reform” will one day be vanquished.

It must be. And it will be because it is destructive and anti-educational at its core.

This will probably be my last year in the classroom as well. I have going on 20 years, but enough is enough. The addition of more and more “testing each year. The “common core”, which might not be so bad, but the administrators have so grossly misinterpreted what the intent is that that no one can believe it – we have been told that all fiction must be abandoned! that is not REMOTELY what the standards say! More and more money being spent on computers and tech toys, and then we are told again, “sorry – no money for teachers. You’ll have to do more with less.” The school board as rubber-stamp for the admin. Voters rejecting millage increases – TINY increases, which would be used to add desperately needed classrooms – year after year. The new “evaluation” system being imposed upon teachers beginning in 2014-2015 school year is an abomination, insulting, demoralizing – I could go on, but we all know.

I have had enough. I did not earn 4 degrees, including the PhD., multiple certifications, and embark on NBCT certification to be treated like crap. I used to be an engineer. I can go back to that world, get more money for less work, and I can even take a bathroom break if I want or need to. The deformers want the schools – fine. Take’em. And when everything implodes, in about 3 years time, who will they blame then? Not me.
Categories Education Reform

What Is Legal Fraud?

By dianeravitch
July 17, 2012 //
5

A reader asks a reasonable question, perhaps wondering why states like Ohio and Pennsylvania continue to authorize cyber charters despite their abysmal results.

He brings up Michael Milken, who was convicted on charges of securities fraud and tax violation and sent to jail in 1990. According to his bio on Wikipedia, Milken made $1 billion a year and was paid out about $1.1 billion in fines and settlements of claims. One way to understand what is happening in education today is to read Connie Bruck’s book about Milken, the junk bond king, in Predator’s Ball. Junk bonds and leveraged buyouts led to lots of “creative destruction” of familiar brand names.

Today, Milken is a leading figure in the education reform movement.

He is one of the founders of the nation’s biggest cyber charter chain, K12. His foundation invests in merit pay (which as I have previously observed, never works); it gives awards annually to outstanding teachers. One does wonder if it is appropriate for an ex-felon to run schools that receive public funding. I don’t think he could work in a school because schools–at least, public schools– usually fingerprint future employees and don’t hire ex-cons. Cyber charters make a lot of money for their sponsors, but they provide a low-quality education, if you judge it by academic results.

I don’t understand the concept of “legal fraud”. Is that just reserved for corporations and some politicians?Re: CorporationsMilken owns K12 Inc and they are operating in 32 states + DC:http://www.k12.com/schools-programs/online-public-schoolsMilken is a convicted felon who admitted to and was imprisoned for fraud related to fiscal managment. Today, he typically says he’s just an investor in his companies and I believe he tries to conceal his real involvement in them by playing a kind of corporate musical chairs. At the very least, state government officials should be able to track and identify his true involvement in his companies and prevent those companies from receiving public funds on the basis of his felony convictions over money matters. I think it’s possible to do, because the feds prevented him from obtaining financial aid for a university he owned, since his felony convictions were related to violating US securities laws. Perhaps it’s because they were violations of federal laws and not state laws, but one would think the issue is more about fraud involving money, rather than jurisdiction.Re: Certain PoliticiansMy city’s former mayor of 22 years got our city into some truly terrible long-term contracts that privatized some public services, in order to cover fiscal deficits, including a 75 year parking-meter contract and a 99 year parking garage contract. Parking rates immediately skyrocketed and that is going to be lasting our ENTIRE lifetimes. This former mayor now works for the very law firm that negotiated that parking-meter deal:

http://blogs.chicagotribune.com/news_columnists_ezorn/2012/05/daley-a-year-later-no-thanks-for-the-memories.html

I just don’t get why these kinds of things look like fraud and yet might be legal. Are there that many loopholes?

It’s particularly disconcerting when the politicians who do such things are attorneys who are familiar with the law –and the loopholes, too, I guess. This mayor was previously a State’s Attorney. Our last two governors, who were also lawyers, are currently serving time in prison for crimes they commited while in office.

One has to wonder why some people manage to avoid prosecution or sanctions while others don’t. Admittedly, I’m sometimes glad when little people, with little money and little crimes that don’t have victims are not targeted, but when we’re talking about big people, with big money and big crimes that impact millions of folks, not so much.
Categories Corporate Reformers, Education Reform, For-Profit, Merit pay, On-Line Education

Good News from New Jersey

By dianeravitch
July 17, 2012 //
9

Jersey Jazzman reports that New Jersey will not approve the state’s first online for-profit virtual charter school. K12 has been told to come back next year, perhaps on the hope that citizen outrage will have died down by then. Jersey Jazzman, you may recall, memorably referred to New Jersey as “the cesspool of school reform.”

This is a big win. The most important message here is that citizens make a difference when they organize and speak up against politically powerful forces who are trying to grab taxpayer money and call it “reform.”

This is two wins in a row against the K12 giant, first in North Carolina, where the school boards banded together to stop the raid on their own strained budgets, and now in New Jersey, where concerned parents and educators blew the whistle.

It’s important to remind everyone that the reformers are vulnerable. They are vulnerable to public exposure because the fact is that their harmful ideas have no public support once the public understands what they are up to. There is no public support for handing taxpayer dollars over to corporate interests and calling it “reform.”

The public loves its community schools and doesn’t want to see them impoverished by corporate raiders.

So, yes, learn from New Jersey. Learn from the parents of Florida, who stopped the fake “parent trigger” legislation. Learn from the school boards of North Carolina.

You are not alone. Work in coalition with others to understand the theft of public education that is underway. You can make a difference.

Categories Education Reform, K12 Inc., New Jersey, On-Line Education

Finding Hope in a Dark Time

By dianeravitch
July 16, 2012 //
2

A reader sent this comment in response to the moving post by another teacher:

Thank you Diane. Your blog gives me hope.

As a student, I often had to read books I was assigned. Most of them I disliked but one high school English teacher require my class to read Viktor Frankl’s, “Man’s Search For Meaning”. This book moved me greatly. The author, a survivor of four concentration camps, describes his experiences in honest detail.

Whenever I have experienced the effects of oppressive authority, I find a connection to the contents of this book.

Here’s is a compelling excerpt:

“One evening, when we were already resting on the floor of our hut, dead tired, soup bowls in hand, a fellow prisoner rushed in and asked us to run out to the assembly grounds and see the wonderful sunset. Standing outside we saw sinister clouds glowing in the west and the whole sky alive with clouds of ever-changing shapes and colors, from steel blue to blood red. The desolate grey mud huts provided a sharp contrast, while the puddles on the muddy ground reflected the glowing sky. Then, after minutes of moving silence, one prisoner said to another, “How beautiful the world could be…”

Thank you to you and those who comment on this blog for giving us reform weary teachers a glimpse of “how beautiful teaching could be …”

Categories Education Reform, Teachers and Teaching

Someone Who Could See the Future

By dianeravitch
July 16, 2012 //
14

A reader sent this comment in response to an earlier post. I jumped when I read it because he was absolutely prescient. Consider this: We hear on all sides that the public schools are failing, declining, etc., that test scores are falling, etc., but NONE OF IT IS TRUE. Test scores on NAEP, the only no-stakes national test with forty years of data, are at their highest point in history. And yet, the spin masters keep spinning their tales of failure. It’s time to ask why. I have often imagined the scenario that this reader describes but have been fearful of saying it out loud. Suppose a group of powerful people decided that they wanted to privatize public education. Where would they start? How would they create a “message” to sell something that no one would accept if it was candidly described?

In June , 1992, I wrote the following letter to the editor. Based on today’s posting, I think this letter is as relevant today as it was in 1992.“Try to picture this. A large national corporation, until recently grazing contentedly on federal military contracts, finds its annual earnings reflecting a shocking drop. It is decided that new access to federal dollars must be found, or the corporation may go out of business. Someone suggests a product which could tap into ever increasing federal education dollars. Another suggestion leads to looking into the possibility of crafting that product so that state and local education dollars can also be tapped.”

“The marketing department points out that the product will not sell, unless the buyers, the American public, can be convinced that the current product is substandard. Marketing is assigned the task of creating the need for these new products by convincing the American public that its public education institutions are utter failures. Once that had been accomplished, a program will be undertaken to separate public education dollars from public education institution. Those dollars would become the mainstay of corporation earnings. The product is private education.”
Categories Education Reform, For-Profit, Privatization

What Chris Cerf Needs to Know About Albert Shanker

By dianeravitch
July 16, 2012 //
44

Chris Cerf, the acting commissioner of education in New Jersey, published an article today defending charter schools, which have become very controversial in his state. They have become controversial because the state is trying to push them into suburbs that have great public schools and don’t want them, and they have become controversial because the public is beginning to revolt against for-profit charters, especially for-profit online charters, which Cerf is promoting.

People in New Jersey are beginning to realize that every dollar that goes to a privately managed charter school is a dollar taken away from their own public school. Because the budget is not expanding, it IS a zero sum game. Fixed costs do not decline when children leave the school.

Despite Governor Chris Christie’s frequent belittling of New Jersey teachers and schools, New Jersey is one of the highest performing states in the nation on the federal National Assessment of Educational Progress. So, citizens of the state have good reason to oppose the Christie administration’s efforts to turn more taxpayer dollars over to private entrepreneurs.

In his article, Chris Cerf writes:

“...it is often forgotten that one of the first advocates for public charter schools was Albert Shanker, the former New York City teachers’ union leader, who supported charter schools as a way to empower public school educators to innovate.”

Chris Cerf needs to know what Albert Shanker really said about charter schools. This is what he would learn if he read pp. 122-124 of my book The Death and Life of the Great American School System:

1. Albert Shanker was president of the American Federation of Teachers, not the New York City union, when he first proposed the charter school idea in 1988.

2. Shanker proposed that any new charter should be jointly approved by the union and the school district. More than 90% of charters today are non-union. Shanker would not have approved any school that did not respect the rights of teachers to bargain collectively.

3. Shanker proposed that new charters should target the hardest-to-educate students: those who had dropped out or were failing. He never imagined that charters would have a selection process or that charters might avoid students with disabilities or English-language learners as is now the case in many charters.

3. Shanker wanted charters to collaborate, not compete, with existing public schools. He proposed them as a way to solve the problems of public schools. Whatever they learned, he said, should be shared with the public schools that sponsored them.

4. MOST IMPORTANT: In 1993, when Shanker saw that the charter idea was going to be used to privatize public education, he turned against charter schools. He opposed the takeover of the charter idea by corporations, entrepreneurs, and for-profit vendors. He became a vocal opponent of charter schools when he realized that his idea was embraced by “the education industry.” In his weekly column in The New York Times, Albert Shanker repeatedly denounced charter schools, vouchers, and for-profit management as “quick fixes that won’t fix anything.”

Here is an idea for Commissioner Cerf. You can fix the charter idea if you align it with Shanker’s original idea.

First, insist that all new charters are endorsed by the local school district and the union representing teachers.

Second, bar all for-profit management.

Third, insist that all charters recruit and enroll only the lowest-performing students, the students who have dropped out, and the students who are doing poorly in their present public school.

Fourth, require that charters collaborate with the public schools and share whatever they learn.

Fifth, to truly revive the spirit of Shanker’s proposal, bar all corporate-owned charter chains. Authorize only stand-alone charters that are created by teachers and parents in the district to serve the children of that district. No chains, just local charters committed to that community.

So, yes, Commissioner Cerf, you are on the right track when you quote Albert Shanker. Now, if you take his advice, you can save the charter school idea from the privatizers and profiteers who are giving it a bad name.

Categories Cerf, Chris, Charter Schools, New Jersey, Unions
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