Diana Senechal is having fun with the metrics business. In this post, she manages to combine data mania with the consumer-driven mentality of our current education policymakers.
All in one short article, you get a free parody of choice, value-added assessment, competition, stack ranking, and the Broad Superintendents Academy.
I wrote a blog about the culture at Microsoft, where employees are evaluated by “stack ranking,” meaning that everyone in every unit is assigned a weighting–best, average, worse. I printed comments by people who had been subject to this system, who said that it stifled creativity and collaboration. I discovered that many major corporations have a similar rating system. At Enron it was called “rank and yank.” Jack Welch of GE championed the idea of finding and firing the laggards.
Something similar is happening now in education. Many of the new state evaluation systems, designed in response to Race to the Top (a font of untested ideas), will evaluate teachers and principals on a bell curve. The bell curve decrees that a certain percentage are at the bottom, no matter how effective they are. Economist Eric Hanushek has proposed that 5-10% of teachers (based on the test scores of their students) be fired and replaced by “average” teachers; he says this will produce incredible results: we will rise to the top of the international rankings and the economy will expand by trillions, just by firing those teachers.
A reader in Memphis noticed that the plan of the Transition Planning Committee (led by Stand for Children and advised by the Boston Consulting Group) proposes stack ranking of teachers:
From p. 56 of the Transition Planning Commission’s recommendations regarding the Memphis merger:
“Measures of success
– A meaningful distribution of teacher evaluation scores—approximately 20% evaluated 1s and 2s and less than 20% evaluated 5s
– The teacher evaluation is used as the basis for professional development, decisions about who teaches, and compensation.”
Even if the distribution recommendation is simply hypothetical, it’s pathetic.
There is not a school system in America with 1/5 of its workforce comprised of bad teachers. If there were, that district’s HR department would deserve getting canned first.
But let’s assume 20% is actually a solid estimate. The district fires those teachers. Then what? Fire good teachers you’ve scored “ineffective” in the hopes of hiring even better teachers? Great idea. What teacher would want to work in that sort of system?
Carol Burris is the principal of an outstanding public high school on Long Island, in New York State. She often writes about education for The Answer Sheet. Burris has won awards for her leadership and her school has been recognized for its achievements.
Burris just published an article about the Relay Graduate School of Education. This is a masters’ program that was created by three charter school chains to prepare teachers for working in charter schools. It is certainly not a traditional graduate school of education. There do not seem to be courses in cognitive development, child psychology, sociology of education, history of education, or varied pedagogical models and strategies. There is only one pedagogical strategy, and apparently it is the one that is best at raising test scores.
As I read Burris’ description of Relay, I had two questions:
Why did the New York State Board of Regents permit this “school” to call its program a “graduate” program of education with the authority to award masters’ degrees? There is something incestuous about a “graduate” program created by charter schools to give masters’ degrees to their own teachers.
And second, what is it in the psyche of young men and women, most of whom graduated from prestigious secondary schools, private and public, that enables them to impose a boot-camp style of discipline on boys and girls of color that is unlike anything in their own experience?
A friend shared this post by a young member of Teach for America.
This young teacher wants to teach social studies, for which he or she feels adequate, but will be expected to teach math, for which he or she feels inadequate.
What comes through as you read the post is a sense of sheer terror.
The teacher-to-be knows that 11 days of training is not enough.
What is distressing is to realize that this ill-trained teacher might be sent to a district that is laying off experienced teachers to make room for inexperienced corps members of TFA.
You can’t read this without feeling terribly sorry for this youngster who has been told that she or he will change the world, but is being thrown into a tough classroom without the skills, knowledge or training to feel prepared.
At the suggestion of a reader, I posted a list of the board of directors of a Broad Center for the Management of School Systems, dating from 2009. It included several school superintendents.
Readers have commented on the track record of the superintendents on that board.
Let’s see:
Joel Klein: Resigned in 2010, after NY State Education Department revealed statewide score inflation and New York City’s celebrated test scores collapsed
Michelle Rhee: Resigned in 2010 after D.C. Mayor Adrian Fenty defeated, largely because of her divisive reputation
Arlene Ackerman: Resigned in 2011 in Philadelphia after tempestuous reign
Maria Goodloe-Johnson: Fired in 2010 in Seattle
Arne Duncan: His plan called Renaissance 2010 failed to lift Chicago public schools, now U.S. Secretary of Education
Margaret Spellings: Not a superintendent, but architect of disastrous NCLB
And to think that this is the organization that is training superintendents to “reform” urban education!
The City University of New York is offering courses in “how to pick a charter school” ($75) and “how to pick a public school” ($75). See page 26 of the link.
So this is what “choice” means. You have to take a course at a public university to figure out how to choose a school for your child.
Only in New York.
How many times have I read stories about New Jersey Governor Chris Christie blowing his stack when the subject is education or teachers?
Just yesterday he blew up when a stranger made a passing remark about his education policy.
Is it a sign of a guilty conscience?
Governor Christie is doing everything possible to privatize public education: promoting online charters (even though they have not been authorized by the State Legislature), expanding charter schools, flirting with vouchers. And, he has famously attacked the New Jersey Education Association, throwing choice epithets their way.
It is easy to forget that Governor Christie is a graduate of Livingston High School, where he received an excellent public school education. It is easy for him to forget that New Jersey is one of the highest rated states in the nation on the National Assessment of Educational Progress. In other words, it has an excellent public school system. If New Jersey would focus on improving the districts marred by intense poverty and segregation, it would the “Garden State” of public education.
Maybe New Jersey readers could explain the governor’s antagonism to anything related to the public schools that benefited him.
A reader sent this list of the board of directors of the Broad Center for the Management of School Systems for 2009.
The center is part of the Eli and Edythe Broad Foundation, which runs a training program for urban school superintendents.
Some (many?) Broad-trained superintendents have been involved in controversy, due to their non-collaborative management style.
| Joel Klein, Chair, Chancellor New York City Department of Education Barry Munitz, Vice Chair, Trustee Professor California State University, Los Angeles Arlene Ackerman, Superintendent of Philadelphia Public Schools Richard Barth (Chief Executive Officer KIPP Foundation) Henry Cisneros, Chairman of City View America, former U.S. Secretary of HUD Arne Duncan, U.S. Secretary of Education (on Board until Feb. 2009) Louis Gerstner, Jr., Retired Chairman and CEO, IBM Corporation Maria Goodloe-Johnson, Superintendent Seattle Public Schools Dan Katzir, Managing Director of the Eli and Edythe Broad Foundation Wendy Kopp (CEO and Founder of Teach for America) Margaret Spellings, President and CEO of Margaret Spellings and Company, former U.S. Secretary of DOE Melissa Megliola Zaikos, Autonomous Management and Performance Schools Program Officer, Chicago Public Schools Michelle Rhee, Chancellor District of Columbia Schools Lawrence Summers, Director National Economic Council Mortimer Zuckerman, Chairman and Editor-in-Chief, U.S. News & World Report; Publisher of the New York Daily News |
A Louisiana legislator who voted for Governor Bobby Jindal’s “reform” legislation is shocked to learn that students will be able to take their state vouchers to Muslim schools. She voted for the voucher plan on the assumption that students could take them only to Christian schools. Now, she is worried. She had “no idea” that taxpayer dollars would go to non-Christian schools. She wanted to help children learn about the religion of the Founding Fathers.
Meanwhile, twenty school districts are suing to overturn the law, saying that it violates the state constitution. The state constitution says that “state funding for public education shall be equitably allocated to public school systems.” Of 125 schools that have been okayed to receive vouchers, 124 apparently are religious schools.
UPDATE: although the article says that 124 of the 125 voucher schools are faith-based, friends in Louisiana tell me that it is more likely 118 of the 125 that are religious schools.
When John White was appointed to run the Recovery School District in New Orleans, Secretary of Education Arne Duncan called him a “visionary school leader.”
Now John White is doing the bidding of a Tea Party governor and leading the most reactionary drive in the nation to dismantle public education; to take money away from the minimum foundation budget for public schools and give it to voucher schools and charter schools; to give public money to small religious schools that don’t teach evolution; to strip teachers of all protection of their academic freedom; to allow anyone to teach, without any credentials, in charter schools; to welcome for-profit vendors of education to take their slice out of the funding for public schools.
I wonder if Arne Duncan still considers him a “visionary leader”?
I wonder what Arne Duncan thinks of the Louisiana legislation. I wonder why he has not spoken out against any part of it. I wonder why he is silent when Tea Party governors like Chris Christie attack the teachers of their state and try to take away whatever rights they may have won over the years. I wonder if he agreed or disagreed with the Chiefs for Change–the rightwing state superintendents–when they saluted Louisiana’s regressive legislation to take money from public schools and hand it over to private sector interests.
I wonder why he never went to Madison, Wisconsin, to speak out for public sector workers there when it mattered. I wonder what he thinks of the emergency manager legislation in Michigan, where state-appointed emergency managers have closed down public education in two districts and handed it off to charter operators. I wonder what he thinks about the Boston Consulting Group’s plan in Memphis to increase the proportion of students in privately managed charters from 4% to 19%. I wonder what he thinks about the Boston Consulting Group’s plan to privatize up to 40% of Philadelphia’s schools. I wonder what he thinks about the rollback of collective bargaining rights in various states or the removal of job protections for teachers. I wonder what he thinks about ALEC’s coordinated plan to destroy public education. I wonder what he thinks of the emerging for-profit industry that is moving into K-12 education.
He has many opportunities to express his views about the escalation of the war against public education and the ongoing attacks on teachers and their unions.
Why is he silent?
Just wondering.
Diane Ravitch's blog 