Archives for the month of: August, 2012
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The Perfect, Research-Based School

By dianeravitch
August 6, 2012 //
11

Bruce Baker of Rutgers has reviewed the research on effective schools and designed a “research-based” school that is guaranteed to produce higher test scores.

He calls his school the “Econometric Academy of Achievement Test Excellence.”

Every teacher will have exactly four years of experience, no more, no less, because research shows that is the point of maximum impact on test scores.

Students will be loaded with carbs on testing days.

Students will be renamed prior to entry into the school, because certain types of names are associated with low scores while others are associated with high scores.

All teacher salaries will be based entirely on loss aversion tied to test scores gains.

Really.

This is so good you have to read it yourself.

And maybe you will conclude that we need not school reform but reform of the zany ideas that now dominate the research agenda. Maybe call it the “nutty professor reform movement.”

Categories Education Reform, Merit pay

Funniest Story of the Month

By dianeravitch
August 6, 2012 //
8

As I was doing some research about virtual charter schools, I came across an article that caused me to laugh out loud.

It appeared in the Star-Ledger, the main newspaper in New Jersey. It was titled “State Has Virtually No Reason to Not Give Online Charter Schools a Shot.”

It said the state should stop “dithering” and should promptly approve an online charter school. No delay, no moratorium, approve the online school now.

It was published on July 11, 2012, as the state’s Acting Commissioner of Education Chris Cerf and the state board of education were mulling a decision to authorize the megacorporation K12 to open an online charter school in New Jersey.

The reason I laughed out loud was that the article appeared on the same day that the FBI raided the offices of the Pennsylvania Cyber Charter. See here too.

And it appeared several months after the New York Times published a withering expose of the terrible academic record of K12.

And it appeared fourteen months after the CREDO study of virtual charters in Pennsylvania, which showed they get awful results.

The invaluable New Jersey blogger Jersey Jazzman showed the fallaciousness of the claim that the state should not wait for more research but should promptly approve a virtual charter school.

Truly, this is one of those laugh out loud moments. They are so few these days that we should enjoy them.

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

Spoof on Offensive Rhee Olympics Ad

By dianeravitch
August 6, 2012 //
1

Tim Slekar and his merry band of public education advocates have just released a spoof of the offensive Michelle Rhee/StudentsFirst ad.

The Rhee ad ridicules the United States, students, teachers, public schools, obesity, and gays. The man in her ad is presented as flabby and effete, performing in an Olympic sport called rhythmic gymnastics that is for women only and falling on his back. He is supposedly a representation of American education.

Just as an aside, the international test score rankings are meaningless. They reflect the high rate of poverty among children in the U.S. When the international tests were first given, we came in 11th out of 12. That was in 1964. We have since then gone on to outperform the nations that had higher test scores by every economic measure. In the years from 1964 to the present, our students never had high scores on the international tests. They don’t predict anything.

Here is the spoof.

Categories Education Reform, International, Rhee, Michelle, StudentsFirst

A View from New Zealand

By dianeravitch
August 6, 2012 //
0

As I have noted before, the idea of introducing a “free market” into education has strong appeal to conservative governments in other nations. Pasi Sahlberg of Finland calls this idea the “Global Education Reform Movement,” or GERM, characterized by testing, accountability, competition, and choice. GERM is now infesting New Zealand, which has a very successful education system.

One of the leading anti-national testing sites is called the Treehorn Express, a blog written by NZ educator Phil Cullen. While the names and organizations will not be familiar to you, the issues will be. New Zealand officials want to introduce charter schools to New Zealand, and this post sees it as a huge step backward that will mean privatization, funding of religious schools, and eliminating the expectation that teachers in these schools must be credentialed.

If you want to see how the global issues are shaped by American developments, and if you want to learn how your peers in New Zealand are reacting, this is a good place to start.

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

Please Comment on CNN Interview with Michelle Rhee

By dianeravitch
August 5, 2012 //
25

Many readers have asked how they can contact CNN to respond to its interview with Michelle Rhee.

CNN has invited comments: http://schoolsofthought.blogs.cnn.com/2012/08/05/rhee-on-saving-americas-schools/comment-page-1/

Bear in mind that the international rankings, which she loves to tout to embarrass America, its students and its teachers, predict nothing.

When the first international assessment was given in 1964, our students came in 11th of 12 nations.

Since then, our students typically rank in the bottom quartile or no better than the international average.

Yet we have the largest economy in the world.

We are number one in child poverty, which explains the performance of our students. The more poverty in a school, the lower its test scores; the less poverty, the higher the scores.

Almost 25% of our children live in poverty. Did Rhee mention that?

Please help inform CNN. Maybe they will get it right next time.

Categories Rhee, Michelle

What Public Education Did for Me

By dianeravitch
August 5, 2012 //
4

The writer of this article sent it to me today. It is a testimonial to a teacher who changed his life. As he says, there are millions of stories like this, and they are all true.

Do you have one to tell?

Bret Wooten: The Value Of Public Schools

Several months ago, we heard from a listener after a state legislator talked about the great potential in charter schools.  Bret Wooten felt more should be said about the great potential offered by traditional public schools.  Here’s his commentary.

I have a degree in industrial electronics, a U.S. patent, had my poetry published, managed thousands of people as the director of a billion dollar company, visited all 50 states and five countries. Now, I am a husband, father and small business owner.

Oh yeah, and I’m dumb.

At least that is the way I thought of myself until third grade. Where Mrs. Nickolas my teacher sat down in front of me and asked me to read a passage to her. I knew I could not read it. So, I hung my head and told her. “I was dumb and could not do it.” Her reaction was a quick hug. Then, she then looked me in the eyes and said, “We are going to fix that.” That year I was diagnosed with dyslexia and placed into a class that helped me learn to deal with this common disability. There is no cure or pill for this, and I am still a slow reader, often finding myself spelling much like the Chick-fil-A cows. However, I have no doubt that my third grade teacher changed my life that day.

When you think about the scale of what public education offers, it is truly amazing and something we should all be proud of. Beyond, the core class’s public schools offer sports of all kinds, music, arts, libraries, clubs, and numerous opportunities for advanced learner. Or the special education programs that millions of children benefit from. But all of these programs are endanger of being minimized or eliminated in Texas.

I have watched politicians and other unqualified people bash the public education system in this country as they ask schools to do more with less.

I never thought I would see the day when our education system would be treated as a pawn in politics and teachers would be faulted for executing the direction of those same politicians. But, the thing that I find most troubling is that some people are cheering them on. Knowing children will pay for their tax cuts through higher class sizes and less effective programs.

Our children are growing up in a globalized world. They are already in an intellectual war with. Countries like China are producing five times the engineering students that the U.S. did this past year. There has never been a time when we as parents can offer so much to our children. We have an intellectual infrastructure that is truly amazing. Think about the access to information an I-pad or smart phone brings to the mix and how items like these can compliment our existing education system. Tools like these get confused as replacements for teacher they should instead be thought of as tools for children to learn and compete on a global market.

Unlike politicians, teachers will be held responsible for these children. Unlike politicians, teachers will have to look children in the eyes every day knowing more could be done. How many kids like me will sit across the table from a teacher like Mrs. Nickolas in the next few years and nothing will happen – simply because of inadequate funding, poor leadership and no accountability at the state level. Because we let that happen.

These kids can be a productive part of society or a burden to it. I feel very fortunate to say I never really needed a hand out. But there was a time, in the third grade, I did need hand up and it was there; reaching out for me. Please, get informed and involved. I am one story; there are millions like me out there right now.

Bret Wooten is a small business owner from Lewisville.

Categories Education Reform, US Education

The Secret Trick Behind Merit Pay

By dianeravitch
August 5, 2012 //
12

Hardly a day goes by without another politician or businessman calling for merit pay, performance pay, incentivize those lazy teachers to produce higher scores!

The Obama administration put $1 billion into merit pay, without a shred of evidence that it would make a difference.

Merit pay schemes have recently failed in New York City, Chicago, and Nashville, but who cares?

The Florida legislature passed legislation mandating merit pay but didn’t appropriate any money to pay for it. That was left to cash-strapped districts.

So here is the secret trick.

There is no money to pay for merit pay!

In a time of fiscal austerity, the money appropriated for merit pay (when it is appropriated) is money that should have been spent on reducing class size, preserving libraries or school nurses, or maintaining arts programs or other school-based services.

Instead, districts will lay off some teachers so that other teachers get bonuses. That leads to larger classes for the remaining teachers.

That is ridiculous, but that is the way of thinking that is now prevalent among our nation’s policymakers.

A reader knows this:

 I find the whole premise behind merit pay insulting.  If the districts have extra money, let’s use it to improve teaching conditions such as providing class sets of reading books, pencil sharpeners, science materials, or any of the hundreds of items teachers end up paying for out of pocket.

Categories Budget Cuts, Chicago, Florida, Merit pay, NYC, Tennessee

What Is a Teacher’s Ethical Responsibiity?

By dianeravitch
August 5, 2012 //
14

Teachers and others have debated the post “Why Are Teachers Silent?” The post has generated more response than anything else I have posted, with (so far) 101 comments.

Clearly, many teachers feel keenly that they should speak up against the policies they know are wrong, the practices they know are harmful to children, but many are fearful. There is a climate of fear and intimidation that now pervades many schools and districts. There is a belief in the corporate reform world that top-down control and direction are necessary, and that those who disagree are troublemakers who must be silenced. And as I said in the original post, teachers need to put food on the table and pay their mortgage.

This teacher has wrestled with her sense of ethical and moral responsibility as a professional. She responded to another regular commenter on the blog, who goes by the sobriquet “Labor Lawyer”:

Labor Lawyer,
Thank you very much for making this clear.  As a tenured teacher, I feel very strongly that I must speak out.  Given the current atmosphere of administrative persecution of those who do so, I advise our bright, young, non-tenured teachers to take their counsel in private with those they trust.  I do feel that my speaking out is an ethical and moral imperative …… at least for myself. My problem is that I feel just as strongly about my perceived duty as a teacher of children to first do no harm.  This ususally means abstaining from implementing stupid reform policies pushed (very agressively) by my administration. When asked about my abstention by  my colleagues, I tell them that it is, for me, a matter of conscious.  I have often said publicly (and I believe) that I do NOT work for any administrator. Instead, I work for the people of my district as represented by the school board.  To my way of thinking, it is my moral and ethical obligation to teach the children of my district to the very best of my ability.  To fulfill this obligation, it is imperative that I ignore much of the foolishness that is modern school reform.  I must ask you (and will very much appreciate you expertise in this area), are my words and my perspective on this issue little more than bellicose rhetoric?  Legally, ethically, and morally, where do I stand in you evaluation?

Categories Education Reform, Teachers and Teaching

How Charter Schools Divide Communities

By dianeravitch
August 5, 2012 //
81

Critics of charter schools have noted that they undermine neighborhood public schools and decimate communities. By offering a slot to a small proportion of students in the neighborhood, they break up any sense of community spirit centered on the community school and they simultaneously promote the free-market fetishizing of consumer choice. Add to the charter movement the effects of NCLB: labeling a school with low scores as a “failing school,” which causes families to abandon it and demoralizes teachers; and the effects of Race to the Top, which encourages school closings as a remedy for low scores. All of this is a great avoidance strategy, a way of not facing up to the most consistent predictor of low test scores: poverty. Yes, poor kids can learn, and yes, it is possible to create a high-test score school composed of poor kids, but neither of those facts contradicts the consistent correlation between poverty and low academic achievement. Corporate reformers like to pretend that poverty doesn’t matter, because they know of 1 or 20 schools where poor kids got high test scores. But that is a non sequitur. There is no district in the nation, even those run by the most ardent reformers, that has closed the achievement gaps of race and income. Certainly not DC or NYC.

A reader reflects on this scenario:

One of the less-developed discussions about charter schools is their role in destroying the neighborhood school – now effectively accomplished among NYC high schools, for example – and how that is integral to the class and racial reconfiguration of the neighborhoods in which they are being placed.

As Mark Naison perceptively wrote weeks ago, throughout the grim Reagan, Bush I and post-NAFTA years of deindustrialization that hollowed out so many communities, the one place that remained was the neighborhood public school, which often employed neighborhood residents and provided an island of stability. Now, as developers have their eyes on some of those communities, they have allied with charter school operators. It’s no coincidence, for example, that one of the most active real estate developers in rapidly gentrifying Harlem (Gideon Stein) is on the Board of Eva Moskowitz’s aggressively metastasizing Harlem Success Academies.

It’s a vicious irony that, hyped as a panacea for poor Black and Latino urban children, charter schools in many cities and neighborhoods are in fact a vehicle for ultimately displacing them. After all, as census data has been showing for a while, the slums of the future are forming in the suburbs (charter operators take note: a rapidly developing market!), and the urban core is becoming whiter and more affluent.

Charters, whether brick-and-mortar schools or virtual sweatshops started by ex-felons (as is the case with K-12 and its founder, Michael Mlken) are not just about busting the unions and monetizing every last data point generated in the school building, but are also a real estate play, eliminating what is often one of the last public, universally accessible institution in these neighborhoods, and making way for more desirable consumers who don’t rely upon or care about the ongoing destruction of the public realm.
Categories Charter Schools, Corporate Reformers, NYC

Rahm and Other People’s Children

By dianeravitch
August 5, 2012 //
23

One of the themes of the corporate reform movement is this:

“We know what’s best for other people’s children but it is not what’s best for mine.”

Many of the leading corporate reformers went to elite prep schools and/or send their children to them.

Schools like Exeter, Andover, Deerfield Academy, Sidwell Friends, the University of Chicago Lab School, Lakeside Academy (Seattle), Maumee Country Day School (Toledo). At these schools there are beautiful facilities, small classes, experienced teachers, well-stocked libraries, science laboratories, and a curriculum rich in the arts, sciences, languages, and other studies.

I hope you read this post about Chicago billionaire and school board member Penny Pritzker. She sends her children to the University of Chicago Lab School, which has the best of everything, but feels no embarrassment that the children of Chicago who attend public schools that she oversees do not have the same advantages.

Mayor Rahm Emanuel sends his children to this school. Arne Duncan is a graduate of it.

Remember that theme: Other People’s Children.

This reader thought about what Mayor Rahm Emanuel wants for his own children. Why doesn’t he want the same for all Chicago’s children?

Others have mentioned that Rahm’s own children attend the University of Chicago Lab Schools. If true, it irks me to no end that they benefit from a school:Whose motto is “learning by doing”Whose total school population is less than 1800 students, nursery school through 12th (and it is still called nursery school, which has an entirely different connotation than preschool or pre-K)

Where John Dewey himself formulated and applied his progressive educational theories

Where Vivian Gussin Paley, a MacArthur Genius Grant recipient, spent many years researching and writing about the importance of young children’s imaginative play (she is a great hero of mine because she documents children’s first language, play, with respect and thoroughness). Most people’s children, mine included, don’t have the benefit of time at school to learn together through play. They have been robbed by adults who don’t understand or care about child development.

The school for Rahm’s kids develops character, values diversity, and provides depth in learning (see website). Other people’s children are left with worksheet after worksheet and empty bubbles to fill in on a test.
Categories Chicago, Curriculum, Education Reform, Emanuel, Rahm
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