Archives for the month of: April, 2013
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USA Today on Rhee Cheating Scandal: LINK ADDED, BLAME MY STAFF

By dianeravitch
April 12, 2013 //
42

USA Today was first to report the cheating scandal in the District of Columbia.

Here is the follow-up story by Gregg Toppo, about the memo first leaked to John Merrow.

Eventually, the allegations were investigated by the DC Inspector General, who decided not to look at the erasure analysis or to interview many people. It was not the kind of full-scale investigation carried out in Atlanta by professionals. The DC Inspector General decided the cheating, if it happened, was not widespread.

This was confirmed by the Inspector General for the U.S. Department of Education.

But suspicions lingered, as did the cloud over the district, and the cloud refused to go away.

Categories Michelle Rhee, Testing

Tennessee: Starvation Bill Deferred for Now

By dianeravitch
April 12, 2013 //
15

Good news from Tennessee: The Legislature will not consider a bill to cut the welfare benefits of families whose children do poorly in school. At least not this year.

Senator Stacey Campfield took note of the fact that several prominent Republican senators planned to oppose the bill, as did the governor.

And Senator Campfield said “we all have true passion to get parents involved.”

So, now we understand his motive. He actually believes that starving the family would encourage parental involvement!

One of the opponents of the bill worried that if the family lost income, the children might be blamed and beaten.

This may be another heartening example of the power of public outrage, the letters, phone calls, and outreach that convinced legislators in Tennessee not to make themselves a national laughing stock.

Getting Jon Stewart’s attention may have turned the tide on this dreadful proposal.

Categories Tennessee

Who Is Funding Privatization in Texas?

By dianeravitch
April 12, 2013 //
2

It won’t surprise you to know hat here is a lot of money behind the conservative agenda in Texas. But you might be interested to see the connections between the privatization advocates in Texas and national organizations like ALEC.

Julian Heilig Vasquez traces the connections in his series on the Teat, in which he reflects on what is known as neoliberalism.

Categories ALEC, Corporate Reformers, Education Industry, For-Profit, On-Line Education, Texas

Florida: Don’t Let a Charter Corporation Steal Your Neighborhood School

By dianeravitch
April 12, 2013 //
5

Bill Sublette is a former Florida state representative who is now chairman of the Orange County school board. He is a Republican.

In this excellent article, he explains how the parent trigger bill, which just passed in the Florida House, will allow charter corporations to grab neighborhood schools, public property paid for by local citizens. And once the corporation takes control, neighborhood children will have to enter a lottery to attend what was once their neighborhood school.

He asks the reader:

“Imagine you live in a neighborhood with a school your community has called its own for years. A school you and your neighbors take great pride in and in which you’ve invested substantial time and effort. A school you sent your own children to, and one which you hope your children will choose to send their children to.”

But then the political consultants arrive to collect signatures and sell your neighbors a bill of goods. Before you know it, the school is owned by a corporation, and you as a parent have no rights at ll.

Here is a true conservative, a man who loves his community and its history. He is standing up against the those in his party who flak for corporate interests.

Categories Charter Schools, Florida, For-Profit, Parent trigger

Who Holds State Officials Accountable When They Are WRONG?

By dianeravitch
April 12, 2013 //
13

In a brilliant post, Bruce Baker of Rutgers demonstrates that states are imposing teacher evaluation systems that are flawed.

This is what Arne Duncan and Bill Gates demanded, and this is what states are doing. And it is wrong, it is factually wrong.

Who will hold Duncan, Gates, and all those state officials accountable?

Chris Cerf in New Jersey and John King and Merryl Tisch in New York assure the public that the evaluation systems will work because they take many factors into account. But Baker demonstrates that they are wrong. The evaluation systems are fundamentally flawed and they will not work. They will do damage to schools, principals, teachers, and students.

Baker writes:

 

“The standard retort is that marginally flawed or not, these measures are much better than the status quo. ‘Cuz of course, we all know our schools suck. Teachers really suck. Principals enable their suckiness.  And pretty much anything we might do… must suck less.

WRONG – it is absolutely not better than the status quo to take a knowingly flawed measure, or a measure that does not even attempt to isolate teacher effectiveness, and use it to label teachers as good or bad at their jobs. It is even worse to then mandate that the measure be used to take employment action against the employee.

It’s not good for teachers AND It’s not good for kids. (noting the stupidity of the reformy argument that anything that’s bad for teachers must be good for kids, and vice versa)

On the one hand, these ridiculous rigid, ill-conceived, statistically and legally inept and morally bankrupt policies will most certainly lead to increased, not decreased litigation over teacher dismissal.

On the other hand… The anything is better than the status quo argument is getting a bit stale and was pretty ridiculous to begin with.”

Categories Accountability, Administrators, superintendents, Corporate Reformers, Teacher Evaluations, Teachers and Teaching, Testing

LA Times: Bill Gates Hath Spoken

By dianeravitch
April 12, 2013 //
39

The Los Angeles Times became notorious in 2010 when it commissioned its own ratings of thousands of teachers in the LAUSD and published them. The newspaper was condemned widely by educators and researchers. Even some who supported such ratings said it was wrong to publish them. The LA Times strongly defended its decision to create the ratings and to make them public.

Now the LA Times is expressing doubts about the overuse of test scores to evaluate teachers. It even scoffs at some of the more absurd practices now flourishing in some states.

Why the turnaround? Bill Gates says that test scores matter too much. He has changed his mind. Many states, following his earlier views about testing, are emphasizing test scores too much.

I guess we have to wait for his next op-ed to find out what the nation should do next.

Categories Gates Foundation, Bill Gates, Teacher Evaluations, Testing

Bruce Baker Challenges the Logic of Privatization

By dianeravitch
April 12, 2013 //
6

Bruce Baker of Rutgers is one of the wisest and sharpest critics of the privatization movement (aka “reform”).

In this post, he analyzes two favorite terms of the privatizers: “relinquishment,” which means “give up,” abandon your antique belief in public education, turn your school over to private management and get over it. The other is “sector agnosticism,” which means pretty much the same thing as relinquishment.

You have to wonder where these guys get this jargon. Do they make it up all by themselves? Or do they hire Republican pollster-linguist Frank Luntz to help them figure out words and terms that will make them sound high-minded, thoughtful, and important as they scheme to dismantle and hand off the public schools?

Then there is that term that Baker refers to here: The privatizers want “not a great school system,” but “a system of great schools.”

I first heard Joel Klein use that term about a decade ago, and I didn’t fully understand what he meant by it.

Now I understand.

It means that the privatizers have no idea how to improve low-performing schools, so they close them. Then they hope that some entrepreneur will step up and offer to take some of the students and start over. The others, well, they are out of luck; they will be bounced around from school to school. If the new school doesn’t work out, then the privatizers close that too.

At some distant point in the future (or never), the city will have only “great” schools because all the “bad” schools were closed. But that point never arrives, as we have learned in New York City. Instead, the Mayor just keeps closing schools every year, the schools that enroll the kids that no one wants.

The bottom line: the privatizers will keep trying to persuade you to give up (relinquish) as they hand off the students, the buildings, and the funding to private operators. The private operators won’t do any better, if they take the same students, but that doesn’t matter. The victory (for them) comes as a result of the dissolution of public education. Once gone, can it be reassembled? The loss (for us) comes as a result of the destruction of one of our great institutions of democracy.

Categories Education Reform

Schneider: Arizona, the Land of Conflicts of Interest

By dianeravitch
April 12, 2013 //
11

Mercedes Schneider takes a close look at Arizona, known as the Wild West of charters.

What she finds is a state where the ethics laws are even laxer than those of her home state of Louisiana.

The charter sector in Arizona is unregulated, unsupervised, and has a firm lock on the taxpayers’ dollars.

Money rules.

Categories ALEC, Charter Schools, Education Industry, For-Profit, Privatization

G.F. Brandenburg on the Rhee “Smoking Memo”

By dianeravitch
April 11, 2013 //
22

G.F. Brandenburg has covered the reign of Rhee for years.

Here he explains the key insights in the memo leaked to John Merrow.

His summary:

“(1) Rhee gave lots of money to adults who cheated

(2) She put impossible pressure on principals to cheat; they, in turn, put that pressure on their teachers

(3) The achievement gap between white and black students, and between poor kids and wealthier kids, increased on Rhee’s and Henderson’s watches; any increases in NAEP scores are continuations of trends that began under her predecessors; and DCPS students’s scores are still at the bottom of the nation

(4) Rhee, Henderson, Kamras, and IG Willoughby have steadfastly refused to investigate the cheating seriously and to do the sort of analysis that actually shows malfeasance

(5) Turnover among administrators and teachers in DCPS has turned a revolving door into a whirlwind

(6) The idealistic principal who followed Wayne Ryan at Noyes, and who was originally a great admirer of Rhee, found a lot of evidence of cheating there, but her whistleblower suit was dismissed, and she now runs a cupcake store

(7) Despite noises to the contrary by Rhee, the number of highly-paid central-office administrators has jumped; DCPS has the highest administrator-to-student ratio anywhere in the region

(8) Funds that should have been used to help students who were behind were, instead, used to pay illegitimate bonuses to dishonest adults.”

Categories Rhee, Michelle, Testing

Breaking News: John Merrow Finds Mystery Memo in Rhee Scandal

By dianeravitch
April 11, 2013 //
52

Someone in the District of Columbia education department leaked a memo to John Merrow about the cheating scandal. The memo warned Chancellor Michelle Rhee about the likelihood of widespread cheating in the DC Public schools. Rhee did not act on it. She should have. The allegations were not investigated. They were brushed aside.

This is a very important post.

It is a bombshell.

Merrow calls the post “Michelle Rhee’s Reign of Error.” It is funny that he borrowed the title of my new book, which will be published September 3. The “Reign of Error” applies not only to Rhee but to No Child Left Behind, Race to the Top, and the whole lot of “reforms” that are in reality a soul-crushing, data-driven approach to education. The so-called reform movement is bad for students, bad for teachers, bad for principals, and ruinous to education.

Categories Administrators, superintendents, Rhee, Michelle, StudentsFirst, Testing
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