Jason Stanford, Texas blogger, notes the growing number of scandals associated with “accountability,” and wonders whether school accountability will blow up like Wall Street did in 2008.
He writes:
“Just like AAA ratings on mortgage-backed securities led to Wall Street’s 2008 disaster, a rash of accountability scandals might be precursors to a similar public school crash. After years of promises that test-driven accountability would yield miracles, scandals with school ratings are popping up all over the country. Unless we hold reformers as accountable as they hold students, these scandals could bring down our public school system the same way Wall Street almost innovated our economy back into the Stone Age.”
The incentives for fraud keep getting higher.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
I completely agree. The fraud will blow up such that something akin to the 2008 fed bailout will be required to sustain any semblace of public education in America.
The corruption nationwide is too drastic to continue without such a crisis.
Ironically, this is more of a national security threat than anything I or my colleagues nationwide could possibly do or not do in our clasrooms. Let Klein and Rice write a report on the that.
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The 640 Billion Dollar Question is —
Who Will the Goobermint Bail Out?
The Victims or The Crooks?
I fear the history is ominous on that score …
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But public ed. isn’t “too big to fail,” according to these robber barons. Public Education will just implode. There goes our democracy. And isn’t that the whole reason for this whole “accountability” nonsense int he first place?
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Scary thought
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Right on!
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It will crash eventually, but it will take a while. And it won’t be pretty when it happens. Just as many Americans were left without savings/income when Wall Street crashed, many American children will be left without education when rheeform crashes. The process has gone on too long and caused too much damage already, but I’m afraid we’ll have to hit rock bottom (meaning, more affluent suburbanites are going to have to feel the pain) before there’s any meaningful change, and even then it will take a long time to rebuild (because first we’ll have to win the revolution).
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As my favorite real estate and bank attorney has said of the homes and lots that no longer have the “value” thought when backing those securities (and whose true owner, in terms of the note, cannot be identified because they’ve been sliced and diced so many times): “This is what happens when you take people out of an equation.”
Real property does not have the same value if it is not being used, and thus will not always rise in value. So, too, perhaps of schools and the relationship of their value to community. Take people out of the equation (colletively, as a community) and. . .
the complexity continues.
I really think a few courses in philosophy could help the business minds driving this ship. The above mentioned attorney has his BA in philosophy. I go with what he says.
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that, and some time in the classroom. For a whole day (at least).
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Yes, but how many bankers or hedge fund managers who brought about the ’08 collapse were held accountable for the mess? Anybody at AIG? Goldman? JP Morgan Chase? Citibank? BoA? Lehman? Bear Stearns?
If anything, the lesson the Wall Street guys learned from the ’08 crash is that you could bring about near-collapse of the economy through your own greed and malfeasance, then have the government bail you out and make money both coming and going.
Same goes foe the mortgage fraud the banks engaged in, the foreclosure fraud, the fixing of LIBOR.
Nobody went to jail, nobody was held accountable other than one mid-level Goldman Sachs guy.
Lesson learned – education reform may crash the way Wall Street did, but if the system is so corrupted that nobody in authority holds these people to account, does it really matter if it crashes?
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I think it is because they did not break laws, necessarily. The laws permitted what was going on back then.
We need to take a hard look at the legislation that enables these situations. New Markets Tax Code (from what I’ve read) has a lot to do with the charter movement.
They are not breaking the law.
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Also, the fraud was more at the local level. Mortgage brokers used lending guidelines set forth by the Community Investment Act (no doc loans) to profit off of loans that should have never been made.
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Mortgage fraud is always at the local level. Borrower fraud and broker fraud. That’s not the fraud that’s at issue when it comes to the Countrywides and Bear Stearns’s and Goldman’s. The fraud at issue with them is what they knew about the quality of the loans they acquired and securitized versus what they told investors. For starters.
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There has been ample evidence of law breaking – read Matt Taibbi.
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Dienne–
thanks for the tip; I looked him up.
I still think, though, having talked to a lot of real estate attorneys on this (I used to work for two during the crash), that most of the fraud occurred at the local level, and the assumption of values was absolutely silly, but not fraud (necessarily). And while the big dogs might have suspected it was going on and gone along with it, the actual fraud was way down the food chain.
Greed, while unfortunate, is not against the law. So if the laws favor it, it will happen.
With charters, the laws favor the greed. That’s where we need to focus. Which laws? When were they passed? By whom? How can we change them?
Those are less emotional questions, but more practical questions to help curtail any mess.
I know, on a personal level, you and I have utted heads on framing events related to greed. I just think sometimes it is better to try to figure out a solution, rather than a wrath.
I sincerely appreciate your posts and I can tell you are passionate about public school. I am too. I just try to be careful not to paint with too broad a brush in either direction.
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It’s not about wrath, it’s about justice, and there can be no solution until there is justice. So long as the billionaire boys club is allowed to repeatedly lie, cheat and steal (in many, many ways which are illegal, it’s just that those who should be prosecuting them are in bed with them), we cannot get out of the hole we are being shoveled deeper into.
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Yes, but it is our civic duty to rise up and defend our republic.
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Joanna,
An article you may find of interest:
http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/why-isnt-wall-street-in-jail-20110216
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Ang–
thanks. I had just found that one too. 🙂
Funny, I called the two attorneys I worked for and quoted a little of the article to see what they would say. They both said, “yeah, it’s complicated.”
So I guess it is complicated.
I watched all the movies about the crash (Too Big To Fail) and others and the people I know who work in that world say if the actions that were taken had not been, it would have been far more catastrophic than letting Wall Street by on gray area.
Catastrophe sounds pretty bad to me. I am glad my dollar bill still works.
This is why I am a woman who prays.
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I’ve spent about a third of my life over the last five and a half years dealing with this stuff. It certainly is complicated.
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But with justice you have to lay out a case; not just generalize, call names and accuse. Just as teachers would never want “union-loving, lazy leftist. . .in bed with whomever” to carry legal ramifications against them, so too can you not expect the same the other way. That is the beauty, among beauties, of being an American.
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You might also want to read All the Devils Are Here by Bethany McLean and Joe Nocera
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Brutus:
What does that look like?
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Thomas Jefferson once said, “I hold it that a little rebellion now and then is a good thing, and as necessary in the political world as storms in the physical.”
He also said, “The first two enemies of the people are criminals and government, so let us tie the second down with the chains of the Constitution so the second will not become the legalized version of the first.”
Given the financial debacle of 2008 and the lack of accountability incurred by those responsible; it seems that our government may be complicit in this national disaster that is still affecting millions of our citizens.
If our elected representatives are not effective in protecting we the people, then perhaps TJ’s words are still relevant?
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David Sirota has a good article at Common Dreams about the corruption, greed and unaccountability of school so-called “reformers” and the privatizers (destroyers) of public education. From his article: “You could consider that the most prolific fundraiser in the education “reform” movement is not someone with a stellar record of education policy success, but instead Michelle Rhee, the former Washington, D.C., schools chief whose tenure was defined by a massive cheating scandal.
But maybe the best way to see that profit is the motive of the education “reform” movement is to note that no matter how many kids they harm or how many scandals they create, Bennett, Bush, Rhee and other privatizers continue getting jobs, continue being touted as education “experts” and continue raising huge money for their cause.”
http://www.commondreams.org/view/2013/08/16-0
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Yes, it is about jobs and money for them.
It is about learning for us.
Astonishing how this has all gotten so twisted.
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The system crashing is inevitable. The de-formers will have made their planned profits from charters, testing etc and will be on to pillaging another part of democratic society.
They will of course not be held accountable since their friends in political office will not permit it.
Precious educational time wasted, careers ruined, neighborhood schools and communities turned upside down, and the working people of these communities left to pick up the pieces.
“Ain’t capitalism grand!”
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Well, this may be a bellweather: Maine Commissioner of Education, Steve Bowen, announced his resignation today.
Bowen as you may have learned from this ‘blog is a part of the ALEC reform crowd, and recently installed an A–F grading system for Maine’s schools based on Tony Bennett’s systems in Indiana and Florida. Right after Bennett resigned under a cloud for allegedly rigging scores, Bowen fired off a defensive statement for his old friend. And now, Bowen finds it just too tempting to leave Maine to become the director of innovation for the Council of Chief State School Officers. (Some group of clowns I’ve not heard of.)
So, if Wall Street crashes are the model, then it pays to watch who starts “cashing out” and when.
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Go to the “clowns” site and you’ll learn about them and their partners. http://www.ccsso.org/ These folks take care of their own and Steve Bowen is being rewarded.
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Of course. More details about Bowen’s departure and legacy are here. Note how the article can’t point to any measurable improvement in educational performance to go with the legislative successes. Bowen sure knows his timing.
Although Governor LePage’s proposal to have Miss Maine act as the state’s STEM spokesperson, despite having no STEM qualifications whatsoever and drawing a strong “no way” from Bowen, may also have contributed to this move.
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Here’s a link to the Miss Maine story.
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REFORMER’S LEMONADE STAND
During the hot summer days, did your children ever sell lemonade to the neighbors or passer-byes? The children learn a little about Sales but not really about Profit, since they are using your Goods to produce their Profits. For your children it is pure Profit, since there is no cost to them for the Goods. We don’t mind too much since at least we don’t have to buy the Lemonade. Now, if you actually bought the Lemonade from them, you would be Teaching them about “Reformer Profit”!
“Reformers” , such as Pearson, Wireless Generation, Amplify, the three having received $249,704,097 in ARRA funds for producing the Goods(“Educational” materials) and then turn around and sell it back to US the tax payers! It is GREAT for them now with CCSS, since once the “Educational” materials are produced from ARRA funds given to them by individual State Education Departments; they can sell these materials to any CC State since they are all doing the same thing. More CC States = more “Reformers” pure profits!
The only profits, comparable to these, were when a young man in the 1980’s became a multibillionaire by selling instructions to us (our computers). At least, to my knowledge, we did not pay him for producing the instructions! Once the “instructions” were produced then except for a small expense for transferal(disk, tape, etc.) , all sales were pure profit! With our current “Educational Reformers”, we are paying them not only for the instructions but also to produce the instructions!!!
P.S. NOTE:
Does everyone know that ARRA funds are paying for TFA summer training? (check it out: http://www.recovery.gov/Transparency/RecoveryData/pages/RecipientProjectSummary508.aspx?AwardIDSUR=124088&vendorstart=2&qtr=2013Q1#vendorawards
The way I understand it is that we are paying them to train graduates to become Teachers in 5 weeks then they charge the School districts hiring these new “Teachers”. According to the above link, TFA received a $50,000,000 ARRA grant and in 2011 spent $2,021,434 to house these students for their “summer institute”!
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I’m not sure it’s designed so that it can crash.
States aren’t going to just take their A-F grading system and throw it away – the first question that people will ask about the reforms is “so now that we have them, even if we know they were corrupted, how can we make them work”.
Unfortunately, my greater fear is that (and this is tinfoil hat stuff) they are intentionally bankrupting education to make way to break the unions and states’ pension obligations so they can redirect even more money towards them.
Why are we seeing Chicago, Detroit, and Philadelphia, all cash out on education at the exact same time? Why are they able to do it even when their constituents tell them loud and clear that it’s not acceptable?
These parasites don’t just feed off their host – they want to take it over and kill what’s there. They are using the markets to do it. Even with these scandals, are we seeing better people put in place that are undoing the changes that came before them?
I just finished reading the book “Homeland” by Cory Doctorow and he makes a very poignant point in it. The main character (spoiler) goes to work to elect an independent politician who he perceives is better than the mainstream candidates – until he realizes this guy plays politics just as well as the others with different rhetoric.
Change in this messed up system needs to come from the people and from lots of them that are organized in innovative ways that force these Boys in the Backroom to listen. Protests are ignored. I don’t know what else we can do but I’m losing faith in electing miracle politicians that will suddenly not pay attention to those waving money at them.
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Yes, absolutely on point in my opinion.
Further proof is that the reformers are infiltrating with the tacit complicity of….?
Why, the public school administrators and bureaucrats, that’s who….
Hiding in plain sight.
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The A-F grading system is not only vulnerable to corruption, it is an absurd way to grade schools. If your child came home with a report card containing only one letter, you would be outraged. Multiply the outrage times 1,000 and you have the A-F system.
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Would a more detailed report card be better? Something like a high school report card with grades for a variety of subjects?
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I read some articles by Cory Koedel as per one of your posts.
His research seems to confirm my anecdotal experience and actually has helped me to perhaps understand my experience in urban school districts better.
What I don’t understand is why you are not seeking to explain to others that it is not the teachers who are bankrupting the system, it is the administrators who are the culprits.
And that the privateers are essentially lining up to feed at the public education fund trough next to the public school admins to the detriment of everyone else. P
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Nope. Because it still only grades one day of an entire year (the standardized test).
If you would like, I will post the letter I wrote to the local newspaper refuting the grading system that’s starting this year in Utah. It was never published, of course, even though a former state senator was able to publish a huge pro-grading screed (which was the reason for my letter in the first place).
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It need not grade a single day of the year or only on standardized tests, it might be based on a variety of measures, some perhaps measuring output (how do students of this school do on standardized tests, how do students from this school do in subsequent schools, etc) others based on inputs (the stability and education levels of the teaching staff, availability of particular kinds of classes, etc.).
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Yes, Louisiana Purchase, please post it here.
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It’s kind of long, but here it is:
As a junior high school debate teacher, I teach my students about logical fallacies. After reading Dan Liljenquist’s laudatory article of June 27, in which he raved about grading public schools, I wish he would have taken my class. There are a number of jumps in logic that Mr. Liljenquist makes that do not stand up to scrutiny. Mr. Liljenquist used the example of his son who was struggling with grades at midterm. He met with his son and then they laid out a plan that would allow him to get his grades up before the end of the term. I applaud Mr. Liljenquist as a parent. However, he then goes on to say that these grades will help schools in the same way. That argument is false for a number of reasons.
First, his son was almost certainly not being graded on a single day of work for the entire year. Most likely, his son had many different types of assessments throughout the term that allowed him to demonstrate his learning. The school “report card” is a snapshot of student scores on a single set of tests: Math and English, for the entire year’s grade. Schools are not graded on anything else. I teach in a school with a very transitory population. Between one-fourth and one-third of students at my school either enter or leave the school sometime during the year. I have many students who enter during the year and then leave before that same school year is out. On many occasions, students arrive at my school only a week or two before the testing, and in some cases, we have students arrive the day of the test. Schools should not be penalized for student populations that move frequently.
Secondly, Liljenquist mentions working with his son to improve his grades and implies that schools will also benefit from this practice. I am assuming here that Mr. Liljenquist and his son had access to the son’s previous class work and tests and could see what he was struggling with. That is not the way it works with school testing. First of all, the testing is done at the very end of the school year, and schools often do not receive the scores until into the summer. This makes it impossible to use those tests to reteach and help students with sections in which they struggled. Furthermore, schools do not see the tests. All we receive is a raw score for each student. Even if the scores were received earlier, there is no way to help students, because we cannot see what it is the student has missed. Unlike Mr. Liljenquist and his son, schools do not have the ability to see what individual students struggled with on these state end of year exams.
Another thing that Mr. Liljenquist assumes as he discusses school grading is that all schools are created equally. Nothing could be further from the truth. In some schools, for a student to move in or out during the year is a rare thing. Students come ready to learn, with appropriate materials. There is support for homework, and students have regular access to enrichment, in the form of libraries, the arts, and other tools of lifelong learning. Then, there are schools with struggling populations. In these communities, parents care about education, but they are struggling to pay the bills. I have lost track how many of my students have parents that are unemployed. Transportation to enrichment activities is sometimes too distant for these families. The nearest public library from my school is over five miles away, without good bus service. Arts and other activities are financially out of reach for some of my students, and some of them do not know if they will be evicted from their homes or have enough to eat. It is not a fair comparison to rank students from financially stable homes against students from financially struggling homes. I have very bright, capable students in very difficult circumstances. They and their families are doing the best they can, but to now tell them and their teachers that the school is failing through no fault of their own is a huge blow to everyone.
Finally, Mr. Liljenquist also feels that teachers have total control over their students’ test scores. This is simply not the case. Students in many schools are dealing with poverty, illness, divorce, death, and many other difficult life circumstances over which teachers, and the students themselves, have no control. I have had students attempting to take the tests while dealing with the news that a parent has been diagnosed with cancer, has just lost their job, or has an ill sibling, have only been speaking English for a few years, or have a disability. Students cannot be expected to perform optimally in conditions such as these, and those situations are not as unique as some may think. Furthermore, because the tests do not affect the students in any way, students often do not take the tests seriously. Students know that their schools and teachers’ jobs hinge on these tests. As a result, some students work really hard to assist their schools, but others see the test as an opportunity to stick it to their school or a specific teacher with whom they do not get along. Teachers have no control over those test scores.
Grading schools by test scores is a simplistic and ineffective way to see how schools are doing. Grades do not inform schools about an entire population of students at a school in the same way grades helped Mr. Liljenquist and his son. I urge Mr. Liljenquist, Legislators, and other state education policy makers to visit public school classrooms for extended periods of time and see what schools, teachers and students struggle with every day, before coming up with ideas that will simply rank schools by poverty and student movement, instead of what is really happening in public schools.
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I concur Diane 100% – why is it though that Indiana isn’t even having a serious conversation about doing away with it? What about Florida?
We’ve seen some minor changes like the Fort Wayne rejection – but – we need massive rejection of these policies in many states on many levels.
With what we’re seeing in NY with the wishlist item of wanting to take over school boards, and in other areas, corporations massively funding candidates (with some notable losses in LA), that the move is beyond the statehouse now and that they are trying to control the “grass roots”.
What types of moves are needed in order to convince politicians that they should pay attention to their constituents more than their corporate sponsors? That states should dump these systems wholesale and not try to make them work better by re-jiggering them?
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According to the Journal-Gazette (Fort Wayne, IN), GOP Governor Pence says:
“I don’t think we should take a time-out on accountability,” he said. “We grade our kids every day. We ought to be willing to grade our schools every year.” (http://www.journalgazette.net/article/20130815/NEWS07/130819690)
The same goes for Indiana Senate President Pro-Tem David Long (R-Fort Wayne):
“For anyone to denounce the system because of the grade change … it’s got a lot more to do with it than that.” (http://www.journalgazette.net/article/20130814/BLOGS13/130819752)
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It’s panning out exactly as I feared in another post I made recently. Compartmentalize the disaster to say it was “just Bennett” but the system is OK – and then try to tweak the system so that it “works”.
It will practically never be rejected if all that ever has to be done is to “fix this anomaly” which will cause another anomaly – and so they will keep tweaking with unintended consequences until they find out that there is no perfect formula – no changes that will make things entirely predictable and fair.
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The “accountability” fraud is taking place in charters, private and public schools. The “accountability” fraud is a actually a fraudulent industry that we do want removed from the arena of Free Public Schools. Professional educators are quite capable of creating curriculum and all requisite assessments.
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The reform agenda for schools very much reflects the values of Wall St: http://bit.ly/1462Ma7
Key graph: “Education reform advocates — either unwittingly or intentionally (does it matter?) –gave the venture crowd a huge gift by decreeing that student scores on standardized tests would define the learning ‘output’ that schools would be accountable for. And all of a sudden everything monetarily related to schools — operations budgets, teacher salaries, classroom costs, government funds, grant money — could be related to a test score output. This in effect turned student learning — and by extension, the students themselves — into a commodity that could be speculated on. Now that edu-venturists had something they could put on the other side of the balance sheet, they could now ‘flip’ student test scores into a speculative market. And all sorts of ‘reform’ schemes and start-ups — from starting charter schools to lowering teacher salaries to closing schools — could be rationalized on the basis of test scores.”
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Excellent perspective!
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excellent summary; “production functions” of education etc
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Thanks, excellent summary Jeff and it has indeed led to the monetization and corporatization (?) of education and of our students. So how to we counter this “trend” and get back to basics – teaching and supporting our public educational system.
It just seems insidious that the education corporations continue to evolve and thrive while those in the trenches become caught up in the pettiness of cheating scandals just to “save their school or “improve” it’s scores.
Dam, I hate it when that happens !
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I don’t think it is appropriate to blame the Community Investment Act ; I know people hate Barney Frank but it was not his form of legislation that “broke the bank” It wasn’t Frank….. The National homeless shelter organization wrote petitions before the market downfalls that Bank of America should not be buying Country wide etc… and they asked for it to halt but no one listened. I have called NPR and requested that they not make Barney Frank a scapegoat (or Community Investment Act).
That being said, I don’t think we can carry this metaphor too far without being “hoist on your own petard.” Sort out and discern the differences as well as the similarities and be specific not over-general.
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Whew many insightful posts, 1st I absolutely don’t see any such implosion or crash of our educational system. While the underlying facts as laid out – massive corporate influence leading to testing overload resulting in numerous school accountability scandals – it certainly won’t bring down our public education system. The structure of our education system is so profoundly different from that which caused the Wall Street/worldwide crash. While our Ed dollars spent are huge ($500 Billion on education in the US – (the combined spending of federal, state, and local governments – US Census Bureau), we have a highly decentralized school system, with more than 14,000 school districts across the country. The causes and culprits of the Wall Street (worldwide) crash/scandal/debacle/meltdown were quite centralized and have the perps have sometimes been narrowed down to 15-20 huge corporations (remember corporations are people too), and yet we still have no prosecutions and minimal fines for the culprits. They were too big to fail and too tough to jail !
Here in education, we indeed have a growing number of “cheaters” which may sometimes even reach the higher levels of government, where they are often found and caught (albeit late). There is no “too big to fail” when you’re talking about 1 or 2 or 10 or even 50 district scandals out of 14,000 districts.
So NO, these scandals won’t bring down our public education system . . .
Truly it’s up to “us” to fight the good fight (against the corporatization of education) to bring our system back to it’s glory days ! I just hope and pray that we are in a very low part of a long cycle of changes that education goes through and we will rise again !
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