In an article in the New York Times magazine, Joel Klein asserted that his company’s products were needed because spending on education had doubled in recent decades had doubled but achievement remained flat. This assertion was wrong but went unchallenged.
In this article, Richard Rothstein of the Economic Policy Institute sets the record straight.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
outstanding
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In reading Rothstein’s post at the Economic Policy Institute blog site, I found this article – Mismatches in Race to the Top Limit Educational Improvement (Lack of Time, Resources, and Tools to Address Opportunity Gaps Puts Lofty State Goals Out of Reach)
http://www.epi.org/publication/race-to-the-top-goals/
I’ve copied the main conclusions below, but to followers of Diane Ravitch’s blog, they will be what she has been observing and warning of in her role as the soul who claims that the Corporate Reformers / Emperors have no clothes . . .
This assessment draws three main conclusions about Race to the Top after three years:
States made unrealistic and impossible promises
With one exception, every grantee state promised to raise student achievement and close achievement gaps to degrees that would be virtually or literally impossible even with much longer timelines and larger funding boosts.
Virtually every state has had to delay implementation of its teacher evaluation systems, due to insufficient time to develop rubrics, pilot new systems, and/or train evaluators and others.
RTTT policies fall short on teacher improvement and fail to address core drivers of opportunity gaps
States have focused heavily on developing teacher evaluation systems based on student test scores, but not nearly as much on using the evaluations to improve instruction, as intended.
Because state assessments tend to test students’ math and reading skills, attention has been focused mostly on those subjects, potentially to the detriment of others. States have also struggled to determine how to evaluate teachers of untested subjects and teachers of younger students, a critical issue, given that they constitute the majority of all teachers.
While some states have developed smart strategies to recruit talented professionals to teach subjects and/or teach in schools that are underserved, the vast majority of alternative certification money and effort has gone to bringing young, largely uncredentialed novices to teach in disadvantaged schools.
Districts heavily serving low-income and minority students, especially large urban districts, face some of the most severe challenges. Tight timelines and lack of resources compound RTTT’s failure to address poverty-related impediments to learning. Heightened pressure on districts to produce impossible gains from an overly narrow policy agenda has made implementation difficult and often counterproductive.
RTTT shortcomings have spurred state–district and union–management conflicts that hinder progress
The tight budgets that led many states to apply for RTTT funding have proven problematic as state education budgets, and staff, are reduced just as more resources and experts are needed.
While states have worked hard to reach out to local education agencies (LEAs) to secure their participation—a main requirement for RTTT funding—districts increasingly protest state micromanagement, limited resources, and poor communications.
The heavy focus on evaluation and punishment over improvement has made teachers, principals, and superintendents suspicious and has reduced support for RTTT.
States and districts that laid strong foundations for change, including making teachers real partners, and making union–management collaboration fundamental to the success of reform, have seen the most progress, have encountered the fewest bumps, and seem more likely to sustain gains. District and school culture, which varies tremendously within and across states, also plays a role in determining whether implementation efforts are succeeding or struggling.
While educators see great potential in the Common Core State Standards, the limited funding and lack of professional development linked to student data from RTTT raises concerns that the even more intense demands of the Common Core will exacerbate achievement gaps rather than produce benefits.
There are signs of progress and areas of promise, including new investment in teacher preparation and support programs, and better use of data, but these tend to be the exception. Moreover, these successes are mostly seen in states and districts that have advantages that may not be widely replicable. Overall, this assessment finds that the key tenet of Race to the Top—that a state hold teachers and schools accountable before helping them establish foundations for success—is deeply flawed. The push to do too much too quickly with too few resources has led teachers, principals, and superintendents to express frustration and stress. Most critical, many of the major problems limiting student and school success remain unaddressed.
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InBloom collects data, lots of data. (Segue)
This from Michelle Malkin:
(I know… Michelle Malkin!)
But she has it right:
“While many Americans worry about government drones in the sky spying on our private lives, Washington meddlers are already on the ground and in our schools gathering intimate data on children and families.
Say goodbye to your children’s privacy. Say hello to an unprecedented nationwide student tracking system, whose data will apparently be sold by government officials to the highest bidders. It’s yet another encroachment of centralized education bureaucrats on local control and parental rights under the banner of “Common Core.”
—
These systems will aggregate massive amounts of personal data — health-care histories, income information, religious affiliations, voting status and even blood types and homework completion. The data will be available to a wide variety of public agencies. And despite federal student-privacy protections guaranteed by the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act, the Obama administration is paving the way for private entities to buy their way into thedata boondoggle. Even more alarming, the U.S. Department of Education is encouraging a radical push from aggregate-level data-gathering to invasive individual student-level data collection.
At the South by Southwest education conference in Austin, Texas, this week, education technology gurus were salivating at the prospects of information plunder. “This is going to be a huge win for us,” Jeffrey Olen, a product manager at education software company CompassLearning, told Reuters. Cha-ching-ching-ching.”
http://michellemalkin.com/2013/03/08/rotten-to-the-core-the-feds-invasive-student-tracking-database/
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Thanks Rangoon for this Malkin article. Usually I avoid her, but she is not only correct in her assertions, I have read that the date mining will also include Social Security numbers…literally every aspect of the life of public school students from pre-school through college.
The legal free marketers are licking their chops at the potential of such a vast list, and so are the illegal child abusers. When a product such as inBloom is on the market, and all this info is stored in its’ cloud, it can be hacked (which Murdoch knows all about since he was indicted for doing similar things in Britain), and of course the huge potential profit from limitless purchasers will surely expand their stated business plan.
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Re: Amplify and the tablet trend — In the long term, it’s perverse to fight against the introduction of new technologies in classrooms. It’s perverse because it’s a losing battle and it’s a battle against our own interests. The use of technology is one of the defining characteristics of our species, and we have decades of evidence that technology, broadly speaking, helps learning. But none of that means it’s a good idea for a school district to drop a billion dollars on tablets or connected education software and services.
We know that, absent some constraint that has yet to manifest itself, technology not only gets better and cheaper, but it gets better and cheaper at ever-increasing rates. We also know that “tablet computing” itself is extremely young — it’s about 3 years old, or at most 6 years old (if you consider the capacitive touch screen smart phone as a small tablet). Tablets are amazingly powerful and stable compared to, for example, the early forms of the personal computer. But they are far less of a mature technology than those early PCs were. It’s very difficult to say what tablet computing will look like in 5 or 10 years, assuming it even exists. The conservative bet is that it will be dramatically different, dramatically more powerful, and dramatically more cost-efficient.
Another thing we know: High and growing “uncontrollable” costs like pension contributions and healthcare costs are putting state and local education budgets under severe pressure. Less money makes it to the classroom every year and raising taxes on the middle class is absolutely taboo. School districts have serious budget problems, and few people have spent more time talking about that than Joe Klein. This is why, in NYC, even the “ultra-liberal” Bill De Blasio concedes that the city cannot afford to offer new, large-scale education services without identifying a new funding source (universal pre-K, to be paid for by a slight increase in the top NYC personal income tax rate). So you can’t pitch pre-K without explaining where the money’s going to come from. But apparently don’t need new funding sources. LA pays for them with construction bonds. NYC presumably will pay for them out of the general education budget. At any rate, there’s no talk about how to pay for it, and that’s fine with Klein, whose sales pitch isn’t about whether the city can afford to buy his product, but rather whether the city can afford *not* to buy it.
So for all these reasons — given what we know we can count on — why in God’s name should we decide that *now* is the time to go all-in on tablets? Why not wait?
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EDIT: “But apparently tablets don’t need new funding sources.”
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Tablets are a gimmick and you seem to be drinking the kook-aid. Parents DO NOT want more screen time at school. There’s enough at home. Tablets for every child will fail as a result of parental push-back as parents follow the money.
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I don’t think you caught my drift.
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After reading Rothstein’s critique of Klein’s latest nonsense — and his expose of Klein’s hypocrisy about “growing up in the projects”, a nice bit of serious reporting — I longed for the days when we could read Rothstein in The New York Times at least once a week.
Then I quickly wrote the following comment to the blog which carried Rothstein’s comment, and though I should share it here. It’s appropriate since tomorrow is the anniversary of the day when we voted to end our picket lines (after seven school days on strike) and return to the schools pending a vote of every Chicago Teachers Union working member (us retirees can’t vote on contracts and strikes) on the proposed contract we had just won.
How did the strike impact “accountability” measures during the 2012 – 2013 school year in Chicago? Consider the following, just posted to Rothstein:
“That was fun, but let me suggest another quickie research project that will raise even more questions about the incantations against real public schools and teacher unions. Twice in the past quarter century, in 1987 and 2012, the Chicago Teachers Union has led a strike against attempts to roll back major parts of public school teacher power. The details can be shared, but the 2012 strike helped block merit pay, helped continue additional pay for years of experience and additional training (and education), and many other things. Karen Lewis and the CTU negotiating team even got a contract paragraph against administrative “bullying” — one of the first in the nation. (Anyone who hasn’t known about how some school leaders are bullies has been out of touch…).
“But here is a fact verified by, of all things, test score data from Chicago.
“The largest “gains” in standardized test scores during the five-year periods surrounding each of the strikes came the year of the strike! In the 1987 – 1988 school year, Chicago Public Schools was using the ITBS and TAP tests, and without high stakes “accountability” (which was looming but had not yet metasticized — that happened in Chicago in 1995 with the birth of mayor control and the “Chief Executive Officer” model for school bossship.
“Anyone who wants to can go back to those early data sets for the TAP and ITBS tests taken during the 1987 – 1988 school year in Chicago and show how the largest number of schools showing gains came that year.
“More recently, Chicago Public Schools “Chief Executive Officer” Barbara Byrd Bennett proclaimed at the July meeting of the Chicago Board of Education that the “gains” on the city’s current set of tests and “matrices” were very good for the 1987 – 1988 school year. What she left out of her Power Point, narrative, and general report was that, once again, those “gains” came during a school year that began with a seven (school) day strike.
“Of course, Barbara Byrd Bennett would have no reason to have any knowledge of the history or reality of Chicago’s public schools. She was brought to town by Mayor Rahm Emanuel in March – April 2012, straight from Detroit. She is, like most of Emanuel’s executives in education, an out-of-towner and a product of the Broad Foundation’s “leadership” training. Byrd Bennett was made CEO in October 2012 after Emanuel dumped her predecessor (the Broad product Jean-Claude Brizard) following the strike. One of the most interesting things about the reign of Rahm has been that the majority of top CPS officials have been imported from out-of-town, as if Illinois and Chicago, the nation’s third largest school system, doesn’t have qualified and experienced men and women to run the various departments in its public school system.
“But that’s another story. For now, the impact of teacher empowerment, via a strike, is worth further study…”
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The problem is that the only newspaper out there who has a clue about Joel Klein is the Washington Post. All New York newspapers are controlled by Joel Klein or one of his best friends. There is no way to have your voice heard in New York because no one has the guts to stand up to Klein.
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Just in hot off the wires! Quoting Joel Klein’s response: “Truth, we don’t need no stinkin truth! You can take the truth and shove it where the sun doesn’t shine!”
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I’d like to know which public relations agency placed the Rotella piece. It wasn’t reporting. It was product promotion — brought to Times readers by the friendly folks at Murdoch’s company.
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Joel Klein is a sniveling, drooling, infested rodent who gnaws on the vulnerable, the young, and the poor. His visage is as repulsive as his politics and opportunism. He could not teach a class of children to save his life, and if he tried, the children would run from him like they would the Boogey Man.
You JUST have to cringe. Make sure you disinfect your eyes after viewing:
http://www.brooklyneagle.com/sites/default/files/styles/free_style/public/b_Joel_Klein_AP101109026241%20(1).jpg?c=a12b54ad3853afa711407de290cad899
Calling all Pied Pipers and pest control units . . . . .
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Correction: Make that:
http://www.brooklyneagle.com/sites/default/files/styles/free_style/public/b_Joel_Klein_AP101109026241%20(1).jpg?c=a12b54ad3853afa711407de290cad899
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This blog does not allow for long strands as links . . . . alas. Maybe you’re better off not viewing Klein. For a substitute, just envision toxic sludge meets Arne Duncan.
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Klein is ugly, got it.
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His ugly essence as a human dwarfs his physicality . . . . .
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You made me laugh so hard I think I just peed a little.
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Now, now . . . .
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I have the dubious honor of being on my school’s SDLT (School Data Leaderhip Team). Now I know a lot of it if hocus, pocus, and I was surpised my principal asked me, since I’m a outspoken cynic. In fact, I responded, “are you sure?” But I decided to do it because I thought it might help my school.
So I go to training and, guess what? It’s being run by Amplify. Folks- this is being paid for with Race to the Top money. Ugh. So the facilitators? They are mostly retired principals and ex-teachers who escaped the classroom, all in their cheap Men’s Warehouse suits. I went through three days of (paid- more RTT $) training ove the summer. Of course, we got the, “I know you’ve been to inservice trainings before but THIS program REALLY works.”
Follow the money…
At one point, what was on the Powerpoint was different than what was in pur packets. The facilitator said, “They changed it.” And I raised my hand and asked, “Did Rupert send down a memo?” He laughed and said, “Nobody has yet to bring him up in one of these.” The rest of the people there, teachers and principals from Rhode Island, did not get the reference at all.
People in general, even people in our feld, are clueless of the great money grab going on in (what’s left of) public education.
This is like a gold rush to the corporate reformers.
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Great comments…thank goodness for Dinosaurs.
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