Archives for the month of: December, 2013
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New Book Demonstrates That Public Schools Outperform the Competition

By dianeravitch
December 17, 2013 //
55

Please read this article about an important new book by Christopher and Sarah Lubienski, scholars at the University of Illinois.

Their book is The Public School Advantage: Why Public Schools Outperform Private Schools.

The article contains an interview with Christopher Lubienski, in which he explains their “counterintuitive” findings.

Here is a sampling:

IDEAS: The thought of a “public school advantage” seems counterintuitive, and as you mention in the book it was initially a surprise to you, too. What did the data show?

LUBIENSKI: We know that private school students tend to score higher than students in public schools. But we also know that these are different populations, and they have different selection criteria. So we looked at the demographics of the different students in these nationally representative data sets, and we found those demographics more than explain the student achievement patterns….We focused specifically on mathematics, because math achievement is a better reflection of the school effects rather than the other subjects, like reading, which are often reflective of what the students are learning at home….Once we actually delved into those achievement statistics, public schools turned out to be more effective. Public school students are outscoring their demographic counterparts in private schools…at a level that is comparable to a few weeks to several months.

IDEAS: So public school students might be months ahead of their peers. And what about charter schools?

LUBIENSKI: They were already scoring beneath public schools before you control for demographics….But even once you control for those demographics, charter schools were still performing at a level lower than public schools, by as much as several months.

This is a book that Arne Duncan and every state and local superintendent should read.

Categories Charter Schools, Research, U.S. education

HuffPost: How a For-Profit College Created Fake Jobs to Win Taxpayer $$$

By dianeravitch
December 17, 2013 //
14

Huffington Post has a startling expose of how a particular for-profit college paid employers to hire its graduates, but only temporarily.

This was done to pad its job-placement numbers.

This will please federal regulators and enable the college to say that its graduates are easily hired.

What they don’t admit: They are soon laid off.

Here is the story:

Eric Parms enrolled at an Everest College campus in the suburbs of Atlanta in large part because recruiters promised he would have little trouble securing a job.

He’d seen the for-profit school’s television commercials touting its sterling rates of job placement, and he’d heard the pledges of admissions staff who assured him that the campus career services office would help him find work in his field.

But after completing a nine-month program in heating and air conditioning repair in the summer of 2011 — graduating with straight As and $17,000 in student debt — Parms began to doubt the veracity of the pitch. Career services set him up with a temporary contract position laying electrical wires. After less than two months, he and several other Everest graduates also working on the job were laid off and denied further help finding work, he says.

It turns out that the college paid the contractor $2,000 to hire its graduates for at least 30 days.

Why would the college pay a contractor to hire its graduates?

Everest College’s $2,000-per-head “subsidy” program in Decatur, Ga., stands among an array of tactics used for years by the institution’s parent company, Corinthian Colleges Inc., to systematically pad its job placement rates, according to a review of contract documents and lawsuits and interviews with former employees.

More than a marketing tool to lure new students, solid job placement rates allow the company to satisfy the accrediting bodies that oversee its nearly 100 U.S. campuses, while enabling Corinthian to tap federal student aid coffers — a source of funding that has reached nearly $10 billion over the last decade, comprising more than 80 percent of the company’s total revenue.

When the Obama administration begins its public ratings of colleges, imagine the games that will be played to burnish the data that affects a college or university’s ability to get federal student aid.

Note: It is called Campbell’s Law.

Categories For-Profit, Higher Education

MIT Researchers: Higher Test Scores Do Not Translate into Higher Levels of Thinking

By dianeravitch
December 17, 2013 //
54

A new study by researchers at MIT, Harvard, and Brown cast doubt on the value of pursuing higher scores on standardized tests as an end in themselves.

Since this has been the highest goal of federal policy since 2002, when No Child Left Behind was signed into law, the study raises questions about the billions spent on testing, test preparation, evaluating teachers and schools by test scores, firing teachers and principals because of test scores, and closing schools based on test scores.

Are test scores the Golden Fleece? No.

Yet with the release of every NAEP test or every international test, the media go into a frenzy, and Arne Duncan leads a national day of high anxiety and breast beating about our nation’s imminent peril because test scores did not rise as much as they should.

The new study raises the question of how much those standardized test scores mean.

The study found:

In a study of nearly 1,400 eighth-graders in the Boston public school system, the researchers found that some schools have successfully raised their students’ scores on the Massachusetts Comprehensive Assessment System (MCAS). However, those schools had almost no effect on students’ performance on tests of fluid intelligence skills, such as working memory capacity, speed of information processing, and ability to solve abstract problems.

The researchers calculated how much of the variation in MCAS scores was due to the school that students attended. For MCAS scores in English, schools accounted for 24 percent of the variation, and they accounted for 34 percent of the math MCAS variation. However, the schools accounted for very little of the variation in fluid cognitive skills — less than 3 percent for all three skills combined.
…
Even stronger evidence came from a comparison of about 200 students who had entered a lottery for admittance to a handful of Boston’s oversubscribed charter schools, many of which achieve strong improvement in MCAS scores. The researchers found that students who were randomly selected to attend high-performing charter schools did significantly better on the math MCAS than those who were not chosen, but there was no corresponding increase in fluid intelligence scores.

U.S. News describes “fluid intelligence”:

Those skills are described as fluid because they require using logical thinking and problem solving in novel situations, rather than recalling previously learned facts and skills.

“It doesn’t seem like you get these skills for free in the way that you might hope, just by doing a lot of studying and being a good student,” said the study’s senior author, John Gabrieli, in a statement.

What improving test scores does do, Gabrieli said, is raise students’ “crystallized intelligence” – the ability to access information from long-term memory to use acquired knowledge and skills.

The importance – or lack thereof – of standardized tests has been widely debated by educators and state policymakers. While some argue that testing is important to track students’ performance and progress, others say there is a culture of over-testing in the United States.

He added that “crystallized intelligence” is important, but should not be the only goal of schooling:

But Gabrieli, a professor of brain and cognitive sciences at MIT, said improving crystallized skills – such as recalling previously learned facts – is still important, and that the findings should also be used to push educational policymakers to add practices that help enhance cognitive abilities as well.

“It’s valuable to push up the crystallized abilities, because if you can do more math, if you can read a paragraph and answer comprehension questions, all those things are positive,” he said in the statement. “Schools can improve crystallized abilities, and now it might be a priority to see if there are some methods for enhancing the fluid ones as well.”

“Fluid intelligence” seems to be the “higher-order thinking skills” that policymakers claim to value. But they are not measured by standardized tests.

Categories Testing

Please Join Me in Westchester County, New York, on January 16

By dianeravitch
December 17, 2013 //
9

Please join me at Fox Lane High School in Bedford, New York, on January 16 to discuss Common Core, testing, and other issues.

The event is free and open to the public. Registration is required.

Categories Common Core, New York, Testing

Wisconsin Researchers: Poverty Influences Brain Development in Children

By dianeravitch
December 17, 2013 //
61

A new study from researchers at the University of Wisconsin in Madison concludes that poverty has an important negative effect on brain development among young children.

“Poverty may have direct implications for important, early steps in the development of the brain, saddling children of low-income families with slower rates of growth in two key brain structures, according to researchers from the University of Wisconsin–Madison.

“By age 4, children in families living with incomes under 200 percent of the federal poverty line have less gray matter — brain tissue critical for processing of information and execution of actions — than kids growing up in families with higher incomes….The differences among children of the poor became apparent through analysis of hundreds of brain scans from children beginning soon after birth and repeated every few months until 4 years of age. Children in poor families lagged behind in the development of the parietal and frontal regions of the brain — deficits that help explain behavioral, learning and attention problems more common among disadvantaged children.”

The study found no differences at birth between children from homes with different income levels:

“The maturation gap of children in poor families is more startling for the lack of difference at birth among the children studied.

“One of the things that is important here is that the infants’ brains look very similar at birth,” says [Seth] Pollak, whose work is funded by the National Institutes of Health. “You start seeing the separation in brain growth between the children living in poverty and the more affluent children increase over time, which really implicates the postnatal environment.”

“The study used brain scans provided by the NIH’s MRI Study of Normal Brain Development, data that excludes children whose brain development may have been altered by a number of factors: mothers who smoke or drank during pregnancy, birth complications, head injuries, family psychiatric history and other issues. As a result, the findings may underestimate the actual deficit developed by a more representative sample of children from poor families.

“The study found no meaningful difference in gray matter between children of middle-income families and those from relatively wealthy ones.”

Studies like this make me wonder whether the billions and billions poured into phony “reforms” like VAM and privatization are a massive distraction (some might say hoax), diverting our attention to the #1 problem in our society: generational poverty.

Categories Childhood, Pre-K, K, Poverty

European Scholars: PISA Rankings Are “Utterly Wrong” and “Meaningless”

By dianeravitch
December 17, 2013 //
16

Professor Svend Kreiner, a prominent statistician and psychometrician at the University of Copenhagen in Denmark and Dr. Hugh Morrison of Queens University in Belfast have published studies blasting the reliability and validity of the PISA league tables. They describe PISA’s rankings as “useless,” “utterly wrong,” and “meaningless.”

According to TES (London),

“Professor Svend Kreiner, a statistician from the University of Copenhagen in Denmark, said that an inappropriate model is used to calculate the Pisa rankings every three years. In a paper published this summer, he challenges their reliability and shows how they fluctuate significantly according to which test questions are used. He reveals how, in the 2006 reading rankings, Canada could have been positioned anywhere between second and 25th, Japan between eighth and 40th and the UK between 14th and 30th.

“Dr Hugh Morrison, from Queens University Belfast in Northern Ireland, goes further, saying that the model Pisa uses to calculate the rankings is, on its own terms, “utterly wrong” because it contains a “profound” conceptual error. For this reason, the mathematician claims, “Pisa will never work”.

“The academics’ papers have serious implications for politicians, including England’s education secretary Michael Gove, who justified his sweeping reforms by stating that England “plummeted” down the Pisa rankings between 2000 and 2009.

“The questions used for Pisa vary between countries and between students participating in the same assessment. In Pisa 2006, for example, half the students were not asked any reading questions but were allocated “plausible” reading scores to help calculate their countries’ rankings.

“To work out these “plausible” values, Pisa uses the Rasch model, a statistical way of “scaling” up the results it does have. But Professor Kreiner says this model can only work if the questions that Pisa uses are of the same level of difficulty for each of the participating countries. He believes his research proves that this is not the case, and therefore the comparisons that Pisa makes between countries are “useless”.

“When the academic first raised the issue in 2011, the OECD countered by suggesting that he had been able to find such wild fluctuations in rankings only by deliberately selecting particular small groupings of questions to prove his point. But Professor Kreiner’s new paper uses the same groups of questions as Pisa and comes up with very similar results to his initial analysis.

“He is sceptical about the whole concept of Pisa. “It is meaningless to try to compare reading in Chinese with reading in Danish,” he said.

“Dr Morrison said that the Rasch model made the “impossible” claim of being able to measure ability independently of the questions that students answer. “I am certain this (problem) cannot be answered,” he told TES.”

To read Dr. Kreiner’s studies, google his name.

Categories Global Education Reform Movement (GERM), International, Testing

Testing Expert Calls for Moratorium on Common Core Testing

By dianeravitch
December 16, 2013 //
82

Fred Smith, who worked for many years in the research department of the New York City Board of Education (back when it had a research department, not a public relations department), offered the following testimony at public hearings in New York City on the Common Core testing (he was limited to only two minutes to speak):

My Two Minutes at the December 11, 2013 Forum in Manhattan – Spruce Street School

Chancellor Tisch, Commissioner King, thank you for visiting us.

I didn’t come here to discuss the merits of the Common Core, or rigorous standards, or high expectations, or equity for all children.

I’m here to call for a moratorium on all New York State testing associated with the Common Core, because the tests themselves are indefensible.

The 2013 exams were developed by trying out items on samples of children in June 2012.  The State Education Department and its test publisher, Pearson, were well aware the stand-alone method they used to field test material for future exams was not viable, because children are not motivated to do well on items and field tests that they know don’t count—and in June, no less.

SED and Chancellor Tisch also knew the separate, stand-alone field testing approach had failed in 2009 when that year’s operational test results were so implausibly high the Chancellor could no longer sustain an obvious farce. That’s why she led us on the path to the Common Core.

So, it is outrageous to learn the 2013 tests were assembled by replicating the same discredited field testing approach that produced the 2009 fiasco.

Yet, the Chancellor and the Commissioner have described the April 2013 test results as the baseline against which students will be measured in relation to the Common Core Standards.

That the 2013 tests were poorly developed is evidenced by the fact that less time was allocated to finishing the exams than had been allocated in 2012 (7% less for ELA; and 13% less time in math). And, correspondingly, my research finds a significantly higher percentage of students were unable to complete this year’s exams. 

How can tests that purport to tap critical thinking, deeper understanding and college readiness give students less time to complete?  How can the results of such ill-conceived exams possibly serve as a baseline? It’s simply irrational and points to defective testing.

To make matters worse, the upcoming 2014 statewide tests are built on the same unworkable stand-alone field testing framework—trying out items this past June. Saying that you now intend to embed more items on the 2015 exams, the preferred way to field test them, acknowledges but fails to address the deficiencies in the pivotal 2013 and 2014 exams.

And the State intends to give two more rounds of stand-alone field tests this spring.  If precedent holds, SED will not inform parents in advance that taking field tests is not mandatory.  Keeping parents in the dark prevents them from withholding consent should they decide they do not want their children to be unpaid subjects in commercial research that only begets unreliable exams.

The State has acted in bad faith by administering a dishonest testing program for over a decade. This shows no signs of changing with the rush to make the flawed 2013 “core-aligned” exams the new baseline. Therefore, nothing short of a moratorium on these tests is acceptable.

~Fred Smith

Fred Smith – Retired from BOE – Worked in Test Department – Member of Change the Stakes

Categories Common Core, New York, Testing

Wendy Lecker: CT Governor Dannell Malloy Can Tell It to the Judge

By dianeravitch
December 16, 2013 //
7

Wendy Lecker, a civil rights attorney in Connecticut, remembers when Connecticut Governor Dannell Malloy was a champion for equitable funding.

But no longer.

He recently spoke at the conservative American Enterprise Institute in Washington, D.C., and boasted about the success of his “reform” program.

According to Lecker:

At his AEI speech, Malloy shockingly dismissed the need to provide all children with educational opportunities as “old rhetoric.” His focus is not on educational opportunity, he claimed, but rather “educational success.” Malloy trumpeted his 2012 education “reform” legislation as providing the path to educational success.

Contrary to Malloy’s contention, educational opportunity is not just “old rhetoric.” The concept of educational opportunity has a specific constitutional meaning in Connecticut. Under our constitution, Connecticut must provide all children with “suitable educational opportunities.” Connecticut’s highest court has defined those opportunities as schools with sufficient resources to provide an education that prepares Connecticut’s children to participate in democratic institutions, attain productive employment and otherwise to contribute to the state’s economy, or to progress on to higher education.

As mayor of Stamford, Malloy understood the constitutional significance of educational opportunity. He was a founding member of theCCJEF coalition and one of the original plaintiffs in the suit demanding the state fulfill its legal obligation to provide fair and adequate funding to all Connecticut public schools.

Two days after Malloy spoke to AEI, a judge in Connecticut denied Malloy’s motion to dismiss the court case that he had helped initiate on behalf of fairness.

Malloy has abandoned his commitment to equality of education opportunity and now relies on high-stakes testing, evaluation of teachers by test scores, and ample funding to charter schools as the reforms that can take the place of equitable funding.

He even appointed a co-founder of the state’s leading charter chain as his state commissioner of education.

In his re-election campaign, Governor Malloy can count on the financial support of some of the wealthiest equity investors in the nation, who live in sheltered enclaves in places like Greenwich and Darien and support charter advocacy organization like ConnCAN.

Lecker writes:

In his motion to dismiss the CCJEF case, Malloy claimed there was no need to continue with this case because his 2012 education reforms cured all the constitutional deficiencies in Connecticut’s educational system. The judge disabused the governor of the fantasy that his reforms have actually improved Connecticut’s schools. He ruled that Malloy and the state presented no evidence to prove that his 2012 reforms were enacted to correct the constitutional inadequacies of Connecticut’s educational system or state school funding.

Malloy’s 2012 education legislation was not designed to provide Connecticut’s children with equal educational opportunity. As he admitted in his AEI speech, educational opportunity is no longer the governor’s focus. He would rather push unproven “reforms” that bear no relationship to what our highest court and our constitution recognize that our children need.

Another incredible claim made by Malloy at the AEI appearance was that his 2012 education legislation, for the first time in Connecticut history, directed copious amounts of money to Connecticut’s neediest districts.

A few hard numbers may help bring Malloy back to this planet. According to CCJEF’s expert’s analysis, updated to 2012 dollars, East Hartford’s school district is owed $6,131 per child in state funding. Malloy’s 2012 legislation gave them an increase of $214 per pupil. Bridgeport’s school district is owed $7,505 per child, but only received an increase of $209 per pupil in the 2012 legislation. The state owes New Britain’s children $10,185 per student. The 2012 legislation provided them with a whopping $245 per pupil increase. The list goes on and on. Moreover, as a condition for each tiny increase in ECS funding, these districts were saddled with costly mandates.

By contrast, charter schools, which educate 1 percent of Connecticut’s public school children and 90 percent of which serve a less needy population than their host districts, received an increase of $2,600 per pupil over three years in the 2012 legislation. Diverting state funding to 1 percent of public school children, who are often not the neediest, is likely to increase educational resource inequity in the state, especially when our neediest schools are getting so little.

 

Categories Connecticut, Corporate Reformers, Education Industry, Poverty

College Presidents Pan Obama Plan to Make College Affordable by Rating Them

By dianeravitch
December 16, 2013 //
40

A new Gallup poll shows that most college presidents don’t think much of President Obama’s plan to “make college more affordable” by rating them.

The Obama plan relies on metrics to determine which colleges are best and most affordable and assumes that student consumers will use this information to make better choices.

Somehow, this process is supposed to make college “more affordable,” although it does nothing to actually lower the cost to students.

According to the account by Scott Jaschik in Inside Higher Ed,

Most college presidents doubt that President Obama’s plan to promote affordable higher education will be effective, or that it will lead students to make better informed choices. Further, they expect that the wealthiest colleges and universities will be most successful in the ratings system Obama has proposed.

Those are the findings of a poll by Gallup and Inside Higher Ed of American college and university presidents, which attracted responses from 675 of them. Gallup has a 95 percent confidence level that the margin of error is plus/minus 3.8 percentage points. The presidents were given complete anonymity so they could answer without regard to the politics of opposing a plan that has become a top priority for the Obama administration.

The plan — proposed in August — would, among other things, create a new rating system for colleges in which they would be evaluated based on various outcomes (such as graduation rates and graduate earnings), on affordability and on access (measures such as the proportion of students receiving Pell Grants). Then the plan would link student aid to these ratings, such that students who enroll at high-performing colleges would receive larger Pell Grants and more favorable rates on student loans.

Only 2% of the college presidents said the plan would be “very effective.” Another 32% said it would be “somewhat effective.” Only 16%  said the plan was a good idea.

One of the criticisms of the Obama plan from the start is that it would favor the wealthiest institutions, which tend to attract the best-prepared students (and so have high graduation rates), enroll students who are well-connected (which, combined with their good preparation, lands them good jobs) and have the endowments to support generous financial aid packages. Fifty-two percent of presidents agree or strongly agree that wealthier institutions will fare best under the Obama ratings.

Molly Corbett Broad, president of the American Council on Education, said that the results were consistent with what she is hearing from college presidents, which is a lot of concern “about unintended consequences that may come from a well-intentioned set of metrics.” She stressed that most college presidents are “fully aligned with President Obama’s ultimate goals — expanding access and making college more affordable.”

But she said that there are doubts among many presidents both about the idea that these data will help students, and that ratings can be done correctly. She noted that most colleges already share considerable data — often covering information similar to what President Obama says should go into ratings. “But there’s not much evidence that the array of key data metrics that most institutions routinely post have made a huge difference,” she said.

At the same time, she said she worries about the impact of ratings. If one looks at existing rankings systems, most college leaders “are skeptical but we pay a lot of attention to them.” Broad said that she feared a new ratings system might have create the wrong incentives. “There’s a real concern that some of the measures might cause institutions to alter their admissions and aid awarding in ways that don’t advance access to low-income college students,” Broad said.

Secretary Duncan defended the approach of the Obama plan. He assumes that data–as in Race to the Top–will solve all vexing problems.

If college costs are too high, wouldn’t it make sense to increase student aid, instead of collecting more data and trusting to the marketplace to magically lower costs?
Read more: http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2013/12/16/most-presidents-doubt-obamas-plan-promote-affordable-higher-education#ixzz2neXL6NEs
Inside Higher Ed

 

 

Categories Higher Education

Missouri State Auditor May Investigate Commissioner of Education

By dianeravitch
December 16, 2013 //
32

A report from Missouri says the state auditor may launch an investigation of state Commissioner of Education Chris Nicasrto, who gave a contract to an Indianapolis firm that was not the low bidder. The firm is known for its love of privatization as a cure for big-city schools.

Teachers unions, legislators, and the St. Louis branch of the NAACP have called for Nicastro’s resignation.

The St. Louis Post-Dispatch reported:

“Last week, the storm developing around Nicastro intensified after a release of department emails triggered questions about how it entered into a $385,000 contract with CEE-Trust, whose bid was three times higher than the next-highest of four bidders.

“The emails showed that Nicastro had been communicating with the firm’s executive director for four months before the contract was agreed upon in August by the state Board of Education.

“They also show that she tried to give the contract to CEE-Trust without seeking other bids, until members of the state board raised concerns about circumventing the typical bidding process.

“The contract is being paid by private dollars from two groups supportive of charter schools — the Kauffman Foundation and the Hall Family Trust.

“Late last month, other department records that became public showed that Nicastro had been consulting with Kate Casas, the state policy director for the Children’s Education Alliance of Missouri, about how to craft a ballot initiative petition aimed at eliminating teacher tenure. Rex Sinquefield, the billionaire investor and school choice advocate, is a primary backer of the organization.”

Categories Charter Schools, Missouri, Privatization
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