Teachers in Michigan are getting hit from all sides.
Teachers in Pontiac will lose their health insurance because the district used the money paid by the teachers for the general fund to balance the books and didn’t pay the premiums. The insurance company is canceling the policy, and the teachers are suing the district.
A new study published by the National Bureau of Economic Research says that high-stakes testing leads to an increase in the incarceration rate.
Olesya Baker and Kevin Lang conclude that the use of high-stakes tests as a graduation requirement leads to a lower graduation rate and a higher incarceration rate.
Anthony Cody has an excellent column about this study here. As he puts it, “exit exams boost the school to prison pipeline.”
The recent NAEP Long Term Trend report showed almost no test score gains from 2008-2012, the era in which high-stakes tests were ubiquitous.
Please, someone, remind me why Congress and Secretary Duncan and President Obama and every governor and legislature is obsessed with testing. Is it confusion, incoherence, indifference, ignorance, or something else?
One of the few remaining Edison charter schools went broke, leaving teachers without a pay check. No one knows if the teachers will ever be paid. Most of Edison’s business now is online, not direct management of schools.
Derrick Thomas Academy charter school in Kansas City, which opened in 2002 with great promise, lost its charter and left behind a massive financial mess, with Edison demanding payment by the state, and financial backers crying about their losses.
According to the local story:
“The money that might have covered teacher salaries is tied up in court over a dispute among the school, the company contracted to manage it and the company that issued bonds for the school’s launch.
“The University of Missouri-Kansas City, which had sponsored the charter school at 201 E. Armour Blvd. since it opened in 2001, has no financial responsibility for the school or its debt. The academy announced last fall it would close after UMKC refused to renew its charter, citing poor management and low test scores. The school has since been overseen by an interim board.
“The Missouri Department of Elementary and Secondary Education (DESE) has been named in legal action to garnish more than $2.2 million that the management company, EdisonLearning Inc., says it is owed.
“Derrick Thomas Academy, now locked up behind a heavy black gate, also owes a substantial amount of money to the bondholder for the school, Lord Abbett.
“Jim Sansevero, spokesman for Lord Abbett, said the school has defaulted on bond payments and “$10 million is at risk.” The school used its building to secure the bonds.”
Is this disaster likely to dim the enthusiasm of charter advocates? Will they say that 11years was not a fair trial? What do you think?
The National Education Policy Center commissioned a review of the 2013 CREDO charter study, the one that allegedly discovered big gains for charters. In its 2009 study, CREDO found that only 17% of charters outperformed public schools. Now, reviewers concluded that the differences between charter schools and public schools are “significantly insignificant.”
The reviewers were Andrew Maul and Abby McClelland. Maul is an assistant professor in the Research and Evaluation Methodology (REM) program at CU Boulder. His work focuses on measurement theory, validity, and generalized latent variable modeling. McClelland is a Ph.D. student in the REM program. The National Education Policy Center is housed at the University of Colorado Boulder School of Education.
The review found:
“Even if concerns over the study’s analytic methods are set side, however, Maul and McClelland point out that the study itself shows only a tiny real impact on the part of charter schools: “less than one hundredth of one percent of the variation in test performance is explainable by charter school enrollment,” they write. Specifically, students in charter schools were estimated to score approximately 0.01 standard deviations higher on reading tests and 0.005 standard deviations lower on math tests than their peers in traditional public schools.
“With a very large sample size, nearly any effect will be statistically significant,” the reviewers conclude, “but in practical terms these effects are so small as to be regarded, without hyperbole, as trivial.”
Bruce Baker has studied Newark charters repeatedly. As he shows in this post, their greatest success is their ability to skim the students who are most likely to succeed. Some if his findings about their academic growth–or lack thereof-may surprise you.
Charters are parasites, he concludes, that harm their host. Making the entire district charter does not change that:
“But sadly, those who most vociferously favor charter expansion as a key element of supposed “portfolio” models of schooling appear entirely uninterested in mitigating parasitic activity (that which achieves the parasites goal at the expense of the host. e.g. parasitic rather than symbiotic). Rather, they fallaciously argue that an organism consisting entirely of potential parasites is itself, the optimal form. That the good host is one that relinquishes? (WTF?) As if somehow, the damaging effects of skimming and selective attrition might be lessened or cease to exist if the entirety of cities such as Newark were served only by charter schools. Such an assertion is not merely suspect, it’s absurd.”
Indianapolis has developed a plan that they call “neighborhoods of educational opportunity.” Every child in the future will go to a high-quality school, which is sure to be a charter school that destabilizes the neighborhood and excludes students who are not likely to get high scores.
It is the usual Reformy con job. Promise the moon, shutter public schools, hand the money off to private operators who are free to set their own admission policies and discipline policies.
At some point soon, the American public will stop buying pie-in-the-sky promises and ignore these hucksters who want to privatize our nation’s public schools.
Steve Rhodes tries to understand how
the Chicago Public Schools claims $600 million in cuts to “central office.”
Rhodes says the claims defy both mathematics and physics.
In fact, the cuts are not cuts, and “central office” does not mean central office.
He writes:
“But this is CPS make-believe land, which is a quasi-quantum place where the rules of earthbound mathematics do not apply.
“[T]he entire central office budget for the current 2012-2013 fiscal year is just $233 million, up from about $200 million in 2010,” Karp reports.
“How do you cut $600 million from $200 million? Just make the claim 400 million times!
“But it turns out Central Office spending is actually up $33 million since 2010.
“Now, CPS claims it has cut $600 million from the Central Office since 2011, so maybe in between 2010 and 2011 the budget went up by $633 million. That’s the only way CPS’s claim can be true.
“But the story gets even more extraordinary.
“The biggest addition since that time was the Office of Portfolio, created in 2011 to authorize and manage new schools.
“The portfolio office went from an initial budget of $5 million to $88 million in 2013, and has now been incorporated into a new Office of Innovation.”
“How is an increase in Central Office spending a cut in Central Office spending? By redefining the terms!”
In a brilliant piece of investigative journalism, Sarah Karp tries to understand the claim by the Chicago Public Schools that it cut $600 million from central office when the entire budget for central office is $233 million.
Furthermore, the budget for central went up, not down.
By now, there must be no one still employed at central offices of CPS.
Andy Borowitz at his best today.
He has figured out what ALEC really wants in Florida and everywhere else.
A reader explains the appeal of charters to communities fearful for their children in a world fraught with danger:
“Perhaps this site can be a venue for discussing the manner in which racial segregation and military discipline are packaged so as to market charter schools to families legitimately concerned with the dangers their children face growing up in communities that lack good jobs, good health care, and adequate housing, and other resources available to more privileged sectors of society. One should not underestimate the short-term appeal that such “discipline” has for people who are besieged, worried about the temptations their kids may succumb to and have, in the present moment, relatively little power. Many of the charters have lifted a page, not from the civil rights or radical Black power movements, but rather from the cultural conservatism of Booker T. Washington and Elijah Muhammad. This time, however, the executioners of the “plan” are largely, though not exclusively, upper middle class whites.”
