Archives for the year of: 2013
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“Education Drained of Its Humanity”

By dianeravitch
May 3, 2013 //
6

This thoughtful and provocative essay by Shawn Gude situates present-day corporate reform in its historical context. Gude shows the connections between early 20th century social efficiency and the present-day demand for testing, standardizing, and data-based decision-making.

Here is an excerpt:

“There’s a special resemblance between the struggles against scientific management, or Taylorism, and today’s teacher resistance to corporate reform schemes. Just as factory workers fought top-down dictates, deskilling, and the installation of anemic work processes, so too are teachers trying to prevent the undemocratic implementation of high-stakes testing and merit pay, assaults on professionalism, and the dumbing down and narrowing of curricula.

“There are more obvious parallels: Proponents of scientific management counted some prominent progressives in their ranks, just like the contemporary left-neoliberals hawking education reform. The nostrums of both Taylorism and the education accountability movement paper over foundational conflicts and root causes. Many of those who espouse education reform cast their solutions as unimpeachably “scientific” and “data-driven,” yet as with scientific management partisans, the empirical grounding of their prescriptions is highly dubious. And proponents of scientific management and corporate school reform share an antipathy toward unions, often casting them as self-interested inhibitors of progress.”

And here is another excerpt:

“When education is reduced to test prep, rich curricula and the craft of teaching are imperiled. The vapid classroom of neoliberal school reform mirrors the vapid workplace of Taylorism. Teach for America, which implicitly advances the idea that the sparsely trained can out-teach veteran educators, engenders deskilling and deprofessionalization. Non-practitioners dictating to practitioners how they should do their work mirrors management’s disciplining of workers; both militate against work as a creative activity. The appropriation of business language — the head of the Chicago Public Schools is the “CEO” — reinforces the idea that schools should be run like corporations. Merit pay individualizes and severs educators’ ties to one another, forcing them to compete instead of cooperate. So too with the anti-union animus that neoliberal reformers and scientific management proponents display.”

Read the essay. You will understand the roots of the corporate reforms of our day.

Categories Accountability, Closing schools, Corporate Reformers, Education Industry, Education Reform, Teach for America TFA, Teacher Evaluations, Teachers and Teaching, Testing, U.S. education

Good Riddance! Cyber School in Virginia May Close

By dianeravitch
May 3, 2013 //
5

The K12 cyber charter in Virginia may close.

The school enrolled 350 students.

The county “hosting” the school decided it was too much of a bother, and only five students from the host county were enrolled.

There have been persistent questions about the quality of virtual charter schools, but their profitability has never been in doubt.

K12 will go looking for another partner or the governor will find another way for them to make a profit by providing inferior education to students in Virginia.

Categories Education Industry, For-Profit, On-Line Education

Spread the Word

By dianeravitch
May 3, 2013 //
6

The public has been sold a bill of goods about what is needed to improve our schools.

We see misinformation on television. We hear it from our leaders in both parties.

It is hard to explain the real issues in our schools when the media bombards the public with the corporate reform narrative.

Once in a while, some insightful journalist breaks through the media blanket.

Here is some good news: I just came across an article posted a while ago by someone who totally gets what is going on.

The author refers to Race to the Top as a “marketing” ploy for failed ideas.

He calls it a “race to the bottom,” tied firmly to Bush’s bad ideas.

It was posted on the popular blog site of Jonathan Turley.

Keep singing.

So will I.

Categories Race to the Top

Hey, Kids! Let’s Open a Charter School

By dianeravitch
May 3, 2013 //
19

What do you do if you head the Connecticut chapter of Teach for America and you long for bigger worlds to conquer?

Simple.

You open a charter school!

The state commissioner is a charter school guy, so he is no problem.

You decide to open your new charter in Bridgeport, where the superintendent won his reputation by privatizing public schools in New Orleans.

All the right connections and the public’s money. No brainer.

Categories Charter Schools, Connecticut, Corporate Reformers, Privatization

Jersey Jazzman: State Brings in Corporate Chain to Run NJ Charters

By dianeravitch
May 3, 2013 //
8

Jersey Jazzman has a sharp article about Commissioner Cerf’s decision to turn a local charter school over to a national chain. The chain is expanding thanks to a $9 million federal grant and extra help from Mayor Michael Bloomberg.

The chain has fewer students who are special education or English language learners, as compared to the local district. It spends more than district schools.

Is this a sustainable model?

Jersey Jazzman concludes:

“To recap: Democracy Prep’s practices includes more spending per pupil, a rigid “no-excuses” culture, high rates of attrition, and segregation by poverty, special need, and English proficiency.

“This is your future, Camden – imposed on you by state-officials and outside CMOs. Don’t even think about fighting back.”

Categories Charter Schools, New Jersey

BREAKING NEWS: US to Milwaukee Voucher Schools: Stop Excluding Students with Disabilities

By dianeravitch
May 3, 2013 //
9

Responding to a complaint filed by the American Civil Liberties Union, the U.S. Department of Justice warned voucher schools in Milwaukee to stop excluding, counseling out, or otherwise discriminating against students with disabilities.

“The state cannot, by delegating the education function to private voucher schools, place students beyond the reach of the federal laws that require Wisconsin to eliminate disability discrimination in its administration of public programs,” DOJ officials wrote in the letter to Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction Superintendent Tony Evers.

Voucher programs across the nation–now operating in 20 states–will be affected, and states are now obliged to monitor voucher programs to be sure they are in compliance with federal laws protecting the rights of students with disabilities.

The ACLU contended that the voucher program excluded students with disabilities, and if they were admitted, they were systematically expelled and/or pushed out. This practice led to a very large percentage of students with disabilities in the public school district even as its funding was declining due to loss of enrollment to vouchers and charters. Consequently, the so-called “failing” district cannot possibly recover because the private schools don’t accept students with disabilities and the public school has to accept all comers. And despite their exclusion of students with disabilities, the voucher schools in Wisconsin DO NOT outperform the public schools.

A statement issued by the ACLU warned of the danger of choice programs:

“Publicly-funded voucher programs have the effect of setting up a separate escape hatch for only a few, leaving the majority of the poor students in schools that are even less likely to succeed than they were before the voucher program or tax credit began. Furthermore, the private schools that spring up to educate a child for $6,500 are producing results that are no better than the public school district – in Milwaukee, for example, three years of comparison test scores show they are performing worse than the public system. We also know that the Milwaukee parents who take advantage of these programs tend to have higher education levels and children without disabilities, leaving the public school district with a higher percentage of children with disabilities and parents with less education. There are few checks in place to ensure that all of the schools accepting vouchers are more than glorified day care providing convenient hours for parents.”

Even more ominous is the specter of segregation academies in the south:

“…some private schools in states like Georgia and Alabama, where tax credits have recently been put into place, were founded as segregation academies to thwart federal integration efforts. While the program in Milwaukee and its school district serve almost entirely students of color, as “school choice” spreads around the country, the stage is set for these programs to become even more exclusionary and segregated. We know this because Milwaukee’s voucher program already excludes students with disabilities and segregates them into the public school district while at the same time stripping the district of much needed funds to educate them. If we permit this to continue, we are condoning separate schools for a number of groups of students, including racial minorities, students with disabilities, religious minorities and LGBT students. What we have known for the fifty years since Brown v. Board of Education is that separate is not equal. School voucher programs and tax credits do not provide a choice for everyone. They create publicly funded separate schools.”

Categories Segregation , Racial Isolation and Integration, Special Education, Vouchers, Wisconsin

A Scary Future? The Teaching Machine and Big Data: LINK FIXED

By dianeravitch
May 3, 2013 //
22

This is a fascinating and rather frightening essay about the quest for a teaching machine.

Philip McRae, the author, looks at the historical search for a machine that would standardize teaching, making it cost-efficient and providing a common curriculum. Then he describes the present-day efforts to aggregate Big Data, discover patterns, and create a platform through which content might be delivered to 100 or 200 students in a class.

Here is the pivotal line:

“At its most innocent it is a renewed attempt at bringing back behaviourism and operant conditioning to make learning more efficient. At its most sinister; it establishes children as measurable commodities to be cataloged and capitalized upon by corporations. It is a movement that could be the last tsunami that systematically privatizes public education systems.”

Categories Budget Cuts, Education Industry, For-Profit, On-Line Education, Teachers and Teaching, Technology, Computers

NY Daily News Reveals Top-Secret State Test

By dianeravitch
May 3, 2013 //
60

Yesterday I received an email from a reporter from the New York Daily News asking for my reaction to a bootleg copy of the Pearson-made fifth-grade exam for English Language Arts. This is part of the first tests of the Common Core in the state, administered in recent weeks to students in 3rd through 8th grades. Students spent about 90 minutes per day for three days on the ELA tests and repeated the process the next week in math.

I read the passages and the questions based on them. My reaction was that the difficulty level of the passages and the questions was not age-appropriate. Based on test questions I had reviewed for seven years when I was a member of the NAEP board, it seemed to me that the test was pitched at an eighth grade level. The passages were very long, about twice as long as a typical passage on NAEP for eighth grade. The questions involved interpretation, inference, and required re-reading of the passage for each question.

I suppose that is what the test-makers think of as critical thinking, and it may be, but there are also issues of what is appropriate for fifth-graders, as well as recognition that this is a timed test.

When the article appeared, I was not quoted but others agreed that the exam was above fifth-grade level. Aaron Pallas at Teachers College said the vocabulary was sixth grade. But it was not the vocabulary that was disturbing to me: it was the cognitive load, the expectation that fifth-graders could read and interpret long passages on a timed test. It would be interesting to put this test alongside released items from eighth grade NAEP. I tried doing that yesterday afternoon, and to my eye, most of the questions would be rated as “medium” or “hard” for eighth graders.

Very high-performing students may find the exam easy. I suspect it was beyond the comprehension of average fifth grade students, and extremely hard for students in the bottom half.

If this test is indicative of what is in store, It reinforces my concern that the Common Core will widen the achievement gaps. Struggling students will fail.

And by the way, read the smug, arrogant editorial in the Daily News. The editors think it is just great that many kids will fail. They are sure that the tests will reveal the poor quality of education in the city’s schools. They forget that every student in the city has been educated under mayoral control, for which this editorial board has been a consistent cheerleader. Do they understand the contradiction? Not likely.

Categories Common Core, NAEP, New York, Pearson, Testing

Robert Shepherd: When Will We Ever Learn?

By dianeravitch
May 3, 2013 //
7

Robert Shepherd has long experience writing and editing textbooks and assessments. I appreciate his kind comments about my book, written in the 1990s, but also his recognition that “reforms” come and go with regularity. My comment: The current wave of phony reforms is the most destructive in the history of American education.

He writes:

“One of the reasons why I love Diane Ravitch’s brilliant Left Back: A Century of Failed School Reforms is that it chronicles our unfortunate tendency in this country to buy into some new voodoo prescription, every few years, for “solving the education problem.”

“Back when I was first teaching, the magic potion was supposed to be behavioral objectives, and every classroom was supposed to be some sort of Skinner box. The state education authorities were mandating behavioral objectives for every lesson despite the fact that, by that time, Behaviorism was effectively dead as the primary model in psychology proper, having received, a couple DECADES earlier, death blows at the hands of Noam Chomsky (his review of Skinner’s Verbal Behavior) and Karl Lashley (his paper on serial behavior). But despite the fact that professional psychologists had moved on to new cognitive models, Behaviorism was treated, in the 1970s, in U.S. education, as the latest, greatest ride on the K-12 education carnival midway.

“A few years ago, there was talk throughout the American education establishment about testing disappearing entirely, fading into the instructional process and becoming formative feedback. Now, a blink of an eye later, we have a federal department of education, many governors, chief state school officers, and a lot of wealthy plutocrats ratcheting up an already clearly failed policy of high-stakes testing and evaluation based on test scores. This particular magic medicine is long past its shelf life.

“(Amusingly, one of the leading proponents a few years back of the disappearance of testing into the instructional process is now one of the biggest cheerleaders for mandated standards and value-added measurement based on high-stakes tests. I won’t name names, but I will say that toadying to educrats pays handsomely.)

“The current testing mania is just the latest of a long line of crazy ideas, failed reform after failed reform, foisted on our nation’s schools and teachers by educrats, politicians, and commercial interests. I’ve come to think that American education at the rarefied levels where policy is made is trendier than are either popular music or haute couture. Turning our schools into test prep factories, mandating one-size-fits-all standards and pedagogical practices for all students, and basing educator and school evaluation on test scores is just the latest of a long series of failed EduFads. Sadly, the cost of this one is enormous.

“In schools across the country, a third of each school years is now being spent doing test prep, administering practice high-stakes tests, and administering the high-stakes tests themselves. The opportunity cost of all that high-stakes testing is breathtaking: kids are being robbed, and teachers are totally demoralized. If history is any guide, and what other guide to we have, the policy makers will soon enough see what a mistake this has been and move on to the next magic solution to be foisted on our schools.

“When will we ever learn?”

Categories Education Reform, Testing

Wayne Gersen: What Obama Could Learn from Vermont

By dianeravitch
May 3, 2013 //
5

Wayne Gersen has been working in several districts in Vermont. He is impressed by Vermont’s determination not to allow testing to be the be-all and end-all of education. The state is determined not to let NCLB wreck its schools and not to ask for a waiver that would allow Duncan to impose high-stakes testing. If only Obama did what Vermont does!

Categories NCLB (No Child Left Behind), Obama
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