Innovation Ohio is a nonpartisan think tank that studies public policy in the state. Its reports are carefully researched and documented.
Its latest study finds that charter schools, a favorite “reform” of Governor John Kasich and the Republican-dominated legislature, cost taxpayers twice as much as public schools and hurt the public schools that enroll the other 90% of the children in the state.
I read on Twitter just now that I compared “school choice” to a Nazi invasion.
. @DianeRavitch likens school choice to Nazi invasion. Yes. You read that correctly. http://bit.ly/Y7svLC”
To say the least, I was taken aback because I had never written or implied any such thing.
But consider the source.
It comes from Jeb Bush’s Foundation for Excellence in Education (“excellence” in this case meaning the promotion of vouchers, charters, and advancing the interest of for-profit entrepreneurs in the public sector).
The post in question was https://dianeravitch.net/2013/02/19/what-about-the-good-charters/.
Jeb Bush–or whoever writes his foundation’s tweets–deliberately misconstrued the post, as well as its authorship.
It was not written by me.
It was written as a comment by a reader on the blog.
I post many readers’ comments, for the sake of discussion, not because I endorse them.
The comment was in response to an earlier post by Mark Naison and Bruce Bernstein: https://dianeravitch.net/2013/02/16/how-to-tell-if-your-local-charter-school-is-avaricious
I am delighted to learn that Jeb Bush and his staff are reading this blog closely.
Maybe they will learn something new.
Maybe they will hear the voices of parents, teachers, students, school board members, and others who are not invited to their corporate conferences.
I hope they spend some time working to improve their ability to comprehend what they read.
Decoding will get you just so far, and no farther.
The Sacramento school board is rushing to shut down 11 elementary schools. That’s 20 percent of the elementary schools run by the Sacramento City Unified School District.
The process has been indefensible. Board members and the Superintendent have short-circuited the usual decision making process on school closure in order to jam these through. The California Department of Education recommends a 6 month process, which includes formation of a citizen advisory committee. But the district has given just five weeks between announcing the list of schools on the chopping block, and the final vote on Thursday. There is no citizen committee.
The fierce urgency of now requires immediate action, and no democratic process whatever.
The district has wildly exaggerated the under-enrollment numbers at these schools, cherry-picked numbers regarding costs and revenue, and refused to take into account the impact that displacing so many students will have on enrollment–as students leave the district for charter schools and other districts. Charter operators are already checking out some campuses, eager to take them over. The superintendent is a graduate of the Broad Academy, which suggests that the mass closure is more about about ideology than cost savings or efficiency.
This is an outrage.
Why don’t they hold hearings?
The lights are going out on public schools in city after city because some billionaire thinks it is a good idea.
Some smart and sophisticated young activists in the Hmong and Latino communities have organized to fight this plan. Listen to them here.
Are there no public-spirited citizens on the Sacramento school board? Don’t they feel a civic obligation to protect public education against privatization?
Jay Mathews wrote a great column on the failure of two inspector generals to probe the DC cheating scandal.
Michelle Rhee is traversing the nation, selling her big “success” story in DC, but the cheating scandal continues to fester. The testing company reported a remarkable number of wrong-to-right erasures in a large number of schools. As Mathews reports, neither IG took the erasure evidence seriously.
As Mathews points out, the only genuine hero in the DC mess was Adell Cothorne, the new principal at Noyes who reported the cheating and got frozen out by top administrators for her integrity.
The failure to get to the bottom of the testing scandal is itself a scandal. Someday, hopefully, a serious investigation will not only inquire into why the scores went up so fast and why they plummeted, but why two slipshod investigations swept the evidence under the rug. Who decided to deep-six the cheating? Why?
Meanwhile, if Rhee comes to town to tout the DC schools as a model, don’t forget to raise two issues:
1) the DC schools have one of the lowest graduation rates in the nation;
2) the achievement gaps between blacks and whites and between whites and Asians in the DC schools are double the gaps of other cities tested by NAEP.
Apparently, Rhee got textbooks delivered to the schools on time. Let’s give her credit for that.
This is the sixteenth installment of Mercedes Schneider’s analysis of the board of the National Council on Teacher Quality.
Mercedes is a teacher in Louisiana who holds a Ph.D. in statistics and research methods. As a teacher, she wanted to know about the organization that is now evaluating teacher preparation programs around the nation.
Tomorrow she will release her overview of the entire series.
Republican leaders in the Tennessee legislature are pushing ALEC model legislation to strip the Metro Nashville school board of its power to authorize charters. This is intended to punish Nashville for refusing to support Arizona-based Great Hearts Academy, a corporate chain that wants to open in an affluent white neighborhood. Memphis is also included in the proposal.
Nashville leaders, excepting the corporate-friendly mayor, oppose the legislation. The mayor believes that the power to expand charters is more important than local control. .
The ALEC bill has the support of Michelle Rhee’s StudentsFirst, the Wall Street hedge fund managers’ Democrats for Education Reform, and Stand for Children. In other words, the usual cheerleaders for corporate reform.
Opposition to the ALEC legislation was so intense from parents in Nashville and Memphis (the only districts targeted to lose local control) that the House Education Committee delayed a vote on the measure.
Supporters of public education are not giving up without a fight.
If I had to choose one post each day that was a must-read, this would be it.
Bruce Baker of Rutgers has followed the evolution of the charter movement.
He initially thought they might be a source of innovation, as their advocates promised.
But over time, he has observed a systematic pattern of cream skimming, where charters pick the best students and leave the toughest cases for public schools.
Although he recognizes that some charters have resisted the temptation to win at all costs, he now concludes that the sector has become parasitic, harming public schools by skimming the students that make the charters look good.
Remember the obesity crisis? Guess not.
In the mad obsession to raise test scores and to outcompete the world, physical education classes are being turned into opportunities to teach reading, math, geography, and almost anything that might be on the test.
The story reads:
On a recent afternoon, the third graders in Sharon Patelsky’s class reviewed words like “acronym,” “clockwise” and “descending,” as well as math concepts like greater than, less than and place values.
“Ms. Patelsky, the physical education teacher at Everglades Elementary School here, instructed the students to count by fours as they touched their elbows to their knees during a warm-up. They added up dots on pairs of dice before sprinting to round mats imprinted with mathematical symbols. And while in push-up position, they balanced on one arm and used the other (“Alternate!” Ms. Patelsky urged. “That’s one of your vocabulary words”) to stack oversize Lego blocks in columns labeled “ones,” “tens” and “hundreds.”………
“Spurred by an intensifying focus on student test scores in math and English as well as a desire to incorporate more health and fitness information, more school districts are pushing physical education teachers to move beyond soccer, kickball and tennis to include reading, writing and arithmetic as well. New standards for English and math that have been adopted by 45 states and the District of Columbia recommend that teachers in a wide variety of subjects incorporate literacy instruction and bring more “informational text” into the curriculum. Many states have interpreted these standards to include physical education and have developed recommendations and curriculum for districts and teachers to incorporate literacy skills and informational text into gym classes.”
Stop.
This is going too far. Why should students be denied the physical activity they need in the service of test prep?
Somehow I suspect no one is doing nonsense like this at Sidwell Friends or Lakeside Academy in Seattle or Deerfield Academy or Maumee Country Day School in Toledo.
Click here to learn details about rally on February 23 in Austin.
Last year, the rally drew 13,000 people.
I am looking forward to joining with my fellow Texans on behalf of the schools that educated me from kindergarten through twelfth grades.
Susan Ohanian hates the Common Core standards. She hates the way they were created and marketed. She thinks they are a great con job. She fears what this mad rush to standardization will do to children. She would oppose them, she says, even if all the recommended readings were her choices. Ohanian lives in Vermont, where she has taught English for many years. She has long been an outspoken opponent of standardized testing and No Child Left Behind.
