Here is the video in which Margaret Raymond of CREDO explains to the Cleveland City Club how charters are doing in Ohio. At the 50-minute mark, she explains why the market model doesn’t work for public schools.
Read the key quote here.
Archives for the year of: 2014
Jonathan Lovell, who has contributed several posts to this blog, has written to Secretary of Education Arne Duncan about his intention to grade colleges of education by the test scores of the students of their graduates. The deadline for submitting comments is January 2. Send comments to: https://www.federalregister.gov/articles/2014/12/03/2014-28218/teacher-preparation-issues
Lovell writes:
Dear Mr Duncan,
As a teacher educator for the past 35 years in the field of English Education–having spent the past 27 of those years in my present institution of San Jose State University–and as someone who has observed upwards of over 2500 middle and high school English classes over the course of my career, I can say without qualification that the proposed new regulations for assessing the quality of teacher preparation programs would be an unmitigated disaster.
Others on this site have spoken eloquently about the extremely serious effects, especially to public institutions like ours, of the costs of implementing these regulations, as well as the wrong-headedness of linking the assessment of teacher preparation programs to a VAM-like measure of student performance in the classes of recent graduates.
I’d like to address a related issue, but one that has been strangely left out of the public discussion to date. It’s the effect of these new regulations on what might be called the “climate” in which teaching as a profession is perceived.
As I’m sure you are aware, there has already been a 50% decline over the past five years in the number of applicants to teacher education programs in the state of California. While we’ve countered this trend in the English Education program here at San Jose State, we’ve only been able to do so by focusing relentlessly of what helps beginning teachers improve not only their instructional practices, but their sense of personal agency in their chosen profession. The major player in this effort has been the San Jose Area Writing Project, which routinely selects exemplary K-12 teachers for an intensive four and one half week summer institute, then positions these teachers in significant roles in the preparation of new teachers.
Your proposed new regulations will be perceived as yet another iteration of all-too-familiar Bush-Obama refrain that “the whipping will continue until morale improves.” I believe it’s high time to turn from this thoroughly discredited approach to the improvement of teaching and teacher training, and to start looking more sensibly and honestly at practices that work.
The practices of the National Writing Project would be an excellent place to start.
Yours truly,
Jonathan Lovell
Professor of English and Director of the San Jose Area Writing Project
San Jose State University
The Néw York Times published a mini-debate about charter schools. Mike Petrilli, president of the conservative Thomas B. Fordham Institute, as you would expect, supported charters. Unlike many charter advocates, Mike doesn’t claim that charters enroll exactly the same students as public schools. He unabashedly believes that charters are for strivers, not for everyone.
Bblogger-and-lawyer Sarah Blaine is appalled by Mike’s take on charters.
My own view is that we are developing an explicit dual public-funded school system, which defeats the communitarian, democratic nature of public schools. One gets to choose its students, the other does not.
What do you think?
Paul Thomas here reviews the persistent efforts to persuade the public that American public education is a failure, starting with the Reagan-era report “A Nation at Risk.” Never mind that none of its dire predictions about our economy came true (except for the outsourcing of jobs–not to countries with higher test scores but to countries with lower wages).
The Common Core is the latest iteration of the Nation-at-Risk narrative that our country needs higher standards and harder tests or we are doomed.
He writes that “Common Core is the problem, not the solution, because it is the source of a powerful drain on public resources in education that are not now invested in conditions related to racial and class inequity in our public schools.”
Where I disagree with Thomas is that he thinks it is a distraction to fight against Common Core and a waste of time. No, it is not a waste of time. Common Core and the tests connected to it will artificially cause test scores to collapse. It will label children as “failures” who are not failures at all. Most students, whatever their color, will be stigmatized by tests aligned with an absurd standard of proficiency (aligned with NAEP proficiency, which is equivalent to an A, in my view). Common Core, as Thomas notes, will bring about the transfer of billions of dollars to testing corporations and additional billions to technology companies and consultants. These billions will be drained from the budgets of public schools, meaning less money for essential and necessary educational opportunities.
The fight over Common Core brings to a head the confrontation between the accountability policies unleashed by Nation at Risk and policies that are based on the needs of children and concepts of education untainted by standardized testing.
Reformers have framed their narrative around the myth of “the bad teacher, without whom all children would make A’s in every subject every year. With this false narrative, they have promoted lengthy, tme-wasting evaluations to find and fire these academic frauds.
The narrative itself is the fraud. Like every profession, there are good and bad practitioners. Some teachers are excellent in some settings, not in others. We count on qualified administrators–not algorithms–to evaluate their staffs.
But now comes another reason to doubt the reformers’ narrative. A new study shows that the quality of teachers has been increasing over the past 15 years.
The abstract says:
“The relatively low status of teaching as a profession is often given as a factor contributing to the difficulty of recruiting teachers, the middling performance of American students on international assessments, and the well-documented decline in the relative academic ability of teachers through the 1990s. Since the turn of the 21st century, however, a number of federal, state, and local teacher accountability policies have been implemented toward improving teacher quality over the objections of some who argue the policies will decrease quality. In this article, we analyze 25 years of data on the academic ability of teachers in New York State and document that since 1999 the academic ability of both individuals certified and those entering teaching has steadily increased. These gains are widespread and have resulted in a substantial narrowing of the differences in teacher academic ability between high- and low-poverty schools and between White and minority teachers. We interpret these gains as evidence that the status of teaching is improving.”
Carol Burris, fearless leader of educators and parents opposed to test-based accountability in Néw York, here appraises the record of John King as state commissioner of education in Néw York.
King was appointed last week to be an “advisor” to Arne Duncan. He and Arne are on the same page in their zealous belief in standardized testing, Common Core, and evaluating educators by student scores.
King came to the job with three years of experience in a “no excuses” charter school. He listed his ambitious goals at the outset of his reign. Higher test scores, higher graduation rates, an evaluation system for teachers and principals. Burris demonstrates that he achieved none of his goals and alienated parents and educators with his top-down, tone-deaf approach.
Thanks to King, students in the class of 2022 will have a 30% graduation rate unless his successors reverse King’s policies.
Democratic progressives have launched a new organization to counter ALEC at the state level. It is called the State Innovation Exchange, or SIX.
Its goal is to advance a “people’s agenda,” not a corporate agenda.
An article in politico.com called it an ALEC-killer.
The question is whether this group will detach itself from the neoliberal slant that have put so many Democrats (think Cuomo of Néw York and Malloy of Connecticut and Arne Duncan) in alliance with the right.
ALEC–the American Legislative Exchange Council--is an organization underwritten by major corporations, whose members are state legislators. It writes model state legislation to reduce taxes and regulation on business, to eliminate unions, to promote vouchers and charters, to reduce environmental controls, and to advance a far-right agenda.
Stephen Dyer, policy analyst in Ohio, went to the Cleveland Club to hear Macke Raymond explain her Ohio charter study.
He came expecting her
to address the obvious issues:
“How only in Cleveland does it appear that Ohio’s charter school sector is providing meaningful, positive benefits to kids. Or how CREDO’s methodology works (averaging kids in traditional public school buildings and comparing these “virtual” kids’ performance with real charter kids). Or how Ohio’s charter school sector has been making very minimal improvements over the years. Or that the state’s charter reform initiatives over the last few years haven’t had much impact on charter school performance. Or that Cleveland charters are doing a good job educating poor, minority kids. Or that 93% of Ohio charter schools’ proficiency scores are below the 50th percentile in the state. Or that 44% of charter school kids are seeing low growth and performance.”
But towards the end of her talk, she dropped a bombshell when she said that education “is the only industry/sector where the market mechanism just doesn’t work….”
Dyer wrote:
“Considering that the pro-market reform Thomas B. Fordham Foundation paid for this study and Raymond works at the Hoover Institution at Stanford — a free market bastion, I was frankly floored, as were most of the folks at my table.
“For years, we’ve been told that the free market will help education improve. As long as parents can choose to send their kids to different schools, like cars or any other commodity, the best schools will draw kids and the worst will go away. The experience in Ohio is the opposite. The worst charter schools in Ohio are growing by leaps and bounds, while the small number of successful charter schools in Ohio have stayed, well, a small number of successful charter schools.
“Raymond made the point too that parents are not informed enough to be true market consumers on education. Websites like Know Your Charter can help with that educational aspect of the parental choice, better arming parents with the necessary information to make a more informed decision. But to hear free market believers say that 20 years into the charter school experiment its foundational philosophy — that the free market’s invisible hand will drive educational improvement — is not working? Well, I was stunned to hear that.
“Raymond also made the point that the states that are seeing the best charter school performance are states whose charter school authorizers are focused on quality and have robust accountability measures — in other words, well-regulated. Yesterday, when the CREDO report was released, it was discovered that if online and for-profit charter schools are taken out of the equation, Ohio charters don’t perform all that bad. Problem is that more than 57% of Ohio charter school kids are in those schools. In fact, at Know Your Charter, we found that less than 10% of Ohio’s charter school kids are in schools that score above the state average on the Performance Index Score or have an A or B in overall value added.
“The point is that there are a few very high-performing charters in this state, like the Breakthrough Schools in Cleveland, or the Toledo School of the Arts, or Columbus Preparatory Academy. While these schools represent a smattering of Ohio’s 400 plus charter schools, the state’s failing charter schools are legion.”
Margaret (Macke) Raymond, leader of the CREDO studies of charters, recently completed a study of charters in Ohio. She concluded that public schools outperform charter schools.
In explaining her findings at the Cleveland Club, she made a statement that shocked free-market zealots:
“This is one of the big insights for me. I actually am kind of a pro-market kinda girl. But it doesn’t seem to work in a choice environment for education. I’ve studied competitive markets for much of my career. That’s my academic focus for my work. And it’s [education] the only industry/sector where the market mechanism just doesn’t work. I think it’s not helpful to expect parents to be the agents of quality assurance throughout the state. I think there are other supports that are needed. Frankly parents have not been really well educated in the mechanisms of choice.… I think the policy environment really needs to focus on creating much more information and transparency about performance than we’ve had for the 20 years of the charter school movement. I think we need to have a greater degree of oversight of charter schools, but I also think we have to have some oversight of the overseers.”
This was not what one of her sponsors, the Walton Family Foundation, expected to hear.
Good for Macke!
Lee Barrios is a retired Nationally Board Certified Teacher in Louisiana.
Open letter to BESE –
Occasionally, albeit rarely, I receive confirmation that I am not only NOT crazy but that I am correct. Because I always base my actions on evidence and am always open to correction, it doesn’t really surprise me and I sleep well at night.
This BESE, on the other hand, ( 8 of you to be exact) have proven that you have personal agendas and are determined to support the lies of Supt. White and his well known cadre of business and political promoters. You are all very intelligent individuals and have ample opportunity to seek out and understand the truth. I give you no benefit of the doubt.
As I have said repeatedly, you are complicit as proven by your actions. However it is never too late to redeem a modicum of respect and honor by standing up and admitting you have been duped. It appears that now is an appropriate time to do that.
You all and John White have created chaos, pain, suffering, loss of excellent teachers, embarrassment for our state, and REAL damage to the education and lives of our children. You must understand that there can be NO test this spring and that the whole high stakes testing accountability must be overhauled and transformed from a purely punitive weapon to some kind of constructive process. Get rid of all the TFA junkies in LDE and replace them with education experts so that can be accomplished! Begin with Supt. White!
Lee P. Barrios, M.Ed., NBCT
Secondary English, Journalism, Gifted
178 Abita Oaks Loop
Abita Springs, Louisiana 70420
http://www.geauxteacher.net
“If a child struggles to clear the high bar at five feet, she will not become a “world class” jumper because someone raised the bar to six feet and yelled “jump higher,” or if her “poor” performance is used to punish her coach.” – – CommonSense
http://tedxtalks.ted.com/video/The-Myth-of-Average-Todd-Rose-a
“I believe in standardizing automobiles. I do not believe in standardizing human beings. Standardization is a great peril which threatens American culture.”—— Albert Einstein
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