Archives for the year of: 2014
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Arne’s Worst Idea Yet

By dianeravitch
December 8, 2014 //
80

This post was written by a lawyer who also earned an MAT in secondary education. Writing as a lawyer, informed by her Ed school experience, she says that Arne’s plan to punish education colleges if the students of their graduates don’t get high test scores is “asinine.”

 

She explains:

 

“Now, please bear with me. Out here in lawyer-land, there’s a slippery concept that every first year law student must wrap her head around: it’s the idea of distinguishing between actual (or “but for”) causation and proximate (or “legal”) causation. Actual causation is any one of a vast link in the chain of events from the world was created to Harold injured me by hitting me, that, at some level, whether direct or attenuated, “caused” my injury. For instance, Harold couldn’t have hit me if the world hadn’t been created, because if the world hadn’t been created, Harold wouldn’t exist (nor would I), and therefore I never would have been hit by Harold. So, if actual or “but for” causation was legally sufficient to hold someone responsible for an injury, I could try suing “the Creator,” as if the Creator is somehow at fault for Harold’s decision to hit me.

 

Well, that’s preposterous, even by lawyer standards, right?

 

The law agrees with you: the Creator is too far removed from the injury, and therefore cannot be held legally responsible for it.

 

So to commit a tort (legal wrong) against someone else, it isn’t sufficient that the wrong allegedly committed actually — at some attenuated level — caused the injured’s injury (i.e., that the injury would not have happened “but for” some cause). Instead, the wrong must also be proximally related to that injury: that is, there must be a close enough tie between the allegedly negligent or otherwise wrongful act and the injury that results. So while it would be silly to hold “the Creator” legally responsible for Harold hitting me, it would not be similarly silly to hold Harold responsible for hitting me. Harold’s act was not only an actual or “but for” cause of my injury, it was also an act closely enough related to my injury to confer legally liability onto Harold. This is what we lawyers call proximate (or legal) causation: that is, proximate causation is an act that is a close enough cause of the injury that it’s fair — at a basic, fundamental level — to hold the person who committed that injurious act legally responsible (i.e., liable to pay damages or otherwise make reparations) for his act. [As an aside to my aside, if this sort of reasoning makes your head explode, law school probably isn’t a great option for you.]

 

Well, it appears that Arne Duncan would have failed his torts class. You see, Arne didn’t get the memo regarding the distinction between actual causation and proximate causation. Instead, what Arne proposes is to hold teacher prep programs responsible for the performance of their alumni’s K-12 students (and to punish them if their alumni’s students don’t measure up). Never mind the myriad chains in the causation link between the program’s coursework and the performance of its graduates’ students (presumably on standardized tests). Arne Duncan somehow thinks that he can proximally — fairly — link these kids’ performance not just to their teachers (a dicey proposition on its own), but to their teachers’ prep programs. Apparently Arne can magically tease out all other factors, such as where an alumna teaches, what her students’ home lives are like, how her students’ socio-economic status affects their academic performance, the level of her students’ intrinsic motivation, as well as any issues in the new alumna’s personal life that might affect her performance in the classroom, and, of course, the level of support provided to the new alumna as a new teacher by her department and administration, and so forth. As any first year law student can tell you, Arne’s proposal is asinine, as the alumna’s student’s test results will be so far removed from her teaching program’s performance that ascribing proximate causation from the program to the children’s performance offends a reasonable person’s sense of justice. [Not to mention the perverse incentives this would create for teaching programs’ career advising centers — what teaching program would ever encourage a new teacher to take on a challenging teaching assignment?]”

 

But that isn’t all. She compares her experience in her education school to her experience in law school and says that the education courses were far more practical than the law school and did a better job preparing her for the real world.

Categories Higher Education, Teacher Evaluations, Teachers and Teaching

Mississippi Governor Bryant: How We Were Hoaxed by the Common Core

By dianeravitch
December 7, 2014 //
35

Governor Phil Bryant of Mississippi recounts how governors were cajoled into supporting the Common Core standards. It sounded like a good idea, it would be “state-led,” but now it turns out that if you try to change your mind, you lose federal funding. So much for “state-led.” Of the 24 states that agreed to use the federally-funded PARCC assessment, only 9 remain, he says.

 

He writes:

 

In 2008, a new system of public education standards was discussed by the National Governors Association. The new standards, called Common Core, would emphasize problem solving and competitiveness and would ensure that students throughout the nation met certain achievement benchmarks. The concept sounded solid, and we were assured that this was a state-led initiative with no federal control or connection to federal funds.

 

Now in 2014, we know something went terribly wrong. State control over the standards turned out to be a myth, and adopting the standards has been required if a state wants to even apply for major federal education funding. So much for no federal control.

 

Federalism in education has long been a feature of American education. States are supposed to be “laboratories of democracy,” encouraged to innovate. Mississippi’s low test scores are not caused by a lack of national standards and national tests but by poverty. Reduce poverty and test scores will rise, no matter what the test.

Categories Common Core

Civics Lessons Financed by the Koch Brothers

By dianeravitch
December 7, 2014 //
28

We recently learned that the North Carolina Department of Public Instruction has proposed to adopt a civics course designed by the Bill of Rights Institute, which is funded by the highly political, very conservative billionaires, the Koch brothers. Fortunately, Bill Bigelow of “Rethinking Schools” has researched the materials produced by the Bill of Rights Institute. Bigelow says that the Koch brothers have donated millions of dollars to the Bill of Rights Institute, which promotes free-market libertarianism and above all, respect for property rights. The BRI was “launched in 1999 and funded by the Charles Koch Foundation, the Fred and Mary Koch Foundation, and David Koch. The BRI directors include Mark Humphrey, Koch Industries senior vice president; Ryan Stowers, director of higher education programs at the Charles Koch Foundation; and Todd Zywicki, a senior scholar of the Mercatus Center at George Mason University, funded with corporate donations from the likes of Koch and ExxonMobil. Until 2013, the Bill of Rights Institute president was the Koch operative Tony Woodlief, who headed the Market-Based Management Institute in the Kochs’ hometown of Wichita, Kansas, and served as president of the Mercatus Center….”

 

“In its materials for teachers and students, the Bill of Rights Institute cherry-picks the Constitution, history, and current events to hammer home its libertarian message that the owners of private property should be free to manage their wealth as they see fit. billofrightsinstitute_libertarianmssgAs one Bill of Rights lesson insists, “The Founders considered industry and property rights critical to the happiness of society.” This message that individual owners of property are the source of social good, their property sacred, and government the source of danger weaves through the entire Koch curriculum, sometimes with sophistication, other times in caricature. For example, in one “click-and-explore” activity at the BRI website, showing the many ways that government can oppress individuals—”Life Without the Bill of Rights?”—a cartoon character pops up with a dialogue bubble reading, “The gov’t took my home!” An illustration shows his home demolished.

 

“Educator resources for “Documents of Freedom” at the BRI site underscore this business-good/government-bad message: “When government officials can make any laws they please—and hold themselves above the law—there is less economic growth, less creativity, and less happiness. Entrepreneurs won’t be willing to risk time and money starting businesses. Writers and speakers will restrain their words. Everyone will worry that his freedoms can be destroyed at the whim of a powerful government agent….”

 

“Focusing narrowly on property rights to the exclusion of racism and issues of social inequality are not limited to history lessons in the BRI materials. One section on the website is “Teaching with Current Events,” and includes a lesson, “Stand Your Ground and Castle Doctrine Laws.” It offers quiet cover for Trayvon Martin’s killer, George Zimmerman, mentioned in the lesson’s introduction. Here’s the lesson’s first discussion question: “Florida’s ‘Stand-Your-Ground’ law states ‘A person who is not engaged in an unlawful activity and who is attacked in any other place where he or she has a right to be has no duty to retreat and has the right to stand his or her ground and meet force with force, including deadly force if he or she reasonably believes it is necessary to do so to prevent death or great bodily harm to himself or herself or another or to prevent the commission of a forcible felony.’ How would you put this law in your own words?”

 

“A follow-up question asks students to search the Constitution and Bill of Rights to support this law. But nothing in the lesson encourages students to search their own lives or to view Stand-Your-Ground from the standpoint of people who might be victimized by someone like George Zimmerman. The sanctity of an individual’s property is paramount—here and everywhere in the BRI materials.

 

“This lesson is especially disingenuous given that Florida’s “Stand-Your-Ground” law was a product of ALEC, the American Legislative Exchange Council—a Koch-funded outfit that promotes “model” conservative legislation. The Kochs not only pay for laws to be written and passed, they now pay for them to be legitimated in the school curriculum as well.”

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Categories Corporate Reformers, Curriculum, North Carolina

Paul Thomas: Grit and Education Do Not Trump White Privilege

By dianeravitch
December 7, 2014 //
53

Paul Thomas, a professor at Furman University in South Carolina and one of our most insightful scholars of race and inequality, writes that the narrative that “anyone can succeed with grit and education” is a myth, a veneer to protect white privilege (Thomas is white). The reality, he argues, is that race and class are powerful determinants, more powerful than effort and education.

 

He writes, with data to back up his assertions:

 

Political leaders and the mainstream media feed two enduring claims to the public, who nearly universally embraces both: Doing well in school and attaining advanced education are essential to overcoming any obstacles, and the key to succeeding in school is grit, effort and perseverance.

 

Education appears significant within race, but not the avenue to overcoming racism. Well educated blacks earn more than less educated blacks, but blacks and whites with the same education reflect significant race disparities favoring whites….Rarely do we admit stunning data on race/education inequity. Blacks with some college have similar employment opportunities as whites with no high school diploma….

 

Anthony Cody has now confronted the relentless and uncritical mainstream media fascination with grit in his The Resilience of Eugenics, linking claims about the importance of grit, the ability to identify students with grit, and the push to instill grit in certain students (brown, black, and impoverished, mainly) with Eugenics.

 

Cody’s argument has deep roots among many of us who have argued for quite some time that charter movements such as KIPP and grit arguments are not sound educationally, scientifically, or ethically. In fact, we have demonstrated that this entire package of narratives and policies is essentially racist and classist.

 

Certainly we should aspire to change our society so that education is more important than race. But we are far from that ideal now, and society is doing very little to alter the reality that race trumps grit.

Categories Equity, Race

Steve Lopez on the Disastrous Events in Los Angeles: Does Anyone Care?

By dianeravitch
December 7, 2014 //
24

Steve Lopez of the Los Angeles Times has written column after column that make sense about the accumulating disasters at the Los Angeles Unified School District.

 

In this one, he describes the latest series of embarrassments for the districts. So the FBI carted off 20 boxes of documents connected to the plan to spend $1.3 billion of bond money dedicated to school construction and repairs to buy iPads.

 

What about the other huge wastes of money in a district that has none to spare?

 

I’m wondering why the feds didn’t kill two birds with one stone, so to speak. While they were rummaging around at district headquarters, they could have grabbed another 20 boxes of documents related to the disastrous multimillion-dollar electronic student tracking system that created chaos in August and still hasn’t been fixed.

 

And speaking of the FBI, district officials were oddly complacent about the storm troopers, if you ask me. You’d think someone would have enough self-respect, even if it was just for show, to put up a fuss or demand an explanation for the raid. But I watched a district lawyer tell a TV reporter, with a smile, “I have no idea what it’s about.”

 

I’ll tell you what it’s about.

 

It’s about a disastrous year for the nation’s second-largest school district, which has managed — thanks to bungling, sloth and political squabbling — to let down more than 600,000 students.

 

And the iPad and MISIS (My Integrated Student Information System) failures were not the only things that went wrong. The district paid out a staggering $139 million last month to settle claims against a teacher who fed his own semen to elementary school students, among other monstrous behavior, some three decades after the district received its first complaint about him.

 

 

And he adds:

 

The challenges in school districts like LAUSD are largely about socioeconomic issues, and that’s the purview of county officials. So why is it that L.A. County supervisors, whose constituents fill L.A. schools, act as if LAUSD is somebody else’s problem rather than everybody’s responsibility?

 

We don’t need a politician to hijack the district, as former L.A. Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa tried to do, or to stock the board with lackeys. But there’s middle ground between Villaraigosa’s hostile takeover bid and Mayor Eric Garcetti’s unapologetic invisibility.

 

Where’s the leadership and collaboration in one of the richest cities in the world, home to some of the greatest universities on the planet, as well as some of the largest nonprofits devoted to lifting up communities?

 

I’m not a fan of blue-ribbon panels that have no authority and produce voluminous reports nobody reads. But I’d be willing to temporarily waive my bias if a team of good people got together to help the district find a new superintendent and map out a plan to turn things around in 2015, especially if no one on the school board is going to lead or get out of the way.

 

There’s too much at stake to plod along, business as usual, as a horrible year ends with the FBI at the door.

Categories Accountability, Los Angeles

CapTimes: Wisconsin’s Teacher Unions Defend Public Education Against Walker

By dianeravitch
December 7, 2014 //
10

For their steadfastness, courage, and consistency in fighting a governor who hates not only unions but public education, I place the teachers of Wisconsin on this blog’s honor roll. Scott Walker is a model ALEC governor, ready to do whatever corporations want, while failing to care for the children of the state. If only he would listen to the teachers of Wisconsin instead of ALEC, the Koch brothers, and big corporations in pursuit of tax cuts, he could secure the future of his state.

 

The CapTimes wrote an editorial saluting Wisconsin’s valiant teachers’ unions, which have been under sustained attacks by Governor Scott Walker. The editorialist knows that Walker wants to privatize public education and that he had to demonize the teachers’ union and undermine their political power to reach his goal.

 

The editorial describes the teachers’ unions as “vital defenders of public education” and says:

 

In recent years, Republican presidential prospect Scott Walker has attacked Wisconsin’s public employees and teachers as part of a cynical political ploy to weaken critics of corporate overreach. Walker’s extremism has been supported extensively by out-of-state special interests that want to privatize public services and public education — so extensively that he has had considerable success. No one is going to deny that.

 

Despite the governor’s money power, however, Wisconsin is still making labor history.

 

Walker’s anti-union initiative sought to make it virtually impossible for organized labor to function in Wisconsin by, among other things, requiring that every public worker union in every workplace must go through a process of recertification every year. Walker’s Act 10 set up a complex process where elections must be organized among workers in every community and school district.

 

To remain as the recognized representatives of teachers and other school employees, for instance, local education associations must win a majority vote not just from the teachers and other employees participating in the election but from all teachers and other workers eligible to vote — whether they participate in the voting or not. Just imagine if corporations had to go through the whole process of reincorporating, issuing stock and setting up business operations every year and you will begin to get a sense of the roadblocks Walker and his out-of-state associates have erected to teacher unions in Wisconsin.

 

But Walker did not count on one thing.

 

Wisconsin teachers like and respect their unions enough to thwart Walker’s anti-labor strategies.

 

This fall, 305 local union organizations representing public school teachers, support staff, and custodial workers held recertification elections in school districts across the state. Despite everything that Walker has done to undermine them, more than 90 percent of the local unions were recertified. Indeed, according to the Wisconsin Education Association Council, 97 percent of its units that sought recertification won their elections.

 

The numbers are even more overwhelming for American Federation of Teachers union locals in Wisconsin.

 

“Since recertification elections began in 2011, every AFT-Wisconsin local union that has pursued recertification has won convincingly,” notes Kim Kohlhaas, an elementary school teacher in the Superior School District who serves as president of AFT-Wisconsin.

 

In many school districts, the numbers were overwhelming.

 

In Madison, where the Madison Teachers Inc. union has played a leading role in opposing Walker’s anti-labor agenda, the pro-recertification votes have been overwhelming.

 

The teachers want a collective voice. They have made that clear. Walker will continue to seek ways to silence their voice, so he can promote more charters and vouchers, more schools that welcome non-union, often inexperienced and underprepared teachers. Despite the wealth of research showing that neither charters nor vouchers outperform public schools in Wisconsin, Walker continues to try to destroy public education.

 

The CapTimes editorial concludes:

 

Of course, unions will remain under assault in Walker’s Wisconsin. But Walker is spending more and more of his time preparing to abandon Wisconsin and to begin a presidential run that is likely not just to embarrass the governor but also to expose his failures nationally and in Wisconsin. Eventually, Walker will be gone, and Wisconsin will again elect a governor who reflects the best of our values and our hopes….It is vitally important that, when Walker is gone, Wisconsin’s rich legacy of supporting public teachers and public education remains — along with the unions that fight to maintain that legacy.

Read more: http://host.madison.com/news/opinion/editorial/school-unions-vital-defenders-of-public-education/article_8937ca68-81f5-5ab2-a806-3660964e5621.html#ixzz3KwuRSniV

 

 

Categories Unions, Wisconsin

Google Me and Get an Ad for TFA

By dianeravitch
December 7, 2014 //
27

Thanks to John Ogozalek, a teacher in upstate New York, who alerted me to this peculiar (but not surprising) phenomenon.

 

John googled my name and the first thing to pop us was an ad for Teach for America.

 

I tried it, and this was the first listing under my name:

 

Dianeravitch – 7 Things You Should Know About Us‎
Adwww.teachforamerica.org/On-The-Record‎
Teach For America On The Record.

 

Don’t they have better things to do with their money?

Categories Ravitch, Diane, Teach for America

Chicago Teacher: How Our School Boycotted the Test

By dianeravitch
December 7, 2014 //
3

Read the rest of this entry »

Categories Chicago, Resistance, Testing

David Sirota: Kentucky Blocks Teachers from Finding Out Where Their Pensions Are Invested

By dianeravitch
December 7, 2014 //
15

Peerless investigative journalist David Sirota writes that the state of Kentucky tells teachers and other public employees that they have no right to know where the state is investing their pension funds or what fees are charged by the investment firms.

 

If you’re a public school teacher in Kentucky, the state has a message for you: You have no right to know the details of the investments being made with your retirement savings. That was the crux of the declaration issued by state officials to a high school history teacher when he asked to see the terms of the agreements between the Kentucky Teachers’ Retirement System and the Wall Street firms that are managing the system’s money on behalf of him, his colleagues and thousands of retirees.

 

In rejecting the request from history teacher Randy Wieck, KTRS general counsel Robert Barnes said the terms of the agreements represent “trade secrets” and that disclosing them would provide “an unfair commercial advantage” to the firms’ competitors.

 

The denial was the latest case of public officials blocking the release of information about how billions of dollars of public employees’ retirement nest eggs are being invested. Though some of the fine print of the investments has occasionally leaked — and created an uproar — the agreements are tightly held in most states and cities. Critics say such secrecy has prevented lawmakers and the public from being able to evaluate the propriety of the increasing fees being paid to private financial firms for pension management services. They also say that the secrecy prevents the public from knowing if the deals comport with rules governing public pension investments.

 

The states of Illinois and Rhode Island have similarly refused to reveal where public pension funds are invested or what the terms of the investment are. They are “trade secrets,” they say.

 

Categories Pensions

Following Jeb Bush’s Money Trail

By dianeravitch
December 6, 2014 //
26

This article appears on Breitbart.com, a conservative media outlet. Written by Dr. Susan Berry, a regular contributor to the website, it is critical of Jeb Bush’s support for the Common Core and details his relationships with other groups and funders.

 

With polls showing Republican support for Common Core plummeting, common sense would dictate that Bush call it a day with the nationalized standards, as has been done by other Republicans, such as Maine Gov. Paul LePage and U.S. Sen. David Vitter, who plans to run for governor of Louisiana next year.
However, as a review of Bush’s history with the education initiative demonstrates, his interest in pushing onto the entire nation the reforms he introduced while governor of Florida – and his methods for doing so – have led his critics to claim he is more about big government crony capitalism than concern for children’s education.
Bush is the founder of several organizations that all play into a reported strategy that involves not only motivating “the people” at large for changes in education, but also using state education officials to administratively make some of those changes happen without the scrutiny or approval of the public.
As the founder and chairman of the Foundation for Excellence in Education (FEE), a national group which states its ambitious mission is “to build an American education system that equips every child to achieve his or her God-given potential,” Bush tapped for CEO Patricia Levesque, his former deputy chief of staff for education, enterprise solutions for government, minority procurement, and business and professional regulation while he was governor.
Chiefs for Change is an affiliate of FEE and describes itself as a “bipartisan coalition of current and former state education chiefs who believe that American public education can be dramatically improved.” Current members of Chiefs for Change include Mark Murphy of Delaware, Tom Luna of Idaho, John White of Louisiana, Hanna Skandera of New Mexico, Janet Barresi of Oklahoma – who was defeated in the state’s primary election this year, Deborah Gist of Rhode Island, and Kevin Huffman of Tennessee, former education commissioner and ex-husband of controversial Washington, D.C., schools chancellor Michelle Rhee…..

 

As it happens, some of the Chiefs for Change are also members of the Partnership for the Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers (PARCC), one of the two federally funded interstate consortia that are developing tests aligned with the Common Core standards.
“Cronyism and corruption come in all political stripes and colors,” wrote [Michelle] Malkin at Townhall. “As a conservative parent of public charter school-educated children, I am especially appalled by these pocket-lining GOP elites who are giving grassroots education reformers a bad name and cashing in on their betrayal of limited-government principles…..”

 

Additionally, Bush has joined with former president of the pro-Common Core Fordham Institute Chester Finn and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce in Conservatives for Higher Standards, a group that promotes the Common Core standards but whose supporters still call themselves “conservatives.” Among the organization’s supporters are Sen. Lamar Alexander (R-TN), soon-to-be head of the Senate committee that oversees education; former Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour (R); former U.S. Secretary of Education Bill Bennett; Iowa Gov. Terry Branstad (R); Tennessee Gov. Bill Haslam (R); former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee (R); and New Mexico Gov. Susana Martinez (R).
The Fordham Institute, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, and Bush’s national organization have all been awarded grants by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the primary private backer of the Common Core standards.
In 2013, Bush’s FEE itself received $3,500,000 from the Gates Foundation. Two million dollars of that was awarded to FEE “to support Common Core implementation,” and $1.5 million was “for general operating support….”

 

In addition to the Gates Foundation, FEE’s donor list includes names not unfamiliar to critics of the Common Core standards: the GE Foundation, the Helmsley Charitable Trust, News Corp, the Walton Family Foundation, Bloomberg Philanthropies, Carnegie Corporation, the Schwab Foundation, Microsoft, Exxon Mobil, Paul Singer Foundation, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, Intel, K12, Pearson, Scholastic, and Target.
Book publishers such as Pearson, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, K12, and Scholastic are all poised to reap billions off the sale of Common Core-aligned textbooks and instructional materials that school districts are forced to purchase if they want their students to succeed on the Common Core-aligned assessments. Similarly, technology companies will benefit from the online assessments and student data collection.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Categories Bush, Jeb, Common Core, Education Industry, For-Profit
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