Archives for the year of: 2014
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New York: Why is Governor Cuomo Stripping Rural Schools of Basic Resources?

By dianeravitch
April 21, 2014 //
19

An editorial in the Glens Falls (NY) Post-Journal deplores Governor Andrew Cuomo’s disastrous policies, which are stripping rural public schools of resources and driving them into economic calamity.

 

Governor Cuomo is not just balancing the state budget on the backs of poor school children, the editorial says, he is literally standing on their backs in his reach for the presidency.

 

So eager is he to preserve his reputation as a fiscal conservative that he has denied rural schools the funding they need to provide a decent education to its children.

 

To meet Cuomo’s demands, class sizes have increased, schools have closed, teachers have been laid off, the middle school band was eliminated, foreign language classes were cut, and the Glens Falls district still can’t balance its budget.

 

We know that Governor Cuomo loves testing and loves the Common Core, but neither of these initiatives will compensate for the damage that his policies are doing to the children in upstate New York.

 

In the latest state budget, Governor Cuomo became a champion of the billionaires’ charter schools, which enroll 3% of the children in the state. What about the children in impoverished rural districts? Don’t they count? Governor Cuomo also found it in his heart to eliminate a tax on the banks, removing a source of revenue that could have been used to replenish the coffers of rural schools.

 

Let’s face it. Our governor, who once declared himself the “students’ lobbyist,” is the lobbyist for Wall Street. He doesn’t care about public education. He doesn’t realize that the children in school today are the future of our state. It’s all about him and his campaign contributors.

 

 

 

Categories Education Reform

Alan Singer: The Dishonorable Governor Cuomo and the Charter School Zombies

By dianeravitch
April 21, 2014 //
9

Alan Singer gets credit for one of the most creative headlines of the year. He calls his article “The Dishonorable Andrew Cuomo Meets the Hedge Fund / Charter School Zombies.”

Governor Cuomo has indeed dishonored his office by selling out the public schools, which enroll the vast majority of children in New York State, and paying court to his campaign contributors who love charter schools, which enroll 3% of the children.

Singer refers to the Camp Philos meeting in the Adirondacks, where Governor Cuomo will host a group of other cheerleaders for privatized charter schools.

The meeting is sponsored by a hedge-fund back group called “Education Reform Now.” What they mean by “education reform” is hand over your community public school NOW to a corporation that will pay outrageous executive salaries and will keep out the students with the highest needs and boast about its test scores.

Who will join Governor Cuomo to promote the strangulation of public education?

As Singer writes:

According to the online agenda, break-out sessions include discussions on “The Next Big Thing: Groundbreaking Approaches to Teacher Preparation,” “Up, Down, and Sideways: Building an Effective School Reform Coalition,” ” Tight-Loose Options for Ensuring All Kids Have Access to a Great Education,” and “Collaborative Models for Changing State and Local Teacher Policies.” But really only one topic will be discussed – How to promote and profit from the privatization of public education in the United States.

Education Reform Now (ERN) is a non-profit advocacy group that lobbies state and federal public officials to support charter schools and tougher teacher evaluations and tenure requirements. In Washington state it supported a successful effort to lift the state ban on charter schools. While ERN claims to be left-leaning, in New Jersey it has been allied with Governor Chris Christie in efforts to weaken the teachers union, increase the number of years before teachers are eligible for tenure, and to evaluate teacher based on student performance on high-stakes standardized assessments.

It is no surprise that Cuomo, who has presidential ambitions, is lending his name to the retreat. Education Reform Now has donated $65,000 to Cuomo’s campaign chest since 2010 through a series of political action committee. Members of the ERN Board of Directors and founders of its “unofficially” affiliated political action committee, Democrats for Education Reform, also give individual contributions to Cuomo. They include John Petry, a board member for ERN, co-founder of DFER, founder and manager of Sessa Capital, and co-chair of New York City’s Success Academy Charter Schools. Other ERN/DFER deep pocket hedge fund operators who help bankroll Cuomo are Joel Greenblatt, founder of Gotham Capital and co-chair of the Success Academy network and Whitney Tilson, founder and managing partner of Kase Capital Management. A DFER representative described the retreat as an “opportunity for elected officials, advocacy leaders, and philanthropists to come together to discuss policy and political ideas to reform education.”

The board of directors of Education Reform Now reads like a list of the royalty of the hedge fund world, Singer writes. Quite a coup for a man with Presidential ambitions to gather so many of the super-rich in one location.

No wonder people refer to Andrew Cuomo as “Governor 1%.” He knows where his priorities lie. No, it is not with the children.

 

Categories Education Reform

How New York State Discourages Immigrant Children by Inappropriate Tests and Labels

By dianeravitch
April 21, 2014 //
19

A teacher wrote this comment in response to a post asking why English language learners, who barely know any English, are required to take the state English test.

 

 

I agree, it is painful to watch our English Language Learners struggle with these ridiculous tests, tests which label students 1,2,3,or 4. I have worked with refugees, many of whom arrive with little or no formal education, for over 20 years in what I consider to be one of the best schools in Buffalo. They, like all students, are much more than 1,2,3 or 4. The kids are remarkable in how they adjust to the cultural, academic, and linguistic demands of school. Their families are supportive and very appreciative of the what the school does to help them and their children. The staff is incredibly dedicated and rallies our school community to help provide many of the basics for our students’ and their families – clothes, food, boots, household items, books, school supplies, etc.

We have over thirty languages represented among our students, most are considered “low incidence languages” such as Burmese, Karen, Nepali, Somali, MaiMai, Karenni, Chin, Turkish, Kinyarwanda, and the list goes on… Some of our classrooms are over 70% ELL – English Language Learners. Of those non-ELLs in our school, many were English Language Learners who have tested proficient in years past or they come from homes of English Language Learners. The teachers are tuned in to the academic and language needs of these kids and provide safe, supportive, engaging, yet demanding environments for these students to learn and grow. There is not a teacher there who would trade a student in front of them for more “4′s.”

These immigrants have added to a culturally rich community, and have introduced their neighbors to amazing and interesting food, art, music, and traditions. Many of the students go on to great success in high school and beyond. Each June, when the local paper publishes pictures of all the local high school valedictorians and salutatorians, our former students are among them, English Language Learners who with enough time and support achieve great success. The operative word there is time.

Most research suggests that it takes 5-7 years (minimum) for English Language Learners to reach academic language proficiency – and that is for students with formal education in their first language. For all the “data” rage, it amazes me that this fact continues to be ignored by policy makers.

What does the state say? New York State labeled us a “PLA – Persistently Lowest Achieving” school in the first round of PLA schools. Why? Because we didn’t make AYP in ELA for our English Language Learners. Based on what? The N.Y. State tests.

Isn’t that obvious? The tests are used to label our kids as failing, our schools as low achieving, and our teachers as ineffective.

Categories Education Reform, English Language Learners, Students, Testing

Another Charter Teacher Tells Her Story: “Tame the Savages”

By dianeravitch
April 21, 2014 //
49

In response to “Confessions of a Teacher in a ‘No Excuses” Charter School,” this comment was posted:

 

Thank you for writing about your experience. I taught at a “no excuses” charter school in Brooklyn for a year. It was the most frustrating and disturbing experience of my life. The ridiculously punitive disciplinary system enforced by a teaching staff of young white recent college graduates felt like a mission to “tame the savages.” The students were forced to lose all individuality and become a white persons ideal of a perfect representation of the black race.

In the end, the school claims that 100% of the student to a four year college. What they don’t tell you about are the numerous students (particular males) that are discarded because they could not be tamed by demerits, detentions and suspensions for speaking without raising their hand or not looking at a classmate when they are speaking or slumping in their chair or speaking out of turn or resting their hand on their chin or talking in the hall.

I have always wanted to tell my story. I applaud you for doing it.

Categories Charter Schools

Julie Vassilatos: Something in Me Snapped Today…And…

By dianeravitch
April 21, 2014 //
19

Julie Vassilatos, a Chicago parent, blogs about school issues.

 

In one of her latest posts, she realized she could  no longer use the term “education reform” because it was a complete phony and misrepresentation of reality.

 

She writes:

 

Something in me snapped today and I realized that I am finished using the phrase “education reform.”

 

That’s how folks refer to the constellation of ideas firmly entrenched in the White House right now, upheld by almost every governor of every state, red and blue, and most mayors, notably our own. It includes the tenets that privatizing our schools will improve them, that the Common Core State Standards are the fix for all that ails our failing schools, and that testing our students more and more will raise test scores.

 

But this, truly, is not “reform.” Some of these are ideas that have been implemented for 25 years all over the country to little effect.

 

This is the status quo.

 

So I’m not going to call it reform anymore.

 

I’m going to call it what it is. Corporate control of education.

 

 

I want you to read her whole post so I hate to print too much of it. But it is so on-target, so clear-headed, so obvious that I am going to have to give you even more to think about, then go open the link and read how this Chicago mom went straight to the heart of the beast:

 

In every instance, every plank in the platform, every element of this effort can be traced back to cash–flowing into the coffers of very rich corporate entities and individuals.

 

Like Pearson, one of the testing companies that is creating the tests and the test prep materials, all new and improved and Common Core aligned, and who lobbies Congress to mandate more tests.

 

Like Reed Hastings, Netflix CEO, a huge proponent of charters and innovative uses of technology in schools. What kind of technology does he advocate as the best fix for students today? In Learning Lab modules at his Rocketship Charters kids sit at a computer monitor, streaming video content for 100 minutes per day.

 

Or Rupert Murdoch. He is a cheerleader for what he calls a $500 billion industry of education technology including content and assessment.

 

Or Bill Gates. His push for the Common Core, the inBloom initiative to harness students’ big data, and his vision for the classrooms of the future, which will be heavily dependent on his own technologies.

 

The proponents of this snake oil have managed to control the rhetoric for so long that we don’t even blink when they say that their education plan is “the civil rights issue of our time.” They say this a lot.

 

So if we wish to stand up against the corporate control model we are not only anti-reform but anti-civil rights.

 

They say they want “excellent teachers,” and by this they mean they want to get rid of union teachers and replace them with uncertified, pensionless staff handling up to 50 kids at once who receive their education from handheld devices or monitors.

 

They say they want “school choice,” which usually means less choice: families can’t choose their neighborhood schools that the city has underfunded to the point of death throes, pouring its available money instead into privately supported charters.

 

 

I don’t know Julie, but I know this: She has seen through the sham rhetoric and the phony claims. She has seen through the facade to the internal workings of a machine that hurts children, closes community schools, and will ultimately do grievous harm to our democracy.

 

She writes:

 

Enough little bits of reality have popped out that folks are starting to notice. The stranglehold grip on the narrative held by the corporate education controllers is beginning to weaken. Because we can all see with our own eyes that it isn’t actually civil rights for kids to have their school closed or subjected to a turnaround. It isn’t actually higher order critical thinking to bubble in bubbles. And it isn’t education and it isn’t reform to work toward the dismantling of public schools in our city and our country.

 

It’s stale old rhetoric that is losing its power. And it can no longer conceal the naked emperor, nor the naked greed of the corporate power grabbers.

 

Thanks, Julie, for seeing through the PR baloney.

 

I am so tired of the media accepting the corporate bosses’ claim that they are “reformers.” Listen up, reporters. They are NOT reformers. Their program is the corporate control of education.

Categories Charter Schools, Corporate Reformers, Education Industry, Education Reform, Privatization, Testing

Chile: Dismantling the Most Pro-Market Education System in the World

By dianeravitch
April 20, 2014 //
39

The following post was written by Mario Waissbluth, President of Educación 2020 Foundation, a Chilean citizen’s movement founded in 2008. Its latest reform proposals (in Spanish) are called “La Reforma Educativa que Chile Necesita”, and were published in April 2013. A book on this subject (in Spanish) is also available. These proposals were mostly adopted by and included in the educational program of the recently elected government of Michelle Bachelet, and are starting to be implemented now.

Valentina Quiroga (32) was one of the student founders of this organization and is now Undersecretary of Education.

Although Educación 2020 remains as a fully independent movement, the positions stated thereon are in many ways similar to those of the current government.

Chile: Dismantling the most pro-market education system in the world

Mario Waissbluth

In August 2013 I wrote in this blog a three piece series, called “Chile: The most pro-market system in the world.” The first described the origins and structure of the system. The second explained its educational and social results, good and bad. The third pointed the way Chile should choose to get out of this mess. If the reader wants to fully understand this situation (the most “Milton Friedmanish” in the world), incomparable with any other country, it is advisable to read those beforehand.
Although some might disagree, from both extremes of the political spectrum, we are happy to inform that the proposals we made are very similar to those being implemented now. However, the political, financial and cultural obstacles will be formidable.

Bachelet was elected by a large margin of voters and has a majority in both the House and the Senate. Nonetheless, positions within the government’s coalition are not fully homogeneous. In addition, there is an impending tax reform that is vital for funding these reforms, costing no less than 2% of gross national product in gradual increments.

Of course, many powerful companies, with strong lobbying capability, are not happy about that. The educational reforms will include dozens of new laws and budgets, covering from preschool to tertiary education.

A warning for American readers. I am fully aware that many of you are criticizing charter schools, profit, teaching to the test, skimming, and the destruction of the teaching profession. I myself have cited Diane Ravitch’s books many times. But you have to be aware that, after 30 years of neoliberal schemes in Chile, charter schools subsidized by government are a majority (55%). One third of them are religious. Two thirds of them are for-profit, and one half of them charge anywhere from US$ 10 to US$ 180 a month on top of the subsidy, therefore skimming quite efficiently.

Teaching to the test, with consequences, has been taken to the greatest extreme imaginable. Policies to destruct public education are too numerous to mention here, and the result is that this system is in acute crisis financially, managerially and emotionally. The teaching profession is in far worse condition than in the US, by any statistical criteria.

In this situation, it is simply not possible to pretend now that charter schools could vanish. Less so if millions of parents have chosen to send their children to highly segregated charters, in a country whose social inequalities are far worse than those in the US, which I know are ugly by themselves.

In short, if the US is navigating towards hell, we are already there and are trying to get out without sinking the ship. It is a very different situation.

The most difficult hurdle in front of us is not legal, political or financial, but cultural. Parents have been led to believe, for decades, that the “best” school is that which is segregated, both academically and socioeconomically. We have a true cultural and educational apartheid. Therefore, the changes will have to be gradual and careful. At the same time, the government is sending strong signals: this is not going to be a minor adjustment but a major change in the overall orientation of the school system; not to make it fully state owned, but simply to resemble the vast majority of OECD countries, probably in a way similar to that of Belgium or The Netherlands. The whole strategy is described in more detail in the above mentioned entries of this blog,

Recently, the Education Minister, Mr. Nicolás Eyzaguirre (with a powerful political and financial experience and profile) has announced the first wave of legislation, to be sent to Congress in May, whose details are now being drafted. They include, amongst other things, the radical ending of academic selection and skimming, the gradual elimination of cost-sharing (to reduce social skimming), the phasing out of 3,500 for-profit schools (to be converted into non-profits), the radical pruning of the standardized testing system, the strengthening and expansion of the public network of schools (so that they can compete in a better way with the charters) and a major reform to the teaching profession, from its training (completely unregulated so far), to improving salaries and working conditions.

This is an evolving situation. I will be most happy (if I can) to answer questions through this blog, and also to inform you about new developments in the future.

Categories International, Privatization, Segregation , Racial Isolation and Integration, Standardized Testing, Students, Teachers and Teaching, Vouchers

Swedish Experiment in Privatizing Schools Floundering

By dianeravitch
April 20, 2014 //
14

Scholars such as Henry Levin have earlier warned that the Swedish experiment in privatization is promoting greater social segregation and not improving education.

 

Reader Chiara Duggan adds this recent Reuters article, with her comment on the failure of market-based reform. Will anyone tell Arne Duncan or will he continue to follow the guidance of (Sir) Michael Barber of Pearson?

 

Duggan writes:

 

“http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/12/10/us-sweden-schools-insight-idUSBRE9B905620131210

 

“Good piece on Sweden’s experiment with privatizing education:

 

“In a country with the fastest growing economic inequality of any OECD nation, basic aspects of the deregulated school market are now being re-considered, raising questions over private sector involvement in other areas like health.

 

Two-decades into its free-market experiment, about a quarter of once staunchly Socialist Sweden’s secondary school students now attend publically-funded but privately run schools, almost twice the global average.

 

Nearly half of those study at schools fully or partly owned by private equity firms.

 

Ahead of elections next year, politicians of all stripes are questioning the role of such firms, accused of putting profits first with practices like letting students decide when they have learned enough and keeping no record of their grades.

 

The opposition Green Party – like the Moderates long-time supporters of privately run schools but now backing the clamp-down – issued a public apology in a Swedish daily last month headlined “Forgive us, our policy led our schools astray”.

 

“I give the Greens huge credit for that.

 

“Can you IMAGINE a US political party writing “forgive us, our policy led our schools astray”? 🙂

 

“Never, ever happen.

 

“In 20 years when there are no public schools left we’ll get “mistakes were made”- by some unidentified person or group of people. :)”

Categories International, Privatization, Vouchers

A Remarkable Teaching Experience

By dianeravitch
April 20, 2014 //
11

Read this teacher’s account of her experience in the D.C. public schools
before they descended into test-prep obsessive policies.

 

She raised the money to take her class to her native state of Montana. And
what a trip they had!

 

After you read it, ask yourself this question: Would they have learned more by prepping for the
standardized tests or by their extended and amazing field trip?

Categories Testing

More on Chile’s Education Reforms

By dianeravitch
April 20, 2014 //
4

I wrote to Professor Mario Waissbluth, who has previously written for the blog, about the new turn of events in Chile.

In his previous posts on the blog, Professor Waissbluth explained that Chile’s free-market system had been an educational disaster.

In his last post, before the recent elections, he wrote:

 

Previously,
I wrote in this blog a 3-part sequence describing the Chilean
educational system, its consequences, proposing some ways to run
away from this malignant design. Recently, Universidad de Chile
published the results of a survey on adult literacy and numeracy
skills, following the exact methodology of SIALS, the Second
International Adult Literacy Survey published in
1998. Within
the survey data, it is shown that 15 years ago, 45% of young people
in the segment between 15 and 24 years, i.e., the generation that
was graduating or recently graduated from high school, had no
comprehension of language and arithmetic… whatsoever, not even
the ability to read and understand a very simple text or balance a
checkbook. Today, this same age segment shows, tragically and
exactly, the same results. With one of the highest high school
attendances in the world, we now find that these young people spent
12 years sitting passively at a desk, not achieving improvement
even in their most basic skills.
Even worse, in the segment of higher
education graduates, only 10% show adequate or complete
understanding of prose and numeracy, similar to what happened 15
years ago. This is the result of market system debauchery and
completely unregulated exploitation of students who pay and/or get
indebted to obtain these spurious titles. So far, only 20% of
higher education programs, most of them for-profit, have some sort
of voluntary accreditation.
This does not happen by chance, it
is the result of a market-based educational model, with extreme
segregation based on academic and socioeconomic skimming,
curricular overload, with students spending most of their time
training as parrots to answer standardized tests, with public
education and the teaching career virtually demolished.The basic
organizational and financial rules of our model do not exist
anywhere in the world and are full of perverse incentives.

 

Happily, the anti-privatization reformers won the election, and changes are in store.

 

Professor Waissbluth has promised to write a longer description of what is happening in Chile.

 

The leadership of the new government, he says, comes from the student protest movement.

 

The rollback of privatization is beginning, but there will not be a sharp break. The privatized charters continue to receive government subsidies, but other forms of privatization will be ended.

 

All of this is very good news indeed.

 

Chile’s love affair with privatization has ended, and the reform movement to restore a healthy and equitable education system in Chile has begun.

 

Professor Waissbluth sent this response in the middle of last night:

 

Hi Diane:
We are happy that the educational reform program is, almost to the letter, the one we, Educacion 2020, proposed a year ago 🙂
The new Undersecretary, 32 years old, is one of the student founders of our movement, she is the lady that drafted the program, and the Minister’s staff includes several former presidents of student federations… plus some key members of our own organization, and I run some risk of it being somewhat dismembered 😦
The program does not end government subsidies to private schools (charter, which constitute almost 55% of the system) but it does end (gradually) the fact that a) most schools charge a copayment to parents, of differing amounts, thus effectively segregating and skimming socioeconomically b) that some of them are for profit c) that they do all types of academic skimming, this last practice including many public high schools. There are yet no specific details,( and they will be complex pieces of legislation) and we shall know them in a month, and these are only a few samples of future reforms. The fights in Congress wil be awesome, but the gov has a slight majority in both House and Senate. I can write a column for you, probably linking it with my three former columns to make it more understandable, or as you wish. Or maybe it should be again a series, since the reforms will be coming gradually, from preschool to tertiary level, and they will be most complex. It is not easy to “change course” radically in the most market oriented system in the world without sinking the ship.
I am happy to say that my 2013 book “Cambio de Rumbo” (Change of Course) is now on its 2nd edition, and the previous one, from 2010 “Se acabo el recreo” (School Break is Over) just entered its 5th edition 🙂

 

Mario Waissbluth

 

And he added this comment this morning on the blog, in response to a reader:

 

We are fully aware that non-profit charters have many spurious practices as well. But you have to be aware that a) 55% of students are enrolled in for profit and non profit charters (far far more than in the US), b) after 30 years of systematic demolition policies, our public education system has virtually gone down the drain, seriously mismanaged (far far worse than in the US). A whole program for the rebirth of public schooling is being designed, it will take a few years to materialize, and for the time being this is the only practical solution. You do not revert 30 years of the most commercialized school system in the world by the stroke of one law, without breaking havoc on the system (beggining with the 55% of parents which have their kids in charters). Today, our key policy is to combat skimming, teaching to the test, and segregation, which are the worst in the world. If you wish, we are trying to go “the dutch way” and we honestly do not see any other solution. If you have a better one, we will be happy to hear about it.

 

As you read his comments, you can see the goal of the privatizers here: to create a critical mass of privately managed charters that will destroy public education, turning our public schools into dumping grounds, and making it difficult if not impossible to reverse the damage.

Categories International

Peter Greene: TNTP’s Brilliant Néw Idea

By dianeravitch
April 20, 2014 //
5

If you have an eye for quackery, as Peter Greene does, you will never run out of material in the world of reform tomfoolery.

In this post, Greene has fun with TNTP’s brilliant new way to identify better teachers: multiple-choice test. I kid you not.

TNTP used to be called The Néw Teacher Project. According to legend, it was founded by Michelle Rhee, although partisans of Wendy Kopp say it was her idea and she asked Michelle to do it. I really don’t know. Maybe someone who was there can let us in on the true story.

So Greene discovers that TNTP has this idea that a multiple-choice test can do what nano human can do. Identify a future talented teacher. He runs with it.

Categories Humor, Teachers and Teaching, Testing
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