Archives for the month of: January, 2014
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Why Kill Néw Bedford High School?

By dianeravitch
January 24, 2014 //
13

EduShyster tells a sad story of the utter irresponsibility and–oh, I can’t think of a better word than “idiocy”–of Massachsetts officials.

Local and state officials are “turning around” Néw Bedford High School by firing half the teachers.

“Ahoy, matey! That great looming specter in the distance is not a mighty white whale but New Bedford High School being turned upside down and shaken till 50% of its teachers fall out. School turnaround time has come to this scenic, hard-scrabble seaport and our trusty state education captains have launched a full sail operation to convince New Bedford residents that throwing half of the high school’s teachers overboard is the only way to reach the distant shores of Excellence. But are the captains on a fool’s errand that could end up capsizing the ship of public education in the Whaling City?”

What they do not admit is that such actions have failed everywhere else. What they do not admit is that the most successful turnaround was Brockton High School, where no one was fired but the school instead collaborated on literacy across all subjects.

So what gives?

Faddishness. Bad policy. Slavish devotion to Race to the Top’s failed remedies. Maybe some consultants making a bundle to “turnaround” the school by firing everyone, whether it makes sense or not.

When will we see an end to this nonsensical charade?

Categories Closing schools, Corporate Reformers, Massachusetts

Bruce Baker on the Future of Independent Schools

By dianeravitch
January 24, 2014 //
20

Bruce Baker, our nation’s pre-eminent truth-teller and statistical whiz-kid, here inquires into a gathering of researchers who assembled to help private independent schools chart their future course.

The president of the National Association of Independent Schools, John Chubb, is a political scientist well known for his support for vouchers and his antipathy for teachers’ unions.

From my days at the conservative Hoover Institution, where John and I served together on the Koret Task Force, a group of eminent conservative intellectuals, I have a certain affection for John. But of course, I disagree with him on almost every significant policy issue, be it testing, vouchers, charters, or every other element of the new “reform” agenda.

In Baker’s post, he questions what values these researchers will add to the world of independent private schools. Many have loudly spoken out in opposition to small classes, but small classes are the trump card of independent private schools. Many of them boast classes of 12 or 14 students, at a time when public schools see their class sizes soaring past 30, in some cases past 40 students in the same room. Too many, certainly, to sit around a table and banter with the instructor.

Reading his piece reminds me of the vast gulf between the world of public schools and the world of private schools, where teachers are not judged by student test scores, where standardized tests are seldom given except for entry exams, where schools have munificent programs in the arts and beautiful playing fields….and, and, and.

So many of the “reform” elites send their own children to such wonderful schools but then argue that Other People’s Children need regimented, scripted schools where such luxuries as they enjoy are unavailable.

What’s sauce for the Goose is not available for the Gander.

Categories Education Reform

Pennsylvania: Governor Corbett’s Attack on Higher Education

By dianeravitch
January 24, 2014 //
7

In an article on Salon, writer James Cersonsky describes the state GOP’s attack on universities.

He calls it “the Enron-esque Higher Ed Plan: Fire Tenured Faculty to Fund Students Dorms.”

In Tom Corbett’s Pennsylvania, he says, if it’s public and it’s education, burn it down!

The same can be said for K-12 education.

Corbett is up for re-election.

The good news is that his poll numbers are down. Only 36% of voters approve of his performance, and about as many support him. All of the Democratic contenders have higher numbers in a poll published last month.

 

 

 

Categories Higher Education, Pennsylvania

Tennessee Charter Leader: Diversity Is Not My Problem

By dianeravitch
January 24, 2014 //
44

Across the south and elsewhere, charters are turning into a force for resegregation–not only by race but by language, class, and disability. They are the ultimate weapon today for those who hope to roll back the Brown decision.

In Tennesssee, Chris Barbic said that diversity was not his problem. If society is segregated, there is nothing he can do to change it.

That is shirking responsibility. Society segregated people by race and class, and one if the responsibilities of PUBLIC schools is to overcome those divisions and create citizens who know how to live together as equals.

But as Barbic reminds us, that’s not the job of charters.

Categories Segregation , Racial Isolation and Integration

A Hero of Public Education in Michigan: Ellen Cogen Lipton

By dianeravitch
January 23, 2014 //
13

State Representative Ellen Cogen Lipton has bravely fought for public education and for the children of Michigan in a hostile environment, in a state where free-market fundamentalists control the governorship and the legislature.

She has been unable to hold back hostile legislation and anti-civic policies, but she has actively resisted those who encourage the plundering of precious taxpayer dollars for corporate benefit, to the detriment of children.

In this interview, conducted by Eclectablog, she describes how the legislature created the so-called Educational Achievement Authority and how she was stonewalled when she tried to get information about what was happening to children in the EAA. She filed a Freedom of Information Act to get the information the EAA refused, and after a long delay, it released nearly 2,000 pages. That is called a data dump, where they give you so much information that they hope you can’t figure it out.

The state boasts about the EAA, but what Rep. Lipton discovered was appalling. This is the way Eclectablog described EAA:

“What has become increasingly apparent is that the administration of the EAA is in complete disarray. They have incredible discipline issues, special education kids are being summarily removed from the program in violation of state and federal law, and they appear to be manipulating testing to both make their outcomes look better than they are and also to justify taking over schools. Instead of being a model for educating kids, classroom instruction is being handled by inadequately trained graduates from the Teach for America program which gives “teachers” five weeks of training before sending them into the classroom. Text books and other teaching methods appear to have been tossed aside in favor of software programs where the student interacts with a laptop computer rather than a teacher.”

The interviewer for Eclectablog writes:

“On the forefront of this effort to hold the EAA accountable and to make sure they are actually achieving the results they say they are before we take the system statewide is Representative Ellen Cogen Lipton (D-Huntington Woods). She has been repeatedly rebuffed by the administration of the EAA as well as the Department of Education, forcing her to pay several thousands of dollars out of her own pocket for Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) data that should have been provided to a three-time elected state legislator for the asking. She and Senator Hoon-Yung Hopgood (D-Taylor) have, through their FOIA requests, been given over 2,000 pages of information in what amounts to a data dump intended to overwhelm them with so much documentation that they couldn’t find the information that they are looking for. They have, however, begun the process of organizing the documents and have them on a searchable website called InsideTheEAA.com.”

Then follows a fascinating conversation, and you realize that Rep. Lipton “gets it.” She sees that what is happening in Michigan is the same as what happened in Louisiana. she sees a national pattern. She sees that Broad, Walton, and Gates don’t like democracy. It is too messy. They like organizations where one person runs everything, and what he does fits their mold.

This is part of the interview:

Q. “He [a state senator] got something like 880 documents in mid-August. How many did you get, you got more than that, right?

A. “Yeah, I got about 1,700 pages.

Q. “It’s like drinking from a fire hose. I was on your site and it’s clear what they’ve done: they want to make it so that it’s impossible to analyze it, basically.

A. “Yeah, that’s sort of the game plan. But there are certain threads that you can definitely glean from the documents. One thread that is abundantly clear is that the Broad Foundation, and specifically Eli Broad, was and still is intimately involved in the creation as well as the carrying out of the EAA.

Q. “How are they doing this?

A. “The Broad Foundation, before the EAA opened, contributed something like $25 million and I believe they’ve made a subsequent grant to the EAA. It appears that he was instrumental in, if not the hiring of John Covington, he was certainly…

Q. “Who was a Broad Fellow, correct?

A. “That’s right, a graduate of the Broad Superintendent’s Academy. There are some emails that suggest that the Broad Foundation put his name forward and there doesn’t seem to be any other names that you can find. There doesn’t seem to be this sort of extensive interview process. Some of the emails from that time are sort of, “This is the person that it’s going to be”.

Q. “What’s interesting is that, when you look at this in a broader context, in terms of what the Broad Foundation and the Gates Foundation and the Walton Foundation, to name a few, have done in other states, there are similarities. The money that they spend, it sort of follows a very interesting trend line. They will go into states with opportunities for state take over districts or where there is mayoral control. So, you’ll see the Broad Foundation in the Louisiana Recovery District, for example.

Q. “Challenged places, in other words.

A. “Mmm hmm. In Philadelphia, places like that. Instead of — and, again, this is my opinion — instead of using their money to fund initiatives that we know work, you have them spending an enormous amount of money to create an infrastructure like an EAA — in Louisiana you have the Louisiana Recovery District — that aggregates control in a single person.

Q. “You begin to wonder, “Why is that?” and then you begin to look at the broader context of corporate reform in education, you see that that seems to be the M.O. Why have to work through all of the messiness of this thing called ‘democracy’? Oh, my heavens! School boards can be so insufferable! I mean, we actually have to work with our community!

A. “You have this sense of this sort of disdain for the democratic process. Because, think about the local school board. That defines democracy for a lot of people, right? I mean, people will say to me, “I’m not political. I couldn’t care less about politics.” And I’ll ask them, “Do you care about your schools?” and they’ll say, “Why heavens yes, my children are in school.” “Do you go to school board meetings?” “Absolutely!”

Q. “So they are involved.

A. “Absolutely. And the concept that these corporate “reformers” loathe is that very concept. So, how do you get around that? Well, first of all, you convince people that the current system is rotten. And you spend a lot of money to do that. And they can, right? These are organizations…”

Q. “That are super-wealthy.”

Categories Corporate Reformers, Education Industry, Honor Roll, Michigan

John Austin, President of the Michigan State Board of Education, Writes the Readers of This Blog

By dianeravitch
January 23, 2014 //
15

I have posted several articles about Governor Rick Snyder’s all-out assault on public education, most recently, this one earlier today. Some 80% of charters operate for profit, fiscally troubled districts have been handed over to for-profit charter corporations (with poor track records) that extract as much in profit as the district’s deficit (this happens only in majority African-American districts), schools and districts are incentivized to poach students from each other to get the money they need to function (and waste millions of taxpayer dollars advertising for students from other districts). In addition, the governor created the ill-named Education Achievement Authority, a super district made up of the state’s lowest-performing schools and overseen by John Covington. Covington, trained in the unaccredited Broad Academy, previously was superintendent of Kansas City, which lost its accreditation under his leadership. Tomorrow, I will post an article containing interviews with teachers who work in the EAA and describe it as a dangerous environment, unsafe for teachers and students alike.

Governor Snyder is achieving his goal: dissolving public education as a civic obligation and turning it into a free-for-all marketplace.

In response to a post about Governor Snyder’s actions, the blog received this comment from the president of the elected Michigan State Board of Education. The state board is dominated by Democrats (like Austin) but seems unable to slow the governor’s wrecking ball. The most outspoken critic of the Snyder assault on public schools is State Representative Ellen Cogen Lipton. In a few minutes, I will post an interview with Representative Lipton about the EAA.

John Austin writes:

John Austin, President of Michigan State Board of Education here. We do have an unfortunate proliferation in Michigan of new charter and cyber schools, both good, mediocre and truly bad at educating children. The legislature’s, and to date the Governor’s unwillingness to insist on quality control in new school creation, to ensure they educate kids, and the fueling of a wild-west free market of largely for-profit new school creation is doing damage both financially, and educationally to all our schools and children.

The EAA was an effort, well-intentioned, to create a functional and effective state turnaround district to improve performance in our worst schools. Unfortunately, it too was tied up in knots, when legislation to codify it was loaded up with ornaments of the unlimited new school creation policy being pushed last year. It also has had real growing pains, problems and transparency issues.

However, different from the account my friend Ellen Cogen Lipton seemed to suggest in the Electabog article, the State Board of Education twice asked Dr. Covington to come and discuss progress or lack thereof with us, and he certainly did so, and we had as recently as last September a useful and robust public discussion of all the issues– hopefully towards helping the EAA work better, and do better with the legitimate concerns raised by Rep Lipton and many others.

Categories Charter Schools, For-Profit, Michigan

Politico: A Wish List for Obama’s State of the Union Address

By dianeravitch
January 23, 2014 //
18

Politico.com asked a number of people to suggest what President Obama should say in his annual State of the Union Address and what he was likely to say instead. Yours truly weighed in below. You will see that I recommended that he toss out Race to the Top as a failed initiative and get a new Secretary of Education. But just take a look at the headline summary of my written remarks. Since most of those who were asked to comment represent the status quo, they concluded “Most suggestions line up pretty well with existing policy preferences.” My suggestions did not.

“By Libby A. Nelson

With help from Caitlin Emma, Maggie Severns, Nirvi Shah and Stephanie Simon

WHAT ADVOCATES WANT TO HEAR IN STATE OF THE UNION: The White House met with education groups a week ago in preparation for this year’s speech. Past State of the Union addresses have pushed pre-K, college completion and Race to the Top. What does 2014 hold? This wishlist from education policy analysts and advocates might have a familiar ring: Most suggestions line up pretty well with existing policy preferences.

On Common Core: The Fordham Institute’s Michael Brickman hopes Obama won’t breathe a word about the Common Core. [http://bit.ly/1hjPxXr] If anything, Obama should apologize for taking credit for the Common Core in 2012, said Chad Aldeman of Bellwether Education Partners. “He should acknowledge the federal government’s role in encouraging states to adopt the Common Core but clearly and unequivocally state that, while he personally supports the Common Core because it’s a high-quality and common set of standards, he never has and never will tell a state or local community which standards it should follow.” Anne Hyslop of the New American Foundation agreed: “The most effective champions for Common Core these days are not coming from Washington, D.C., and certainly not from the administration.”

-What else should he avoid? Maybe he should stay away from education altogether, said Michael Petrilli of Fordham. “The federal government hasn’t done such a stellar job, so let’s keep mum in the speech,” he said. Kris Perry of the First Five Years fund: “We hope the President doesn’t declare ‘mission accomplished’ on early childhood education, simply because of the good news coming from the appropriations bill, or that he’s scaling down his requests on early childhood. Now is the time to ramp up our efforts, not to pack it in.”

-So what should he say? Possible policy goals: Ending childhood hunger due to its inherent link to improving educational success (Billy Shore of Share Our Strength). He could talk about the great role community colleges play in the development of a healthy middle class (David Baime, American Association of Community Colleges). Richard Barth of the KIPP Foundation would love to see Obama reiterate his goal of increasing college graduation rates for low-income students. And he could back off of his administration’s push to rate teachers based at least in part on student test scores, said Mark Naison , a history professor at Fordham University and co-founder of the Badass Teachers Association. Or he could take a stronger position in favor of education reform and accountability for students, said Hanna Skandera, New Mexico’s state education chief and the chairwoman of Chiefs for Change.

-Noelle Ellerson of AASA: The Superintendents Association, wants Obama to direct Congress to get back to working on reauthorizing ESEA. And the right new version of the law could encompass most of the president’s education initiatives, such as early education and education technology, minus the competition. “Rather than siphon off political chits and divide resources (political support and funding) by creating stand alone programs, focus on the federal flagship K-12 program, ESEA.”

-A new speechwriter? Education historian and activist Diane Ravitch dashed off her own version of an ideal Obama speech: “I am canceling all the unproductive mandates associated with Race to the Top, which have caused teaching to the test and wasted billions of dollars. I am delighted to announce that Arne Duncan, who served nobly in my first administration, has agreed to become the American ambassador to Micronesia.”

-The big picture: American Federation of Teachers President Randi Weingarten has a 30,000-foot goal for the address: “Rather than the yearly overtesting of our students, I’d like to see us deeply examine and embrace what other countries that outperform us in education do: hands-on learning, professional development and wraparound services.”

Categories Corporate Reformers, Obama, Race to the Top

“What Are We Willing to Stand Up For?” Why Parents Opt Out of Testing

By dianeravitch
January 23, 2014 //
9

Rebecca Mead has written a brilliant blog post for “The New Yorker” explaining why parents plan to opt their children out of NewYork’s Common Core testing in 2014.

It Is as succinct an explanation as I have read, and it is vivid because the writer is a parent in a progressive public school that teaches students to think for themselves. The principal of the Brooklyn New School has spoken out against the cruel and unusual demands of the tests but she must comply, by law.

The parents, however, have a special interest: their children.

Mead begins:

“Anna Allanbrook, the principal of the Brooklyn New School, a public elementary school in Carroll Gardens, has long considered the period of standardized testing that arrives every spring to be a necessary, if unwelcome, phase of the school year. Teachers and kids would spend limited time preparing for the tests. Children would gain familiarity with “bubbling in,” a skill not stressed in the school’s progressive, project-based curriculum. They would become accustomed to sitting quietly and working alone—a practice quite distinct from the collaboration that is typically encouraged in the school’s classrooms, where learners of differing abilities and strengths work side by side. (My son is a third grader at the school.) Come the test days, kids and teachers would get through them, and then, once the tests were over, they would get on with the real work of education.

“Last spring’s state tests were an entirely different experience, for children and for teachers. Teachers invigilating the exams were shocked by ambiguous test questions, based, as they saw it, on false premises and wrongheaded educational principles. (One B.N.S. teacher, Katherine Sorel, eloquently details her objections on WNYC’s SchoolBook blog.) Others were dismayed to see that children were demoralized by the relentlessness of the testing process, which took seventy minutes a day for six days, with more time allowed for children with learning disabilities. One teacher remarked that, if a tester needs three days to tell if a child can read “you are either incompetent or cruel. I feel angry and compromised for going along with this.” Another teacher said that during each day of testing, at least one of her children was reduced to tears. A paraprofessional—a classroom aide who works with children with special needs—called the process “state-sanctioned child abuse.” One child with a learning disability, after the second hour of the third day, had had enough. “He only had two questions left, but he couldn’t keep going,” a teacher reported. “He banged his head on the desk so hard that everyone in the room jumped.”

Mead gets it. Read the whole article. Testing has spun out of control. It is consuming time and resources needed for teaching and learning.

This can’t continue. When little children are tested more than those who take the bar, you must know something is terribly wrong.

The school asks its fifth-grade students: “What are we willing to stand up for?”

The parents will answer this spring, not only at the Brooklyn New School, but in many schools and districts and states.

Categories Common Core, Parents, Pearson, Resistance, Students, Testing

Peter Greene: John King Said What??

By dianeravitch
January 23, 2014 //
10

I didn’t plan to say anything at all about Néw York Commissioner John King’s tasteless commentary on Martin Luther King Day. He twisted logic and common sense to claim that adopting Common Core was somehow a fulfillment of Dr. King’s noble vision of justice and equality. I thought it best to let it pass unremarked.

But Peter Greene, who has a keen sense of language, literacy, and simple decency decided not to let it pass. He was taken aback by our state commissioner’s ideogical posturing.

Read it and….well, do. Close reading.

Categories Common Core

EduShyster Takes a Ride on a Rocketship and Finds Miraculous Visions

By dianeravitch
January 23, 2014 //
8

In this post, EduShyster surveys the progress of the Rocketship charter chain, which aspires to enroll 1 million children in its low-cost, high-tech fleet of schools.

She writes:

“The audacious exercise in audaciousness was off to an audacious start. Fueled by an explosive combo of Silicon Valley funding and free advertising from *journalists* who found the use of rocket-related terminology irresistible, the super cool new rocketships blasted off towards the stratosphere. Before long, ground control envisioned a whole fleet—no wait—a whole galaxy of rocketships, each populated by rocketeers excelling like never before. Why not eight schools serving up to 4,000 children in Milwaukee. Why not schools in Tennessee, Louisiana, Indiana and Washington D.C.? Why not 2,000 schools in 50 cities, serving 1 million rocketeers?

“But space colonization turned out to be rather more challenging than expected. For one thing, sending all of those rocketships into orbit was an expensive business, meaning that new rocketships had to be launched continuously in order to pay for the ones that were already soaring. The mothership was a hungry beast too, and required each school to fork over a 20% facility fee and a 15% management fee. In an old school school that $$ would have gone to pay for outmoded freight like teachers and their salaries. But once again the mothership had thought of everything. The space-age solution: Boost student to teacher ratios from 40:1 to 50:1 and *supplement* their numbers with plenty of minimum-wage-ish computer lab aids on hand to oversee the *individualized* instruction.”

But that’s not all. Big plans ahead to expand the empire and reach 2 billion customers, er, students, with programming delivered to cell phones. Really.

Categories Charter Schools, Education Industry, Technology, Computers
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