Eclectablog has been posting a series of interviews with teachers in Michigan Governor Rick Snyder’s Education Achievement Authority. This is a statewide district intended to “save” the state’s lowest performing schools.
In this account, a teacher tells how he was suddenly fired without notice and describes what happens in the EAA.
It is dangerous for a teacher to spill the beans. He or she will be fired. Even after firing, it is dangerous because speaking out can mar future job prospects.
An AP teacher sent me the following letter. I don’t know the answer. Can anyone answer her question? Maybe not, maybe we are all in the dark. It does not seem beyond belief that Pearson and the College Board are closely collaborating. Is there more afoot than collaboration? Shouldn’t they be competitors?
Here is the communication I received:
“Hi Diane,
Just wanted to bring this to your attention. As a member of the AP English listserv, er, college board-monitored discussion board, I received this message yesterday. When I logged in to follow the discussion thread, it had been removed. If true, it is important information that AP teachers have not yet been informed about. Several AP teachers, from AP Biology to AP Language, noted that their students reported “weird” questions on the exams, which are similar to the comments that have been made about the Pearson 3-8 exams in New York.
“I can’t find any proof written anywhere except that when I registered this year for the AP National Conference in Las Vegas, I called AP central about a question I had because Pearson was communicating with me about needing a code or something to complete my application and the young man on the phone said “Oh Pearson is handling AP now and GED so you’ll have to call this number. He said the website etc. would remain on College Board but that it was really “a separate entity” now. I am anxious to hear what they have to say at the National Conference. I fear we are going to see a major change in philosophy and more alignment with Common Core. It’s hard to pin them down. They are sneaky about things. Almost Everything our school does now is governed by Pearson. We are mostly government funded–Navajo school but it is a trickle down process. What happens with us will eventually worm its way into every school. We are the guinea pigs. They are updating our internet connections this summer so that we have more room for all these tests that will be taught online. 3rd graders will be taught to type on the computer all their work so they can do the tests, as well as everyone else. They are practicing because eventually the tests will become the determiner for passing the kid on. They say in 2 years but they keep moving it up.
“The above is from a recent conversation on a literary-minded thread on LinkedIn. Can anyone speak to this matter of Pearson and the CollegeBoard as bedfellows to the extent that things may be changing, and not for the better? Heck, I wonder if I am wrong for even posting this thread here…”
Leonie Haimson, leader of New York City’s Class Size Matters, reports that Governor Andrew Cuomo has named a panel to study the implementation of the Common Core standards in the state. The panel, she says, is stacked with supporters of Common Core.
She writes:
No early childhood experts, elementary or special ed teachers on commission, which is unfortunate because these are the people whose critiques have been most sharp.
Litow chair already wrote an oped in favor http://bit.ly/1ea69ge
Russo is one of the few Superintendents in entire state on record in favor http://bit.ly/1ea6wHP
He was booed by parents & teachers at a Common Core forum http://bit.ly/1ea6wHP and says CC curriculum “one of best things I’ve seen in education in 31, 32 yrs”
Dan Weisberg head of TNTP has received $23M from Gates Foundation including $7M in last yr alone http://bit.ly/1bDFNH8
Gates has spent >$170M on the Common Core and will not go down lightly http://wapo.st/1bDHggw
Cuomo names Common Core panel as rollout remains under fire
by Philissa Cramer on February 7, 2014
More in Albany ReportMORE IN ALBANY REPORT
Gov. Andrew Cuomo has named the members of a panel that he has asked to advise him about the way the state is implementing the Common Core standards.
The 11 panel members include state legislators, educators from New York City and upstate, an upstate parent, business leaders, and advocates. Linda Darling-Hammond, the Stanford University education professor who advised President Barack Obama on education, is also on the panel.
Cuomo announced in his budget address in January that he would convene the panel, after remaining silent for months amid growing concerns about the state’s rollout of the new standards. Parents and educators from across the state have said schools did not get enough time or support to adjust to the standards before being held accountable for having students meet them.
The panel’s work gained new significance this week when legislators — including the two on the panel — called for the state to untie Common Core test scores from teacher evaluations for at least two years. Darling-Hammond has supported Common Core testing but criticized using test scores to measure individual teachers.
“It would be premature to consider any moratorium before the panel is allowed to do its work,” Cuomo said in response.
The panel will deliver recommendations before the end of the legislative session this spring, according to Cuomo’s office.
The full list of panel members is below:
- Stanley S. Litow, Vice President, IBM Corporate Citizenship and Corporate Affairs & President, IBM International Foundation (Chair)
- Senator John Flanagan, Senate Education Committee Chair (Senate appointee)
- Assemblywoman Catherine Nolan, Assembly Education Committee Chair (Assembly appointee)
- Linda Darling-Hammond, Charles E. Ducommun Professor of Education, Stanford University Graduate School of Education
- Todd Hathaway, Teacher, East Aurora High School (Erie County)
- Alice Jackson-Jolley, Parent (Westchester County)
- Anne Kress, President, Monroe Community College
- Nick Lawrence, Teacher, East Bronx Academy for the Future (NYC)
- Delia Pompa, Senior Vice President of Programs, National Council of La Raza
- Charles Russo, Superintendent, East Moriches UFSD (Long Island)
- Dan Weisberg, EVP & General Counsel, The New Teacher Project
Lawrence, the UFT lead teacher at his school, wrote last year about his experience with New York City’s teacher evaluation rules for Chalkbeat’s First Person section.
A reader from North Carolina sent this wonderful post, filled with words that can be used to play “Ed-Lingo Bingo” during professional development time.
When I was conducting research in San Diego about 2006, teachers there shared a list of Bingo words that they had compiled from many P.D. days.
They called it “B.S. Bingo,” and the idea was to mark off a box each time you heard one of the words, and shout Bingo! when you reached a straight line on your card.
You too can find useful and amusing things to do with the meaningless language that too often fills the air.
Eclectablog has run a series of articles about the Education Achievement Authority, the special district created by Michigan’s Governor Rick Snyder to contain the state’s lowest performing schools.
The district is run by Broad-trained superintendent John Covington, who left Kansas City right before the district lost its accreditation.
The communications director for EAA complained about the Eclectablog series, for obvious reasons.
Here, another teacher speaks out. This teacher is a veteran, with 43 students in his or her class.
This is part of the interview:
Can you give me some specific examples.?
Yes, I can. For example, the BUZZ program. The BUZZ program does not work. I had 43 students in my classroom the first year…
All by yourself?
By myself. And, with the 43 students, I didn’t have enough computers. Just like other teachers have stated. There were not enough computers. And half the time the computers would freeze up or the internet would crash.
I really feel sorry for the Teach for America teachers because they had been put into an environment that they really were not prepared for. It was like throwing an inexperienced lion trainer into a cage full of lions. But, at the same time, if the EAA really wanted to help students, these so-called disadvantaged students or at-risk students, if they really cared about them, they would have brought in professional veterans like me; teachers who had been proven and in their career for quite a while, who knew what they were doing. That would have made sense.
It’s true that everything is based on the performance series testing, but at the same time how can you give students higher learning, critical thinking skills — they want them to do that — but not teach them the basics? But they wanted us to keep pushing and keep testing them. It doesn’t work. It doesn’t work.
I got very frustrated because they kept asking me to use this Student Centered Learning (SCL) model and I knew it wasn’t working. I knew it wasn’t helping the children. So, I did what one of the other teachers in your articles did. I just ignored what the EAA administrators said and started doing the traditional things that I knew from years of experience work for children.
It’s true that they didn’t have any curriculum. No textbooks. A lot of times we didn’t have just basic supplies. So, I would go out of my own pocket and do what knew what I had to do. I had a lot of materials of my own from over the years and I would bring them in and supplement when the EAA was not giving me the materials that I needed. What they wanted me to do was put the kids on the computer and let them teach themselves. And half the time the computer program didn’t even work!
That’s the thing that blows my mind the most, that they designed the whole thing around computers and then didn’t give you guys enough to teach the kids with!
I’m speaking out because I feel for the children. And, you can quote me on this: This reminds me of the Tuskegee Experiment.
In other words, this is what states do to Other People’s Children, especially children of color.
You can be sure that you won’t find these methods in the upscale, well-funded schools of Grosse Pointe.
University of Washington scholars Wayne Au and Joseph J. Ferrare have written an excellent analysis of the big money that flooded the state of Washington to pass charter legislation in 2012. Although defeated three times before by voters, this time the proposal passed by a tiny margin. Its major funders were Bill Gates, who has no children in public school, and Walmart heiress Alice Walton,who lives in Arkansas. Substantial help was provided by other members of the Billionaire Boys Club and their claque (such as Stand for Children).
The more than $10 million they amassed was sufficient to buy what they wanted.
The moral of the story: a small number of very wealthy individuals and organizations bought a policy of their choosing. This subverts democracy. It subverts the principle of one man, one vote.
These are not reformers. They are plutocrats who use their vast wealth to buy what they want.
Here are a few choice quotes:
“Conclusions/Recommendations: This study concludes that, compared to the average voter in Washington, an elite group of wealthy individuals, either directly through individual donations or indirectly through their affiliated philanthropic organizations, wielded disproportionate influence over the outcome of the charter school initiative in the state, thereby raising serious concerns about the democratic underpinnings of an education policy that impacts all of the children in Washington State. This study also concludes that elite individuals make use of local nonprofit organizations as a mechanism to advance their education policy agenda by funding those nonprofits through the philanthropic organizations affiliated with those same wealthy elites. In light of these conclusions, the authors recommend that a mechanism for more democratic accountability be developed relative to education policy campaigns, initiatives, and legislation.
“INTRODUCTION
“To paraphrase F. Scott Fitzgerald, today’s plutocrats are not like you and I; nor do they resemble the politicians we elect. Even when they assume the authority to set public policies, they are, I fear, not sackable. (Bosworth, 2011, p. 386)
“With the backing of both major political parties, billionaire philanthropists, venture capitalists, business leaders, and a growing network of nonprofit organizations and research centers, charter school policy has evolved into a major component of the current education reform movement in the United States (Fabricant & Fine, 2012; Rawls, 2013). As of 2012, all but nine U.S. states allowed charter schools (National Alliance for Public Charter Schools, 2013), and in one of those nine, Washington State, charter school legislation was passed by popular vote in November 2012 (Reed, 2012)…..”
And more:
In this section we present the findings of our network analysis in two phases. First, through two tables, we present data on cash and in-kind contributions to the Yes On 1240 campaign and funding relationships between campaign donors, affiliated philanthropies, and organizational campaign supporters (Tables 1 and 2). Second, we visualize these relationships through a simple directed graph that traces the flows of sponsorship (material and symbolic) among policy actors (Figure 1).
YES ON 1240 CAMPAIGN CONTRIBUTIONS
Several important findings arise when we analyze the contributions to the Yes On 1240 campaign.
Table 1: Yes On I-1240 Campaign Cash and In-kind Contributions of $50k and More
Yes On 1240 Donor
Donation Amount
1.
Bill Gates Jr. – Microsoft cofounder and current chairman
$3,053,000.00
2.
Alice Walton – heiress; daughter of Walmart founder, Sam Walton
$1,700,000.00
3.
Vulcan Inc. – founded by Paul Allen, Microsoft cofounder
$1,600,000.00
4.
Nicolas Hanauer – venture capitalist
$1,000,000.00
5.
Mike Bezos – father of Amazon.com founder Jeff Bezos
$500,000.00
6.
Jackie Bezos – mother of Amazon.com founder Jeff Bezos
$500,000.00
7.
Connie Ballmer – wife of Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer
$500,000.00
8.
Anne Dinning – managing director D.E. Shaw Investments
$250,000.00
9.
Michael Wolf – Yahoo! Inc. board of directors
$250,000.00
10.
Katherine Binder – EMFCO Holdings chairwoman
$250,000.00
11.
Eli Broad – real estate mogul
$200,000.00
12.
Benjamin Slivka – formerly Microsoft; DreamBox Learning cofounder
$124,200.00
13.
Reed Hastings – Netflix cofounder and CEO
$100,000.00
14.
Microsoft Corporation
$100,000.00
15.
Gabe Newell – formerly Microsoft; Valve Corporation cofounder
$100,000.00
16.
Doris Fisher – Gap Inc. cofounder
$100,000.00
17.
Kemper Holdings LLC – local Puget Sound developer
$110,000.00
18.
CSG Channels
$60,000.00
19.
Education Reform Now
$50,000.00
20.
Bruce McCaw –McCaw Cellular founder
$50,000.00
21.
Jolene McCaw – spouse of Bruce McCaw
$50,000.00
Source: Washington State Public Disclosure Commission (2012a)
Table 1 highlights that $10.65 million in total, or almost 98% of the $10.9 million raised for the Yes On 1240 campaign, was funded by 21 individuals and organizations who each donated more than $50,000 to the campaign (Washington State Public Disclosure Commission, 2012a).
Notably, Bill Gates Jr. is the biggest contributor ($3M) to the campaign, nearly doubling the next biggest contributions coming from Walmart heiress Alice Walton ($1.7M) and Vulcan Inc. ($1.6M),2 Microsoft cofounder Paul Allen’s company. As a more general finding, these amounts indicate that a number of select wealthy individuals with no immediate connection to Washington State (e.g., Eli Broad and Alice Walton) demonstrated a vested interest in charter school policy in the state. Another finding that emerges from the data is that wealthy individuals who are connected to the technology sector also demonstrated a vested interest in promoting charter school policy in Washington State (12 of the top 21 contributors to Yes On 1240 are strongly connected to the technology sector). Additionally, as might be expected given the interconnectedness of any sector of industry, several of these individuals have historical and industry-related connections to Microsoft Inc. and Microsoft Inc. cofounder and chairman, Bill Gates Jr.
It is also of value to highlight the $50,000.00 donation to the Yes On 1240 campaign from Education Reform Now Advocacy Committee because it illustrates the tightly woven interconnectedness of organizations and funding structures associated with education policy reform advocacy. New York State tax records from 2006 explicitly indicate that Education Reform Now, Inc., Education Reform Now Advocacy Committee, and DFER all share officers, personnel, office space, and paymasters (Libby, 2012). Tax records from 2007 further indicate that Education Reform Now Inc. and Education Reform Now Advocacy Committee share these same resources (New York State Office of the Attorney General, 2013). Thus, it is difficult to determine where DFER, Education Reform Now Inc., and Education Reform Now Advocacy Committee begin and end individually because, in essence, they represent a financially intertwined cluster of three organizations that seem to operate as a single organization with overlapping staff and resources. Consequently, even though tax records do not allow us to fully understand the exact relationship, the $50,000.00 donation to the Yes On 1240 campaign from Education Reform Now Advocacy Committee is functionally also a donation from Education Reform Now Inc. and DFER.
YES ON 1240 CONNECTED ORGANIZATIONS
As discussed above, four organizations, LEV, DFER, Stand for Children, and Partnership for Learning, publicly claimed credit for leading and coordinating the Yes On 1240 WA Coalition for Public Charter Schools (Yes On 1240, 2012a). An analysis of the in-kind donations to the Yes On 1240 campaign (that is, donations of labor or other services that are given cash value and added to the campaign donation total) supports this claim: Those four organizations predominate the in-kind donations database and are the only organizations listing “staff time” as donated in kind to the campaign (Washington State Public Disclosure Commission, 2012c). Further, as a university-based research center, they cannot be listed as having provided in-kind donations (or any donations) directly to a political campaign in the state. Because of their active role in providing direct, nonmonetary support for the Yes On 1240 campaign vis-à-vis being highlighted prominently in a campaign video (Yes On 1240, 2012b) and authoring a research report explicitly in support of I-1240 (Lake et al., 2012), we have included the CRPE here as a “connected organization” for their symbolic contribution to the campaign through the lending of their expertise.
PHILANTHROPIC CONNECTIONS TO THE YES ON 1240 CAMPAIGN
Cross referencing information gathered from the Google search engine, philanthropy websites, and available tax records (Foundation Center, 2013) produced the following 11 foundations directly connected to major donors to the Yes On 1240 campaign (in alphabetical order): Apex Foundation (formerly the Bruce & Jolene McCaw Foundation), Bezos Family Foundation, Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, Corabelle Lumps Foundation (formerly the Anne Dinning and Michael Wolf Foundation), the Doris & Donald Fisher Fund, The Eli and Edythe Broad Foundation, the Goldman Sachs Philanthropy Fund (connected through the Connie and Steve Ballmer advised Biel Fund),3 Lochland Foundation (Katherine Binder, cofounder, officer, and contributor), The Walton Family Foundation, and Wissner-Slivka Foundation. Using foundation databases, foundation reports, available tax records, organizational websites, and institutional reports, we then looked for whether or not these foundations provided funding to the Yes On 1240 campaign-related organizations.
Table 2: Philanthropic Support for Yes On 1240 Connected Organizations
Organization
Amount
Foundation
Center on Reinventing Public Education
$8,578,000
Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation
$701,000
The Walton Family Foundation
$512,813
The Eli and Edythe Broad Foundation
Education Reform Now (Democrats for Education Reform)
$2,925,000
The Walton Family Foundation
$2,481,716
The Eli and Edythe Broad Foundation
$600,000
Doris & Donald Fisher Fund
$500,000
Corabelle Lumps Foundation
$15,000
Bezos Family Foundation
League of Education Voters
$4,790,000
Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation
$257,000
Lochland Foundation
$160,139
Bezos Family Foundation
$1,000
Apex Foundation
Partnership for Learning
$4,700,000
Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation
Stand for Children™
$9,000,000
Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation
$2,857,945
The Walton Family Foundation
$350,000
Goldman Sachs Philanthropy Fund
$120,304
Bezos Family Foundation
$55,000
Wissner-Slivka Foundation
$25,000
Lochland Foundation
$1,000
Apex Foundation
(Sources: Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, 2013; Foundation Center, 2013; Libby, 2012; New York State Office of the Attorney General, 2013; Stand for Children, 2013; University of Washington Bothell Office of Research, 2013; University of Washington Bothell Office of Sponsored Programs, 2013)
“As Table 2 indicates, the philanthropic foundations connected to major contributors to the Yes On 1240 campaign provided a range of support directly to three of the four campaign-coordinating organizations and the CRPE: the Apex Foundation’s $1,000.00 contributions to each LEV and Stand for Children were the smallest, and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation’s total contribution of $9,000,000.00 to Stand for Children was the largest. Further, while DFER received no direct philanthropic support, its sister organization Education Reform Now received ample support from campaign-connected philanthropies, and, as detailed above, the overlap of resources between the cluster of Education Reform Now Inc., Education Reform Now Advocacy, and DFER, is very fluid. The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation is the most prominent here, haven given over $27 million total to Yes On 1240 campaign-connected organizations across multiple years, grants, and contracts. The Walton Foundation is second-most prominent, having contributed $6.48 million to campaign-connected organizations, followed by the Broad Foundation at $2.99 million in support for campaign-connected organizations. There is a precipitous drop in total support after these three, potentially indicating smaller amounts of financial support originating from smaller foundations (e.g., Lochland Foundation or the Bezos Family Foundation). Regardless of the amount, foundation support of the organizations directly involved in the Yes On 1240 campaign is indicative of ideological alignment around specific education reforms (in this case, charter schools) between funders and grantees/contractors.”
Colin McEnroe of NPR in Connecticut has discovered the root problem of corporate reformers: They have lost touch with common sense and the meaning of learning. To cover up their ignorance, they have invented rhetoric that sounds impressive but is no more than unintelligible verbiage.
He starts here, and gets better:
“I don’t know about you, but I remember the moment when, as a boy, I fell in love with learning. It was 1964, in the spring. My fourth-grade teacher, Miss Vick, sat down with me in the late afternoon and gently pried from my hands Hardy Boys book No. 42, “The Secret of the Mummy’s Strategically Dynamic New Paradigms.”
“Colin,” she said. “I know you’re a good boy with a bright mind. But your EAPE scores don’t point to project-based learning across the curriculum. You need to scaffold texts to other texts, and to that end I’m going to start interfacing with your developmental space.”
“Miss Vick,” I stammered, “can you disintermediate that for me in a way that unpacks the convergence in assessment-driven terms?”
We talked for hours as the sun sank toward the horizon. I believe both of us wept. My mind opened like a flower. That night, I chopped my Hardy Boys books into little pieces and fed them to the neighbor’s python. I read Emerson’s “The American Scholar” instead.
Wait. Maybe it didn’t happen that way, because in 1964, American education was not drowning in incomprehensible crap.”
Have we lost the ability to say what we mean and mean what we say?
Eclectablog has been posting a series of articles about Michigan’s Education Achievement Authority, where the state has clustered its lowest-performing schools. There again is that nasty reformer habit of calling things the opposite of what they really are. Because the schools are the lowest-performing, they now have the honor of joining the state’s Education Achievement Authority. The leader is John Covington, trained–so to speak–in the unaccredited Broad Academy, where closing public schools and handing them over to private corporations or authoritarian leaders is considered a mark of success.
Governor Rick Snyder, who does not like public education, created the EAA as a special place for the state’s “worst” schools, apparently because not even a for-profit entity wanted them. But that is just my guess. Maybe he will eventually turn them over to one of the for-profit charter chains that is proliferating in Michigan.
In this post, Eclectablog interviews an unusual teacher at the EAA: she is experienced. Most of the EAA teachers are first-year teachers or members of Teach for America. Like others that the blogger has interviewed, this teacher is anonymous. The reasons should be obvious. If her name were used, she would be fired.
Read her description of the culture of the EAA schools. Does it sound like a climate that will foster excellence?
In the interest of balance, I remind you that the EAA disputes all these testimonies because they are anonymous.
This post is a continuation of the previous one.
I am addressing my many friends who are BATs.
I am asking you to work with your local PTAs to battle against privatization and to oppose attacks on teachers.
In state after state, public education is under attack. Teachers are under attack.
Build coalitions with parents, especially local PTAs.
We are natural allies.
PTAs want to strengthen their schools.
Work with them.
We must build a powerful coalition to support and improve our public schools and the teaching profession.
We are in this together, to do what’s right for children and for our society.
Alone, you lose.
Together, we win.
A reader directed our attention to this curious phenomenon. The Néw York PTA conducted a survey showing that parents in the state are outraged by the botched implementation of the Common Core, yet the NYPTA remains strongly committed to CCSS.
The militant dedication of CCSS enthusiasts says something interesting: in the absence of any concrete evidence for the success of this initiative, why are their hopes so high? Why do they share the same talking points? why are they so certain that CCSS will be successful at making every child college-and-career-ready, in what are their hopes and boundless enthusiasm founded? Could it be Gates funding? Or could it be the triumph of marketing over critical thinking? Of hope over experience?
Says the reader:
“New York PTA gave a survey with results definitively anti-CCSS. But their conclusions are from another world. They still strongly support CCSS.”
Click to access Report_CCLS_Survey_Jan_2014.pdf
The National PTA has received at least $2.5 million from the Gates foundation, some of it specifically designated for promoting CCSS. In this statement, National PTA explained its position with this convoluted logic.
National PTA has not received funding from any association to advocate for the Common Core State Standards.
National PTA applied for and has received grants from several associations, including the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and GE, to help fund its efforts to educate and support parents and educators across the country as the Common Core State Standards are implemented in classrooms.
National PTA is committed to ensuring that parents and educators are knowledgeable about the standards and new assessments and also is committed to supporting them every step of way as states transition to the standards.
Now, there is clear and consistent reasoning!
BUT: Most PTAs do not get Gates funding to promote Common Core. Most PTAs are authentic parent voices.
If you want to save our schools, work with parents, work with your local PTAs.
The road to success depends on collaboration! Teamwork! All hands on deck to stop privatization!
Diane Ravitch's blog 