Blogger Yinzercation describes Governor Tom Corbett’s latest proposal as a “Race to the Top” that will benefit the highest-performing, most affluent districts. He learned his lesson from Arne Duncan. Forget about equity. Forget about restoring the draconian cuts he made to the state’s suffering urban districts. Forget about the have-nots. Forget about Philadelphia, whose schools were stripped of basic services and programs. Reward excellence!
Archives for the month of: February, 2014
Maybe the tide really is turning!
Terry McAuliffe, the newly elected Democratic governor of Virginia, said on a radio program that he wants to end the practice of giving letter grades to schools, a practice pioneered in Florida by Jeb Bush.
McAuliffe recognized that the letter grades (which, by the way, are highly misleading, inaccurate, and unstable) have the effect of stigmatizing not only schools but entire communities:
“I don’t like this letter grade for our schools — the second you give a school an ‘F’ grade, you have stigmatized the students, the teachers, the school, the community,” McAuliffe said during his first “Ask the Governor” call-in radio show on WRVA in Richmond.
“At the end of the day you have to fund these through your local real estate taxes — if their school is an ‘F,’ I can promise you nobody is going to move into that area for that school,” he added.
“And folks that are there are going to try and move out, and some people who are under water with their mortgages have no chance so they’re stuck there.”
Mayor Bill de Blasio has already announced his intention to eliminate the letter grading of schools.
Perhaps the bipartisan consensus built around the ideology of the far-right is crumbling.
Nothing contained in NCLB or Race to the Top has improved schools.
It is time to think and plan anew.
The best place to start is to stop doing those things that actually harm students, teachers, principals, schools, and communities.
Another star in the corporate reform, teacher-bashing firmament goes dim.
Tom Luna, author of the deservedly malligned Luna laws, is not running for re-election.
The Luna laws were vintage corporate reform, but were soundly overturned in every county in red state Idaho.
Luna is known for his devotion to online learning. His campaigns always attracted generous support from the tech industry, and he in turn made it mandatory for high school graduation.
Quid pro quo.
Frank Biden, brother of Vice President Joe Biden, is president of the Mavericks charter chain in Florida, explained the secret of charter success.
He said,
“Biden, the brother of Vice President Joe Biden, offered some red meat, saying the school choice movement needs to continue organizing parents – and accumulating political power.
“It’s all about the 501(c)(4) and how much money we get in it,” he said. “And we go see our friends and we tell them we’ll support them. And we go see our enemies and look ‘em in the eye and say we’re going to take you down.”
In that state, charters give handsomely to politicians and have a lock on the legislature.
Biden spoke truth.
At a conference in Florida celebrating Nationsl School Choice Week,
Eclectablog of Michigan continues its invaluable reports on the stste’s disastrous so-called “Educational Achievement Authority.” This one contains the testimony of a special education teacher.
Governor Snyder has created a streamlined version of the school-to-prison pipeline.
Remember the study that claimed that teachers who produce higher test scores in fourth or fifth grade have miraculous lifetime effects on students? Among other things, the students are less likely to get pregnant and an entire class will increase its lifetime earnings by $250,000 a year!
The study was reported on the first page of the Néw York Times, where one author said the lesson was to fire teachers sooner, based on value-added test scores.
President Obama was so impressed–since the study echoed Race to the Top’s focus on using VAM for firing teachers and giving bonuses –that he mentioned the study in his State of the Union Address. Of course, Sidwell Friends, where his daughters are enrolled, wouldn’t do any such thing as VAM.
Critics quickly pointed out that the Chetty study, as it was known for its lead author Raj Chetty, had not been peer reviewed and its findings were overstated.
Bruce Baker explained that an increase of $250,000 for a class works out to about $5 a week, maybe a cup of coffee at Starbucks or a couple more plus a donut at Dunkin Donuts.
Now, Audrey Amrein-Beardsley provides a valuable service by pointing out that the study has been released a THIRD time, still not peer reviewed.
Bob Braun has a fascinating blog where he writes about New Jersey politics and education, based on his 50 years of covering both as a reporter and columnist.
Here he tells the story of the current administration’s determination to sell off public buildings to KIPP and perhaps other charter operators.
Newark is under state control and has been since 1995. The state-appointed superintendent Cami Anderson is a former Teach for America teacher who has been knee-deep or neck-deep in corporate reform, from TFA to New Leaders for New Schools to the Bloomberg administration, and now the Chris Christie administration. Her present assignment apparently is to turn public assets over to charter operators, in this case, a corporation named “the Pink Hula Hoop.”
The story begins like this:
Keeping public education public and out of the grasp of privatizers won’t be easy. The people behind it all make following the power and the money deliberately complicated. Consider the story of the Pink Hula Hoop, a convoluted tale of big money and insider contacts that could be the future of public education.
Pink Hula Hoop—more correctly “ Pinkhulahoop1, LLC”—is a profit-making company, one of four legal entities created to, among other things, raise money for the Team Academy Charter schools in Newark so it can buy and occupy public schools put on the auction block by the state-appointed school administration in New Jersey’s largest city. The Team Academy is considered a “region” of the better known KIPP charter schools.
The saddest part of the story is the inscription over the 18th Avenue School (photo):
“THE PUBLIC SCHOOL IS THE BEST DEFENSE OF A DEMOCRATIC NATION.”
In a startling development, the State Board of Education in Tennessee made clear at its meeting on Friday that it may eliminate or modify value-added measurement (VAM).
State Commissioner Keven Huffman was stunned.
Tennessee is the state where VAM got started, launched in the 1980s by agricultural statistician William Sanders. Based on his experience, Sanders assumed that it was possible to hold all other variables constant and attribute the rise or fall of test scores to teachers. Most social scientists understand that children are not corn, and it is impossible to hold all other variables constant. But Sanders now has a consulting business, and his methods are proprietary information, c.osely held.
In the future, if the board sticks to its guns, VAM will not play a part in deciding whether teachers may be licensed to work in the state of Tennessee. Audrey Amrein-Beardsley, an expert on VAM, celebrates that major victory here. Beardsley includes links to the three YouTube videos that the TEA shared with the board, called “The Trouble with TVAAAS.”
Given this background, the discussion at Fridays board meeting was indeed welcome to critics of test-based accountability, which has failed wherever it has been put into place.
Joey Garrison of the Tennessean reports:
” At its meeting in Nashville on Friday, the board stepped away from the new policy, promising an April rewrite eliminating learning gains as the overriding factor in whether teachers can work in Tennessee. The state’s educators claimed victory after a three-year pounding that also ended the promises of contract negotiations and annual raises, then tied their tenure to student test scores.
“Education Commissioner Kevin Huffman, who backed the original policy, and state education board Chairman Fielding Rolston downplayed the vote, characterizing it as a small and appropriate tweak before the policy takes effect in 2015. Education reform advocates took the same tack, pointing out that basing licenses on overall teacher evaluation scores, which include learning gains but give more weight to principal observations, is still progress….
“But the vote coincides with a bipartisan bill gaining ground in the legislature this session. The Educator Respect and Accountability Act, sponsored by Rep. Matthew Hill, R-Jonesborough, and Sen. Mike Bell, R-Riceville, would prevent the state from yanking teachers’ licenses based on “any statistical estimate utilizing standardized test scores.”
Huffman, who is heartily disliked by both teachers and administrators (nearly half the state’s district superintendents signed a petition decrying his top-down, non-collaborative style), was clearly outraged by the board’s second thoughts but leveled his criticism at the union. (Tennessee withdrew collective bargaining rights in 2011, and the TEA is weak.)
He said “he was flummoxed to see the union withdrawing its support of any use of value-added scores in evaluations and licensing after the state received a $500 million federal Race to the Top grant in part based on it.
“This is a very significant change in their position, and to be frank, I find it incredibly hypocritical that TEA would support the inclusion of value-added scores when there’s a bunch of federal money at the table and then turn around a few years later when that money is no longer going to be around,” he said.
“In a media release, the 46,000-member TEA countered that it endorsed the Race to the Top plan under former Gov. Phil Bredesen’s administration, but Huffman and Gov. Bill Haslam didn’t honor the agreements.
“Since Bredesen’s administration, teachers have complained of abysmal morale over the loss of union contract negotiations and use of student test data in their evaluations — even if the subjects they teach aren’t tested.”
Another way to look at the change of view of the board and the teachers is that they know now that VAM doesn’t wrk, that it is inaccurate, and they are acknowledging the realities.
John Deasy, superintendent of the Los Angeles public schools, testified that it was outrageously expensive and time-consuming to fire a tenured teachers, but also acknowledged that good administrators don’t grant due process rights to ineffective teachers. Further, he took pride in the number of teachers to whom he denied tenure as well as the number he removed.
John Thompson, teacher and historian, didn’t use the word “sham,” but that was exactly his meaning in this good analysis of the case where the claim has been made that due process for teachers denies the civil rights of students.
The reality, as Thompson notes, is that the lawyers for the plaintiffs aren’t even trying to show that any child has been harmed because of tenure. They aren’t trying because there is no evidence. Teachers in high-performing districts have tenure, as do teachers in low-performing districts. Don’t expect the lawyers to introduce evidence about districts that abolished due process for teachers and closed the achievement gap, because there is none.
Taking away the right of teachers to a fair hearing before an impartial administrator won’t help a single child, and presumably the lawyers know it.
What it will take away is teachers’ academic freedom, and the lawyers don’t care.
What is the point of the Vergara case? It is to attack unions and due process rights for teachers. If teachers serve at the will of administrators, as John Deasy and the corporate reformers want, who will be brave enough to disagree with their principal, or to teach evolution, or to teach a challenged book that offends even a single parent? What teacher will speak out against the attacks on their profession? Surely not those who want to feed their family and pay their mortgage.
John Thompson feels sure that the plaintiffs will lose because they have no evidence for their claim that children lose when their teachers have due process. Let’s hope he is right.
Diane Ravitch's blog 