Archives for the month of: March, 2014
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Privatizers Make Bold Move to Take Over Dallas

By dianeravitch
March 17, 2014 //
24

Mayor Mike Rawlings of Dallas is working hard to convince the public that the Dallas Independent School District should be turned into a “home rule” district. What this means is that Mayor Rawlings and his rich pals called (ironically) Supporters of Public Schools want to eliminate public education and turn the whole district into an all-charter district.

The shadowy group behind the “home rule” idea is led by ex-Enron billionaire John Arnold, who advocates for privately managed charters, not public schools. Arnold, no friend of public schools, leads the Support Our Public Schools group.

Thus far, Mayor Rawlings is having a hard time convincing black and Hispanic citizens that he and his billionaire buddies can be trusted.

Wouldn’t it be great if reformers would call themselves what they are, instead of using names that disguise their goal of privatization?

The most impressive member of the Dallas school board, outgoing member Carla Ranger, described what is really going on. She wrote:

“This is all about politics, power and money — not education.

“With Mayor Mike Rawlings’ constant unethical meddling into Dallas ISD affairs and Superintendent Mike Miles doing more harm than good, the result is a Dallas ISD teaching staff that appears to be more broken in spirit than I have seen in the 8 years I have served as a Trustee.

“Authoritarians always want all power.

“They never want to share it.”

The blog that reported Carla Ranger’s prescient comments proceeded to mock her, but what she said fits the national pattern. Destroying public education in Dallas fits with the movement’s plans in many other cities. The billionaires will say whatever they must and do whatever they can and spend whatever they need to, just so long as they can put an end to public education.

Carla Ranger is right. The people of Dallas should listen to her.

Categories Charter Schools, Dallas, Privatization

Tennessee Teacher Sues to Invalidate Teacher Evaluation System

By dianeravitch
March 17, 2014 //
12

In one of what is likely to be a tidal wave of lawsuits, the Tennessee Education Association sued the state because a teacher was denied a bonus based on the state’s flawed evaluation system.

“The Tennessee Education Association (TEA) has filed a lawsuit on behalf of a Knox County teacher who was denied a bonus under that school system’s pay plan after Tennessee Value-Added Assessment System (TVAAS) data for 10 of her students was unknowingly attributed to her.

“TVAAS is Tennessee’s system of measuring student growth over time. It generates data based on student test scores on TCAP and end of course tests.

“In this specific case, the teacher, Lisa Trout, was assigned TVAAS data for 10 students after being told her evaluation would be based on system-wide TVAAS data because she taught at an alternative school.

“The TEA lawsuit cites two different memos which indicated that Ms. Trout could expect an evaluation (and bonus eligibility) to be based on system-wide data. At the conclusion of the school year, Ms. Trout was informed that her overall evaluation score, including observations and TVAAS data was a 4, making her eligible for a bonus under the Knox County pay plan.”

The system, the suit alleges, is arbitrary:

“The TEA goes on to contend that Ms. Trout and similarly situated teachers for whom there is little or no specific TVAAS data are held to an arbitrary standard in violation of the 14th Amendment of the U.S. Constitution.

“Specifically, the suit notes: ” … the majority of teachers in the Knox County Schools … have had their eligibility for additional compensation (under the APEX bonus system) determined on the basis of the test scores of students they do not teach and/or the test scores of their students in subjects unrelated to the subjects they teach.”

“The suit alleges that such a system violates the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment because some teachers are evaluated and receive bonuses based on the scores of their own students while other teachers are held accountable for students they do not teach and over which they have no influence or control.

“In short, the entire system is flawed and should be discarded.”

Categories Teacher Evaluations, Teachers, Tennessee

Jack Hassard: Why Bill Gates Defends the Common Core

By dianeravitch
March 17, 2014 //
108

We have long known on this site that Bill Gates’  foundation underwrote every aspect of the Common Core standards. Mercedes Schneider has documented nearly $200 million in grants specifically for the writing, evaluation, review, implementation, and advocacy for the Common Core standards.

Jack Hassard, a retired professor of science education, has scoured the Gates search engine and concluded that the investment of the Gates Foundation in the Common Core is actually $2.3 billion.

Hassard notes:

Why is Bill Gates so concerned about those that have taken on Achieve’s Common Core State Standards?

The answer is that the Gates Foundation has invested about $2.3 billion into the Common Standards and related efforts.  Please read ahead.

In public speeches, Gates has called out those who try to interfere with the implementation of the Common Standards.   When Gates first used his billions to reach out to eduction, there was some glimmer of hope.  The Gates Foundation idea of funding smaller high schools appeared to be a plausible conception.  But things changed, and as we’ve seen, someone with a lot of money can influence organizations in ways that ordinary classroom educators can not.

Soon the Gates Foundation began to fund efforts that, in my view, undermined the work of professional teachers.  Gates own simple conception of “measuring” student learning, has been accepted by many politicians and state education bureaucrats.  Test the students when they come into your class.  Test them when they go out to summer play.  Subtract the scores, and there you have it.  A measure of what student learned.

This idea that teacher quality can be easily measured by value-added has not worked out so well.

But then there are the Common Core standards, which the Gates Foundation has heavily funded as its biggest bet of all.

He writes:

I did a search of the College-Ready grants for 2009 – 2013 using the terms Common Core, and the search returned 161 results.  The largest grant was awarded to the Kentucky Department of Education for $9,800,877, and the smallest grant was awarded to Benchmark Education Company for $25,000.  Using an Excel spreadsheet of the 161 programs that focused on the Common Core, I found out that the Gates Foundation has awarded grants totaling $204,350,462.  That’s $269 million for 161 programs.  The average grant was for $1,269,258.

Then he finds another classification in the Gates search engine:

But the truth is that the Gates Foundation has provided much more money than the $204,350,462.  This figure is based on only 161 of the grants from the College-Ready category of grants.  The Gates Foundation awarded more than 1800 projects in the group of College-Ready grants, which is one of the main goals of the Common Core.  I’ve not downloaded the data from the 1800 grants into Excel. You might want to go to the Gates website and take a look at the data for these grants. But we can do a rough estimate based on the 161 grants that were analyzed.

If we use the average grant of $1,269,258., then the estimated amount funded to support Common Standards and related education programs by Gates is $2,306,241,786 (that $2.3 billion).

And finally, he asks,

Is Gates and his Foundation’s influence what will improve education in the American democracy?  Or has the influence of power and money brokers been accepted, with little criticism, by the general public?  Is the unrest about the Common Standards in the interests of the future of education, or is it just a few people complaining?  What are your ideas?

Categories Education Reform

Edward Haertel: Why VAM Fails: The Oak Tree Analogy

By dianeravitch
March 17, 2014 //
10

Audrey Amrein Beardsley invited Stanford Professor Emeritus Edward Haertel to explain why a video called “The Oak Tree Analogy” is flawed.

Apparently there are districts that use this video to try to explain teacher evaluations based on growth or decline of test scores.

Whether you are talking about oak trees or corn or teachers, VAM is Junk Science.

And if you want to know more, read Haertel’s excellent review of the research on VAM here.

Categories Teacher Evaluations

Titanic, 2014?

By dianeravitch
March 17, 2014 //
21

A reader, Karen Taylor, sent the following reflections about her life as a teacher today:

Titanic, 2014

I am finishing the eighth week of my twenty-seventh year of teaching in public schools.

Today I had a startling insight- that somehow I have been given the task of saving the sinking Titanic. Public schools are the Titanic, run aground against icebergs of state-mandated test scores and the failing family structures of our children.

I’m instructed, prodded, encouraged, and held responsible for saving all the students who may have little or no support. And there certainly aren’t enough life rafts or life preservers to meet their needs. There are no other sturdy crafts nearby to rescue them.
I alone am responsible for this future generation.

And the band plays on deck with strains of, “No Child Left Behind”, “Higher Order Thinking Skills”, Hands-on Learning,” and “Data Driven Instruction.” I hear “Key Academic Vocabulary” and “Learning Objectives” played between each set.

And though I hum and sing and dance with all the rhythms, the deck still capsizes. Children are still struggling to hang on until I can reach them.
Believing that “all children can learn” is our lighthouse. All children can learn, as the beam pronounces. Yet as it circles I remember……they can’t all learn in the same way or on a state-mandated timeline.

The lives I save are measured by “my scores”, while in reality, the scores are very faulty life-preservers for our children. Those scores reflect a single moment in time, like a tiny ripple in the ocean of their lives. And many children perform unbelievably well when the reality of their tsunami-riddled lives are filled with abuse, neglect, alcohol, drugs, and hunger, with very little room left over for worry about a test score.

But they hang on, and they try to hum and sing and dance and move, except for when they are distracted by the memory that their dad gets out of prison next week and their mama needs them to babysit tonight because she has to work late.

So I inflate their little life vests with a hug, a joke, a smile. I give them a pencil and read them a book and we laugh, and for a moment, the ship is stable. And they read a book in English for the first time, and we celebrate, and I pretend that the iceberg has melted and we will sail again.

Because I love this big old ship and all the passengers it holds, and I treasure the message of the lighthouse. But the reality of the iceberg is not just sinking our ship. It is bruising and battering those of us who serve it and seek to save our children.

Categories Students, Teachers and Teaching

On Our Way to a Dual School System?

By dianeravitch
March 17, 2014 //
42

Word of mouth says that charter schools kick students out before the testing begins.

The charters make a big show of holding a lottery, but they choose the students they want and kick out the ones they don’t want.

They cherry pick the students that will get the highest scores and shed the ones who don’t.

What is the end game?

A dual publicly-funded school system.

One sector gets to choose its students.

The other takes everyone.

Brown vs. Board of Education has been repealed by hedge fund managers and the craven politicians they own.

Categories Charter Schools

Burris: Arne Duncan’s Pathetic Lies About Our Students and Our Public Schools

By dianeravitch
March 17, 2014 //
45

When Arne Duncan visited Boston recently, he lamented the sorry state of public education in Massachusetts–the highest scoring state in the nation on NAEP, a state whose students have been ranked at the top of international tests—and he praised privately managed charter schools for their excellence. For reasons he has never publicly explained, he wants to see more public dollars and students turned over to unaccountable corporations. He is a cheerleader for privately managed charters and the nation’s chief critic of public education. He aids and abets the movement to privatize public education. As public policy, this is irresponsible. To call this bizarre is an understatement.

When Duncan spoke with a columnist from the Boston Globe, he alleged that 40% of the high school graduates in the state require remediation when they get to college.

In this post, Carol Burris demonstrates that Duncan was confused, misinformed, or worse.

Duncan told the columnist that 40%–a”staggering” number of students—need college remediation.

Burris writes:

” What is “staggering” is the gross inaccuracy of the claim. Here are the facts:

“Twenty-two percent of the students who attend four-year state universities in Massachusetts and 10 percent of the students who attend the University of Massachusetts take at least one remedial course. That group (students who attend four-year public colleges) comprises 28 percent of all high school graduates in the Commonwealth.

“Thirty percent of all Massachusetts graduates attend private four-year colleges. Although I could not find remediation rates for such students, we know that nationally 15 percent of students who attend not-for-profit four-year colleges or universities take remedial courses.

“Using the above, I estimate that the percentage of students in Massachusetts who attend four-year colleges and take remedial courses is roughly 17 percent, not the 40 percent that Duncan claimed.”

It is also staggering that the U.S. Secretary of Education does not have accurate data about our nation’s highest-performing state.

And it is staggering that the columnist feels no need to fact-check the data.

And most staggering of all is that Duncan wants to harm our nation’s public education system, which is part of the fabric of our democracy.

What is his goal?

Categories Duncan, Arne, Supporting public schools

Marc Tucker on Why Punitive Accountability Fails

By dianeravitch
March 17, 2014 //
14

Marc Tucker has written an excellent post on the failure of punitive accountability.

The working theory behind the Bush-Obama “reforms” is that teachers are lazy and need to be motivated by rewards and punishments and the threat of public shaming.

This is in fact a theory drawn from the early twentieth century writings of Frederick Winslow Taylor, who studied the efficiency of factory workers.

Tucker writes:

Let’s start by examining the premises behind the prevailing system.  The push for test-based accountability systems to evaluate teachers have their origin in the work of a professor of agricultural statistics in Tennessee who discovered that differences in teacher quality as measured by analyses of student test scores over time accounted for very large differences in student performance.  Many observers concluded from this that policy should concentrate on using these statistical techniques to identify poor teachers and remove them from the teaching force.  At the same time, other observers, believing that the parents would choose effective schools for their children over ineffective schools if only they had information as to which schools are effective, pushed to use student test data to identify and publicly label schools based on the available test score data.  And, finally, policymakers passed the NCLB legislation, requiring the identification of schools as chronically underperforming and remedies involving the replacement of school leaders and staff, and, in extreme cases, closing schools down.

All of these accountability systems are essentially punitive in design and intent.  They threaten poor performing schools with public shaming, takeover and closure and poor performing individuals with public shaming and the loss of their jobs and livelihood.  The introduction of these policies was not accompanied by policies designed to improve the supply of highly qualified new teachers by making teaching a more attractive option for our most successful high school students—a key component of policy in the top-performing countries.  There is a lot of federal money available for training and professional development for teachers but no systematic federal strategy that I can discern for turning that money into systems of the kind top-performing countries use to support long-term, steady improvements in teachers’ professional practice.  I conclude that policymakers have placed their bet on teacher evaluation, not to identify the needs of teachers for development, but to identify teachers who need to be dismissed from the service.  And, further, that the way to motivate school staff to work harder and more efficiently is to threaten them with public shame and the loss of their job.

Race to the Top incorporates the ideas of economist Eric Hanushek of the Hoover Institution at Stanford University, who has argued in various writings that the way to improve results (test scores) is to “deselect” the bottom 5-10% of teachers based on the test scores of their students.

As Tucker shows, modern cognitive psychology recognizes that people are motivated to do their best not by humiliation and punishment, but by a sense of purpose, professionalism, and autonomy.  Unfortunately, neither our Congress nor the policymakers in the Obama administration are familiar with modern cognitive psychology, with the work of scholars and writers like Edward Deci, Dan Ariely, or Daniel Pink, nor with the organizational theory of Edwards Deming, who acknowledged that people want to do their best and must be allowed and encouraged to do it, not threatened with dire punishments.

Categories Accountability, Education Reform, NCLB (No Child Left Behind), Race to the Top, Teacher Evaluations

Our Unaccountable, Corrupt Charters in Ohio

By dianeravitch
March 16, 2014 //
25

A reader writes:

“How do you like this for accountability???
Lack of regulations, accountability and transparency invites charter school fraud

“Pet care, alcohol, vacations and other personal purchases were charged to taxpayers via Cincinnati College Preparatory Academy charter school, according to a 2013 state audit. The school misspent $520,000 in public money. Two former officials from the Cincinnati College Preparatory Academy are awaiting trial in Hamilton County Court of Common Pleas for theft in office and tampering with public records. Based on the states past record of recovering misspent funds by charter schools, the school districts from which these funds were extracted will not receive reimbursement

“In the now-closed Lion of Judah charter school fiasco, $1.2 million in public funds were lost but the court agreed to a settlement of $195,000 in restitution from the charter school operator. It is interesting that the Cuyahoga County Common Pleas judge approved a payback of less than 20% of the funds misspent and indicated that a prison sentence was not proper because the state didn’t properly anticipate the mistakes that could be made when citizens tried to run charter schools. It appears that the charter school operator received a lenient sentence for the fraud committed due to the judge’s view that the charter school law in Ohio is defective.

“On February 25, the State Auditor issued a finding for recovery in the amount of $507,206 against a Cleveland businessman who had unlawful interests in public contracts awarded to the now-closed Greater Heights Academy. Other persons involved in this charter school operation have been charged with a conspiracy to defraud the charter school of over $400,000.

“In a news release regarding the Greater Heights Academy charter school case, the State Auditor said, “…I’ll never understand what motivates people to steal from children.” An equally puzzling incomprehension is what motivates state officials to enact and continue to support charter school laws that provide for a license to steal.

“When will lawmakers regulate charter schools in ways to stop the fraud on the public and the low quality education provided to charter school students? Not until the public becomes outraged and demands that state officials refuse campaign contributions from charter school operators and advocates and begin to regulate charter schools.

“But hey, you know they are all in it for the kids. Aren’t you just wowed by the “innovation”? I’m sure people in NYC would love to know what is happening in the charters that they pay for.”

And what happens when the State Comptroller is legally barred from auditing charter schools, as in Néw York, because charter schools are not “a unit of government.” That means they get public money but they are not public schools and may not be audited by public authorities.

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, New York, Ohio

Richard Hake Defends Testing with No-Stakes

By dianeravitch
March 16, 2014 //
23

From a reader:

“You might be interested in a related discussion list post “The Defiant Parents: Testing’s Discontents – Response to Hunt” [Hake (2014)]. The abstract reads:

***************************************************

ABSTRACT: In a post “Re: The Defiant Parents: Testing’s Discontents” [Hake (2014)], I pointed to the “vigorous leadership, voluminous messaging, and pro-public-/anti-private-education positions of (a) Diane Ravitch and (b) FairTest .

Then I commented that neither appeared to be informed regarding the virtues of rigorous measurement of students’ higher-order learning by means of zero-stakes formative evaluation “designed and used to improve an intervention, especially when it is still being developed” [JCSEE, copied onto p. 132 by Frechtling et al. (2010) at .

In response, Russ Hunt (2014) at wrote: “The virtues of rigorous testing aren’t really the point: it’s how the tests are administered and what uses they’re put to that Ravitch and FairTest (and I) are concerned with.”

However, it IS to the point for many of those who wish to enhance students’ higher-level learning. Modesty forbids mention of these examples:

1. “Lessons from the Physics Education Reform Effort” [Hake (2002)] at ;

2. “The Physics Education Reform Effort: A Possible Model for Higher Education” [Hake (2005)] at ;

3. “Should We Measure Change? Yes!” [Hake (2007a)] at (2.5 MB);

4. “Re: pre-to-post tests as measures of learning/teaching” [Hake (2008a)] at ;

5. “Design-Based Research in Physics Education Research: A Review” [Hake (2008b)] at (1.1 MB);

6. “The Impact of Concept Inventories On Physics Education and Its Relevance For Engineering Education” [Hake (2011a)] at (8.7 MB);

7. “SET’s Are Not Valid Gauges of Students’ Higher-Level Learning #2” [Hake (2011b)] at ;

8. “The NRC Finally Comes to Its Senses on Improving STEM Education” [Hake (2013a)] at ; and

9. “Can the Cognitive Impact of Calculus Courses be Enhanced?” Hake (2013b)] at (2.7 MB).

***************************************************

To access the complete 66 kB post please click on .

Regards,
Richard Hake, Emeritus Professor of Physics, Indiana University; Honorary Member, Curmudgeon Lodge of Deventer, The Netherlands; President, PEdants for Definitive Academic References which Recognize the Invention of the Internet (PEDARRII); LINKS TO: Academia ; Articles ; Blog ; Facebook ; GooglePlus ; Google Scholar ; Linked In ; Research Gate ; Socratic Dialogue Inducing (SDI) Labs ; Twitter .

“Physics educators have led the way in developing and using objective tests to compare student learning gains in different types of courses, and chemists, biologists, and others are now developing similar instruments. These tests provide convincing evidence that students assimilate new knowledge more effectively in courses including active, inquiry-based, and collaborative learning, assisted by information technology, than in traditional courses.” – Wood & Gentile (2003).

REFERENCES [URLs shortened by and accessed on 31 Jan 2014.]

Hake, R.R. 2014. “The Defiant Parents: Testing’s Discontents – Response to Hunt,” online on the OPEN! AERA-L archives at . The abstract and link to the complete post are being transmitted to several discussion lists and are on my blog “Hake’sEdStuff” at with a provision for comments.

Mead, R. 2014. “The Defiant Parents: Testing’s Discontents,” New Yorker, 23 January; online at .
Wood, W.B., & J.M. Gentile. 2003. “Teaching in a research context,” Science 302: 1510; 28 November; online as a 213 kB pdf , thanks to Ecoplexity .”

Categories Testing
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