Archives for the month of: March, 2014
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Wendy Lecker: Arne Duncan and David Coleman Are Wrong About Standards

By dianeravitch
March 11, 2014 //
35

Civil rights lawyer Wendy Lecker writes that Arne Duncan has sold the American public a bill of goods, a false narrative. He and David Colemn think that national standards will fix all the problems of American education. She says they are wrong. Their bad ideas are the problem. They are wrong.

She writes:

“Before the Common Core, according to Duncan, high school success was a “lie” — it certainly did not mean that students were “college ready.”

“What a compelling, but false, narrative. A new peer-reviewed longitudinal nationwide study confirmed that the most reliable predictor of cumulative college GPA and college graduation is a student’s high school GPA.

“The study, co-authored by former Bates College Dean of Admissions William Hiss, examined more than 123,000 student records at public and private universities across the country, universities serving predominately minority students and art schools. It compared those who submitted SAT or ACT scores for admission to those who did not.

“The authors found students with strong high school records succeeded in college, despite lower standardized test scores. Strong testers with lower GPAs had lower college performance. Non-submitters tended to be women, first-generation college students, PELL grant recipients, students of color and students with learning disabilities. The authors found a broad geographic appeal to non-submissions.

“All of the students in this study attended school prior to the adoption of the Common Core State Standards. Many began school well before the No Child Left Behind Act. They graduated from a variety of schools across the country, learned different curricula in states with different standards. Their GPAs did not depend on standardized tests. Yet consistently, their high school GPAs were reliable predictors of college success. If these students succeeded in American high schools, no matter what the curricula, standards or assessments, they succeeded in American colleges, public or private, large or small.

“This fact undermines the claims that American students need national standards, standardized curricula and nationally standardized tests in order to be “college and career ready.” The high school teachers of students in this study accurately assessed their achievement, and taught them what they needed to know to do well in college — without common standards, scripted lessons or a nationalized test. In fact, the data show that the two national standardized tests, the SAT and ACT, were poor predictors of college success.”

Turns out that teachers’ grades are better predictors of college success than the SAT, the ACT, or other standardized tests.

Categories Coleman, David, Common Core, Duncan, Arne

Who is the #1 Enemy of Public Education?

By dianeravitch
March 11, 2014 //
29

Bill Phillis, the leader of the Ohio Coalition for Education & Adequacy is a tireless crusader for equitable funding of public schools. He is a retired after serving as assistant state superintendent of schools.

He writes:

Public education enemy #1

The Gates, Walton Family and Broad Foundations have federated with the U. S. Department of Education to eliminate the public common school system. The Obama administration’s point man, Arne Duncan, is spearheading an assault on public education that is unprecedented in American history. He is attempting to override the education provisions of every state Constitution. All states have one or more constitutional provisions that establish and maintain a public common school system.

It is mindboggling and unconscionable that this federal administration is deferring to the corporate, for-profit agenda to destroy the premier promoter of the public good-the public common school system.

Policies coming out of Washington D.C., and in many state capitols, are demoralizing teachers, undermining the traditional role and governance of boards of education, de-professionalizing the teaching profession, re-segregating American communities and reducing the traditional dynamic of learning to a testing obsession.

Many chief state school officers in recent years are moles of the privatizers or lack the conviction to fight for the public common school system. Hence, state legislatures and governors, in many cases, receive no resistance to their privatization agenda.

Often local public school personnel, including boards of education, feel helpless to stem the tide of public school bashing and the privatization movement.

Enough is enough. It is past time to hold all state officials accountable for their support of policies that lead to the privatization of public education.

Ohioans and the citizens of the nation, when mobilized, can uproot the anti-public education agenda of America’s oligarchs and their plutocratic political allies.

William Phillis
Ohio E & A

Ohio E & A | 100 S. 3rd Street | Columbus | OH | 43215

Categories Budget Cuts, Charter Schools, Corporate Reformers, Duncan, Arne, Obama, Ohio, Privatization, Race to the Top

Under State Control, Children of Detroit Lose More Ground

By dianeravitch
March 11, 2014 //
20

The Detroit Data and Democracy Project reports that the children of Detroit have seen deteriorating results since the state takeover of their public schools in 2009.

 

Dr. Thomas C. Pedroni of Wayne State University reported that the manipulation of statistics has been a defining characteristic of state control of the schools:

 

He writes:

 

One year ago this month I watched in disbelief as the Emergency Manager of the moment, Roy Roberts, declared on NBC’s nationally broadcast Education Nation Detroit Summit that Detroit Public Schools had surpassed the Michigan average in 14 of 18 MEAP categories.  At the time I suspected that Snyder’s appointee, a former auto executive with no education background, had simply misspoken or just didn’t quite have his facts straight.  What bothered me more was that none of his carefully selected co-panelists—including EAA Chancellor John Covington and Detroit Parent Network President/CEO Sharlonda Buckman—batted as much as an eye over Roberts’ jubilant mispronouncement.  A clearly impressed Chelsea Clinton declared that when the day came she would gladly enroll her own children in the public schools of Detroit.

 

As I dug through the MEAP results on the Michigan Department of Education’s website that day—confirming that DPS students had scored behind the state average in all 18 tested categories, typically by 20 percentage points or more—I made a discovery I had not anticipated:  in most categories, children in Detroit’s public elementary and middle schools had fallen even farther behind their state peers since 2009.  That year (2009) was the year that U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan declared Detroit “ground zero” for education reform, and the State once again took away local democratic control of Detroit’s schools.

I was particularly troubled that, since 2009, the youngest children taking the test—3rd, 4th, and 5th graders—had declined the most.  Although already so far behind their statewide peers, Detroit’s youngest test-takers had somehow lost even more ground.

 

Read what happened when he tried to publish this story in the Detroit News. 

 

The latest release of test scores in Detroit in 2014 show that the children continue to lose ground compared to their peers in the rest of the state.

 

Sadly, grievously—the new MEAP data, released February 28, reveal the further deepening of a devastating pattern.  In both reading and math, Detroit’s children have fallen even further behind their state peers.  Somehow, in 10 of the 12 grade-level math and reading MEAP tests, Detroit’s children under state control in DPS and the EAA have lost even more ground.

Fourth graders in Detroit’s state-managed schools actually progressed marginally in reading relative to their Michigan peers, bringing the proficiency gap down by 0.8 points to 29.5 percentage points.  But in every other tested grade– third, fifth, sixth, seventh, and eighth– they fell even further behind in reading.  In math, Detroit’s sixth grade students in state-managed schools gained marginally on their Michigan peers (by 0.3 points) and are now only 27.7 percentage points behind.  But they lost even more ground to their statewide peers in all the other tested grades– third, fourth, fifth, seventh, and eighth.

 

Pedroni says it is another lost year for the children of Detroit.

 

 

Categories Detroit, Michigan

Anthony Cody on “March Madness”: Time to Stop Teaching, Time for Test Prep

By dianeravitch
March 11, 2014 //
28

Anthony Cody makes clear how teaching has been redefined and degraded by No Child Left Behind and Race to the Top.

March is the month when teaching ends and test prep begins.

Federal education policy is a disaster.

The Bush-Obama agenda has de skilled teachers and made testing the most important aspect of US education.

Cody quotes teachers at length. One says:

“I wish you could hear my colleagues telling me “they don’t mind this” as it gets kids “ready” or solves them having to plan actual learning. They’ve been so de-skilled they don’t even feel the connection to instructional leadership. To them the school is a rote drill factory.

“The teaching profession has been redefined. A teacher is now the manager of a workbook drill. No projects, no model making, no literature, no research, no discovery. The planning you do is taking prefab programs and administering them. Sort of as if you were giving a test like the state test ALL the TIME. Room empty, pencils out, bubble. All things arranged around test prep. No themes, no critical thinking. Really! Not to get Biblical but it really fits – they know not what they do. Because they don’t, we are talking about folks that are responding to what their perception is – they perceive this to be what’s required.”

This is not education.

Categories NCLB (No Child Left Behind), Race to the Top, Standardized Testing

NC Charter Warned Due to Low Enrollments

By dianeravitch
March 11, 2014 //
3

A charter run by politically connected Baker Mitchell was warned that it may have to close due to low enrollment.

Mitchell is a close associate of state budget director Art Pope, a multimillionaire who founded the libertarian John Locke Foundation and whose campaign contributions pushed the legislature far to the right. Mitchell is on the board of the John Locke Foundation

Mitchell runs three charters and was just awarded a fourth:

“Mitchell, who has collected in the neighborhood of $16 million in taxpayer funds over the past five years for managing the two other charter schools in southeastern North Carolina, is under investigation by the U.S. Department of Education’s Office of Inspector General. Details of the case have not been made public.”

And it gets better!

“Baker Mitchell also sits on the N.C. Charter School Advisory Council, the body tasked with reviewing charter school applications and making recommendations to the State Board of Education for which applicants should be green lighted to open charter schools.”

Categories Charter Schools, North Carolina

Understanding the Propaganda Campaign Against Public Education

By dianeravitch
March 11, 2014 //
48

A few years ago, when I was blogging at Education Week with Deborah Meier, a reader introduced the term FUD. I had never heard of it. It is a marketing technique used in business and politics to harm your competition. The term and its history can be found on Wikipedia. FUD stands for Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt. The reader said that those who were trying to create a market-based system to replace public education were using FUD to undermine public confidence in public education. They were selling the false narrative that our public schools are obsolete and failing.

This insight inspired me to write “Reign of Error,” to show that the “reform” narrative is a fraud. Test scores on NAEP are at their highest point in history for white students, black students, Hispanic students, and Asian students. Graduation rates are the highest in history for these groups. The dropout rate is at an historic low point.

Why the FUD campaign against one of our nation’s most treasured democratic institutions? It helps the competition. It makes people so desperate tat they will seek out unproven alternatives. It makes the public gullible when they hear phony claims about miracle schools, where everyone graduates and everyone gets high test scores, and everyone goes to a four-year college. No such school exists. The “miracle school” usually has a high suspension rate, a high expulsion rate, a high attrition rate, and such schools usually do not replace the kids they somehow got rid of. Some “miracle schools” have never graduated anyone because they have only elementary schools, but that doesn’t stop the claims and boasting.

It turns out that there is actually a scholar studying the phenomenon of the “the cultural production of ignorance.”

He hasn’t looked at the attack on public schools, but his work shows how propaganda may be skillfully deployed to confuse and mislead the public. Michael Hiltzik of the Los Angeles Times writes about the work of Robert Proctor of Stanford University:

“Robert Proctor doesn’t think ignorance is bliss. He thinks that what you don’t know can hurt you. And that there’s more ignorance around than there used to be, and that its purveyors have gotten much better at filling our heads with nonsense.
Proctor, a professor of the history of science at Stanford, is one of the world’s leading experts in agnotology, a neologism signifying the study of the cultural production of ignorance. It’s a rich field, especially today when whole industries devote themselves to sowing public misinformation and doubt about their products and activities.

“The tobacco industry was a pioneer at this. Its goal was to erode public acceptance of the scientifically proven links between smoking and disease: In the words of an internal 1969 memo legal opponents extracted from Brown & Williamson’s files, “Doubt is our product.” Big Tobacco’s method should not be to debunk the evidence, the memo’s author wrote, but to establish a “controversy.”

“When this sort of manipulation of information is done for profit, or to confound the development of beneficial public policy, it becomes a threat to health and to democratic society. Big Tobacco’s program has been carefully studied by the sugar industry, which has become a major target of public health advocates.”

FUD was pioneered decades ago. Now public education is the target, and privatizing it is the goal. I hope Professor Proctor turns his attention to this issue, where a well-funded propaganda campaign seeks to spread enough doubt to destroy an essential Dmocratic institution.

There is no evidence from any other nation that replacing a public system with a privatized choice system produces anything but social, economic, and racial segregation.

http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-hiltzik-20140307,0,1622098.column#ixzz2vU1s5OXR

Categories Charter Schools, Corporate Reformers, Education Industry

Schneider to Florida Parents: The Jeb Bush “Miracle” Is a Sham

By dianeravitch
March 11, 2014 //
10

Good news for Florida parents: Mercedes Schneider has written a brief fact sheet to show that Jeb’s “miracle” didn’t happen.

One example: Alabama has a higher graduation rate than Florida.

“Florida’s graduation rate has been among the lowest for years. In 2001-02, Florida’s graduation rate was among the bottom five states. In 2010-11, it was among the bottom seven (three states did not have rates calculated).

The 2010-11 calculation is a better measure for state-to-state comparison since the 2001-02 rate was not calculated uniformly for all states.

For 2012-13, Florida reports its overall graduation rate as 75.6%, up from 70.6% in 2010-11. This article attributes the rise in Florida school district graduation rates– which varies widely from district to district– to an emphasis on college preparedness–and the ACT test. Yet Florida was in the bottom six states for its average ACT score of 19.8 in 2012.

(For comparison sake: Alabama has a 2012-13 graduation rate of 80% and a 2012 average ACT of 20.3, and it does not promote establishing charter schools or grading teachers using student test scores.)”

Categories Accountability, Bush, Jeb, Charter Schools, Florida, Graduation rates, Testing, Vouchers

What EduShyster Learned in Austin about David and Goliath

By dianeravitch
March 11, 2014 //
10

EduShyster went to the first national conference of the Network for Public Education, and it reminded her of the Biblical story of David and Goliath.

Our Goliath is the giant billionaire who only talks to people who agree with him. When he first encounters puny David, his first thought is, “Who is paying him? Must be the teachers’ union.” Goliath loves money so much that he cannot imagine anyone who is not motivated by money. He can’t understand–he cannot even imagine–that 400 parents, educators, students, academics, and concerned supporters of public education met in Austin and paid their own way! No corporate sponsorship! No union subsidy! Just people who wanted to be there because they are passionate about keeping Goliath’s hands off their school.

EduShyster’s sister, a teacher in Illinois who has watched Goliath swing his axe at her school, wrote a comment that appears in the post. She left the conference excited to know she is not alone. She has many allies. They are everywhere. Her allies have slingshots. And they are not afraid.

Tremble, Goliath. You too will fall. For all your bluster and money, you are hurting kids. Even though you own the U.S. Department of Education, you will not prevail. You will not prevail because your “reforms” not only hurt kids, they hurt teachers. They don’t make education better. They damage communities. Everything you do fails. You are a loser. Got that? A loser.

Categories Corporate Reformers, Network for Public Education, Supporting public schools

The Smear Campaign Against Mayor Bill de Blasio

By dianeravitch
March 10, 2014 //
79

I cross-posted this article on Huffington Post, to reach a wider audience beyond the blog.

The moral of the story is that it is very risky to tangle with the charter school lobby.

They are very rich, they are very powerful, and they are accustomed to opening their boutique charters in public space without paying rent.

They are also accustomed to pushing aside the children already enrolled in the public schools where they “co-locate,” and they don’t care if the children have profound disabilities, or if they take away the children’s art room, dance room, library, playground, whatever. The other children don’t count. Only the children who enroll in their schools matter. Children who get high test scores count more than children with low test scores and deserve privileges.

The de Blasio administration tried to play nice, gave them 14 new charter schools out of 17 proposals, including five new schools for Eva Moskowitz’s Success Academy charter chain instead of the eight she wanted.

That, to Eva and her billionaire backers, was a declaration of war! Only five new schools! How dare he!

Since that decision, Eva is now trying to destroy the de Blasio administration, which won only a few months ago in a landslide victory.

The Rupert Murdoch press and the TV talk shows have been filled with tales of de Blasio’s crimes against children. This media blitz may be due in part to the fact that Success Academy pays at least $500,000 a year to Knickerbocker, a high-powered public relations firm in D.C., run by Anita Dunn, who served as President Obama’s director of communication in 2009.

Here is the article. Help it go viral:

Perhaps you have seen the headlines and the television interviews about how New York City’s new mayor, Bill de Blasio, is closing charter schools, evicting poor minority children, destroying their dreams for the future, and their chance to escape failing public schools.

Almost all the complaints come from Eva Moskowitz, who runs New York City’s largest charter chain. Her grievances have been amply vented on Fox News, MSNBC’sMorning Joe and Chris Mathews, in the Wall Street Journal and the New York Post.

Time for a fact check.

When de Blasio ran for mayor, he said he would slow the growth of charters and would charge them rent, based on their ability to pay. In the closing months of the Bloomberg administration, the city’s Department of Education approved 45 new co-locations. A co-location is a new school inserted into an existing public school, meaning that different schools must share the cafeteria, library, playground, and give up its art room, music room, and every other space that is not an active classroom. Public school parents hate co-locations, because it means overcrowding, jostling for space, and reduction of facilities.

The new mayor, having inherited 45 co-locations, decided to approve 36 of them. This disappointed many public school parents. The mayor turned down only nine co-locations.

The de Blasio administration rejected the nine based on these criteria:

    1. It would not approve putting an elementary school into a high school.
    2. It would not open any school with less than 250 students because the school would be too small to meet the needs of students.
    3. It would not approve any co-locations that required heavy construction.
    4. It would not approve any co-location that dislocated students with disabilities. The neediest kids would not be shoved aside to make room for other students.

 

The nine schools that were turned down did not meet these criteria.

Of 17 charter schools that applied, 14 were approved.

Success Academy, which has screamed the loudest about losing space, won five new charters, not the eight that it wanted. Yet Eva Moskowitz was so outraged that she closed her 22 schools for a day and bused thousands of students and parents to Albany to lead a mass rally against de Blasio’s failure to give her the eight schools she wanted. Governor Andrew Cuomo appeared at Moskowitz’s rally to pledge his loyalty to charter schools.

De Blasio did not abandon charters or evict children from charters. The attacks on him are a power play by charter operators, specifically Moskowitz, to restore the good old days of the Bloomberg administration, when her requests were never turned down. This blowup is also intended to send a message to de Blasio not to mess with charter schools. While it is true that they enroll only 3 percent of New York state’s children and only 6 percent of New York City’s children, their boards contain the city’s financial elite. They can pay millions for a media campaign; they can make $800,000 in campaign contributions to Governor Cuomo, but they refuse to pay rent.

There is another peculiar aspect to the charter controversy in New York City. The charter industry has a theory that schools with high scores are entitled to evict schools that serve children with profound disabilities. This is a challenge not only to Mayor de Blasio, but to our basic sense of fairness and decency. Should schools with high scores (even if they are obtained by excluding students with handicaps and students who don’t speak English) get preferential treatment as compared to schools that enroll students with lower scores and to schools that enroll students who are profoundly disabled? 


Diane Ravitch is a historian of education and author of the national best-sellerReign of Error: The Hoax of the Privatization Movement and the Danger to America’s Public Schools.

Categories Education Reform

This is the Man Behind the Curtain Who Loves Standardized Testing

By dianeravitch
March 10, 2014 //
75

A reader (identified by her Twitter handle as mimi@zombienation15) responds to an earlier post called “Who Loves Standardized Testing?,” where I described a panel in Austin at SXSW where both Randi Weingarten and Peter Cunningham, Arne Duncan’s former Assistant Secretary of Education for communications, agreed that it was time for a Congressional investigation of the abuses, misuses, and cost of standardized testing. I asked, if no one is in favor of what we are doing now,  “Who is the man behind the curtain who is wasting billions on testing, forcing severely ill children to take tests, making little children hate school ?” Here is this reader’s response:

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

The “man behind the curtain” is the negative judgmental voice of authority that is now “hard wired” into almost every man, woman, and child in America. It is the voice that has resulted from people living in fear and insecurity from chronic stress. It is the voice of people who have been functioning in a survival mode for a long time, and they have become self-absorbed, callous, and dishonest. That is the hallmark of Narcissistic Personality Disorder. It is pervasive not only in the school system, but in government, business, and all phases of American society. It is a psychological plague.

We have become a society that is destroying our children. Our children cannot survive in an environment that is punitive and critical, and creates chronic stress from fear and insecurity. They are withering on the vines from lack of nurturing. Parents own fears have allowed them to become “indoctrinated” into this test obsessed data system that causes them be punitive and focus on their children’s performance, while in denial about their children’s emotional distress. They are not connecting to their children’s greatest needs. Teachers’ fear of their own job performance ratings has allowed them to become indoctrinated into a system that uses them to bully and punish children with boring mind numbing work and no creative freedom to grow independently and develop their own identity. Teachers are not connecting to children’s emotional needs. School boards and community leaders have become fearful of challenging the status quo and are impotent and in denial. They are not connecting to children’s most basic developmental needs. Government and business leaders have become enmeshed and greedy, and more concerned with their self interests. They are not connecting to children’s needs. We are a country living in fear, and the greatest price is being paid by our children.

The “man behind the curtain” represents the “weak, impotent, callous, greedy immature leaders” who lust for power and control. They are not connecting to the children’s distress, nor do they understand children’s basic developmental needs. They are using their wealth and power to gain control over all the “brainless”, “heartless”, “courage-less” submissive people in our country of OZ. These submissive parents and community members were conditioned as children to be “good and obedient and never question authority”. They were taught not to think for themselves, but only to take orders from domineering parents and teachers. Most of our leaders today are products of this oppressive dysfunctional environment that has resulted from chronic stress in the US since the 80′s. We cannot trust our leaders, but we are obedient to their abusive authority. We are struggling financially and morally, and living in chronic fear of survival because we feel insecure and threatened. Our children are endangered. We have lost our spirit.

But, we cannot afford to be idle bystanders any longer and listen to the “man behind the curtain”. We cannot continue listening to our internal judgmental voice saying “What will people think”. We cannot continue to feel depressed and helpless like most victims of bullying. It is time to step out of that helpless submissive obedient role of a victim and take action. Do not participate in bullying your children! Do not allow this psychological abuse to damage them for life. Do not let them participate in high stakes testing and obsessive test drill! Refuse the test! Demand a nurturing environment for your children. Civil Disobedience is the only immediate way to stop this insanity that is causing the US to become a pied-piper dictatorship that is stealing our children.

I have been an educational social worker for years. As others in my profession, I recognize that children’s mental and physical health cannot survive this current punitive school environment. Just like any living organism, children need a safe and nurturing place to grow. If you as a parent will not advocate for your child, who will?

Categories Accountability, Education Industry, Testing
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