David Sirota, one of the nation’s top investigative reporters, is now writing for International Business Times. In this article, he describes the differences between Elizabeth Warren and Hillary Clinton.
Archives for the month of: August, 2014
Most of us are familiar with the college-university rankings published by Forbes and U.S. News and other journals. Here is a different approach to ranking these institutions, looking at them more from the students’ experiences and opportunities than to their SAT test scores and AP classes taken in high school. The author, journalist Iris Stone, divides them into the most affordable 25 public institutions and 25 private institutions. The results will surprise you.
Download the pdf here 50_Great_Affordable_Colleges_in_the_Northeast.
The best public universities include Towson University, the University of Delaware, Binghamton University, the University of Vermont, and several campuses that are part of the State University of New York and the City University of New York. The best public university, she concludes, is the City College of New York, which is the flagship campus of the City University of New York, which has a library of 1.5 million books, nearly 80 academic majors, more than 100 academic clubs, and a staggeringly low tuition of less than $6,000 per year.
The best private colleges and universities include such superstar institutions as Harvard University, MIT, Johns Hopkins University, Wellesley College, Princeton University, Dartmouth College, Columbia University, Haverford College, Williams College, Amherst College, and Yale University. No surprises there.
But here is the shocker: the best private institution, she decides, is St. Joseph’s College, which has campuses in Brooklyn, New York, and Patchogue, New York. With tuition under $14,000 a year, it is the least expensive of all the campuses on the list of private colleges and universities. Its retention rate is about 85%. She writes that “the more than 500 faculty members spend a lot of individual time with students and keep the student-faculty ratio down to only 11:1.” St. Joseph’s College has supplied a large number of the teachers and administrators for public schools in New York City and its suburbs. As it happens, I know this institution well. Its recently retired president, Sister Elizabeth Hill is a kind, humble, brilliant woman. SJC is noted for the compassion and kindness that it directs to its students. It is an institution that cares about each student as an individual.
Bigger and richer is not necessarily better.
I the past few days, Twitter has been a twitter with tweets acclaiming or denouncing Whoopi Goldberg for her comments opposing tenure on “The View.” Ken Previti says that it is not reasonable to criticize Whoopi because she clearly doesn’t know much about what tenure is and why teachers defend it. It is a guarantee of a hearing, of due process, if a boss wants to fire you. Teachers earn tenure over a period of 2, 3, or 4 years. Many teachers don’t have tenure. Unions don’t grant tenure, administrators do.
Are our schools overrun with bad teachers? No. The latest evaluation plans typically find that 95% or more of teachers are effective or highly effective.
Critics of tenure never acknowledge that about 40% of new teachers don’t last more than four or five years. Teaching is a hard job, and tenure is a guarantee that you won’t be fired. For arbitrary or capricious reasons. You get a hearing, where an independent arbitrator considers the evidence. This protects teachers from students who make false accusations, from parents angry that the teacher didn’t raise their child’s grade, from community members who don’t want teachers to mention evolution, climate change, or certain literary classics. Tenure protects teachers from being fired because the district wants to hire cheaper teachers; it protects teachers from being fired to make a job for a city councilman’s daughter; it protects teachers from being fired because of their race, their gender, their sexual orientation, or their looks.
Ken Previti says, don’t blame Whoopi: educate her. Reach out to her on Twitter or Facebook. Help her understand.
Paul Thomas notes the success of the Walton-funded “reform” machine at the University of Arkansas. They pump out study after study proclaiming the superior results of school choice. Are you surprised? This is the idee fixe of the Walton Foundation. They want government out of our lives. It worked for them. With low taxes, little regulation, they pay low wages and outsource manufacturing to China, where wages are even lower than in Arkansas. And now they are all billionaires.
They want to bring their philosophy of deregulation, ruthless competition, and small government to education, perhaps to prepare the workforce of the future, and they use their tax-free dollars to promote vouchers and charters. So what if they create segregation or make it worse? So what if teacher attrition is high? The Waltons will always have a stable of researchers to promote the sham success of their model.
The current campaign is on to argue that charter schools are more successful than public schools, even though it is not true.
Having a higher “return on investment” (ROI), they deserve more public funding and less public scrutiny.
They count on us to forget that the original promise of charter schools was that they would do a better job academically at a lower cost (because they would get rid of the central bureaucracy). Now we see that they don’t do a better job academically, and they want more money because their administrative costs are as high as the public schools they replace. And they expect us to ignore the charter school scandals of nepotism, embezzlement, conflicts of interest, and other crimes that seem to increase as public scrutiny decreases.
Will we fall for it?
Anthony Cody notes that Glen Beck brought his tirade against the Common Core to parents in 700 theaters. A critic described him as the Music Man, trying to sell his wares to a gullible public.
Cody says: “The funny thing is that Common Core itself is being sold by yet another version of Professor Hill, in the form of billionaire Bill Gates.”
Cody writes:
“While Beck warns about the dangers of big government, Gates has been warning us about another bogeyman – the supposedly broken public school system. He warns that our kids are going to wash out in the international race for the jobs of the future, which supposedly will only go to those prepared for college and career by the new rigorous standards and tests.
“Those who recall The Music Man will remember that Professor Hill wanted to sell the town on the idea of a band, so that they would purchase musical instruments and uniforms, on which he would make a tidy profit. That sounds a bit like the new Common Core-aligned curriculum, tech devices, tests and professional development which must be bought in order for the project to succeed.
“Beck’s claim that Common Core is a progressive plot to turn our children into socialists is way off base. Likewise, Gates’ claim that the jobs of the future depend on preparing ever more students for careers in technology and math is shown to be without support. Just this week, an oped in USA Today pointed out that at the same time Gates proclaims the need for more skilled workers, Microsoft has laid off 18,000 of them, and stagnant wages show a lack of real demand. Furthermore, three out of four graduates with STEM degrees are not even working in jobs that require these skills, making it hard to believe there is any real shortage that would support Gates’ push for larger numbers of people prepared for such careers.
“In The Music Man, the fast-talking con artist was ultimately redeemed by an unlikely savior – the town’s librarian. Unfortunately neither Glenn Beck nor Bill Gates seem to pay much attention to librarians – or their friends in the teaching profession. Professor Harold Hill’s downfall was when he fell in love, and wound up sticking around to make his promised band a reality. Sadly, this seems the unlikeliest of outcomes for either Beck or Gates.”
When I heard from Randy Hoover about his new website called “The Teacher-Advocate.com,” I asked him to write a post explaining his hopes and goals. I knew that he could describe it better than I could. Hoover spent 46 years as an educator.
Randy Hoover writes:
A Project to Reanimate Teacher Advocacy
(Teacher-Advocate.com)
Randy L. Hoover, PhD
Emeritus Professor, Youngstown State University
I began teaching in the late 60s, a political science major who never took an education course nor wanted anything to do with teaching or public schools but who fell into a 6th grade social studies teaching job in Madison, Ohio, on the shores of Lake Erie. I will omit the somewhat sordid details of how I got the job and simply say that within a few weeks of encountering my first middle school students, my life took a 180-degree turn for the better, and I never looked back, at least not until recently. To make a very long story very short, I taught public school social studies for twelve years, acquired a master’s degree, and then earned my doctorate specializing in teacher education at The Ohio State University and headed into a temporary one-year job at Youngstown State University that morphed into a 30-year stint.
I loved my profession dearly because it was my calling, but I despised the politicization that began to happen with Reagan’s A Nation at Risk, which later led to No Child Left Behind, followed by Race to the Top, as they became the hitching posts for the reformist, state-level, pseudo accountability systems across America. My early experience in Madison was a time when both NEA and AFT aggressively embraced the philosophy of teacher advocacy, as it was referred to. My induction into the union and its philosophy stand as my baptism into consciously embracing the value of America’s public schools and the legitimacy of their educators. It was a time when the prime directive of my union was teacher advocacy in the noble pursuit of intellectual empowerment and social justice for the children of our public schools.
Though I initially taught undergraduate courses at YSU, my professorial passion lay in teaching graduate studies, and my later years at YSU were spent entirely developing and teaching graduate courses for practicing teachers and administrators. I had always encouraged a sense of teacher and public school advocacy in my students, but as their thoughts and feelings about Ohio’s accountability system became their overwhelming professional concern, I worked diligently to give them more opportunity to learn the critical issues of reform mandates and especially the political realities that shape them.
With every new semester, my students expressed greater concern and more confusion about what was happening to them. They wanted to know why their professional worlds were being so drastically altered for the worse, why they were being singled out as a profession for demonization and ridicule by the media, the public, and both major political parties. Indeed, some of my students were even beginning to believe the rhetoric of reform. Sadly, the only explanations they had were the fragmented, shallow propaganda slogans the reformists were peddling to the media for public consumption. There was simply no reflective critique, no voices challenging No Child Left Behind and the cascading, anti-teacher, anti-public school mandates gushing from the Ohio legislature and the Ohio Department of Education that were inundating them.
For my students working in high-poverty schools, the isolation and alienation was palpable, with very good, dedicated teachers feeling demoralized and abandoned amid the very public, state-mandated accountability reports showing them to be professionally incompetent. Equally disturbing were those in the wealthier schools who were starting to become a bit smug because these same accountability reports portrayed them to be professionally excellent. Neither group understood that teachers in low-performing schools were no more the cause of low performance than those in high-performing schools were of performance success.
I became more and more concerned at how powerless and how far removed my graduate student educators were from even having a clue to the real nature and substance of the school reform mandates, especially in terms of their role as teachers in affecting achievement test outcomes. I tried my best to teach about the accountability mandates, especially the fallacies of the standardized tests as the vehicle for judging schools and their educators. As I did, one thing that became eminently clear was that our unions had failed entirely in educating their memberships as to what was happening. It was sad, but simple: our unions were now accommodating the politics and, to large degree, the mentality of the anti-teacher, anti-public school reform movement. The legacy of teacher advocacy I acquired back in my years in Madison was dead and the ideal of social justice for America’s children abandoned.
While mentally preparing to retire at the end of spring term 2013 after 46 years as an educator, I became starkly aware that teacher education, especially graduate teacher education, was also failing to address the fictions and fallacies of educational reform as well. My own experience and a lot of anecdotal evidence from my colleagues across the country made it clear that schools and colleges of education were just as culpable as were our unions in not providing our students the opportunity to learn the critique of education reform. Thus was born my vision of The Teacher Advocate project (Teacher-Advocate.com).
The Teacher Advocate project is designed to educate public school educators and others who seek a fair, valid, and credible education accountability system and to advance the ideals of intellectual empowerment and social justice through our public schools. The website offers a series of papers, commentaries, and links specifically identifying and addressing the critical issues necessary to understand why and how our test-driven educational accountability systems are replete with invalid metrics and false claims resulting in indefensible and grossly unfair high-stakes consequences for students, educators, and communities. The site is unique in that it is a one-stop source for acquiring most, if not all, the concepts and ideas needed to expose the pseudo accountability of the system and to expose the special interests that pseudo accountability serves.
The resources available in the project enable the reader to deconstruct the language, slogans, and especially the contrived metrics to show how the accountability systems violate both established scientific principles of psychometrics and nationally-accepted ethical standards for educational assessment and evaluation. The site brings together a variety of emerging concepts from different sources such as the false proxy, the metrics machine, and authentic vs. pseudo accountability to illuminate the fallacious arguments of the reform movement. The Teacher Advocate represents many themes, all focused on the principle that the claims, the ratings, and the conclusions that flow from the metrics of any educational accountability system must be demonstrably credible and warranted and also be absent of any political or corporate hidden agendas. The project is a personal reminder to me that being vigilant toward the well being of the public schools and especially their teachers is being vigilant toward social justice and the well being of our nation’s children. My vision is that if knowledge is power, then knowledge of the intricacies of the reformist accountability movement offered in The Teacher Advocate may empower us to become the advocates we must become if public schools and their teachers are to survive.
The Teacher Advocate
Teacher-Advocate.com
Valerie Strauss shows in this post that there were NO gains in reading in the District of Columbia Public Schools during the tenure of Michelle Rhee and her successor Kaya Henderson. G.F. Brandenburg noted these facts on his blog on July 31. Brandenburg asks: “So where are all those increases that Michelle Rhee promised in writing?”
Strauss writes that this is more than just a personal failure. This is a failure of the entire reform strategy.
Bernie Horn of the Public Leadership Institute writes:
“If this isn’t failure, what is?
“The latest results of the DC-CAS, the District of Columbia’s high-stakes standardized test, show that the percentage of public school students judged “proficient” or better in reading has declined over the past five years in every significant subcategory except “white.”
“This is important, and not just for Washington, D.C. It is an indictment of the whole corporatized education movement. During these five years, first Michelle Rhee and then her assistant/successor Kaya Henderson controlled DCPS and they did everything that the so-called “reformers” recommend: relying on standardized tests to rate schools, principals and teachers; closing dozens of schools; firing hundreds of teachers and principals; encouraging the unchecked growth of charters; replacing fully-qualified teachers with Teach For America and other non-professionals; adopting teach-to-the-test curricula; introducing computer-assisted “blended learning”; increasing the length of the school day; requiring an hour of tutoring before after-school activities; increasing hours spent on tested subjects and decreasing the availability of subjects that aren’t tested. Based on the city’s own system of evaluation, none of it has worked.”
There were no gains, no miracles. Except for a very small improvement in the proficiency rates of white students, every other category declined: low-income students declined; black students declined; Hispanic students declined; Special education students declined. Whites saw a small uptick of 1.6% from 2009-2014.
Horn writes:
“In truly Orwellian fashion, DCPS presents these disastrous numbers under the heading “Long-term progress in Reading has been maintained.” The Mayor, the DCPS Chancellor, and the powers-that-be all act like there’s nothing wrong.
“But clearly, this is what failure looks like. If a school had scores like this over the past five years, it would be targeted for closure. If principals or teachers had scores like this, they would be fired. If a student had scores like this, s/he would be made to feel like a failure. Where is the accountability in this supposedly “data-driven” system?”
Yet remember that TIME magazine had a cover story on December 8, 2008, about Michelle Rhee (written by Amanda Ripley) saying that this was the woman who knew how to “fix” America’s schools?
Does Michelle Rhee know how to “fix” America’s schools? There is no evidence that she does. She didn’t do it in D.C. She is still collecting millions of dollars from unnamed donors to persuade legislators to follow her disastrous strategies.
We should know by now that the data-driven, test-driven approach doesn’t work. We should know by now that schools need experienced teachers and leaders to help children and new teachers. We should know by now that schools need stability and constancy of purpose, not disruption and high teacher turnover. We should immediately end the war on public schools and teachers and give our schools the resources they need and give our professionals the respect they deserve.
This is a good news story about a state commissioner of education who stood up and said, with quiet determination, that the emperor has no clothes.
That state commissioner is Rebecca Holcombe of Vermont. She wrote a clear and eloquent letter to the parents and caregivers of Vermont, explaining the punitive and incoherent nature of federal education policy, which (under NCLB) requires that every single school in Vermont be labeled low-performing, even though many national and international measures show that Vermont is a high-performing state. She explained that Vermont refused to apply for a waiver from NCLB offered by Secretary Duncan because it would have forced the state to evaluate teachers by their students’ test scores, which is unreliable and unfair to teachers and students.
Commissioner Holcombe wrote that Vermont believes that schools have purposes that are no less important (and perhaps more important) than test scores.
For her thoughtfulness, her integrity, her devotion to children, her understanding of the broad aims of education, and her courage in standing firm against ruinous federal policies, Rebecca Holcombe is a hero of American education. Most people go along with the crowd, even when doing so violates their sense of personal and professional ethics. Not Commissioner Holcombe. If our nation had more state commissioners like her, it would save our children from a mindless culture of test and punish that the federal department of education has imposed on them and our nation’s schools.
This is the letter that State Commissioner Holcombe wrote to every parent and caregiver in Vermont:
“Under the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB), as of 2014, if only one child in your school does not score as “proficient” on state tests, then your school must be “identified” as “low performing” under federal law. This year, every school whose students took the NECAP tests last year is now considered a “low performing” school by the US Department of Education. A small group of schools were not affected by this policy this year because they helped pilot the new state assessment and so did not take the NECAPs last year. Because these schools had their federal AYP status frozen at 2013 levels, eight schools are not yet identified as low performing by federal criteria. However, had these school taken the NECAPs as well, it is likely that every single school in the state would have to be classified as “low performing” according to federal guidelines.
“The Vermont Agency of Education does not agree with this federal policy, nor do we agree that all of our schools are low performing.
In 2013, the federal Education Department released a study comparing the performance of US states to the 47 countries that participated in the most recent Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study, one of the two large international comparative assessments. Vermont ranked 7th in the world in eighth-grade mathematics and 4th in science. Only Massachusetts, which has a comparable child poverty rate, did better.
“On the National Assessment of Educational Progress, Vermont consistently ranks at the highest levels. We have the best graduation rate in the nation and are ranked second in child well-being.
“Just this week, a social media company that compares financial products (WalletHub) analyzed twelve different quality metrics and ranked Vermont’s school system third in the nation in terms school performance and outcomes.
“Nevertheless, if we fail to announce that each Vermont school is “low performing,” we jeopardize federal funding for elementary and secondary education. The “low performing” label brings with it a number of mandatory sanctions, which your principal is required to explain to you. This policy does not serve the interest of Vermont schools, nor does it advance our economic or social well-being. Further, it takes our focus away from other measures that give us more meaningful and useful data on school effectiveness.
“It is not realistic to expect every single tested child in every school to score as proficient. Some of our students are very capable, but may have unique learning needs that make it difficult for them to accurately demonstrate their strengths on a standardized test. Some of our children survived traumatic events that preclude good performance on the test when it is administered. Some of our students recently arrived from other countries, and have many valuable talents but may not yet have a good grasp of the academic English used on our assessments. And, some of our students are just kids who for whatever reason are not interested in demonstrating their best work on a standardized test on a given day.
“We know that statewide, our biggest challenge is finding better ways to engage and support the learning of children living in poverty. Our students from families with means and parents with more education, consistently are among the top performing in the country. However, federal NCLB policy has not helped our schools improve learning or narrow the gaps we see in our data between children living in poverty and children from more affluent families. We need a different approach that actually works.”
What are the alternatives? Most other states have received a waiver to get out from under the broken NCLB policy. They did this by agreeing to evaluate their teachers and principals based on the standardized test scores of their students. Vermont is one of only 5 states that do not have a waiver at this time. We chose not to agree to a waiver for a lot of reasons, including that the research we have read on evaluating teachers based on test scores suggests these methods are unreliable in classes with 15 or fewer students, and this represents about 40-50% of our classes. It would be unfair to our students to automatically fire their educators based on technically inadequate tools. Also, there is evidence suggesting that over-relying on test-based evaluation might fail to credit educators for doing things we actually want them to do, such as teach a rich curriculum across all important subject areas, and not just math and English language arts. In fact, nation-wide, we expect more and more states to give up these waivers for many of the reasons we chose not to pursue one in the first place.
Like other Vermont educators, I am deeply committed to continuously improving our schools and the professional skill of our teachers. I have heard from principals and teachers across the state who are deeply committed to developing better ways of teaching and working with parents and other organizations to ensure that every child’s basic needs are met. If basic needs are not met, children cannot take advantage of opportunities that we provide in school. However, the federal law narrows our vision of schools and what we should be about. Ironically, the only way a school could pass the NCLB criteria would be to leave some children behind – to exclude some of the students who come to our doors. That is something public schools in Vermont will not do.
Matching Our Measures to Our Purpose
Certainly, we know tests are an important part of our tool kit, but they do not capture everything that is important for our children to learn. With this in mind, our State Board of Education clearly outlined five additional education priorities in our new Education Quality Standards, including scientific inquiry, citizenship, physical health and wellness, artistic expression and 21st century transferable skills.
As parents and caregivers, we embrace a broader vision for our children than that defined in federal policy. Thus, we encourage you to look at your own child’s individual growth and learning, along with evidence your school has provided related to your child’s progress. Below are some questions to consider:
• What evidence does your school provide of your child’s growing proficiency?
• Is your child developing the skills and understanding she needs to thrive in school and
the community?
• Are graduates of your school system prepared to succeed in college and/or careers?
• Is your child happy to go to school and engaged in learning?
• Can your child explain what he is learning and why? Can your child give examples of
skills he has mastered?
• Is your child developing good work habits? Does she understand that practice leads to
better performance?
• Does your child feel his work in school is related to his college and career goals?
• Does your child have one adult at the school whom she trusts and who is committed to
her success?
• If you have concerns, have you reached out to your child’s teacher to share your
perspective?
Be engaged with your school, look at evidence of your own child’s learning, and work with your local educators to ensure that every child is challenged and supported, learning and thriving. Schools prosper when parents are involved as the first teachers of their children.
The State’s Obligation to Our Children
Working with the Governor, the State Board, the General Assembly and other agencies, and most importantly, with educators across the state, the Agency of Education will invite schools across the state to come together to innovate and improve our schools. We hope your school will volunteer to help develop and use a variety of other measures that will give parents, citizens and educators better information on student learning and what we can do to personalize and make it better. These measures include:
• collaborative school visits by teams of peers, to support research, professional learning and sharing of innovative ideas,
• personalization of learning through projects and performance assessments of proficiency,
• gathering and sharing of feedback from teachers, parents and students related to school climate and culture, student engagement and opportunities for self-directed learning,
• providing teachers and administrators standards-based feedback on the effectiveness of their instruction,
• developing personalized learning plans that involve students in defining how they will demonstrate they are ready to graduate, and basing graduation on these personalized assessments of proficiency rather than “seat-time”,
• analyzing growth and improvement at the Supervisory level as well as the school level, to identify systems that seem to be fostering greater growth in students, as a way of identifying and sharing promising practices across schools.
Vermont has a proud and distinguished educational history, but we know we can always do better. We are committed to supporting our schools as they find more effective and more engaging ways to improve the skills and knowledge of our children. As we have done before, we intend to draw on the tremendous professional capability of teachers across the state as we work to continuously improve our schools. Our strength has always been our ingenuity and persistence. In spite of federal policies that poorly fit the unique nature of Vermont, let’s continue to work together to build great schools that prepare our children to be productive citizens and contributors to our society
Sherry Gay-Dagnogo won the Democratic primary in Michigan’s 8th House District. The Network for Public Education endorsed her because of her strong stand against over-testing and privatization. She is a former middle school teacher. Gay-Dagnogo also supports Congressional Hearings on the cost and misuse of testing.
Sherry Gay-Dagnogo’s victory is a big win for students and public education in Michigan. Her victory sends a strong message to candidates nationwide that siding with the over-testing zealots isn’t just bad policy, it’s bad politics. Seat by seat, in legislatures, in the gubernatorial races, in Congress, we will fight to elect friends of public education, who defend children and sound education.
Never forget: no matter how much money the privatizers spend, we are many, and they are few. A victory for public education is a victory for democracy.
Congratulations, Sherry!
Charles P. Pierce posted an astonishing piece about Campbell Brown on the Esquire politics blog that delves into her devotion to transparency, except where her donors are concerned. I cannot reveal the title of his article because it would violate one of the very few rules of this blog. I do not use certain four-letter words of ancient origin on the blog, nor do I permit others to do so. So, if you want to know what Pierce titled his article or what he said about Campbell Brown, open the link.
Diane Ravitch's blog 