Laura Chapman read Stephen Dyer’s post about Ohio’s ranking on Education Week’s “Quality Counts” and called for skepticism:
She writes:
“The Quality Counts reports in EdWeek are representing the data that the Gates Foundation wants to see publicized along with mandated reporting from USDE. These data systems have been jointly funded by USDE and Gates since 2005.
“This is to say that every reader of this annual dedicated report on education in the United States should pay attention to what is NOT reported, including, for example, cuts to studies in the arts, physical education, studies in the humanities, foreign languages. The continued use of flawed measures for teacher evaluation, including VAM and versions of SLOs.
“In addition, EdWeek gets editorial support from 18 foundations, and their support is targeted so that, for example, the headlines and prime editorial space this week is devoted to teacher education programs and why so few have been shut down.
“The topical coverage of teacher education is funded by the Joyce Foundation. This reporting is parallel to the launch of full scale attacks on the absence of a national passion for firing teachers…with absurd discussions of the potential benefits of firing 25% in order to raise test scores.
“In other words, what counts as “quality” is determined by those who get to decide, and on what criteria.
“I live in Ohio where charter corruption is rampant, where few voters bother to examine the views of candidates running for the State Board of Education, where there is a data warehousing program that rarely makes the news that it deserves. There are many reasons to question whether education in Ohio is better or worse than last year, or the year before, and so on. Putting too much emphasis on stacked ratings among states, from year to year, is a version of the stack ratings within each state imposed on schools.”
Diane Ravitch's blog 
See my complementary post (just now) on some of the indicators in the print version of EdWeek’s Quality Counts–really wierd constructs include, for example, “best in class” for the stack ratings of states…makes me think of dog show ratings, but those are more interesting.
Reblogged this on biochemlife and commented:
I am going to reblog some of Diane’s blogs in hopes that others outside of education will see them. I know I don’t have many followers yet but it is a start.
biochemlife,
You’re right that people outside of education are unaware that departments of education, state and national, are privatizing tax-supported schools to create profits for tech and test companies and Wall St.
Thanks for your efforts.
Well, I just realized that I can do more to spread this by tweeting, LinkedIn and Facebook for these posts.
Dear Laura:
I agree with your post 200%.
Here is other reader’s opinion that agrees with you, as shown here:
“Visiting the June Jordan School for Equity in San Francisco last month, I was delighted to hear one of the staff members say, “I’d rather have a student come to us, drop out their sophomore year, and go on to be a good person than graduate with a 4.0 and go on to be an asshole who doesn’t know how to deal with other people.”
“Good=humane/considerate for the unfortunate” person is much better a “smart *ss =quality in mind” person for any community and society. Back2basic
Not my first choice of language but it is on target for the values we need honor. By coincidence, this profile fits my brother, a high school dropout who did some incredible things before retuning to complete high school, then on to college. Just met three people he mentored about fifty years ago.
What counts as quality is determinant on who gets to decide as the author mentions. And these days, “who gets to decide” are people completely not in the know about education issues. They are people with lots of money and ideas they want to try out and let others in their circle profit by. There are absolutely no professional fields other than education where we would have inexperienced people making these decisions. It is OUTRAGEOUS.
I am partially in agreement with you. Unfortunately, as a former principal, I know only too well that there are many “in the know about education issues” must be profiting one way or another because they are doing everything in their power to ruin a school. Experienced or inexperienced, does not matter so much when Children First are really Children Last, and the educators that stand up to help the children are shut down by people on all sides. It is outrageous and their needs to be a call to action by those of us who know what is really taking place in our educational system. I want to thank all the educators who do an amazing job day in and day out and all the people that support us.
Agree. It is not only outrageous, it should be criminal.
Thanks for pointing it out to me-I forgot with my excitement about MA being the top 3 out of 4 spots—whoever is paying for the study gets to decide what’s important.
“Reformed Accounting”
Lots of counts
But no accounts
For quality that’s real
Because, you see,
The quantity
Is quality, they feel.
Results and findings can be selective and presented through the lens of a particular perspective. Statistics can be twisted or colored by bias,omission and false conclusions. Beware of internal reviews or reviews representing a special interest.
The Ohio Dept.of Education will select a chair in the next few days. A likely contender is Thomas Gunlock. Frequent commenter, Chiara, in a Ravitch blog comment, on Nov.10, 2014, 5:41, posted a link, to an Ohio.com interview with Gunlock, titled, “Thomas Gunlock: Family of Republican Donors…”. During Gunlock’s tenure on the board of a charter school, the state auditor found “a failure to adequately monitor finances”. He was quoted as saying, “I was just a board member. I mean, we had a board meeting once a quarter or something and I listened to the financial statements and all the reports…like all the other board members.” IMO, it shows a callous disregard for accountability,…. his own.
Plunderbund.com lists the e-mail addresses of state board members, in an article today, and asks Ohioans to contact them to let them know what citizens expect from the Board’s leader.
No wonder Obama targeted Teacher Education next. He served on the board of the Joyce Foundation. He must owe them big time for bankrolling the political career of a nobody whose very limited experience in politics amounted to just stepping through each successive open door. It’s amazing what money can buy today, especially when you have no allegiance to the common good and are willing to sell your soul to the highest bidder and enter a pact to sell out humanity while pretending to do otherwise.
Teacher Educators are NOT the only professors who prepare teachers in colleges. Regardless of their majors, all education students must take many courses from professors who teach Liberal Arts and Sciences. The attacks on Teacher Ed and Community Colleges are just the opening salvos in the battle against higher education. This was a major component of the 1971 Powell Memo, which was followed by the formation of ALEC in 1973. so other professors had better be prepared to be targeted next in this neoliberal war against education and the common man.
The Lewis Powell Memo – A Corporate Blueprint to Dominate Democracy: http://www.greenpeace.org/usa/en/campaigns/global-warming-and-energy/polluterwatch/The-Lewis-Powell-Memo/
The U.S. Dept. of Education is not concerned about the future potential of the United States. The focus would be on university economic departments and colleges of business, if they were.
Former economic and business students drive the financial sector that drags down GDP and, they devise and implement policies that concentrate wealth.
The damage inflicted on America isn’t from schools of education. Neither student academic achievement nor worker skill and performance influence plutocratic schemes to take the rewards of worker productivity. The concomitant harm to America’s future is immaterial to the Dept. of Education because it exists to enrich oligarchs.
In Illinois, Bruce Rauner is appointing public school critic Rev. James Meeks. Meeks is a political sell-out and charter school proponent. One of our administrators who tried to start a charter school several years ago has just tendered his resignation, saying something better is coming down the horizon. My guess is that he will be running an Illinois charter school somewhere, perhaps under the leadership of Meeks himself. I am sure Rauner and Rahm Emmanuel will begin twisting arms to funnel taxpayer dollars into yet another charter school, run by the Rev. James Meeks.
Charters are not destructive. What is destructive is a public education system that has become so corrupted and eroded from government agendas that they no longer can teach to children who underachieve or who think differently. Art and music education programs in public schools feel mechanized and forced. There is an overall lack of creativity in the atmosphere of public schools today. My generation who have children in the system have no patience to wait for the public schools to turn around. We who have children that think differently need to protect our children by pulling them out of environments which are stifling. I do commend however investigators and whistle blowers who are exposing corrupt charter officials who misuse funding. I do believe that there should be a stricter set of measures used to hold all charters accountable. Perhaps this is the purpose of charter bashing debates. Charters as I see it are an inevitable part of the “evolution” of education since it is clear that not all children thrive in a public school setting. Charters are necessary but hold them more accountable for their funding. It should not be an either or debate about public vs charter. As a mother of a highly imaginative right brain thinking child I thank the heavens for alternative education environments. CHOICE and VARIETY will help our youth find their voice and become more thoughtful and productive adults. The alternative is a whole lot of teens that never feel understood and ultimately seek to drown their sorrows in alcohol and drugs. This is what I witnessed while attending one of the best public schools in our nation. Many of my peers never fit the rigid mold of public school. Many of them now in their early forties are still recovering from being marginalized in a system which favors the conformist and belittles the nonconformist.
Curious as to the creative, right brain activities that your child is experiencing in your charter school? Specifics will help. And also wondering what is preventing this type of opportunity in your public school? It couldn’t be the scripted, test-prep approach that emphasizes math and ELA to the exclusion of almost everything else? The very, test-and-punish, federal reform agenda that virtually every public school in America was illegally coerced into adopting? The same edu-faker reform that we have been fighting for almost three years on this blog?
Took the words, right out of my mouth.
Charters are held much less accountable for their funding. This is borne out by the facts. If you are going to present yourself as informed then please do the research and actually become informed. Everything that you describe as a negative at public schools is brought on by the private sector takeover of public schools. There is not one true educator who wants the environment you describe. Charter schools are mostly about strict conformity. They would rather counsel you out asap then have to give time and attention to your individual needs. That is your choice, there will be no variety.
I used this article to see if I could provoke somebody…anybody….into saying something in St. Louis..On current affairs I posted “B. Gates legacy-turning poop into H2O, or education to poop?”.””””””I am not sure how much Bill Gates has to do with this…but I hope it will be his legacy…..great stuff if it works…..
Bill Gates says a new plant that can turn human feces into electricity and clean drinking water can save a huge number of lives………..
He probably respects the expertise of scientists with something like this….
Starting with common core, that has not the case when it comes to the expertise of teachers regarding education”””…then I posted what Chapman said, linking it to this site. The last paragraph gives me an opportunity to talk about something I posted about this weekend in the PD current affairs…I would give almost anything for a couple of words comment about it. No one in St. Louis is going to touch it.
She mentions widespread charter corruption in Ohio….I think the corruption is so widespread that the reports of failure and corruption in charters, divert attention from a much more serious problem…..the ones that “succeed”. I zeroed in on KIPP…..which gets the routine puff piece stuff, as people miss the larger picture. St. Louis Public Schools were taken over by the state in 2007….attributed to a questionable loss of accreditation, it stopped the elected people from questioning charters. KIPP now has ten percent of the 25,000 public school students in St. Louis. I do not know how many of those 2500 are special needs, but I mentioned the number 750, or 15 percent as being appropriate. I do not know about attrition and diversity issues….they are not considered relevant. Unless I am mistaken, the newest of the schools is run by former Senator John Danforth’s daughter. The board of directors was recently successful in negotiating free rent on a building in exchange for…..slps right to count KIPP students scholastic scores on the annual evaluation dealing with their provisional accreditation…..does that amount to a cherry picked charter, with cherry picked students to help make things look better than if they included all charter school students’ scores? Finally, as vague as the KIPP website is about the identities of actual teachers and principals……they do make available their board of directors…….I have to wonder…….is the local board and the state board at any disadvantage in negotiating with these people? I will not accuse them of neglecting their students….they are valuable tools in making it possible….to show a profit. Using a stacked deck.
John W. Kemper
john is the President and COO at Commerce Bancshares,
Kyle Chapman, Vice-Chair
Kyle is co-founder and Managing Director of Forsyth Capital Investors.
Kerry Casey, Vice-Chair & Treasurer
Kerry is the Vice President of Customer Advocacy at Exegy
Keith H. Williamson, Secretary
Keith is a corporate attorney and business executive
Maxine Clark
Maxine is the Founder of Build-A-Bear Workshop
Don Danforth
Don co-founded City Academy and assumed the role of President when the school opened in 1999.
June Fowler
June is the Vice President of Corporate and Public Communications at BJC.
Gabriel E. Gore
Gabe is a partner at Dowd Bennet LLP Clients have included Fortune 500 Companies and high-ranking members of the executive and legislative branches of the federal government
Flora P. Tersigni
Flora is the owner of Royalty Imports, a food and beverage business focused on Italian wine
Robert J. Wasserman
Rob is Senior Vice President at U.S. Bancorp Community Development Corporation.
Gregory W. Wendt, KIPP: St. Louis, Founding Chair
Greg is the Senior Vice President of Capital Research and Management Company, a division of Capital Group Companies
“Poop to Money”
Gates turns poop to money
And Microsoft is proof
In land of billkin’, honey
The poop is through the roof
thank you sdp…..it is almost impossible for me to get responses, but sometimes I do get views….387 for my “Most dangerous racial problem in MO-state board of education”…all the publicity has gone to the murder of Brown, but thousands of children are being impacted by our state board of education….the article about the let our charter have free rent meeting produced a response by former elected board of education president Veronica O’Brien—and I told her I thought someone should sit down with her and talk about all she has observed in the last ten years…..st. Louis once paid a superintendent five million dollars….we share a frustration over the refusal of the media to follow up on the murder of former special needs student Tim Bacon in august of 2006……I have to wonder if there is any state which has a more timid media than Missouri….
I went back to a year ago in the public radio story…..Danforth’s daughter is not in charge of a KIPP schoo…..hers is an all girl school…the Hawthorn academy…….from January, 2014…Six years ago Mary Stillman attended a lecture by Ann Tisch at Washington University.
“That was my ah-ha moment,” Stillman recalls. “Here she is talking about this group of public schools for girls who wouldn’t otherwise have this model of education and it’s working.”
Tisch is the founder of the Young Women’s Leadership Network, which operates a network of all-girls public schools and boasts a 93 percent graduation rate at its flagship institution in East Harlem.
I made a comment at that time……a 990 tax form? Andrew and ann tisch? New York?
a look at ann tisch’s 990 tax returns shows that the percentage of afro american children in their student population in 2010 was 58 percent…dropped to 35 two years later….mostly more latino students…I was unable to determine how many special needs students were enrolled. these are details which need to be examined automatically in considering opening a new charter school.
tonight, I offered this,,,,,,,,,,personally, I find the Hawthorn school to have a more impressive board….more women, including one from the Illinois aclu…….still, this shows some charters are high echelon…like this one…..the pd needs to do an organized list, with numbers and comparisons……to see what is really going on with the overall impact of the charters….http://www.hawthornschool.org/hawthorn-board.html
http://interact.stltoday.com/forums/viewtopic.php?f=6&t=1084360&p=14518017#p14518017
I am very interested in everything on this website. Please take the below in the spirit of wanting to learn.
I don’t understand the conspiracy theory slant to dicephering these results. I read the report, and gleaned several things. 1) the report’s measured changed from year’s past. The report says that the emphasis changed from process to outcome. So, I don’t understand why these posts are determined to compare previous results when the measures are different. 2) access to early childhood education appears to be why Ohio didn’t do well. This is a true problem that concerns me. I don’t understand spinning the results to imply that there is going to be a mass teacher firing. Ohio does need to improve in early childhood education, and I felt happy this was accounted for in the report. To me, this has been long-overlooked.
I guess my problem is that I am not understanding the venom. I read Diane’s books, which is why I came here for more information. I agree with her about many things, and have for a long time. I am very opposed to charter schools, and have seen the terrible things that can happen in Ohio. I’m opposed to high stakes testing. I am opposed to the Michelle Rhees of the world. I get all of that. What I don’t understand is labeling all of these educational foundations as the bad guy up to something malicious. True, they have made mistakes, but aren’t we all just working toward the same goal of improving education? I guess I just don’t see this vast conspiracy of trying to privatize education. I think there have been some experiments that have gone wrong, and it seems that we have all learned from them. Wouldn’t it be better to work with them than in militant opposition?
While we are on topic of my lack of understanding, I really don’t understand the hatred for the common core. Haven’t we long waited for better standards? It is true that they haven’t been tested, but isn’t in good that we are on a path to more rigorous standards? The way they are being implemented hasn’t been great, but isn’t there great potential here? Is this an ego thing because we weren’t represented well at the table? Aren’t we adaptable to make this work? I am sincerely confused.
Here is an example of my confusion playing out: My daughter, a kindergartener, took a standardized test via computer without even learning how to use a mouse first in October. Anybody who knows anything about kindergarteners knows this is ridiculous. So, I contacted the school and the director of curriculum. She informed me that this was something that had to do now with all the changes. So, I did my own research and learned that this was not true. The law allows the district to do the traditional kindergarten readiness tests, but our district is opting for these stupid standardized tests. Why? Because now they don’t have to pay the teachers over the summer to do the longer kindergarten readiness assessments. It is quicker. Additional research showed most of the surrounding districts are doing the same exact thing. However, if you listen to teachers and parents they are rabble-rousing about the state and how wrong this is when the real culprit seems to be the district. Why do I bring this up? Because it seems to be what is happening on a broader level in these conversations. It is very easy to blame everything on these corporations or foundations, but it isn’t that simple. What if there isn’t a bad guy?
I believe that this conversation deserves a bit more nuance. This is hard to do if the other guy is the enemy, I guess. I’m afraid our vision may be clouded in anger, and that will make it hard for us to serve our children well.
Oh yeah, corporations are our friends. And if you keep your head in the sand long enough, you will delight in discovering that you have been eating Monsanto GMOs –of which the beneficent Gates owns 500,000 shares and promotes across the globe as part of his “charity” work: http://seattletimes.com/html/localnews/2012751169_gatesmonsanto29m.html
The Gates Foundation sold its Monsanto position years ago.
Where’s the evidence?
The foundation trust has to report its large holdings with the SEC, and it also has to report all of its holdings in year-end tax filings. The 500,000-share position initially appeared in 2010 SEC filings and then stopped appearing in 2011, and the year-end filing for fiscal 2011 doesn’t list Monsanto at all. That means the position was sold sometime in fiscal 2011.
So we should just take your word for that when articles have continued to come out about the Gates stock in Monsanto? I could find no articles to the contrary.
How about Gates’ investment in private prisons –which have guaranteed quotas, including for immigrants, “The Gates Foundation Tries to Defend Its Investment in Private Prisons”
http://slog.thestranger.com/slog/archives/2014/04/10/the-gates-foundation-tries-to-defend-its-investment-in-private-prisons
You don’t have to take my word for it. You can look up the trust’s Form 13F reports and its annual tax filings. Whoever’s writing the “articles” you’re seeing is just cutting and pasting the same thing over and over again without knowing how to verify the information.
Gates has a hell of a lot of stock in companies that are known to pay unlivable wages to workers, such as Macy’s, McDonald’s and Walmart.
In fact, Gates has a hefty number of shares in the latter two, including 10.8 Million shares in McDonalds, with a base value of over $1Billion, and over 19 Million shares in Walmart Stores. with a base value of nearly $914Million, plus 75.5 million shares in Walmart of Mexico, with a base value of $19.7M.
That’s nearly $2Billion worth of McDonalds and Walmart stock, according to the Gates 2013 Annual Tax Return, Form 990-PF: Return of Private Foundation (PDF, 3MB, 98 pages) http://www.gatesfoundation.org/Who-We-Are/General-Information/Financials
No wonder Gates pals up with the Waltons in the pursuit of privatizing public education. The lousy system they have decided America should get is very likely to result in a lot more low wage workers for them and big time returns for him.
There is anger because our profession and professional judgement have been usurped by Congress, the past two presidents, RW think tanks and multiple snake salesmen; All in order to squeeze profit from a new frontier.
Your Kinder daughter’s test is making a CEO wealthy, at the public’s expense. Someday her Kinder reading scores might be factored into her driver insurance rates.
But my point was that my district CHOSE to perform this test. It certainly didn’t have to administer this test. I get the anger. My point is that if we are so angry, we are not able to see the picture clearly.
I have to admit Sarah…..despite thinking this is the most valuable place in the nation for information about educational issues………there is a heck of a lot of nuance in the corporate foundations approach, and though they cannot quite laugh off the corruption and failures to compete academically….that principle of the bad ones go out of business so only good ones will be left is a powerful tool……but the principle of playing with a stacked deck of student populations, which produces media praise is something that deserves closer attention.
Re: Sarah.
The three basic and related problems are:
One, a few of these corporate leaders decide what should happen in education. Even if they had the best of ideas, this is unacceptable in a democracy. But they don’t have the best of ideas.
Two, their ideas about education is completely inappropriate. Based on their promotion of TFA and friends, they have no idea what a good educator looks like and how to train them. Hence their firing of “bad” teachers and replacing them with good ones makes no sense, since they cannot tell right from wrong. Their idea of being able to scientifically evaluate teaching performance is as sensible as saying “I am now going to measure your music performance”.
Three, they believe in competition. They believe that, similarly to markets, competition among students, among teachers, will make education work. This is as sensible as thinking competition among orchestra members will produce the most beautiful music.
One of the greatest heroes of 20th century physics, Wolfgang Pauli, would say “Their theories are not even wrong.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Not_even_wrong That they are allowed to experiment on kids using their theories is a testament to the outdated legal system in this country.
Thanks for your thoughtful reply. I will have to look into these things. I know about their past mistakes, but my impression was that they were switching gears and trying new things, like pushing equal access to preschool. The strong language that I have read here indicates that this is war. I am a skeptical person, and I am struggling to see all of the malicious intent. I think we should be looking for ways to work together instead. I intend to do further research of my own about these organizations before jumping on this band wagon.
Many of the so-called education “reformers” are a lot like science crackpots: their ideas are not based on research and are disjoint from reality, existing in some sort of La La Land where down is up, black is white and right is left (ie, where pretty much anything is true if you want it to be)
Like the science crackpots, these folks are almost completely ignorant about the subject they are allegedly “reforming”, but nonetheless claim they have made an earth-shattering “discovery” (testing and VAM in this case) that will revolutionize the discipline.
And also just like the science crackpots, they won’t listen to any real expert who tries to tell them otherwise – -and even claim they are being persecuted (like Galileo) when the experts criticize them. Some of them even have the gall to sue the education experts, claiming they were unjustly “smeared”.