I sent this to each Senate Committee member:
Dear Sen. xxxx
I am a TN educator and I’d like to ask that you consider some facts about public education reform in TN generally and the proliferation of charter schools in particular.
The testing & accountability measures in TN were written by ALEC and by for-profit entities that have an interest in privatizing public education.
The value-added model (TN version is TVASS), marketed as an indicator of teacher quality, is junk science according to the American Statistical Association and by a majority of independent researchers: The lit review is here:
http://vamboozled.com/recommended-reading/value-added-models/
How can an education system improve if Congress allows junk science to dictate the direction of our education system? Test scores are designed to sort & rank. Testing is not learning- it’s a tool that teachers know when & how to use. Congress doesn’t dictate to any other profession how to use the tools of their profession. Why should teaching be any different?
All around the country VAM & standardized test scores are being misused to close schools, disperse, destabilize poor communities, sort out high needs (e.g. expensive children in SPED or at-risk) and privatize. The Dept of Education is now promoting VAM junk-science for colleges of Education.
Accountability has been in short supply for TN’s charter authorizer Achievement School District (ASD) and for outside consultants sucking up our tax dollars for invalid teacher evaluations and useless standardized tests(e.g., TEAM/TAP was developed by convicted felon Michael Milken & his brother and has no valid research line to support it’s claims)
Here are some persistent problems with charter schools & education privatizaion that deserve greater accountability and compliance.
1. Increased Segregation
• The vast majority of high-poverty charters fail due to racial & socio-economic segregation. The high-poverty model has not met with success at a national level.
• The most comprehensive study of charter schools completed to date found that only 17% of charter schools outperformed comparable traditional pubic schools.83% of public schools are better than charters. New Orleans Charter Schools have the lowest ACT scores in the country.
• Many families now believe- as do virtually all leading colleges & universities- that racial, ethnic, & income diversity enriches classrooms.
• The main problem with American schools in not their teachers or their unions, but poverty & economic segregation.
Reference:
Kahlenberg (2013). From all walks of life: New hopes for school integration. American Educator. Winter 2012-2013, pp. 2 – 40.
2. Sanctioned Discrimination or Whose Choice?
• The first choice of most parents is to send their child to a high-quality neighborhood school; it is unclear how this bill supports that choice. In fact, we have seen how the rapid expansion of the charter sector has undermined neighborhood schools, drawing resources from them and at the same time expecting them to serve our most at-risk students. –
• Charters take public money yet have the legal status of private schools.
• Charter organizations have gone to court to protect themselves from educating & retaining ALL children.
• Charters discriminate against children with disabilities, children who do not test well, or who do not fit into inflexible discipline policies. Such children may be admitted to bolster enrollment but are expelled or counseled out after BEP funds are distributed, Public schools lose $6,000/child and face class overloads near testing time.
• Charters advertise ‘choice’ but overwhelmingly exclude parent voice.
• Parents have no legal recourse to challenge harmful charter school practices. Charters may legally ignore the key aspect of parent involvement: school level decision- making.
• Parents and the public are consistently misled about the community desires for a charter school. Charter waitlists cannot be confirmed and many records are slipshod.
• In New Orleans where all public schools have disappeared, the most difficult to teach children have been abandoned.
References:
Green, P. C., III, Baker, B. D., & Oluwole, J. O. (2013) Having it both ways: How charter schools try to obtain funding of public schools and the autonomy of private schools. Emory Law Journal, Vol. 63.303.
Parents Across America (PAA) http://parentsacrossamerica.org/parents-america-hr2218-%e2%80%9cempowering-parents-quality-charter-schools-act%e2%80%9d/#sthash.Ch0TKntq.dpuf
Welner, K. G. & Miron, G., (2014). Wait,wait. Don’t mislead me! Nine reasons to be skeptical about charter waitlist numbers. National Education Policy Center, University of Colorado, Boulder. http://nepc.colorado.edu/publication/charter-waitlists
Gabor, A. (2013) The great charter tryout. The Investigative Fund. http://www.theinvestigativefund.org/investigations/politicsandgovernment/1848/
What we support:
More community schools just like the highly successful Pond Gap in Knoxviile, TN.
To improve the schools we have, rather than shutting down or turning around traditional schools to make way for more charter schools.
All charter schools to have neighborhood boundaries and accept all children from within those boundaries whose parents choose to enroll their child at the charter school. Charter school enrollment processes should be consistent with and as simple as those of neighborhood public schools.
Charter schools should be held accountable for their enrollment, discipline, transfer, and other practices.
Charter schools and all other schools receiving public funds must be equally transparent and accountable to the public.
Finally, TN has a shameful 45% child poverty rate. My state has one of the highest rates of low wage & minimum wage jobs in the country. Our public schools in TN need resources- not privatization- to compensate for failed political & economic policies.
Thank-you for your work & consideration,
Joan Grim
Diane Ravitch's blog 
The real kicker here is that in this era of “data driven decision making” we’re relying on junk data and junkier “science”.
I strongly encourage every educator to read some of Dr. Willingham’s work, particularly “When Can You Trust the Experts.” Most of the “science” in education research seems to be an attempt to latch onto the credibility of science. For example, take the phrase “data driven decision making”. What were they doing10-20 years ago–just making random decisions? Of course not.
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I thought this was about Delaware….we have the same crap going on here….
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I don’t have a Senator on the HELP Committee but I did write both of my Senators on this – one Republican, one Democrat.
I got no response at all. I’m surprised by that. I would have expected some response to a constituent even if it’s boilerplate babble penned by an aide or an intern or something. .
My personal opinion is that DC is a lost cause on public schools. I think I’m better off working to influence state legislators, not because they value public schools (I don;t think they do) but simply because the vast majority of children in their districts attend public schools. If the parents and community members who support public schools pressure them, they’ll respond because we’re the vast majority and they want to retain their jobs 🙂
I do so appreciate all the advocacy public school teachers do, though. It’s really heartening to see, particularly because they’re all volunteers when they’re filling the advocacy role politicians abandoned.
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Too, frankly. I was disappointed in what I heard out of the HELP Committee. Lamar Alexander seems to me to be pursuing an ideological crusade on federalism and some of the Democrats were countering him on that (Elizabeth Warren, most notably) but most of the specifics I heard were the same ed reform slogans I’ve been listening to for the last 15 years. There’ s no substantive difference between Duncan and Patty Murray as far as the practical effects on local public schools.
My sense is they’re captured-nothing is getting in past what are really well-entrenched beliefs and those beliefs track so closely with the ed reform “movement” that dominated both the Bush and Obama approach to public schools there’s very little room for debate or discussion.
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No one in DC has had a fresh idea about education in at least 20 years.
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The subtext of Alexander and Warren’s debate was federalism-the role of the federal government. That’s an interesting legal and process debate (I’m not a conservative, so I would lean Warren’s way) but they’re not really talking ABOUT public schools.
Patty Murray seems to be attempting some practical approach, but she’s essentially repeating Duncan’s position.
Al Franken just sounds bored 🙂
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Reflecting my state of mind, I first read this as if Joan Grim sent this to the University of Memphis’ faculty senate. I wish that was the case.
We, at the University, try to prevent a $5/year teacher training program from running. The program officially would train teachers for Shelby County Schools, but mostly for schools taken over by ASD and for Izone schools. The program would be run by the infamous, NY based Relay graduate school completely autonomously on campus—like a charter department.
As far as I know, such an arrangement on a 4 year college campus is unprecedented.
The science Joan Grim is presenting above should be enough to keep the K-12 charterizers/privatizers off college campuses.
Wouldn’t such a junk-science program be as embarrassing for a university as an Intelligent Design department?
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Wierdlmate, as you know, the. “Relay Graduate School of Education” is a farce. There is no research, no scholarship. It consists of charter teachers as faculty, teaching charter teachers how to raise test scores. Your comment is apt. Just another way to take down the teaching profession.
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Wow. This is a great letter. This really resonates: “Congress doesn’t dictate to any other profession how to use the tools of their profession. Why should teaching be any different?”
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Why can’t all private industry contracted by the public education system be supportive to make public education better? We should be pursuing ways to create partnerships and increasing teacher quality, not creating hourly teacher tracks, devaluing university study, pushing hostile takeover strategies through charters, vouchers and for-profit charter schemes.
By law we must educate children.
Public education is not the post office with Fed_Ex and UPS and Amazon as its competition. I’m not forced by law to use the post office. And post office outcomes are not slanted by poverty of the customers they serve. Education is influenced by a child’s mindset to learn (ELL, disabled, just having a bad day). We are bettering lives with education. It should be our NASA.
Business models discount the human and the need for childhood stability. When a parent is sick, when a child moves, things can disrupt a child’s learning. The public education system should be the safe haven. Something to count on. Your community should be there to back you up when everything else falls apart. We cannot reduce eduction to numbers and a free-for-all with choice. Education is the prime example of a government service that must work. Just like the military, roads, or police and fire.
We are being held hostage by test scores. Our society is being scammed into thinking we don’t need this vital government service. And there are a lot of really smart people with their heads in the sand afraid of being politically active.
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I cross posted at Oped News,
http://www.opednews.com/Quicklink/A-Reader-in-Tennessee-Writ-in-Best_Web_OpEds-Accountability_Alec_Bottom-up_Controversy-150208-578.html#comment532305
WITH THE COMMENT BELOW, which contains links to all quotes and facts from this site:
The TIME FOR CHOOSING VOUCHERS AND CHARTERS SCHOOLS was never right, say parents, children, teachers , principals and superintendents, but the voices at the bottom are lost because the top have the power of money and that means ACCESS TO THE LEGISLATURE AND GOVERNORS.
For every link I provide below, there are dozens more at the Diane Ravitch site which show how OUR public education system is GOING DOWN NOW! get the daily feed from the bottom–the educators who are following the most dangerous conspiracy today, the one that ends the road to opportunity and replaces history with the oligharch’s version.
There is not much more to add to the facts in my post, but I can show you insanity in Indiana: Where Testing Has Reached the Height of Absurdity
I can show you : How top down works in Chicago where Duncan Threatens to Punish Chicago If They Don’t Give PARCC
I can show you top -down at work in the PHILADELPHIA SCHOOL DISTRICTwhich threatens to TAKE DISCIPLINARY ACTION AGAINST TEACHERS FOR INFORMING PARENTS OF THEIR OPT OUT RIGHTS AROUND HIGH STAKES TESTING.
Because I follow the Ravitch site daily feed; I CAN SHOW YOU WHAT :
* Moody’s have to say about the drain on public schools. Or another VOUCHER scandal in Loisiana
* Peter Greene reports on an audit in Ohio about phantom students in charter schools. Charters are paid by headcount, and some charters have seen the advantage of inflating their enrollment, although it is illegal.
* Steve Cohen, superintendent of schools in Shoreham-Wading River (NY), wrote a column in Ling Island newspapers criticizing the state’s heavy-handed method of mandating change.
*Wisconsin? Governor Scott Walker released a budget proposalthat contains no significant increase in funding for public schools, but a large expansion of vouchers and charters for the entire state. He wants to remove the cap on the number of students who may receive vouchers to attend private and religious schools but maintain the income limit of about $44,122 for a family of four. He wants a new charter board that he and his allies control. He wants to withdraw support for the Common Core exam known as Smarter Balanced and to cancel Milwaukee’s integration funding. He proposes to lower standards for those entering teaching and to introduce A-F letter grades (a Jeb Bush invention):
* how to follow the money in Colorado as one local parent who wonders, “Quid Pro Quo or Coincidence?”
* In this post, that high school principal Carol Burris reports:that the chairperson of the state Board of Regents, Merryl Tisch, responded to Governor Cuomo’s pique by offering to double the importance of test scores in teacher evaluations.
Burris reports that the governor at the top in NY “was very disappointed when only 1% of teachers were found “ineffective” in their state ratings, and is demanding tougher evaluations, using the “value-added model” whose validity has been questioned by many research groups, including the American Statistical Association, the American Education Research Association, and the National Academy of Education.”
This week, according to the UFThe is holding hostage the money that the government has given to education.
You can hear from the genuine educators at the bottom as a public school teacher, writes at the Ravitch site: “I am enraged at our situation in Florida. Just this year we lost more than 300 students to a local charter chain (the nearby Academica). Because of this they relocated 16 teachers, closed the third floor, and the library is closed for the students with no librarian. I called around to neighboring schools and the situation is just as bad at other schools. Now I am stuck in a room of 40 or so students in which 20% barely speak english and I have major behavioral problems that charters don’t have to deal with. How much longer can we stand for this? Has the democratic party abandoned its union interests? It is time for real “Systemic Reform” that works.”
William Cala, superintendent of schools in Fairport, New York, write a scathing critique of Governor Cuomo’s plan to increase charter schools, fund “tax credits” for private and religious schools (vouchers), and increase the importance of test scores in teacher evaluations. “Let’s be clear that the governor’s agenda has nothing to do with what is good for kids. Far from it. It is what is good for his financial supporters: the corporations who are making billions of dollars on the tests, the texts, the technology, the corporate professional development and the data collection, retrieval and distribution.
As this country gets poorer and poorer and the few get richer and richer the pride of our nation, its public schools, are being disassembled while Bill Gates, The Walton’s, The Koch Brothers, Eli Broad and other scavengers are feasting at the table of greed.”
Or you can read Jeff Bryant who analyzes the debate about the federal testing mandates and concludes it’s all about politics, not education and Politico writes: “SCHOOL CHOICE WEEK HITS THE HILL: School choice advocates will pack serious star power this morning on Capitol Hill at a gathering celebrating National School Choice Week. House Majority Leader John Boehner is on tap to give the keynote address Indiana Rep. Luke Messer, who was recently elected to a position in House leadership, is continuing his push on school choice: He’s scheduled to be master of ceremonies at today’s event and is also reintroducing a school choice proposal he put out last year. Vouchers might not fit into the “political reality” of the push to reauthorize No Child Left Behind this year, Messer said Tuesday, but he emphasized that he’s in it for the long haul and that “every idea has its time.”
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They try to make this an issue about either choice or Civil rights. For the wealthy, they want and are getting A FREE PRIVATE EDUCATION for their children where they use to pay thousands of dollars. Now tax dollars are paying the costs. For the non-wealthy, their children’s neighborhood schools are being closed in the name of Civil rights, and changed into Charters with TFA staff who are there for the WRONG REASONS. If they are concerned about Civil rights, then why is it that I am not hearing them addressing the increasing gaps in earnings between groups of people and the resulting consequences on these families or addressing the related issues of poverty and school success? Someday a wealthy person will buy a TV station who will present the 99% side of each issue so we will begin to have a real dialogue about solutions to these issues. Unfortunately, Theodore Roosevelt’s do not come along very often and until then, we will be regressing to the 1890’s at an increasing pace. Hold on, it will get a lot worse before it starts to get better.
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Charles… you got it right, but for me, as everyone who reads me here knows, the issue of civil rights is very personal. It boils me to hear these charlatans and snake-oil salesmen usurping the issue of civil rights when they are the very ones ensuring that the poor and middle class child has no access to the public INSTITUTION of education which is of paramount importance in the words of the preamble of our Constitution… “to promote the common good.”
And in case you do not know what started the failure of the schools, here is the essay I wrote an published here many times. I wrote it five years after recovering from being blindsided in NYC, when my civil rights diapered, because of the total DISAPPEARANCE OF the grievance procedure outlined in theUFT CONTRACT in the little white book which sits on my desk as I write.
Many readers here who know me, have heard me post this before,
http://www.speakingasateacher.com/SPEAKING_AS_A_TEACHER/No_Constitutional_Rights-_A_hidden_scandal_of_National_Proportion.html
BUTI do it no repeat it over and over to say, ‘poor me’ nor to rant, but because In the 15 years since I found myself without a legal rep to defend me against principals who could say anything (not sworn under penalty of perjury and free to invent documentation).
I keep repeating it because I have discovered that THIS is still the HIDDEN first assault on public education, … hidden by the media, and by the fact that since we really desperately need unions (or they could murder us) too many people court their voices and are unable or unwilling to say, “But how the hell did you let them take out all the tenured teachers in your care? AND what are you going to do now to ensure that the union enforces the civil rights of EVERY TEACHER?”
The caveat is we need to SUPPORT THE UNIONS, BUT also to rid the unions of those political beasts who allowed this to occur.! I have all the evidence of the NYC Manhattan rep’s complicity. (Moreover, the UFT legal team knows it, and has seen it.)
The essay I wrote above is the verifiable truth which allowed that first assault on teachers.
VAM is really THE SECOND.
My husband and I were astonished, as the years passed and I lost everything, at the top of a career. He often tells friends what he observed during gym travails –the conversations he overheard that told him, I was not being served.
http://www.opednews.com/author/author40790.html
I tell you this, because MY story is THE same for ALL teachers who discovered that the PROCESS to cause catastrophic failure in the ‘hospital’ was to remove the voice and practice of the best practitioners….then “they could come up with the magic elixirs…like VAM and charter schools… no evidence required
http://www.opednews.com/articles/Magic-Elixir-No-Evidence-by-Susan-Lee-Schwartz-130312-433.html
I tell you this because it is still ongoing.
Inventing failure is their game
and it is the dark money that is in play
http://billmoyers.com/2014/09/22/5-signs-dark-money-apocalypse-upon-us/?utm_source=General+Interest&utm_campaign=94370722aa-Midweek_0924149_24_2014&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_4ebbe6839f-94370722aa-168347829
as the growing shadow of political money affects everything –health care, the environment, , financial manipulation and the collapse of the banks and our currency.
This is what Citizen’s United brought into America’s landscape that is playing out in the Congress, at the legislative level, as schools go down and businessmen run the show.
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So true… and so sad.
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