Archives for the month of: March, 2015
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Peter Greene: Competition Creates Better Marketing, Not Better Products or Schools

By dianeravitch
March 13, 2015 //
19

Peter Greene uses the example of Coke to show how market competition does not produce a better product. When faced with a loss of market share, Coca-Cola decided to put the same product into smaller cans. Maybe the failure of “Néw Coke” in 1985 taught them not to mess with the formula.

Similarly, in education, competition has not produced better education. Vouchers are used to send children to schools that teach creationism, that have no curriculum or certified teachers or to charter schools that push out low-scoring students and spend inordinate time on test prep.

Our slavish devotion to competition is destroying education.

Categories Charter Schools, Corporate Reformers, Education Industry, For-Profit, Vouchers

Robert Putnam: Yes, Poverty Matters. It Matters a Lot.

By dianeravitch
March 13, 2015 //
15

I recall reading Robert Putnam’s previous book, Bowling Alone, about the decline of civic life in America. It caused quite a stir. I am looking forward to reading his new book, Our Kids: The American Dream in Crisis. It seems certain to upset the “reformers,” as it blows away their assumptions that the schools are failing our children. As I read this review in Education Week, our society is failing our children, and we are not funding our schools in ways that help the neediest kids.

 

Sarah D. Sparks writes that Putnam “gathers a flood of research on the unraveling web of formal and informal supports that help students in poverty succeed academically and in life.

 

“If it takes a village to raise a child, the prognosis for America’s children isn’t good: In recent years, villages all over America, rich and poor, have deteriorated as we’ve shirked collective responsibility for our kids,” Mr. Putnam wrote. “And most Americans don’t have the resources … to replace collective provision with private provision.”

 

The attack on public education by the elites funding privatization is part of the shirking of collective responsibility. The drumbeating for “choice” is a way to replace collective responsibility with individual preferences, which are sure to intensify racial and economic segregation.

 

Sparks writes:

 

Mr. Putnam directly ties education to economic and social class; he speaks interchangeably of poverty and earning a high school degree or less, and of wealth and earning at least a four-year college degree.

 

Schools are not to blame for the academic gap between rich and poor students that starts before kindergarten, but, Mr. Putnam said, “the American public school today is as a kind of echo chamber in which the advantages or disadvantages that children bring with them to school have effects on other kids.”

 

He pointed to an analysis by the School Funding Law Center which found that as of 2009, 16 states had funding systems that provided less money per pupil to high-poverty school districts, while only 17 provided more per-pupil spending for districts with greater poverty. (An update of the study suggests those trends have worsened, with only 14 states providing significantly more money to high-poverty schools, and 19 states providing significantly less.)

 

Schools with 75 percent poverty or more offered one-third the number of Advanced Placement courses in 2009-10 than did wealthier schools—four each year on average compared to nearly a dozen each year at schools with 25 percent poverty or less.

 

Even where high-poverty schools get compensatory funding, Mr. Putnam told me: “Equalizing inputs is not equalizing outputs. Just because you have the same student-teacher ratio, just because you are investing the same dollars per kid, does not mean you are closing those gaps.”

 

For example, he noted in the book that high-poverty schools have more than twice as many disciplinary problems as low-poverty schools, and “equal numbers of guidance counselors cannot produce equal college readiness if the counselors in poor schools are tied up all day in disciplinary hearings.”

 

As a result, nearly 15 years after the federal education law was revised to “leave no child behind,” an analysis of the National Education Longitudinal Study data finds that even the brightest students in poverty can’t get ahead. Students in the poorest quarter of families who performed in the top third on national mathematics achievement were slightly less likely to graduate college than the worst math performers in the wealthiest quarter of families, 29 percent versus 30 percent.

 

The graph reproduced in this article starkly shows how poverty affects academic achievement and college graduation rates. This is not a problem that can be solved one student at a time. It requires a rearrangement of school funding so that schools enrolling poor students get the resources they need, not equal funding but more funding. It requires that the federal government invest in infrastructure programs that rebuild our crumbling highways and bridges and tunnels and sewers while creating meaningful work for men and women who can’t find jobs. That’s a tall order, but sooner or later our society must make decisions to do something significant to reduce poverty and inequality or to continue with the illusion that more high-stakes testing and more privatization of public education will solve those problems.

Categories Charter Schools, Corporate Reformers, Education Industry, Poverty, Privatization, Testing

Matthew Di Carlo: A Review of the Latest TFA Study

By dianeravitch
March 13, 2015 //
13

Matthew Di Carlo of the Albert Shanker Institute of the American Federation of Teachers is neither pro-TFA nor anti-TFA.

 

Here he reviews the latest study of TFA by Mathematica.

 

It has been widely reported that the study found little or no difference between the test scores of the students taught by TFA and by regular teachers. TFA saw that as a victory, since it presumably showed that no training or experience was needed to achieve the same results. Others saw it as a repudiation of TFA’s oft-repeated claims that their recruits were superior to career teachers.

 

Di Carlo parses the results and reaches this conclusion:

 

Now, on the one hand, it’s absolutely fair to use the results of this and previous TFA evaluations to suggest that we may have something to learn from TFA training and recruitment (e.g., Dobbie 2011). Like all new teachers, TFA recruits struggle at first, but they do seem to perform as well as or better than other teachers, many of whom have had considerably more experience and formal training.

 

On the other hand, as I’ve discussed before, there is also, perhaps, an implication here regarding the “type” of person we are trying to recruit into teaching. Consider that TFA recruits are the very epitome of the hard-charging, high-achieving young folks that many advocates are desperate to attract to the profession. To be clear, it is a great thing any time talented, ambitous, service-oriented young people choose teaching, and I personally think TFA deserves credit for bringing them in. Yet, no matter how you cut it, they are, at best, only modestly more effective (in raising math and reading test scores) than non-TFA teachers.

 

This reflects the fact that identifying good teachers based on pre-service characteristics is extraordinarily difficult, and the best teachers are very often not those who attended the most selective colleges or scored highly on their SATs. And yet so much of our education reform debate is about overhauling long-standing human resource policies largely to attract these high-flying young people. It follows, then, that perhaps we should be very careful not to fixate too much on an unsupported idea of the “type” of person we want to attract and what they are looking for, and instead pay a little more attention to investigating alternative observable characteristics that may prove more useful, and identifying employment conditions and work environments that maximize retention of effective teachers who are already in the classroom.

 

For me, the problem with all such studies is the assumption that the best (perhaps the only) way to identify the best teachers is by comparing changes in test scores. Great teachers supposedly get higher scores than mediocre teachers. I think that places far too much faith in standardized testing and in the assumption that education is solely measured by those tests. It makes the tests the arbiters of all things, even though most teachers do not teach tested subjects. Test-based findings are even more suspect when the children are very young.

Categories Research, Teach for America, Testing

Connecticut: Superintendent Changes Mind on Opt Out

By dianeravitch
March 13, 2015 //
4

The superintendent in affluent Néw Canaan, Bryan Luizzi, changed his mind. A few days ago, he said that students were not allowed to refuse to take the Common Core tests. After parents objected and signed a petition, he realized that students have the right to opt out.

Protests work.

Categories Connecticut, Opt Out, Parents, Resistance

Laura Chapman: The Federal Marketing Campaign for Common Core

By dianeravitch
March 13, 2015 //
12

You have probably read many times that the Common Core standards are not related in any way to the federal Department of Education. Don’t believe it.

Reader Laura H. Chapman investigated the marketing campaign paid for by the U.S. Department of Education:

“Federal policies are so alien to the educational thought and practice that USDE has funded a full-scale marketing program in an effort to secure compliance with these measures.

“For compliance with Race to the Top, for example, USDE’s offered a $43 million grant to IFC International, a for-profit consulting and public relations firm. The grant was for two purposes: (a) to create the Reform Support Network (RSN) enabling Race to the Top grantees to learn from each other, and (b) to promote promising practices for comparable reforms nation-wide. The grant included $13 million for nine subcontractors, each with specialized skills for RSN’s marketing campaign.

“The sophistication of the marketing campaign is suggested by one of the largest subcontracts— $6.3 million to Education First. The founding partner is Jennifer Vranek, a former advocacy expert with the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. She and others working for Education First helped a number of states apply for the RttT competition. They have fashioned PR campaigns for the Common Core State Standards in many states. The firm’s website includes a sample of the firm’s communication and advocacy services: “Outreach and public-engagement strategies and activities; strategic communications planning; reports, white papers and articles designed to synthesize, explain and persuade; development of communications tools, including marketing materials, web copy, press releases, and social media content.” (Education First, website 2014).

“Here is one example of RSNs work. In December 2012, anonymous contract writers for RSN published a portfolio of suggestions for marketing key policies in RttT. “Engaging Educators, A Reform Support Network Guide for States and Districts: Toward a New Grammar and Framework for Educator Engagement” is addressed to state and district officials. It offers guidance on how to persuade teachers and principals to comply with federal policies

“Engaging Educators then packs about 30 communication strategies, all portrayed as “knowledge development,” into four paragraphs about “message delivery options.” These include “op-eds, letters to the editor, blast messages, social media, press releases,” and regular in-house techniques (p. 4). RSN writers emphasize the need to “Get the Language Right,” meaning that messaging should focus on improving student learning (p. 6).

“Among the other suggested techniques for messaging are teacher surveys, focus groups, websites with rapid response to frequently asked questions, graphic organizers placed into professional development, websites, podcasts, webinars, teacher-made videos of their instruction (vetted for SLO compliance), and a catalog of evocative phrases tested in surveys and focus groups. These rhetorical devices help to maintain a consistent system of messaging. RSN writers also suggest that districts offer released time or pay for message delivery by “teacher SWAT teams that can be deployed at key junctures of the…redesign of evaluation systems” (p. 9).

“The marketing campaign calls for the use of “teacher voice groups” as advocates for reforms. A “teacher voice group” is RSNs name for a non-union advocacy collective funded by private foundations favoring pay-for-performance. Five voice groups are mentioned by name. All have received major funding from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation: Teach Plus ($9.5 million), Center for Teacher Quality ($6.3 million), Hope Street Group ($4.7 million), Educators for Excellence ($3.9 million), and Teachers United ($942, 000). Other foundations are supporting these groups. For example, Teach Plus receives “partner” grants from eight other foundations including the Broad, Carnegie Corporation of New York, Joyce, and several investment firms.

“Of course, the marketing campaign for the Common Core is not limited to this paper trail to federal funds. Another marketing program can be seen this USDE website, that just assumes teachers should be implementing the CCSS… http://www.ed.gov/blog/tag/respect/

“Foundation money is also keeping the marketing campaign in place. For example, a website operated by Student Achievement Partners—key players in writing and first stage marketing of the CCSS— is made possible with funds from the GE and Helmsley Foundations see http://achievethecore.org/get-involved.”

Categories Common Core, Funding, U.S. Department of Education

How to Make More Students Fail: DIBELS

By dianeravitch
March 13, 2015 //
38

Blogger “Lace to the Top” (aka Kevin Glynn) reports that Fountas and Pinnell have raised their expectations to align with the demands of the Common Core.

 

He also reports that the reading and assessment program DIBELS has raised its cut scores to align with the Common Core standards.

 

He writes:

 

Under the guise of Common Core, the cut scores for DIBELS have been changed. For instance, pre Common Core a 1st grader was expected to read 40-64 words per minute. Under the Common Core, they are now expected to read 69+ words per minute.

There is no money to be made in labeling children as successful, but labeling them failures has continued to fuel the perceived crisis in education and increases profits.

 

I am sure that DIBELS stands for something important, but I can’t find out by googling the website of the group at the University of Oregon who created the program and assessments.

 

 

 

 

Categories Accountability, Common Core, Education Industry

Peter Greene Responds to Those Who Mock the Opt Out Movement

By dianeravitch
March 13, 2015 //
45

Peter Greene, who apparently reads everything, has been following a Twitter thread where various people are making fun of the Opt Out movement. One of them, Mike Thomas, works for Jeb Bush’s Foundation for Educational Excellence (since Jeb is running for President, his place has been taken by Condaleeza Rice). The basic line of argument is that there are things we have to do in life that aren’t fun, and you just have to suck it up and do those unpleasant things. Peter explains to Thomas why he is wrong. 

 

What is on his list of things you have to do whether you want to or not?

 

The list includes colonoscopies, teeth cleanings, lice checks, braces, lockdown drills, and watching romantic comedies with your wife, and it’s a swell list. It’s just that the list has nothing to do with the Big Standardized Test.

 

The items on the list only occur when there is a particular reason for them. You get a colonoscopy when your doctor, a trained medical professional, says it’s time. You get braces when a trained professional says they’re needed. You go see a movie with your wife when she asks you to (though if that’s a chore for you, you have other problems). And like all the other items on the wacky list, these are annoyances you endure because you know there is some good reason to endure them.

 

The “well, you just have to suck it up and do some unpleasant but necessary things in life” argument assumes the sale. It focuses on the “unpleasant” rap on testing so that it can pretend that the “necessary” part is not in doubt. But of course it’s the notion that the Big Standardized Test is necessary that is at the heart of the opt-out movement…..

 

Writers like Thomas have been reduced to justifications like this:

 

“And that’s why I’m an opt-in on testing. I want to know how well my kid is doing in algebra. I want to know how smart she is compared to all the other kids in the state. The same goes for reading, writing and science…This information will let me know if she is on track for being first in line when the University of Florida opens its doors to incoming freshman.”

 

Is Thomas suggesting that all students everywhere should be tested so that he can brag about his own daughter? Or is he suggesting that his daughter’s teachers keep all her grades, school work and achievements a secret from him? And does he really mean to suggest that he’s an opt-in, because if that’s what he wants, I’m sure we can find support for a system where people can opt-in to testing if they wish, but would otherwise be in a no-testing default.

 

That system would have great support, but it’s not what Thomas and FEE and other reformsters and testing corporations want– they want a system in which all students are compelled to test, not one where they have a choice (though oddly enough, they are huge fans of choice when it comes to charter schools).

 

Here’s the other thing about colonoscopies and braces– the government doesn’t compel you to have them, whether your professional expert thinks you need one or not. You opt-in, voluntarily, weighing the advice of trained experts and the advantages of the procedure. You don’t need to come up with a justification for not having a root canal today– you only have one if someone (or your tooth) presents a reason to opt in.

 

It is funny. I have four grandsons. I want to know how they are doing, and I learn about it from their teacher reports. I don’t care how they compare to children their age in the rest of the state or the nation. When my sons were young, that question never occurred to me. That’s the lamest possible reason for spending hundreds of millions on standardized tests. I suppose we should let Mike Thomas’s daughter take the test, as well as those who want to, and let others choose not to.

 

 

Categories Opt Out

International Business Times: Chicago Teachers’ Pension Funds Invested with Rahm’s Supporters

By dianeravitch
March 12, 2015 //
22

The International Business Times reports that pension funds from Chicago teachers have been invested with Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s friends and campaign donors.

 

According to city documents obtained by IBTimes, the firm affiliated with Illinois’ Republican Gov. Bruce Rauner — a longtime friend of Chicago’s Democratic mayor — as well as executives at private-equity giant Madison Dearborn have gained substantial investments from the Chicago Teachers’ Pension Fund (CTPF) since Emanuel took office. The documents also show the CTPF has an indirect equity stake in Grosvenor Capital Management. Executives at the latter two firms have donated nearly $1.8 million to Emanuel’s campaign and political organizations since 2011.

 

 

Categories Chicago

Good News! Ohio Constitution Will Not Delete Key Phrase

By dianeravitch
March 12, 2015 //
1

A report from public education champion Bill Phillis of the Ohio Coalition for Equity and Adequacy:

“Thorough and efficient system of common schools clause will stay in the Ohio Constitution

“The Education, Public Institutions, and Local Government committee of the Ohio Constitutional Modernization Commission (OCMC) voted unanimously to retain the thorough and efficient system of common schools in the Ohio Constitution during the committee meeting today, March 12, 2015.

“In April 2014, the chair of the committee proposed that this clause be removed from the Ohio Constitution. Subsequently, a loud cry of protest reverberated across Ohio, particularly from the education community.

“Thank you to those who testified before the committee and those who made their opinions known to committee members and other state officials.

“The kids of Ohio won one today!”

William Phillis
Ohio E & A

Categories Education Reform

Michigan: Governor Snyder Takes Control of School Reform Away from State Education Department

By dianeravitch
March 12, 2015 //
18

Oh, good! Governor Rick Snyder wants to be held directly accountable for the improvement of the bottom 5% of schools in Michigan.

 

He has taken away responsibility for them from the State Department of Education and transferred it to an agency he controls.

 

He must have forgotten the lessons of the Educational Achievement Authority.

Categories Accountability, Michigan
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