Archives for the month of: June, 2015
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Peter Greene: Stop Saying That Music Raises Test Scores

By dianeravitch
June 27, 2015 //
36

It is a universal truth, well known, that when budget cuts are imposed by the state, teachers of the arts are the first to go. I recently met with a leader of the arts community in Houston who told me that she wanted to make a gift of art supplies but could not few elementary schools with art teachers.

Some advocates for the arts–music education, especially, claim that the study of music increases test scores.

Peter Greene says: Don’t do that! See here too.

There so many important reasons to treasure music, and the pursuit of higher test scores is not one of them.

“Music is universal. It’s a gabillion dollar industry, and it is omnipresent. How many hours in a row do you ever go without listening to music? Everywhere you go, everything you watch– music. Always music. We are surrounded in it, bathe in it, soak in it. Why would we not want to know more about something constantly present in our lives? Would you want to live in a world without music? Then why would you want to have a school without music?
Listening to music is profoundly human. It lets us touch and understand some of our most complicated feelings. It helps us know who we are, what we want, how to be ourselves in the world. And because we live in an age of vast musical riches from both past and present, we all have access to exactly the music that suits our personality and mood. Music makes the fingers we can use to reach into our own hearts.
Making music is even more so. With all that music can do just for us as listeners, why would we not want to unlock the secrets of expressing ourselves through it? We human beings are driven to make music as surely as we are driven to speak, to touch, to come closer to other humans. Why would we not want to give students the chance to learn how to express themselves in this manner?….

“In music, everyone’s a winner. In sports, when two teams try their hardest and give everything they’ve got, there’s just one winner. When a group of bands or choirs give their all, everybody wins. Regrettably, the growth of musical “competitions” has led to many programs that have forgotten this — but music is the opposite of a zero-sum game. The better some folks do, the better everybody does. In music, you can pursue excellence and awesomeness without having to worry that you might get beat or defeated or humiliated. Everybody can be awesome….

“Do not defend a music program because it’s good for other things. That’s like defending kissing because it gives you stronger lip muscles for eating soup neatly. Defend it because music is awesome in ways that no other field is awesome. Defend it because it is music, and that’s all the reason it needs. As Emerson wrote, “Beauty is its own excuse for being.” A school without music is less whole, less human, less valuable, less complete. Stand up for music as itself, and stop making excuses.”

Categories Arts Education, Budget Cuts, Funding, Joy, Standardized Testing

EduShyster Interviews Andre Perry about His New-Found Skepticism re Reform

By dianeravitch
June 27, 2015 //
29

In this post, EduShyster interviews Andre Perry. In 2013, he became Founding Dean of Urban Education at Davenport University in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Before that, he was a leader in the charter school movement in Néw Orleans. As I read this interview, I heard echoes of my own thinking from about a decade ago. I didn’t care who was sponsoring the schools so long as they were good schools. By 2009, I realized that it did matter, because many charters were skimming the best students and needed resources from the poorest districts, this left the public schools, which enroll most children, even worse off than they were before. We will see how Dr. Perry’s rethinking evolves.

Here are Jennifer Berkshire’s first questions:

“EduShyster: You were involved in the education reform experiment in New Orleans from its inception. But you’ve become increasingly critical of the direction reform has taken. Why?

“Andre Perry: The goal of education has to be build the capacity of local residents. It has to be—and I’m talking about from top to bottom. Our goal is not to improve a school in spite of the community. Our goal is to improve a community using schools. And it’s not just to give students the skills to get a job—that’s one small part. It’s to make sure they have sustainable communities to live in. You’re not going to fire your way to improving community. You have to do the hard work of building capacity and training people and becoming a member of the community. That’s how you do it. That wasn’t happening and it’s not happening. In addition, and this is where I am clearly biased, New Orleans is 60% Black. If we don’t have Black leaders in the mix, we’re just reinforcing a power structure that helped cause the situation we were in.

“EduShyster: Was there anything specific that caused you to start to question what was happening in New Orleans?

“Perry: I became very critical because I saw a script that folks had to follow. There was a clear bias against New Orleanians, some of which was predicated on race, some on folks’ affiliation with the prior system. But there was a clear bias. Around 2008 and 2009, I sat on some of the charter authorizing committees. I would see Black and local charter applications just passed on, and I would see white applications that had clearly been written by someone else, and yet the odds were stacked for their acceptance. I remember in the beginning, it was really about quality and making sure we found new voices. Then it became about *scaling up.* There was a big transition, and I said *whoa—that is not the move.* The goal is to bring in different voices and new, innovative perspectives. It’s not to give the same people more schools. I didn’t get into reform for that. I got in it to build the capacity of local residents.

“EduShyster: People should also know that you’re very critical of the critics of education reform in New Orleans. I’ve heard you use words like *crass,* *silly,* and *camp-ish* to describe some of the anti-reform arguments. And can we acknowledge that merely typing those words makes my fingers hurt?

“Perry: I’m very critical of the anti-reform narrative because it lacks any form of nuance. These labels—sometimes I don’t even want to say them out loud—and if I hear the word neo-liberal again… There are no complicated scenarios posed; it’s completely ideological. Let’s be real. We have to be very pragmatic about change. There’s no one way to bring about change. It typically comes from young people who aren’t wedded to any particular brand, and it will come from a commitment to making sure that the lives and outcomes of those communities are improved by any means. That’s what’s frustrating to me on the anti-reform side. Black people have never had the luxury to do things one way. We need good schools across the board—public, charter, private—and delivery systems that really speak to our existence. This idea that we can’t have multiple players in the same space is ridiculous. But when you’re in these settings where the rhetoric is so intense, you completely miss that there is good work happening in the charter space, or good *reformed* work happening in the traditional space. And what you also don’t see is how privilege and class are pervasive in all of these systems.”

I know I am missing something. Nuance is important but too much nuance, and you get rolled by those who know exactly what they want and go for it.

Categories Charter Schools, Corporate Reform, Equity, New Orleans

Harvard Political Review: The Case Against Annual Standardized Testing

By dianeravitch
June 27, 2015 //
16

Quinn Mulholland of the Harvard Political Review examined the issues surrounding annual mandated testing, interviewed leading figures on both sides, and concluded that the exams are overkill. They cost too much, they narrow the curriculum, they take too many hours, they distort the purpose of education.

 

Mulholland concludes:

 

Given all of these problems with standardized testing, it seems that the civil rights issue is too much testing, not too little. Instead of forcing low-income schools to spend millions of dollars and countless hours of class time preparing for and administering standardized tests that only serve to prove, oftentimes inaccurately, what we already know about the achievement gap, we should use those resources to expand programs in the arts and humanities, to provide incentive pay to attract teachers to areas where they are needed most, and to decrease class sizes, all things that could actually make a difference for disadvantaged students.

 

This is not to say that America’s accountability system should be completely dismantled. Politicians and schools can de-emphasize testing while still ensuring high achievement. Student and teacher evaluations can take multiple measures of performance into account. The amount of standardized tests students have to take can be drastically reduced. The fewer standardized tests that students do take can incorporate more open-ended questions that force students to think critically and outside the box

 

Thirteen years after NCLB’s mandates were first set into place, the rhetoric used by politicians and pundits is sounding more and more like that which the same politicians and pundits used to endorse NCLB. Congress would be ill advised to try to use high-stakes test-based accountability to narrow the achievement gap and expect a different result than the aftermath of the 2002 law. It is time to acknowledge that putting an enormous amount of weight on standardized test scores does not work, and to move on to other solutions.

 

Regardless of the outcome of the current debate, grassroots activists like [Jeanette] Deutermann will continue to fight against harmful test-based accountability systems like New York’s. “This is an epidemic,” she said. “It’s happening everywhere, with all sorts of kids, from the smartest kids to the kids that struggle the most, from Republicans to Democrats, from kids in low-income districts to kids in high-performing districts. It doesn’t matter where you are, the stories are exactly the same.”

 

“We may be passive when it comes to all the other things [corporate reformers] have interjected themselves into,” Deutermann warned, “but when you mess with our kids, that’s when the claws come out.”

 

Categories NCLB (No Child Left Behind), Standardized Testing

How Jeb Bush Dumbed Down Education in Florida

By dianeravitch
June 27, 2015 //
17

Dan Gelber, a former state senator in Florida, offers a devastating overview of Jeb Bush’s education policies while he was governor of Florida.

Gelber says that Bush was indeed passionate about education, but his passion was tied to ideas that dumbed down the quality of education.

“He force-fed unprecedented testing into public schools, did all he could to neuter the teaching unions and unapologetically pushed private-school alternatives to public education. As he runs for higher office, Bush now relies on his “education revolution” to make his case….

“In 1998 when a newly elected Gov. Bush and a compliant Legislature started Florida’s “education revolution,” our graduation rate was among the lowest in the nation. After Bush’s two terms in office, Florida’s graduation rate was dead last and remains near the bottom.”

With so much emphasis on testing and test prep, the scores went up in the early grades, but the gains were short-lived. The gains might have been the result of a constitutional amendment forcing class-size reduction on the early grades, which Bush opposed.

Gelber says Florida should not be a national model. It is “an example of the perils of combining excessive testing with inadequate funding….

“As schools began teaching to the test and neglecting anything not measured, Florida’s floor of minimal competence became our ceiling. This distortion became especially acute because, while money alone isn’t a solution, money does matter. Under Bush, Florida had one of the lowest per-pupil funding levels in the nation, so principals and administrators did what any overwhelmed emergency-room doctor does. The state began to triage its curriculum and programs in order to devote scarce resources to what was tested.

“Art “carts” replaced art classrooms, physical education was deemed nonessential. Foreign languages, gifted programs, music, higher-level math and English, civics and science all were among courses that were deemphasized or sometimes even abandoned because they were not measured by the FCAT.

“My eldest daughter’s accelerated algebra class didn’t complete its course work one year because the school stopped teaching it to devote time to relearning FCAT math from years earlier. My youngest daughter’s school cut its exciting science lab program. Not taught on the FCAT!

“Talk about a mad dash to mediocrity….

Florida’s incredibly low education spending is, sadly, in sync with its dismal graduation rate, and nearly last in the nation SAT and ACT scores….

“The debate of accountability vs. funding marginalizes the importance of both. Money has to be adequate, and testing has to be thoughtful or you end up with a dumbed-down and narrow curriculum that fails too many kids.”

Categories Bush, Jeb, Florida, School Choice, Standardized Testing

The Atlantic: Teachers Take to the Streets Around the World to Protest

By dianeravitch
June 27, 2015 //
20

The Atlantic has an interesting feature about teacher protests around the world. Most are about low pay, but others are about working conditions, lack of respect, and–in the United States, at least–the standardization of curriculum and testing that is eliminating teacher autonomy and professionalism.

What is interesting in addition to the substance of the piece is the fact that it appears on the website of The Atlantic. For many years, The Atlantic was firmly tied to the corporate reformers and could be counted on to give them plenty of space for their views. Recently, however, The Atlantic has published numerous articles that conflict with the privatizers’ well-honed narrative of failed schools that can be “rescued” by taking away teachers’ job protections or by adopting the Common Core or some other reformy nostrum.

I thought maybe the ownership had changed. It has not. It is still owned by David G. Bradley, who also owns the National Journal.

The Wikipedia page for The Atlantic contains this tidbit:

The Atlantic Media Company receives substantial financial support from the Gates Foundation through the National Journal ($240,000+) to provide coverage of education-related issues that are of interest to the Gates Foundation and its frequent partner in education policy initiatives, the Lumina Foundation.[37][38] Critics have suggested that this funding may lead to biased coverage and have noted the Lumina Foundation’s connections to the private student loan company Sallie Mae.[39][40][41] Gates-funding of the National Journal is not always disclosed in articles or editorials about the Gates Foundation or Bill Gates, or in coverage of education white papers by other Lumina or Gates Foundation grantees, such as the New America Foundation.[42]

According to the New York Times in 2010, David Bradley’s wife, Katherine Bradley, paid $100,000 for a public relations firm to help Michelle Rhee polish her image.

During contract talks earlier this year, Ms. Rhee turned to Anita Dunn, the former communications director for President Obama, to help with her image.

A gift of $100,000 toward her fee was paid by an education philanthropist, Katherine Bradley, the wife of the publisher David Bradley of The Atlantic Monthly and National Journal.

Now it is Ms. Dunn’s firm, SKD Knickerbocker, that is coordinating Ms. Rhee’s rollout of her new group. Whatever advice it may have given her to bring all sides together when she was a public official, she clearly feels unrestricted by that now.

Google Katherine B. Bradley and Michelle Rhee to see the many ties between them.

Yet The Atlantic is now publishing articles sympathetic to teachers. Very puzzling. Did someone at The Atlantic have a change of heart? Or mind? Or get informed? Would love to know more about how they switched their views, as expressed in what they choose to publish.

Categories Corporate Reformers, Media, Teachers

Stephen Dyer: A Rare Chance to Enact Charter Reform in Ohio

By dianeravitch
June 26, 2015 //
9

Stephen Dyer of Innovation Ohio says that the state senate passed a charter reform bill that could help eliminate some of the scandals in that sector. He warns that if the bill goes to a conference committee, the lobbyists will eviscerate it.

He writes:

All:

A meaningful charter reform bill passed out of the Ohio Senate late last night. While there were a couple changes that would help shelter some of the ways for-profit operators spend their money, it would for the first time have the state track, rate and account for their spending. In addition, it would force charters with Fs AND Ds on the report card that have been dropped by sponsors (authorizers) to have to go to a highly rated sponsor and then have that sponsor join the school at a hearing before the Ohio Department of Education to explain why they should remain open.

In addition, it creates better transparency, forcing charters to actually put who’s on their board on the school’s website, restricting who can be on the board, bans self-dealing, and several other worthwhile provisions. It doesn’t directly deal with tightening the state’s closure law (which has only closed 24 schools in 10 years), nor does it address the greatest issue out there — funding — but it is a big step forward for our nationally ridiculed charter school sector.

Today, the Ohio House was set to send the Senate bill to a conference committee — a secretive negotiation setting — which would have allowed Mssrs. Brennan (White Hat) and Lager (ECOT) to wield their typical legislative “magic”. There was a strong push last night and this morning from me and some friends on the pro-charter and pro-public school side of the ledger to have the House vote to concur in the Senate bill, meaning it would go to the Governor’s desk as is — a far more preferable outcome.

The good news is our work paid off. There were enough Democratic and Republican votes to avoid conference committee. So Ohio House Speaker Cliff Rosenberger, who wants a conference committee, pulled the bill from the House Calendar — literally erasing it from members’ laptops just before they were set to take it up.

The General Assembly is in session Tuesday for the last time until September. We are ratcheting up the public pressure through media outlets and networks to try to convince the House to simply concur with the Senate bill, which while not perfect, is certain to be weakened in conference.

I am asking each of you to reach out to your media friends, your social media contacts, and to your legislators to encourage them to accept the Senate bill as is — in legislative parlance, Vote to Concur. We can’t let the same people who drove our charter school system into the ditch to undo the good work done in the Senate.

For the first time in my memory, Ohio’s charter school law has a shot of not being written primarily by those who profit from it. That is a good step for us. Please help me keep it that way.

Best Regards,

Stephen Dyer
Education Policy Fellow
Innovation Ohio
35 E. Gay St.
Columbus, OH 43215
http://www.innovationohio.org

Categories Charter Schools, Ohio

Los Angeles: Esquith Under Investigation for Alleged Abuse 40 Years Ago

By dianeravitch
June 26, 2015 //
96

The Los Angeles Times reports that suspended teacher Rafe Esquirh is being investigated for abusing a child 40 years ago.

This must be every teacher’s worst nightmare: being accused of behavior to which there were no witnesses. The accusation alone, even if false, can ruin one’s reputation

In this situation, an allegation about what did or did not happen 40 years ago, how is it possible to establish guilt or innocence?

I tend to be skeptical because of a situation that occurred when I lived in Washington, DC, in the early 1990s. Half a dozen girls accused their teacher of inappropriate touching. The case seemed overwhelming against the teacher. But when the girls were questioned individually, they retracted their accusation. They wanted to punish the teacher for assigning too much homework and being a tough grader.

Everyone is innocent until proven guilty.

Categories Los Angeles

Steven Fesmire: Education and the Industrial Model

By dianeravitch
June 26, 2015 //
20

A comment by a reader:

 

 

Education and the Industrial Imagination

 

 

Prof. Ravitch and followers of her blog are of course right to underscore the fact that for-profit colleges and universities must be understood in the broader context of an increasingly dominant business or industrial model of education. It is helpful to spell out that model more precisely, so that our criticisms can be more clearly and forcefully targeted. Let me take a stab at that here.

 

On the industrial model, educating whole persons for lifelong growth is replaced by education as just another industrial sector, on a par with any other sector. Education’s job is to manufacture skilled labor for the market in a way that is maximally efficient. Knowledge on this model is a market commodity, teachers are delivery vehicles for knowledge content, and students are either consumers or manufactured products. Educational institutions on the industrial model are marketplaces for delivering and acquiring content, tuition is the fair price for accessing that content, and the high-to-low grade differential is the means for incentivizing competition. It is not clear where growth, community, and democracy come into the picture.

 

 

A school may train more students with fewer teachers, and an industrial sector may produce more clothes, cars, or animal protein to meet market demands with lower overhead costs. These products can then be used, or put to work to produce more things. The industrial imagination stops here, with efficient production. This is arguably useful, but what else has been unintentionally made, to which industrial thinking is oblivious? Have we made narrower lives? Have we embittered and disabled? Have we anesthetized moral and ecological sensitivity? Have we, in John Dewey’s words, made life more “congested, hurried, confused and extravagant”? If the answer is a qualified yes, then these are questions that should be central to public deliberation about education. It would be a tragedy that trivializes all of our successes if we continue unchecked down a cultural path in which schools—or industries—gain efficiency and increase productivity by frustrating human fulfillment.

 

 

Steven Fesmire, author of Dewey (Routledge, 2015)

Categories Budget Cuts, Corporate Reformers, Education Industry, For-Profit

Who Cares About Privacy? Not the US DOE. Not Bill Gates.

By dianeravitch
June 26, 2015 //
9

Laura Chapman read this post about proposed legislation to allow massive collection of college student data, and she did some research. This is what she found:

The proposed law to monetize the worth of a degree certainly reflects the values of Bill Gates and his “Data Quality Campaign,” and his desire to stack rank almost anything he can, preferably with publication in U.S. News and World report. I recall vividly that he once said he wanted kids to “get a college degree that is worth something,” meaning worth money.

In prior posts I have noted that, beginning in 2005, Gates funded the Data Quality Campaign” (Orwellian name), as if in tandem and designed to complement USDE funds for the Statewide Longitudinal Data Systems (SLDS) program.

The Teacher-Student Data Link system (TSDL) system envisioned by Gates is in place as the records system for local to state reporting to USDE. In Ohio that system actually structures the categories for teacher evaluation. So, InBloom may be gone but the Gates vision has prevailed and, from the get go, his campaign was intended to “keep current and longitudinal data on the performance of teachers and individual students, as well as schools, districts, states, and educators ranging from principals to higher education faculty.

Moreover, as articulated in the Data Quality Campaign, one of the main purposes of the data gathering was to determine the “best value” investments to make in education and to monitor improvements in outcomes, taking into account as many demographic factors as possible, including health records for preschoolers. Access to such records has been made easier by USDE’s poking holes in the FERPA law that offered a bit of protection for the use of student data.

Now this proposed legislation is about higher education. Suppose it passes. Whether the oversight is done by a special agency or USDE is not clear. But if USDE has oversight of the law and the program, then all of the data management and cost/benefit on programs and degrees are likely to be outsourced to a private company, just as USDE’s data management is outsourced now. I discovered this by snooping around at the USDE website. In the process I discovered that USDE has two key people as privacy officers. One is Kathleen Styles, USDE’s first “Chief Privacy Officer”—Email: kathleen.styles@ed.gov. The second is Michael Hawes, who is her advisor and the person who oversees USDE’s extremely important “Privacy Technical Assistance Center (PTAC).” Email: michael.hawes@ed.gov

Privacy Technical Assistance Center (PTAC) is supposed to be a “one-stop” resource for learning about “data privacy, confidentiality, and security practices related to student-level longitudinal data systems and other uses of student data.” PTAC provides timely information and updated guidance on privacy, confidentiality, and security practices through a variety of resources, including training materials and opportunities to receive direct assistance with privacy, security, and confidentiality of student data systems.” This technical assistance is targeted to meet the needs of state and local education agencies and…… institutions of higher education.

PTAC is really at the center of everything–The contractor for PTAC is responsible for working under “the guidance of the Chief Privacy Officer and in close collaboration with the FERPA Working Group,” which consists of representatives of the Office of Management, the Family Policy Compliance Office, and the Office of General Counsel. PTAC also “regularly consults” with the USDE’s Privacy Advisory Committee, whose members include Chief Statistician of National Center of Education Statistics, the program officer of the Statewide Longitudinal Data Systems (SLDS), and representatives from the office of Federal Student Aid, the Office of Civil Rights, and the Office of Special Education and Rehabilitative Services (among others).

The for-profit company managing and warehousing USDE data and at the center of all of the work of all of these agencies is Applied Engineering Management Corporation (AEM). Since 2010, (AEM) appears to have been awarded about $12 million to set up the resources at PTAC.

AEM also has contracts with OTHER federal, state, and local governments and agencies.. Their work for USDE includes management of data gathering required to support the “No Child Left Behind” legislation, including the 180 data descriptions for EdFacts. EdFacts is the destination for all of those disaggregated test scores, and other data that law requires. AEM can do heavy-duty data warehousing.

AEM has also operated the National Student Loan Data System receiving data from every college, university, and agency that participates in Title IV loan guarantees and related programs. That work gives AEM a leg up as a possible contractor for more work under the proposed legislation.

AEM’s website also says it helps “educators in developing high quality longitudinal P-20 data warehouses and business intelligence solutions that stand the test of time and enable data-driven decision making.”

AEM–-the go-to corporation for USDE’s data management and privacy–-has managed to suppress its identity as the conduit for USDE’s “big data” projects and USDE’s (pitiful) guidance to state and local agencies on privacy. Use this phrase to get to the PTAC resources “Privacy Technical Assistance Center.”

Categories Data and Data Mining, Democracy, Privacy and Privacy Rights, U.S. Department of Education

A Good Reason Not to Take the ACT

By dianeravitch
June 26, 2015 //
21

In displaying readiness for college, grade point average matters more than a score on a college admissions test like SAT or ACT. Even the testing companies acknowledge that this is the case. But they are businesses, and they compete with one another for numbers and dollars. So they are always on the lookout for new avenues by which to serve their customers (the colleges, not the students).

 

The ACT, Mercedes Schneider reports, will offer a new service to colleges (not to students). It will not only test the student, but it will give the college confidential advice about his or her readiness, based on subtest scores. This information will go to the college, but not to the student.

 

Schneider writes:

 

Thus, ACT is intentionally shifting its role from reporting test scores to advising postsecondary institutions regarding admissions decisions.

There’s more:

Students will not be privy to the advice ACT is offering regarding ACT’s predictions of student success. None of this info will be part of the student score report. Such info will be between ACT and postsecondary institutions.

And not only does ACT believe it has a right to both form and communicate its opinions of student success to colleges and universities; ACT is fine with forming some of its judgments based upon unverified, volunteered student self-report information.

 

So, get this. The students pay to be tested; ACT reports the results to the students and to colleges. But then ACT gives the colleges information about the students and recommends whether or not they should be accepted. This advice is not shared with the students who paid to be tested.

 

Does this strike you as outrageous? ACT is not your guidance counselor. What nerve!

Categories Accountability, Education Industry, Students, Testing
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