Politico.com posted about the fight over vouchers in D.C. and about the charter teachers’ rally for “equality” (meaning more charter schools in New York City):
OUTSIZED FIGHT OVER D.C. VOUCHERS : Outgoing House Speaker John Boehner has one swan song that’s guaranteed to be a hit among even his most bitter Republican critics: picking a fight with the president over private school vouchers. The House is expected to pass a bill extending the life of Washington’s school voucher program today, setting up an outsized fight with the White House over a small, $45 million program that allows students from low-income families in the nation’s capital to attend private schools on the taxpayer dime. Maggie Severns has the story: http://politico.pro/1LJCos7.
– School vouchers have united even the angriest factions of the GOP : The day after Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy dropped out of the race for speaker and the chamber descended deeper into turmoil, some of Boehner’s fiercest critics gathered to wax poetic about vouchers during a markup. Democrats have criticized the program as ineffective and harmful to public schools – and an ironic Republican cause celebre given the GOP’s frequent calls for transferring more power to states.
– The D.C. Opportunity Scholarship Program allocates funds directly from Congress for D.C. students to use at a private school of their choice. About 6,200 students have used the vouchers over the last 10 years, and the average household income of enrolled students is about $20,575. The fight over Washington’s vouchers, which has raged for more than a decade and even earned a plot line on the television show “The West Wing,” is a proxy for lawmakers debating if – and when – the government should pour resources into helping poor kids escape failing public schools.
– The White House strongly opposes the bill, but didn’t say whether President Obama would veto it: http://politico.pro/1M6O5eu….
– And speaking of school choice: More than 1,500 New York City teachers will rally in Manhattan this afternoon to decry Mayor Bill de Blasio and his policies that ignore “the depth of inequality in the classroom while opposing charter schools – some of the only city schools that have narrowed the achievement gap,” according to the pro-charter group Families for Excellent Schools. The group and other advocates have held a number of similar rallies over the last year.
Now, here are the nits I have to pick. Paragraph 3 describes vouchers in GOP rhetoric as a way for “the government [to]…pour resources into helping poor kids escape failing schools.” Not a word about the fact that multiple evaluations by a researcher from the Walton-funded Department of Educational Reform at the University of Arkansas has never found any achievement gains in voucher schools in D.C. (or anywhere else) for “poor kids” trying “to escape failing public schools.” The studies show no achievement gains but a higher graduation rate, which may reflect the huge attrition rate of these schools. In Milwaukee, for example, nearly half the students who started in a voucher school left before high school graduation.
D.C., like Milwaukee, now has three publicly funded sector: the shrinking public schools, the charters, and the voucher schools. Milwaukee, having had this tri-part division of public funding for more than 20 years, is one of the nation’s lowest performing school districts on the Urban NAEP. Writers for Politico.com should know this.
In addition, Politico.com refers to a “rally” by 1,500 teachers, without mentioning that they are teachers in charter schools (most of whom will be gone within 2-3 years due to teacher churn in NYC charters) and does not explain who the “Families for Excellent Schools” are. These are not poor black and brown families seeking more charter schools. FES consists of a handful of billiionaires, the same hedge fund managers who raised millions of dollars in a few minutes to attack de Blasio with a barrage of TV commercials in 2014 when he gave Eva Moskowitz only 8 of the 11 new charters she wanted, the same hedge fund managers who gave some $800,000 to Governor Cuomo to turn him into a charter school champion.
Please guys, some in-depth reporting is needed here, as opposed to quoting press releases.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
In-depth reporting ???
But that would be haaard ❢❢❢
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I had the same reaction to the Politico framing.those are not nits that you picked. Think of Politico as one of the disease spreading, blood sucking journalistic ticks in the landscape of reporting on education.
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Diane, they’ll do anything in DC except discuss improving public schools. Anything. It’s simply amazing we have an entire governmental ed apparatus that only discusses the public schools the vast majority of ALL US children attend when they’re haranguing us to turn over our kids for testing.
Utter and complete capture. Public schools are only discussed when they’re being compared unfavorably to 1. charter schools or, 2. private schools or they’re rolling out a new testing scheme.
The same is true in my state legislature. They have spent the last 11 months on charter schools, and there’s no end in sight! Now we’re on Phase Two, which is “charter expansion”. You can’t pay these people to discuss public schools, because we are paying them and they refuse to do it. These public employees simply aren’t interested in public schools, which is ludicrous but true. I don’t know how we got here, but here we are. Maybe we could hold a rally or hire a celebrity? Hire a private advocate to lobby them?
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I’m confident the two political factions in the ed reform “movement” will reach agreement and expand vouchers. After all, they’re absolutely identical other than that one relatively minor area of disagreement and vouchers are going in all over the country anyway, and no one in the “movement” objected, so why not DC?
As long as we aren’t talking about the unfashionable “public sector schools” and it’s “charter schools or private schools?” both sides will be achieving their political objectives.
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This is a bit much from John Le’Orange. DC has about a 50- 50 mix of public versus charters. The latter foisted on us by Congress back in the mid-1990’s. SO much for the free-market. I might just have to set-up a school in a vacant business. Why not? Lots of money and no accountability.
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NIts to pick indeed.
“The female head lice lay eggs in sacs that stick to individual hairs. A baby head louse then hatches 7 to 10 days later. If your child has head lice, you might be able to spot the remains of the tiny white egg in their hair. This is called a ‘nit’. Some people also use the word ‘nit’ to mean ‘head lice’.”
This is what is meant by lousy reporting. If you don’t pick the nits quickly, they hatch and grow.
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“Not a word about the fact that multiple evaluations by a researcher from the Walton-funded Department of Educational Reform at the University of Arkansas has never found any achievement gains in voucher schools in D.C. (or anywhere else) for “poor kids” trying “to escape failing public schools.” The studies show no achievement gains but a higher graduation rate, which may reflect the huge attrition rate of these schools.”
The 3-year evaluation (ies.ed.gov/ncee/pubs/20094050/pdf/20094051.pdf) found “there was a statistically significant positive impact on reading test scores, but not math test scores. Overall, those offered a scholarship were performing at statistically higher levels in readingequivalent to 3.1 months of additional learningbut at similar levels in math compared to students not offered a scholarship.”
So to say the evaluations “never found any achievement gains” is directly untrue.
The final evaluation also found a positive impact on reading achievement, but the p value was 0.06 rather than 0.05. If you know what p values are, it is unwise to treat a 0.06 as radically different from 0.05. Chances are good that the voucher program did increase reading achievement.
As for graduation rate, it is falseto say that the gains could be because of attrition. The graduation rate went up by 12 percentage point for students who were merely offered a voucher, even including students who attrited out of the voucher program and even including students who never used a voucher in the first place. When they looked at students who actually used vouchers, the graduation rate went up by 21 percentage points. So yes, that 21 percentage point rate would go down if you include attrition, but including attrition only dilutes the gain to 12 percentage points.
Name another high school intervention that increases the graduation rate by 12 percentage points for poor urban minorities.
Anyone who cares about evidence or about poor kids’ lives would support the DC voucher program. The only reason for opposing it is ideology.
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The gains in the D.C. Opportunity Scholarship were not evenly distributed, as the report says:
The OSP improved reading achievement for 5 of the 10 subgroups examined.2 Being offered or using a scholarship led to higher reading test scores for participants who applied from schools that were not classified as “schools in need of improvement” (non-SINI). There were also positive impacts for students who applied to the Program with relatively higher levels of academic performance, female students, students entering grades K-8 at the time of application, and students from the first cohort of applicants. These impacts translate into 1/3 to 2 years of additional learning growth. However, the positive subgroup reading impacts for female students and the first cohort of applicants should be interpreted with caution, as reliability tests suggest that they could be false discoveries.
• No achievement impacts were observed for five other subgroups of students, including those who entered the Program with relative academic disadvantage. Subgroups of students who applied from SINI schools (designated by Congress as the highest priority group for the Program) or were in the lower third of the test score distribution among applicants did not demonstrate significant impacts on reading test scores if they were offered or used a scholarship. In addition, male students, those entering high school grades upon application, and those in application cohort 2 showed no significant impacts in either reading or math after 3 years.
My summary:
In short, the students with the greatest needs, the students coming from “Schools in Need of Improvement, the students with the lowest test scores before entering the program, and boys, showed NO gains.
Only an ideologue who works for Walton University would seek to distort the findings as you did, WT.
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You said no achievement gains. That wasn’t accurate. You said the graduation gains could be explained by attrition. Also not accurate.
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No achievement gains for the children whom the program were designed for: no achievement gains for the children from SINI (Schools in Need of Improvement); no achievement gains for the kids who entered with the lowest test scores; no achievement gains for boys.
That really is a great record for a program designed to “save poor kids from failing schools.”
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You’re nitpicking at the achievement gains. But the graduation gains were just as high for “Schools in Need of Improvement.” For kids in those schools, just winning the voucher lottery improved the high school graduation rate from 66% to 79%. (Note: that figure already accounts for all attrition from the program). Put another way, it reduced the dropout rate from 34% to 21%.
That is a HUGE gain.
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HS graduation rates would be higher, NOT because of vounchers or corporate charters, but because of cherry picking students and forced HIGHER attrition rates, and higher suspension rates, to drive out the poorest test takers and children who are the most difficult to teach.
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Hey Lloyd, as I’ve already said twice, the higher graduation rate I am discussing is calculated by looking at ALL kids who ever were offered a voucher via a lottery, whether or not they dropped out themselves, and even whether or not they ever used the voucher in the first place.
Literally zero of your criticisms have any merit or applicability whatsoever. They just do not apply to this program or to the particular study I’m discussing.
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Hey, WT, your use of graduation rates for vouchers is grasping at straws and it is as flawed as the greedy psychopathic corporate education reformers using the average score of the PISA test as evidence that public education in the United States is a failure when the exact opposite is the case.
To discover what I mean, look beyond the graduation rate among children who use public vouchers to attend private schools to learn about the real reason the high school graduation rate is higher than the country’s public schools—to do that, we ahve to look at the average voucher child’s environment and family (parents/guardians).
1. “The vast majority of private schools are run by religious groups. According to the U.S. Department of Education, 76 percent of private schools have a religious affiliation. Over 80 percent of students attending private schools are enrolled in religious institutions. Most of these religious schools seek to indoctrinate as well as educate.”
2. “School vouchers are little more than a backdoor way for the government to subsidize religious and other private schools. Under most voucher bills, private schools can take taxpayer money and still deny admission to any student they choose.”
3. “According to multiple studies of the District of Columbia, Milwaukee and Cleveland school voucher programs, the targeted population does not perform better in reading and math than students in public schools. The U.S. Department of Education studies of the D.C. program show that the students using vouchers to attend private schools do not believe that their voucher school is better or safer than the public school they left.”
4. “Vouchers do little to help the poor. The payments often do not cover the entire cost of tuition or other mandatory fees for private schools. Thus, only families with the money to cover the cost of the rest of the tuition, uniforms, transportation, books and other supplies can use the vouchers.”
There’s more the blow your theory to so much house dust. Just click the link and learn.
https://www.au.org/church-state/february-2011-church-state/featured/10-reasons-why-private-school-vouchers-should-be
Since most private/corporate charter schools are rigid and authoritarian in their approach to teaching children—supported by the fact that these rigid schools suspend students starting as early as kindergarten in much higher rates than public schools—-it is arguable that the the majority of parents of the children who end up going to private schools on public vouchers are fundamentalist Christians who are authoritarian parents who also think that God created everything 10,000 years ago and they don’t want their children to learn about evolution.
In this style of parenting—that matches most private/corporate charters—children are expected to follow the strict rules established by the parents. Failure to follow such rules usually results in punishment. Authoritarian parents fail to explain the reasoning behind these rules. If asked to explain, the parent might simply reply, “Because I said so.” These parents have high demands, but are not responsive to their children. According to Baumrind, these parents “are obedience- and status-oriented, and expect their orders to be obeyed without explanation”
To understand what the home environment is for these children, I suggest you read the following post from someone who suffered from that type of authoritarian parent.
“Unfortunately, we have not always gotten along so well. Less than ten years ago, our relationship had been almost completely destroyed thanks to the authoritarian parenting techniques of the fundamentalist Christian homeschooling culture. Authoritarian parenting forced both of us into roles that we were not at all suited for, with tragic results.”
http://www.patheos.com/blogs/nolongerquivering/2012/03/authoritarian-parenting-and-emotional-repression/
In addition to this: The dark side of home schooling: creating soldiers for the culture war
http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/may/08/christian-home-schooling-dark-side
Who is behind the voucher movement?
The big money bankrolling the school voucher movement.
According to the Division of Non-Public Education’s records, 70 percent of North Carolina’s 700 private schools are religious or sectarian. The Division of Non-Public Education requires only the most minimal oversight of private and homeschools. This is a direct result of heavy lobbying and pressure from Christian fundamentalists in the 1970s. As a DNPE website describes it, “As their numbers increased, Christian school leaders soon realized that the non-public school regulatory system (established as part of the 1955-1956 era Pearsall Plan) was going to be a major obstacle to the operation of their schools.” Lobbying and protests at the state capital led to the passage of the so-called Christian School Bill in 1979.
http://www.indyweek.com/indyweek/the-big-money-bankrolling-the-school-voucher-movement/Content?oid=3875268
In conclusion, the money behind the voucher movement in the U.S. is similar to the money that funds Islamic fundamentalists throughout the Middle East and the world.
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Just like Eva’s rallies with her charter kids, we can bet that it was mandated for those 1,500 charter school teachers to protest for more charters—if they didn’t, fear for job loss would probably run high and there is always food to buy, and rent/mortgage to pay.
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On another note:
On Democracynow.org you can hear, read a GREAT discussion of a new book by Dale Russakoff. She talks about Newark, the money spent by Christie and others supplied mainly by the owner of [facebook?] what ever.
About the last 20 minutes of the hour long program
Think you would find it interesting.
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Here’s an article by GLenn Greenwald on Politico’s owners… they haven’t changed since then: http://www.salon.com/2007/05/04/politico_funding/
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