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Teacher Educators Warily Endorse ESSA

By dianeravitch
December 9, 2015 //
8

The American Association of Colleges for Teacher Education commended the passage of Every Student Succeeds Act, but warns that its provisions could lower standards for teacher credentialing and that the law allows states to authorize the creation of “academies” to offer master’s degrees. These academies might have no faculty members with graduate degrees, as is the case with some of the charter “graduate” schools of education, where charter teachers grant master’s degrees to other charter teachers.

 

 

AACTE Commends Congress on ESEA Reauthorization, Urges Responsible Implementation

 

(December 9, 2015, Washington, D.C.) – Today, Congress completed its long-overdue reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act. The bipartisan legislation, titled the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA), now awaits the president’s signature. The American Association of Colleges for Teacher Education (AACTE) applauds the leadership of Chairman Lamar Alexander (R-TN) and Ranking Member Patty Murray (D-WA) in the U.S. Senate and Chairman John Kline (R-MN) and Ranking Member Bobby Scott (D-VA) in the U.S. House of Representatives for bringing the bill to closure.

 

Overall, AACTE supports ESSA for its improvements over existing policy and for returning more power to the states to oversee local PK-12 education. However, certain provisions in the bill could threaten efforts to provide all students equitable access to high-quality teachers and principals. AACTE believes that all students should be taught by a profession-ready teacher who has completed preparation, demonstrated content knowledge and effectiveness, and achieved full state certification or licensure. AACTE members stand ready to assist their states in supporting well-researched, evidence-based approaches to meeting this goal—and steering clear of policies that would undermine it.

 

Of particular concern in Title II of ESSA is the inclusion of H.R. 848, the Great Teaching and Leading for Schools Act (the GREAT Act), which permits states to authorize new teacher, principal, and school leader academies. Such academies would award certificates that could be treated as equivalent to a master’s degree, effectively bringing the government into the function of academic credentialing.

 

Yet the academies would not have to meet the same requirements as traditional higher education providers. Higher education has long been held to state standards for key aspects of educator preparation, including academic credentials of faculty, physical infrastructure, number of required course credits, course work previously completed by candidates, the process of obtaining accreditation, and admissions criteria. The new academies are exempt from such restrictions.

 

Holding academies to a lower set of standards will undermine the nation’s goal of ensuring all students have a profession-ready teacher, especially as the bill requires states to allow teacher candidates to serve as teachers of record before completing their preparation and receiving their certificate or license. AACTE and its members will continue to advocate in the states for the necessity of having a fully prepared, certified or licensed teacher in each classroom.

 

Beyond the provisions of the GREAT Act, ESSA includes other troubling opportunities for states to expand alternative routes to certification and licensure for high-need fields such as special education and the STEM disciplines—again without attention to standards for such programs.

 

Furthermore, ESSA does not include minimum entry standards for the teaching profession, leaving this determination up to each state. With multiple provisions in the bill encouraging expansion of alternate routes to the classroom and the use of teachers-in-training as teachers of record, ESSA tempts states to lower standards for the profession, which would have an adverse impact on the students who are most in need of highly skilled, well-prepared teachers. AACTE looks forward to working through its state chapters and membership across the nation to help states execute the provisions of ESSA responsibly.

 

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AACTE: The Leading Voice on Educator Preparation

The American Association of Colleges for Teacher Education is a national alliance of educator preparation programs dedicated to high-quality, evidence-based preparation that assures educators are profession-ready as they enter the classroom. Its over 800 member institutions represent public and private colleges and universities in every state, the District of Columbia, the Virgin Islands, Puerto Rico, and Guam. Through advocacy and capacity building, AACTE promotes innovation and effective practices that strengthen educator preparation. Learn more at http://www.aacte.org.

Categories Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA), Teacher Education

Nicholas Tampio: Is ESSA a Hoax?

By dianeravitch
December 9, 2015 //
13

Nicholas Tampio, a professor of political science at Fordham University, argues that the Every Student Succeeds Act is a sham. Instead of dismantling the harmful policies of corporate reform, it shifts the burden of imposing them to the states. By his reading, the warped soul of NCLB and Race to the Top was preserved with their emphasis on high-stakes testing.

The opt out movement must grow and grow until every state government and Congress recognizes that parents won’t tolerate the worship of high-stakes testing. We will not sacrifice our children and grandchildren to the gods of testing. The achievement gap is a product of standardized tests. The standardized tests faithfully reproduce family income, not the ability to learn. American students need a great education, like the one Bill Gates wants for his children at the Lakeside School, like the one Rahm Emanuel wants for his children at the University of Chicago Lab School, like the one President Obama wants for his children at the Sidwell Friends School. An education that includes the arts, foreign languages, history, science, physical education, literature, civics, time for play, time for exploration, time for projects, time for recess. NOT an “education” that is centered on standardized tests, where children are rated and ranked by their ability to mark the correct bubbles. We want an education that encourages children to ask question, not an education that prepares them to give the “right” answer.

 

He writes:

 

How can people say that the new bill is a U-turn from the education policies of the past 14 years? Under it, the federal government would not be able tell states what academic standards to adopt or how student test scores should be used in teacher evaluations. Nonetheless, states would have to submit accountability plans to the Department of Education for approval, and these accountability plans would have to weigh test scores more than any other factor. Furthermore, under the act, states would have to use “evidence-based interventions” in the bottom 5 percent of schools, determined, again, by test scores.

 

In short, states would be free to choose test-based accountability policies approved by the secretary of education or lose access to federal Title I funds that sustain schools in low-income communities across the country. In a move that belies Alexander’s claim about local control, the Department of Education has offered to establish “office hours” for states or districts that wish to meet its “policy objectives and requirements under the law.”

 

Does the bill at least permit states to escape the Common Core? It is hard to see how. According to the bill, each state would have to adopt “challenging state academic standards.” The Obama administration’s testing action plan stipulates that assessment systems should measure student knowledge and skills against “state-developed college- and career-ready standards” — which has long been code for the Common Core. So, yes, states could invest hundreds of millions of dollars to write new academic standards and make aligned tests, but there is no guarantee that the secretary of education would approve standards or tests that implicitly chastise the administration’s education policies.

 

Advocates of high-stakes Common Core testing have applauded the Every Student Achieves Act. Catherine Brown, the director of education policy at the Center for American Progress, said, “At the end of the day the bill appears to allow the department to set parameters in key areas and enforce statutory requirements.” John Engler of the Business Roundtable likewise applauded the bill for keeping test scores “a central feature” of state accountability systems. Lanea Erickson at Third Way praised the bill for throwing “some much-needed water on the political firestorm around testing.”

 

These advocates have not changed their minds about the Common Core or testing. They are just happy to shift the responsibility for administering it to the states rather than the federal government if that would help defuse parent and educator animosity. They misunderstand the justified anger that fuels the test refusal movement.

 

 

Categories Education Reform, Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA), Opt Out, Parents, Standardized Testing

What the BATs Think About ESSA

By dianeravitch
December 9, 2015 //
3

I was not sure if anyone had actually sat down and read every word of the 1,061 pages of the Every Child Succeeds Act of 2015. It was passed today and is on its way to the President’s desk for his signature.

 

The Badass Teachers Association created a committee of five classroom teachers who did read every word of what will soon be the new law governing public (and charter) education in the United States.

 

Their analysis highlights both the good and the bad in the bill. None of their concerns were addressed. The bill dismantles NCLB but allows more charters, more room for TFA, “Pay for Success” for investors, and a bunch of other things that teachers worry about. And of course the teachers object to annual testing, which wastes instructional time and narrows curriculum.

 

It is a fine statement and I recommend that  you read it, because it was written by classroom teachers who know how the law is going to affect them and their students.

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Education Reform, Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA), Privatization, Testing

Daniel Katz: Why The New York Times Editorial Board is Wrong about Testing

By dianeravitch
December 9, 2015 //
13

Daniel Katz of Seton Hall University pulled apart a recent editorial in the New York Times which hailed the preservation of annual testing in federal law as a great and necessary step towards improving education for all children, especially the neediest who would otherwise be overlooked. This is the same line we have heard about the virtues of No Child Left Behind since 2002, when it was signed into law. Without annual testing, would we know how any student was doing? Would we know if teachers and schools were accountable? Etc.

 

Without annual testing, the editorial asserts, the country would have “no way of knowing whether students are learning anything or not.” Really? Is there no one at the New York Times who has heard of the National Assessment of Educational Progress? It seems that every time a story appears in the Times, there is the same lament about how we have “no way” to know, etc., but we do! NAEP tests scientific samples of students in every state and in many cities. Why must we squander billions on testing every child every year, when the same money could be spent to reduce class sizes, to employ teachers of the arts, to hire guidance counselors, and to restore libraries?

 

Katz writes:

 

Such statements might have been viable in 2001 when the NCLB legislation was passed with bipartisan support, but after nearly a decade and half, there is no evidence to be found that test based accountability is telling us anything we did not already know from other means, nor is there evidence that the children whose plights provided NCLB’s rationale are prospering. To be honest, at this point in our policy cycle, it takes a love of annual standardized testing similar to Smeagol’s love of the One Ring to be blinded to how thoroughly it has failed to improve our schools.

 

He then cites the latest NAEP data to show that after 13 years of annual testing, gains have ground to a halt, and achievement gaps persist.

 

If we mark the NLCB era from the 2002 test administration, then we have to conclude that, in the 8th grade reading NAEP, the gap in scores between white and black students has closed a grand total of one point. The 4th grade gap has closed a more generous four points in the same time. In mathematics, the NCLB era has seen a score gap in both 4th and 8th grade close all of three points.

 

Paul Barton reported years ago in a study of the Black-White Achievement Gap for the Educational Testing Service that the most significant narrowing of the gap occurred from 1973-1988 (Katz includes the graphs from NAEP). Barton attributed the narrowing of the gap to racial integration, reduced class sizes, more early childhood education, and increased economic opportunities for African American families.

 

Yet in the era of high-stakes testing, the gap has widened and remained persistently large.

 

Katz writes:

 

There is a limited role that standardized test data can play in a comprehensive system of school monitoring, development, and accountability, but it must play a small role at best in coordination with a system that is premised on support and development. However, no school accountability system, regardless of premise, is capable of turning around a 40 year long, society spanning, trend towards inequality and segregation. That requires far more than clinging to annual, mass, standardized testing as our most vital means of giving every child access to an equitable education, and if The Times and other testing advocates really cannot see past that, then they are not merely shortsighted; they are clinging to damaging and delusional policies. A bit like our, poor, deluded Smeagol and his final cry of “Precious!”

 

 

 

Categories Education Reform

NCLB Is Dead: ESSA is Law (After President Signs It)

By dianeravitch
December 9, 2015 //
28

The new Every Student Succeeds Act passed the Senate by an overwhelming vote. It will be law as soon as the President signs it, which he has said he will do. No Child Left Behind is history, a cruel law that set goals so far out of reach that it was certain to label every school in the nation a failure. Because of NCLB, data became more important than education. It was a boon for the standardized testing industry. It labeled and ranked schools by test scores and led to cheating, teaching to bad tests, gaming the system (by districts and states), and narrowing the curriculum. Thanks to this dreadful law, many schools abandoned or reduced time for the arts, physical education, recess, science, history, and foreign languages. NCLB was the platform for the even harsher, even more punitive, even more disastrous Race to the Top.

 

The fight for better education for all now shifts to the states. As Mercedes Schneider reports here, the 1,061 page act was released to the public on November 30. It is now December 9. Who read the entire act? We know from Kenneth Zeichner’s reading of the section on teacher education that the new law opens the doors to alternative routes, in some cases enables institutions to award graduate degrees that have no faculty with graduate degrees (Relay, Match). We know from Mercedes Schneider’s work that Teach for America moles on the Congressional staff protected TFA. We know from the crowing of charter organizations that the bill protects them.

 

There is much we don’t know. What we can say for certain is that the fight for the survival of public education and the teaching profession now shifts to the states. The battle to repel the monetization of education funds goes on. The struggle to allow teachers to teach goes on. The battle to prevent technology entrepreneurs from replacing teachers and mechanizing teaching goes on.

 

Now, as never before, our role as citizens and defenders of the common good is necessary. The Network for Public Education will continue to be in the forefront of the struggles ahead. Plan to join us at our annual meeting in Raleigh on April 16-17 to discuss how we can make our schools ready for all our children, not just a few. And how we can repel the privatization movement in its efforts to capture and profit from what belongs to all of us.

Categories Education Reform

Clyde Gaw: All Children Are Creative

By dianeravitch
December 9, 2015 //
4

Clyde Gaw is a veteran art teacher, K-12, in Indiana. In this post, part of Anthony Cody’s series on the importance of art, Gaw describes the teaching and learning of art and how it brings out interest, motivation, and passion in students. They become invested in their work. They want to do it; they want to finish it.

 

Here is a small part of a thoughtful and provocative post:

 

 

At the end of the day, I ask myself, if art experiences optimize developmental pathways and provide learning experiences that allow students to make sense of content, why are fine arts programs not fully funded and supported by federal and state policy makers whose mantra is “We should do what’s best for children?” President Barack Obama, whose presidential theme of “change” propelled him to the White House in 2008, defaulted on that promise with RTTT, an initiative resulting in the de-emphasis of arts learning and new emphasis on testing and data collection. Despite happy talk from politicians about arts education, federal and state lawmakers should know if schools and educators are going to be penalized for low standardized test scores, a school’s curricula structure is going to emphasize test-taking skills in a myriad of ways including increased time spent on tasks and subjects preparing for tests.Screen Shot 2015-12-01 at 10.58.35 PM

 

In the classroom, I look at my watch. “Children, it’s clean-up time. The next class has arrived and they are waiting outside for their turn in the art room.” “Tell them to wait,” chirps Frank, “We don’t want to go!” After clean up, Frank’s class lines up at the door and reluctantly waves good-bye while the next class moves in for another 40-minute art experience. This sequence is repeated 37-39 times a week, for 36 weeks. My thoughts race back to a comment a student made to me a two years earlier, “Art should be….like the whole school!” What would happen if students spent most of their day learning through creative experience?

 

What would that look like?

 

At the end of the day, I review photo-documentation of student art-making activities in our studio where child initiated ideas to build, paint, draw, sculpt, act, sew, write or develop other trans-disciplinary ideas are honored. Democratic education is emergent and means children have a voice and co-collaborate in the design of the curricula experiences they participate in.

 

After decades observing children in studio settings devoted to self-expression in art, there is much evidence to conclude the mind is a biologically unique organ. Howard Gardner’s theory of mind, which states human beings are biologically endowed with unique intellectual and creative capacities, is perfectly illustrated in our art program. Children are not homogeneously constructed.

 

Children thrive in fine arts settings because art, music, theatre and dance are the first language of humans. It is not by accident that educational experience is optimal when integrated through multi-sensory learning experience. There is a biological basis for memory formation and it has everything to do with multi-sensory experience. Research in physiology by 2000 Nobel Laureate, Eric Kandel reveals neural networks are strengthened and expanded when learners engage in sensory-based learning experience. From this educator’s perspective, Kandel’s research means fine arts experiences are critical, foundational experiences in the development of mind.

Categories Arts Education, Joy, Real Education

John Merrow Asks: Why is Washington Celebrating Kaya Henderson’s Five-Year Anniversary?

By dianeravitch
December 9, 2015 //
12

John Merrow says that the celebration of Kaya Henderson’s five years as chancellor of the D.C. public schools is premature.

 

In a scathing article, he reviews what has happened in the District of Columbia under the nine-year rule of Michelle Rhee and Kaya Henderson.

 

Last month Kaya Henderson celebrated her fifth anniversary as Chancellor of the public schools in Washington, DC. Five years at the helm of an urban district is a milestone that few big city superintendents achieve, and she has been praised for hanging in and for calming down the storm created by Michelle Rhee, whose 3+ year reign was marked by numerous controversies, included the massive scandal sometimes called “Erasergate,” when USA Today investigative reporters found that thousands of student answers were changed–and almost always from ‘wrong’ to ‘right.’

 

The Washington Post, a consistent cheerleader for Henderson and her controversial predecessor, celebrated Henderson’s anniversary with a largely laudatory article that included praise from two members of Washington’s education establishment, US Secretary of Education Arne Duncan and the long time Executive Director of the Great City Schools, Michael Casserly. The latter called Henderson “one of the most effective and popular school leaders any place in the country.” As the Post put it, “Unlike her predecessor, whose turbulent style and top-down approach made enemies of many teachers and politicians, Henderson is credited with taking a more collaborative approach.” That’s another way of saying that Henderson is a “kinder, gentler version of Rhee,” a familiar observation over the years.

 

But a closer look at what Henderson has achieved reveals that there’s little reason to celebrate.

 

Looking at the huge score gaps on NAEP and the dismal performance of D.C. students on the Common Core tests (which he calls a “catastrophic failure”), Merrow wonders why the applause for Henderson.

 

It seems to me that the District’s academic performance–the NAEP gaps, the PAARC scores, the exodus of veteran teachers and principals–are prima facie evidence of the bankruptcy of the Rhee/Henderson ‘test and punish’ approach. Henderson may in fact be a ‘kinder, gentler version’ of Michelle Rhee, but she’s still an acolyte and enthusiast for policies that damage learning opportunities for children….

 

Nationally, many in education people are waking up to the failures of ‘test and punish,’ and the new ESEA pulls back on testing. Of course we need ways of assessing teachers, but teachers themselves have to be part of the process. Every other country uses tests to assess students, not to play gotcha with teachers.

 

The approach to ‘education reform’ begun by Michelle Rhee in 2007 and continuing under Kaya Henderson to this day is a failure and a fraud. Washington’s students and teachers deserve better……

Categories Accountability, District of Columbia, Education Reform, Testing

Annie Paul Murphy: Fiction Helps Our Brains Develop

By dianeravitch
December 9, 2015 //
8

Annie Paul Murphy writes about neuroscience. In this article in the New York Times in 2012, she says that neuroscientists have documented how fiction helps brains develop. Reading fiction enlarges our understanding and imagination. It teaches us about a wide range of social situations that we may have never encountered. As others have written in the past, fiction is a magic carpet that allows us to enter into other worlds and other places, to walk in the shoes of people we might never meet or people that are purely imaginary. (I actually have some trouble, philosophically, with the idea that we must find a utilitarian justification for engaging with art, whether literature or music or other imaginative expression, like those who say that listening to Mozart increases your math scores, or similar claims of the connection between test scores [i.e., the Holy Grail of education] and activities whose purpose is to give people a sense of joy, to stimulate their imagination, to deepen our humanity.

 

This relates to a discussion on the blog a few days ago about how Common Core appears to be causing a decline in the teaching and reading of fiction in fourth and eighth grades, which are tested by the National Assessment of Education Progress. Brookings scholar Tom Loveless pointed out what appears to be a direct connection between the introduction of Common Core and the decline in reading fiction.

 

The Common Core standards direct that teachers in the grades K-8 spend 50 percent of instructional time on fiction and 50% on non-fiction. In the high school, teachers are supposed to spend 30 percent on fiction and 70 percent on non-fiction. This directive has no basis in research, experience, or reason. Why cut back on fiction?

 

Apparently, the drafting committee decided that the best way to prepare students to do well on the National Assessment of Educational Progress–federal tests that are given every two years to samples of students in every district across the nation–would be to incorporate the NAEP instructions to assessment developers. NAEP recommends that the developers allocate 50 percent of the test questions on the reading exams in fourth grade to fiction and 50 percent to non-fiction, and that the proportions shift in high school to 30 percent fiction and 70 percent informational text. For some unknown, unexplained reason the CCSS writing committee decided this must be the way that reading is taught in American schools, with a declining emphasis on fiction.

 

This is not only arbitrary, it is senseless. No other nation tells teachers how to allocate time between fiction and non-fiction. Both are worthy. Teachers should make their own decisions about what they think is best in their classroom.

 

When criticism of this arbitrary allocation became widely known, there was a public outcry that the Common Core was anti-literature. The advocates for the Common Core responded that the allocation applied to all subjects–including mathematics, sciences, physical education, social studies, and so on–and thus left English teachers free to teach fiction if they chose, to the extent they chose.

 

But neither textbook publishers nor teachers saw it that way. If the purpose of the 50-50, 30-70 divisions was to leave reading teachers free to choose their own assignments, what was the point of embedding the allocations in the standards? If they had no purpose other than to tell math teachers and science teachers not to assign fiction, did the allocation make any sense? Obviously not. It doesn’t take a high level of sophistication to see that the purpose of the allocation was to diminish the amount of time devoted to fiction.

 

I know of no research that says that children who read fiction are less well prepared to understand informational text than children who read informational text. The most important determinants of reading fluency and skill are not the genre read, but the students’ vocabulary, background knowledge, and interest. Government regulations are “informational text” and O. Henry short stories are fiction. Which is more likely to contribute to a students’ ability to read?

 

I am not making a case here for fiction over non-fiction. I write non-fiction, and I read non-fiction. But I would never claim that anything I write is worthier than poetry by William Blake or novels by John Steinbeck. Yes, I think students should read classic literature, including classic speeches (“the Gettysburg Address,” Martin Luther King Jr.’s speeches) and classic essays (like George Orwell’s “Politics and the English Language”). Students should be exposed to both great literature and great speeches and essays (otherwise known as “informational text.”)

 

But I fail to see why any committee anywhere should have the right to tell English teachers whether to teach fiction or “informational text.” That is a decision that belongs to teachers.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Categories Common Core, Education Reform, Real Education, Standardized Testing

Mercedes Schneider: What ESSA Says About “Highly Qualified” Teachers

By dianeravitch
December 9, 2015 //
21

Mercedes Schneider reports that the new Every Student Succeeds Act has revised a key element of No Child Left Behind. NCLB referred to “highly qualified” teachers 67 separate times. It seemed to be important when this bill was written in 2001 that every child should be instructed by a highly qualified teacher. But as she explains, Teach for America got into the act and persuaded its champions in Congress to play around with the definition so that even a young college graduate with only five weeks of training could be considered “highly qualified.”

 

The new ESSA solves this problem by deleting any reference to “highly qualified” teachers. Instead, it refers to “effective” teachers.

 

Schneider writes:

 

What is interesting is that ESSA foregoes the NCLB language prohibiting emergency or provisional certification. In fact, ESSA does allow for provisional certification and the waiving of licensing criteria for states and schools receiving Title I funding (see page 143). Furthermore, it seems that provisional or emergency certification could be subsumed in “certification obtained through alternative routes.”

 

It appears to be up to states to decide to specify emergency or provisional certification as belonging under the heading of “alternative certification.”

 

In October 2013, Senator Harkin worked to include language into federal government debt legislation a provision that allowed teachers in training to be considered “highly qualified.” Such a provision was a gift to Teach for America (TFA), for it allowed TFAers with their five weeks of summer training to “highly qualify” to become full-fledged teachers under NCLB.

 

However, someone like 2014-15 Alabama Teacher of the Year Ann Marie Corgill, who had been teaching elementary school for over two decades, could not be allowed to teach in a Title-I-funded state under her National Board certification because Alabama does not count National Board certification as an “alternative” certification, nor could the state offer Corgill provisional status to teach fifth grade because such was expressly prohibited under NCLB.

 

The professional teaching world is on its head, my friends.

 

To bring it home: Under NCLB and additionally Harkin’s provision stealthily slipped into a debt bill and altering the definition of “highly qualified,” a five-week-trained TFAer is qualified to replace Corgill as a teacher in a state receiving Title I funding.

 

Be it noted that Senator Tom Harkin of Iowa had Teach for America on his staff, advising on education legislation. Be it also noted that Arthur Rock, a wealthy businessman in California, underwrites the entire cost of putting TFA interns into key Congressional offices ($500,000 a year). There the interns have protected TFA’s interests, getting them named “highly effective,” and now getting them protected in the ESSA.

 

Is this like the tobacco industry offering free interns to the Senators who regulate their industry?

Categories Education Reform, Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA), Teach for America TFA

Kevin Huffman: How I Tried and Failed to Close the Worst School in Tennessee

By dianeravitch
December 9, 2015 //
26

As readers of this blog know, I am not in the Kevin Huffman fan club. Unlike him, I don’t believe in free market solutions to education, nor do I care for the teacher evaluations that have been pioneered and continued in Tennessee over the past 20 years (without, be it noted, vaulting Tennessee to the top of the nation).

 

But I am a fan of this terrific article by Kevin Huffman. Huffman tells the story, in graphic detail, about how he tried to close down the lowest performing school in the state and got outsmarted year after year by the lobbyists for the national corporation that owns the Tennessee Virtual Academy: K12, Inc. That corporation, launched by Michael and Lowell Milken, is the biggest purveyor of online education; it operates for profit. It is listed on the New York Stock Exchange. The last time I checked, the CEO was paid $5 million a year. K12 has been criticized repeatedly in studies of its performance but it shrugs off evaluations and keeps going. Recently, CREDO released a study that concluded that students in online charter schools lost ground: 72 days in reading, and 180 days in math. That is, a student who studied math for a year lost the equivalent of a full year of instruction, i.e., learned nothing.

 

Huffman notes that the school ranked dead last in the state in its first year. It showed no gains or tiny gains in every succeeding year. He tried to close it but each time was outfoxed by the lobbyists. He showed them the data, they said it wasn’t true. He offered to give them suggestions about how to improve their performance, but K12 sent lobbyists to meet with him, not educators.

 

Despite his attempts to close the school, it was still in operation when he left office. He reached the conclusion that for-profits are a bad fit in the school marketplace; we agree. If the charter industry is ever to clean up its house, it must distance itself from the for-profit corporations that give charters a bad name.

 

Huffman concludes:

 

This past summer, the state released the school results from the 2014-15 school year. The Tennessee Virtual Academy earned a Level 1 in growth for the fourth year in a row. It clocked in at #1312 out of 1368 elementary and middle schools in the state. It is no longer the most improved lousy school in Tennessee. It is just plain lousy. It is, over a four-year time, arguably the worst school in Tennessee.
K12 Inc. lives on in Tennessee. The Tennessee Virtual Academy opened its online doors again in August. State officials tell me that they aren’t thinking about other legal steps. After all, if and when the school fails again this year, they will close it down.
I will believe it when I see it.

 

The K12 saga raises a lot of difficult questions for me. Is it possible for a for-profit company to run schools? Our very best charters all over the country are non-profits, and I see little evidence of for-profits succeeding in the school management business. I may be platform-agnostic, but the data is telling a compelling story on this one.
How do we encourage innovation while still holding the bar on quality? The virtual school concept almost certainly has a place in the future of American education. But how long should an “innovative” school be allowed to fail?
What is the responsibility of the state as a regulatory enterprise, even in a choice environment? None of the parents signing up for TNVA were forced into the school — it is a school of choice.
And yet, the “marketplace” fails when we are not able to ensure that parents know that the school they are choosing has a running track record of failure. Clearly, there is a critical regulatory role, and we cannot simply assume that an unfettered choice environment will automatically lead to good outcomes.
In theory, K12, Inc’s stock should be hammered by its terrible performance in Tennessee, but it’s actually up in 2015. And why wouldn’t it be? The corporate shareholders aren’t looking for student results — they are looking for K12 to expand and grow and add more students.
Nobody asks me for stock advice, but I say: Buy! Buy K12 Inc.! It is the rarest of breeds — a company utterly impervious to failure. It fails again and again, and yet it lives and breathes!
No doubt, I will have ample opportunity to talk about this with their lobbyists at my next education conference.

 

 

Categories Online Education, Tennessee
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