The ads for the program describe the crisis of the school to prison pipeline. According to the ad on Sirius for the Sunday 4 pm show, Arne Duncan will explain what the school to prison pipeline is and why it starts in school.
I hope someone listens. I am sure it doesn’t start in school, unless he means the bootcamp schools where children are dehumanized.
After I posted an article about Denver yesterday, in which former board member Jeannie Kaplan asserted that corporate reform had failed in Denver, I received a note from Mike Petrilli of the Thomas B. Fordham Institute. I responded and copied Kaplan, since she wrote the post. I think it is an interesting discussion. Please read it from the bottom.
From Mike Petrilli at 9:26 pm:
If it’s everything in the chain below, yes.
On Fri, Oct 9, 2015 at 9:18 PM, Diane Ravitch wrote:
Mike, would you be okay with my posting your exchange with Jeannie Kaplan?
Diane Ravitch
On Oct 9, 2015, at 3:30 PM, Jeannie Kaplan wrote:
Sorry, Mike, but I totally disagree with you. When you make reducing the gap a main tenet of measuring success and this gap increases for ten years, you are failing. That’s like changing the rules in the middle of the game. But I guess it is all about winning, just not for the students.
And I would love to hear what you see as success in Denver. We have more segregated schools than any time since before bussing, we have the highest teacher turnover of any district in the metropolitan area, we have the most bloated administration in recent memory, etc., etc. The bottom line for me is telling the truth, and the truth is Denver is our kids are not being educated. That’s what matters. Taking tests isn’t educating. Reducing curricula isn’t educating. Pretending this is success isn’t telling the truth. My greatest fear when I was first elected in 2005 was Denver would be left as a district for those who have no other choice. I believe that is what we could easily be seeing in the not too distant future, especially when you have a board and administration that absolutely refuses to listen to anyone but themselves. And, frankly, like you, insist this is success.
Show me the (money) progress! And don’t cite 1+% gains. For all the hoopla that doesn’t cut it. The first Denver plan (2006) had very high standards and goals, none of which were ever reached. No accountability. I get asked repeatedly, where is the accountability and why does Tom Boasberg still have his job? Because when you buy the board and when you have no press, and when you have organizations like yours pretending this is working, you can say whatever you want and no one challenges. Reformers here have been very clever – a form of mayoral or superintendent control of the board without asking the voters to approve it. We are outgunned financially. Your side has poured 300,000 dollars per race into getting the six board members elected. I will expect nothing less this time.
And meanwhile, as your side hides the truth or spins it, our children and communities and Dps employees suffer. But you are certainly winning the pr battle!
Jeannie
On Oct 9, 2015, at 3:14 PM, Michael Petrilli wrote:
Hi Jeannie. What I’m saying is that we might find some common ground here. Looking literally at gaps turns everything into a zero sum game. Certainly we don’t want to root for white or Asian or middle class kids to do worse.
The right goal is to see progress across the board. Which is what Denver is demonstrating. Not that it’s perfect, but its progress is real, and promising.
Mike
******
On Fri, Oct 9, 2015 at 3:05 PM, Jeannie Kaplan wrote:
We seem to be crossing emails. Answering this I would say when reformers claim to be all about data, and when they point to reducing the gap as a mark of success, and when the Denver public schools has seen an increase in the gap in all three academic subjects based on free/reduced lunch as well as ethnic categories – white v. Black and Hispanic – for ten years it just might be time to try something different.
And if we were to stop using the gap as an indicator what might you suggest to replace it?
Jeannie
From Mike Petrilli at 3:12 pm
Yes, and then stagnation in the late 80s and most of the 90s, and then progress again with test based accountability. See: http://www.nber.org/papers/w15531
On Fri, Oct 9, 2015 at 2:57 PM, Diane Ravitch wrote:
No, read Paul Barton on the black-white gap.
Biggest narrowing was late 1970s-early 80s. Smaller classes; early childhood; economic opportunities for African American families; desegregation.
Diane Ravitch
On Oct 9, 2015, at 2:47 PM, Michael Petrilli wrote:
Well, if that’s the case, you should stop using gaps to hit reformers over the head.
However, we did see major gap closing from the late 1990s into the 2000s, probably because of test-based accountability. Though that has now plateaued.
Mike
On Fri, Oct 9, 2015 at 2:39 PM, Diane Ravitch wrote:
We know the reasons for the gaps
The reformers have cynically politicized the issue by claiming that they can close it. No they (you) can’t and you won’t, [My addition here: not with test-based accountability. Tests are a measure, not a cure.]
Diane Ravitch
On Oct 9, 2015, at 2:28 PM, Michael Petrilli wrote:
Hi Diane. Just FYI:
1. Denver is one of the few urban districts in the country with about 30% white non low-income kids (and some very high end kids) so kids are starting out far apart.
2. Both low-income and non-low income kids have grown. Low income kids growing at 1-2% per year while non low-income kids growing at 1.5-2.5% per year so the gap grows
But do we want to start rooting for affluent kids to do worse? As you’ve said, “closing the achievement gap” is good rhetoric but we don’t want to take it too literally. The goal is for everyone to learn more.
Mike
Just when I think I have heard the most absurd story possible about charter schools that pillage taxpayers’ dollars, I discover a story like this one (thanks to a reader in Florida).
This is only part of the story:
With roughly 270 students, the new Paramount Charter School in Sunrise has already received $740,000 in taxpayer-funded money and is slated to get about $3 million during the school year.
Despite the infusion of public cash, Paramount — an elementary-level school that, like all charters, is privately owned but publicly funded — is riddled with problems. According to a school board member, it’s already had three principals, lost nearly all of its teachers after the first month due to firings and resignations and has some parents alleging their children aren’t learning there.
The president of the company that owns the school, Jimika Williams Mason, drove away from a Local 10 News camera in her vehicle. It was discovered the listed vice president of the company, Ashley Challenger, is a 22-year-old Nova Southeastern University student who said she was given a spot on the school’s board of directors through the college and had no idea she had even been listed as a corporate vice president of the Advancement of Education in Scholars Corporation.
She said she had met once with Mason but had no idea what was happening at the school and had yet to attend a board meeting.
More findings about the troubled charter school include:
Mason, the president, lists no experience in the education field in the application, instead noting that she spent six years in management at a Miramar company that specializes in unsecured home improvement loans.
Former NFL player and reality TV star Hank Baskett is listed in the application as a “non-voting board member” who will “aid in the Sports and Fitness program.” But Baskett’s agent, Jim Ivler, said Baskett is not affiliated with the school. “They reached out to us more than five years ago interested in establishing a relationship with Hank,” Ivler wrote Local 10. “It never went anywhere and we haven’t heard from them in years.”
The corporate office goes to a building in Boca Raton’s Mizner Park, but a manager there told Local 10 the company doesn’t actually rent physical office space, but rather has a “virtual office” where it can receive mail and phone messages.
After promising at least two teachers who spoke to Local 10 on condition of anonymity a salary of $36,000 and full benefits, the school after the first month instructed them that if they wanted to keep their jobs they would have to take a $6,000 pay cut and forego benefits. Both teachers were among those who resigned, while numerous teachers were fired. “I don’t understand how you can give someone a school just based on paper,” said one teacher. “Not only the school, how can you give them the children,” said the other.
A member of the local school board said:
“Everything is a free-for-all basically…And the sad part is we’re going to find this generation of kids, many of them, who are not educated properly in these schools.”
To learn more about this school, read Mercedes Schneider’s description here.
Peter Greene notes that the corporate reformers are still pressing for more data on each student. There can never be enough data. When there is more than enough, then you have Big Data, where government and corporations can analyze mega-trends. But reformers don’t say that this is what they want; they insist that this data is what parents want and need, even if they don’t say so themselves.
He writes:
Over at Getting Smart, a website devoted to selling educational product, guest writer Aimee Rogstad Guidera makes her case for more data collection for each student– because it’s what parents want.
“Parents are eager for information about their child’s education. As a mom, I want to know if my daughter is struggling in math before she comes home in tears. I need information to support my child’s learning at home, and to support my child and her teacher in making the best decisions for her learning in the classroom.”
Maybe I just don’t get it, but I’m inclined to think that if you didn’t know your child was having trouble in math before the coming-home-in-tears part, you’re just not paying attention. I have heard this pitch enough times to make me occasionally wonder if there is, in fact, some place where teachers keep every scrap of information carefully hoarded, students never speak to their parents about school, parents never ask about school, and all parent requests for conferences and information are denied by all school personnel. Maybe there is some place where parents are so deeply clueless and helpless that they have no idea how their students are doing.
Or maybe Guidera is the CEO and President of the Data Quality Campaign, a group interested in student data and funded by the Gates Foundation, the Waltons, the Dells, and the Ford Foundation. They do have some rules about how such data should be kept in a safe lockbox, but they are clearly Big Data fans.
Guidera is advocating for student data backpacks– little (or not so little) bundles of data that just follow students around, providing parents with all sorts of longitudinal data (because, again, parents don’t know much about their own children).
Greene has some advice for parents who want more information about how their child is doing: pick up the phone and call the teacher.
Stephen Dyer of Innovation Ohio has been a thoughtful critic of charter schools in Ohio. He has written about, documented, and publicized their low performance and lack of transparency and accountability. He helped to create the informative website, KnowYourCharter.com, which allows citizens to compare charter performance to that of public schools.
In this post, he describes how he worked collaboratively with charter advocates to shape a bill to regulate charters.
“On Wednesday, everybody’s hard work paid off with the most sweeping, comprehensive and meaningful reform of Ohio’s charter school system since the program began in the late 1990s. It will keep track of Ohio’s operators, letting the public know where they operate and how they perform. It will force sponsors to do their job and hold schools to account, or else they won’t be able to sponsor schools. It will open up the mostly opaque world of charter schools so the public can better track the now $1 billion a year in state money that goes to charter schools.
“It is not perfect. It doesn’t directly close poor performing charters, choosing instead to force sponsors to do that. It doesn’t address the funding issues that force districts to have to backfill the lost state money with local money. And it relies on an Ohio Department of Education in disarray.
“But man, it does a lot. As a first step, this one is a Lulu (apologies to B. Bunny).”
Why did Matt Kramer step down as co-director of Teach for Anerica? He was making $400,000 a year. On the other hand, he had never taught.
Gary Rubinstein, TFA 1991, is one of the closest watchers of the organization. He makes some educated guesses. He predicts that the other co-director won’t be around long.
He wouldn’t be surprised if Wendy Kopp returns to salvage the organization, which pulls in a cool $300 million a year.
Susan Ochshorn is an authority on early childhood education. She reports with pleasure that many states and districts are expanding access to pre-kindergarten, but notes with unhappiness that the political leaders who are expanding early childhood education are making a terrible mistake: They are introducing four- and five-year-olds to Common Core and imposing “rigor” on these little ones.
Rigor for 4-year-olds? What about their social-emotional development, which goes hand-in-hand with cognitive skill-building? What about play, the primary engine of human development?
Unfortunately, it seems like we’re subjecting our young children to a misguided experiment.
“Too many educators are introducing inappropriate teaching methods into the youngest grades at the expense of active engagement with hands-on experiences and relationships,” Beverly Falk, author of Defending Childhood told me. “Research tells us that this is the way young children construct understandings, make sense of the world, and develop their interests and desire to learn.” She isn’t alone.
Early academic training has become an obsession among child development experts and teachers of young children as the Common Core standards have encroached upon the earliest years of schooling.
Ochshorn cites research studies that show that children actually learn better if they are not subjected to an academic curriculum too soon.
It’s not that they can’t read at this young age. Some pick it up on their own. In fact, studies have shown that children as young as 4 or 5, including those defined “at risk,” can be taught decoding skills, the foundation for reading. But research has also shown that youngsters who begin this process later than their peers — by as much as 19 months — eventually reach parity in fluency, and do even a little better on reading comprehension.
And we may well actually be doing kids harm.
Earlier this year, the report “Reading Instruction in Kindergarten: Little to Gain and Much to Lose” highlighted the research of developmental psychologist Rebecca Marcon. In a study of three different curricula, characterized as “academically oriented” or “child-initiated,” she found negative effects of overly directed preschool instruction on the later school performance of 343 students, 96% of them African-American and 75% eligible for subsidized lunch. By third grade, the differences in academic achievement were minor. But by fifth grade, students in the academic preschool earned significantly lower grades than those who had spent their days in classrooms in which they were actively engaged, with their peers and teachers, in the process of learning.
Mike Klonsky comments on the latest scandal in Chicago, where ex-CEO Barbara Byrd-Bennett pleaded guilty in a scheme to take a kickback from a no-bid contract.
Klonsky says Mayor Rahm Emanuel hand-picked Byrd-Bennett. The Mayor hand-picked the school board. No one question the $23 million contract to SUPES, which had a s secret deal with the CEO.
Klonsky writes:
“My take is that the SUPES scandal goes way beyond BBB and her crew. Mayoral control of the schools has created a culture of corruption that goes all the way up to the top of the system. Turning CPS into a wing of City Hall — one of the most disreputable institutions in history — with an autocratic mayor in charge, was a mistake for which we all now will pay a tremendous price.
This is familiar to those of us who live in Néw York City. The board of education approved hundreds of millions on no-bid contracts during the Bloomberg years. The mayor-controlled board supinely approved each one, never challenging them (8 of 13 members were appointed by the mayor). The only dissident voice was Patrick Sullivan, appointed not by the mayor but by the Manhattan borough president Scott Stringer. Other than Sullivan, the board went along to please the mayor, no questions asked.
Democracy implies the need for checks and balances, transparency and accountability.
Jeannie Kaplan, a former member of the Denver Board of Education, has warned for years that corporate reform was not working. But reformers pour big bucks into every school board race, and they totally dominate the board.
The central promise of the reformers was that they would reduce the achievement gap among different groups. As Kaplan shows, despite their control of the schools for ten years, the achievement gaps have increased. In fact, a new study by the reformy University of Washington’s Center for Reinventing Public Education (CRPE) finds that Denver has the largest gaps of any urban district!
CRPE’s study “cites Denver as the district with the largest achievement gap in reading and math based on socioeconomics out of ALL OF THE 50 URBAN DISTRICTS STUDIED for the past three years. That’s right. Denver Public Schools is dead last in closing the gap between children living in poverty and those not. Even the “reform” funded, “reform” supporting online newspaper, Chalkbeat Colorado, had a difficult time putting a positive spin on these findings….”
“The CRPE report provides information that is extremely important for public education nationally. It is even more important to Denver voters at this time because there is a school board election rapidly approaching (All mail in ballot election. You must vote by 7 p.m., November 3, 2015. Ballots go out mid-October), and three candidates are strongly supporting continuing the direction this District is going. The current Board president and at-large candidate Allegra “Happy” Haynes, touted her work for the past four years, and cited the DPS strategic plan, Denver Plan 2020, with its focus on reducing the gap, as a reason to re-elect her. In a debate October 5, 2015 she said, “I believe this is the progress we’ve made under my leadership and that of my colleagues.” This gap has increased in all three academic areas for the past ten years of “reform” and this progress has landed this District at the very bottom of the heap regarding one of the five tenets of the Denver Plan 2020 – the newly named Opportunity Gap. Call it what you will – opportunity or achievement – the reality is the gap has increased between economic (Free and Reduced Lunch and paying students) and ethnic groups (white students and students of color). After ten years of focusing on reducing this, the exact opposite has occurred. Isn’t it time for a change? Robert Speth, parent not politician is challenging Ms. Haynes for this at-large position….
“Now, we pretty much know the past ten years have been a failure in almost all aspects of educating our children and respecting out communities’ wishes. At the same time we pretty much know individualized attention, smaller classes, an enriched curriculum, more professional educators, attention to the non-educational needs of our children, particularly those who live in poverty and those who speak English as a second language, can produce well educated students. Just ask the guys in charge why their parents sent them to private school.”
So pay attention to the school board election in Denver. Is it time for more failure or time for a change?
This post arrived from Randall Roth, a one of the signers of the article:
The following commentary appears in the October 8 edition of the Honolulu Star-Advertiser under the headline, “New testing regime at public schools is a recipe for disaster.” The byline follows the piece:
Testing obviously plays an important role in educating children — particularly tests designed to help teachers identify the needs of individual students.
The state’s new testing regime, called the Smarter Balanced Assessment (SBA), is quite different. It is not just unhelpful, but counterproductive.
First, SBA test results are not available until long after the test-takers have moved on from their current teachers’ classrooms and, in many instances, from their current school.
Second, SBA tests and the entire battery of tests administered cost more money to buy and consume more time to prepare for and administer than most members of the public would ever imagine possible.
These resources should instead be spent educating the children.
Third, test-takers perceive these tests as inconsequential and have little incentive to take them seriously, yet teaching careers are on the line, including those of teachers in subject areas not even covered by these tests.
Fourth, subject areas not covered by the SBA tests, such as art, music, history and science, tend to be de-emphasized by school communities seeking higher test scores, and individual teachers have a strong incentive to “teach to the test” in the areas that are tested.
The superintendent has long contended that the SBA test results would be helpful in evaluating teachers.
Ironically, the combination of these flawed tests and their role in an equally flawed teacher-evaluation system has already adversely affected a principal’s ability to deal effectively with teachers who require their attention and support.
Such unintended consequences can be expected when non-educators like the superintendent take it upon themselves to dramatically alter the way schools work without first seeking the meaningful involvement of school-level personnel.
Businessmen Terrence George and Harry Saunders recently expressed enthusiastic support for the new testing regime in Hawaii’s public schools (“Students did well on challenging exams,” Island Voices, Sept. 27).
They described recently released test scores as “encouraging,” not because the scores were high — they were not — but because the scores had been expected to be even lower.
After acknowledging that making sense of all this is “admittedly confusing,” these businessmen concluded that senior members of Hawaii’s Department of Education should be commended.
With all due respect, we strongly disagree.
And Hawaii’s public school principals overwhelmingly disagree.
According to our 2015 survey of public school principals, approximately nine out of 10 believe that the DOE has performed poorly in this area of implementing the SBA.
There is an inherent risk in harmful unintended consequences as a result of top-down decisions such as these decisions about the recent testing.
Such risks can be minimized or eliminated by seeking involvement and using the meaningful feedback of students, parents, teachers, and principals.
Such consequences can be avoided if DOE leadership has a deep understanding of what works and what does not.
We can’t help but wonder if the superintendent has ever asked herself why no private schools in Hawaii have adopted anything remotely close to the new SBA testing regime currently being forced on every public school in Hawaii.
Darrel Galera is executive director of the Education Institute of Hawaii (EIH) and former principal of Moanalua High School, and Roberta Mayor is EIH president and former principal of Waianae High School and education superintendent in Oakland, Calif. This commentary was also signed by EIH board members Marsha Alegre, John Sosa and Randall Roth.
The commentary can be found at http://www.staradvertiser.com/editorialspremium/20151008_new_testing_regime_at_public_schools_is_a_recipe_for_disaster.html?id=331193142&c=n (registration required)
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