A computer glitch did it. Thousands of students in Indiana received the wrong scores on the state tests.
Company officials downplayed the problem, but education officials said the integrity of the tests was crucial, as they will affect student grades, teacher pay, and people’s lives.
This is is the latest in a series of flaws that have plagued the computerized testing.
Andrea Gabor signed up to tour a Success Academy charter school in the Bronx. She was accepted, but shortly before the big day, her invitation was rescinded. When she inquired why, she was told that the tour was limited only to principals of other schools.
So, I was dismayed when, on December 4, three days after my original acceptance arrived, Jaclyn Leffel, the director of New York City Collaborates, which was helping to organize the tour, rescinded my invitation. “In reviewing our guest list, I did see that you are currently not leading a NYC public school. This workshop is specifically designed for people in elementary school education. Unfortunately this event is only available to principals at this time. Thanks so much for your interest!” wrote Ms. Leffel.
The only problem was that to register for the event, you had to include your title and affiliation, which in my case is the Bloomberg Chair of Business Journalism at Baruch College/CUNY. It was crystal clear from my affiliation that I was not a New York City principal. Moreover, I knew that not everyone on the tour was a current principal.
So I responded to Leffel, pointing out these discrepancies, and asked that she reconsider. She responded that she would not. I followed up with a request that she include me in another tour. Again, she responded cordially to let me know that another tour would be organized in February, but has not yet responded to my request for more information about the date and location.
All this is especially puzzling since New York Collaborates is an organization that seeks to “encourage public conversation and on-the-ground partnerships between district and charter schools.” (emphasis added by me.) Nor is this the first tour organized by New York Collaborates; previous tours also have included non-principals.
Clearly, the “public conversation” at Bronx 1 was not intended to include anyone who might be the least bit critical of the charter sector. Incidentally, New York Collaborates is “spearheaded” by the New York City Charter School Center and New York City Department of Education, and receives funding from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation
Nor was there much partnering between district and charter schools at the Bronx 1 tour. All but one of the educators on the tour was from the charter sector. Via email, I asked Ms. Leffel about this and she responded: “We had a 50/50 signup.”
If half the registrants were from public-school, this of course raises the question: Why was the guest list for this collaborative opportunity so heavily stacked in favor of charter schools?
So Gabor relied on the report of a friend who was accepted for the tour. The group of 28 was allowed to spend only five minutes in each classroom. They were very impressed with the provisioning and the happy children. The children sat quietly, hands folded, and their eyes tracked the speaker. The principal of the school told the group that she considers the school to be part of the progressive education movement.
If the schools are proud of their work–and clearly they are–why don’t they open their doors to other educators more frequently?
New Jersey Democrat Theresa Ruiz, chair of the Senate Education Committee, has a truly terrible idea. She wants to introduce “social impact bonds” that would pay off investors to reduce special education referrals. The assumption behind the bonds is that high-quality pre-K can reduce the need for special education.
A parent blogger was aghast and sees these bonds as an effort to end special education.
The blogger writes:
“What is Senator Ruiz attempting to achieve? Her statement, “we won’t have to have early-intervention programs and classification and wrap-around services because we did the work early on” is naive at best and potentially destructive at worst.
“High quality” Pre-K is not a magic bullet. Students with disabilities will not be magically cured by attending preschool. It sounds too good to be true because it is. New Jersey’s classification rate is about 14.5%, higher in low-income districts where this program will take place.
“Will preschool help decrease the percentage of students who need special education services in those districts? I have no doubt that it will. The research supports that presumption.
“Are you going to end the need for Early Intervention, classification, and wrap-around services? No. You aren’t. There will always be students who would have been classified no matter how much preschool they had. There will always be students who need wrap-around services because we, as country, much less as a state, are doing nothing to address the poverty that creates the need for these services.
“Big picture here is, Goldman Sachs is going to make money on students NOT being classified. RtI is going to become the framework for K-12, delaying as long as possible the identification and classification of students with disabilities. And the Special Education Ombudsman position the Senator is trying to create (because constituents have been begging for help) will work for the NJ Department of Education.”
A reader posted a comment about her own children.
“OMG! We won’t have to have early intervention because we have high quality PreK!
“I have three kids. One reg ed., one legally blind, one entered school as profoundly autistic.
“How, precisely, would the most awesome preK in the world have helped my one year old legally blind child? Who would have taught me to teach him?
“Would great preK have made my autistic kid neurally typical?
“Would NOT classifying them have led to educational success? Does Ruiz honestly believe that neither kid would need special ed if they got great preK?
$1700 a year would not have paid for OT!(and, strangely enough, legally blind kids have issues with hand eye coordination !)
“I am way to hot to write to her right now. I will gather my thoughts and write a letter.
“Thanks. I didn’t know Ruiz was so short sighted as to believe no child could possibly remain disabled when they had great preK.”
Bob Braun covered education for the Star-Ledger in New Jersey for fifty years. He retired from reporting, and now he writes one of the best blogs in the nation.
And this is one of his best. He explains that he supports teachers and he supports the teachers’ union, and no one pays him to do it (as critics charge). Those who hate public schools can’t believe that anyone would defend them unless they were paid to do so. Those who hate unions can’t believe that anyone would side with them unless they were paid to do so. They are wrong.
He writes:
I do support unionism. I grew up in a family–two families, really, but that’s a long story not appropriate here–that owed their middle-class status to unions. My father was a railroad engineer and a union member. My step-father was a teamster and a shop steward. They made good salaries that allowed them to buy decent homes and afford vacations–only on their salaries. I believe the inexcusable income inequality from which many suffer today is a direct result of the collapse of the union movement.
So, yes, I support unionism–for private and public employees, including teachers. Teacher unions have helped many urban residents achieve middle-class economic status and that translates into better lives for their children. I do not believe it is a coincidence that corporate reforms that have led to school closures, Teach for America, charter expansion, and other changes have come just at a time when many persons of color finally got good, secure jobs as teachers and other public employees. Yes, I do believe many so-called “reforms” are aimed at African-American school employees.
One deranged blogger–a suburban school board member from Lawrenceville–has called me a “loyal union lackey.” Recently, she quoted none other than a paid charter supporter from Montclair–and former spokesman for the disgraced Cami Anderson–in her continuing rants against me. I am an outsider, they say, because I live in Elizabeth, a city that abuts Newark and is a hell of lot more like Newark than either Montclair or Lawrenceville.
I have been accused of “working” for the union. Readers will note I have one advertiser, a neighborhood restaurant that is almost a second home to me. Both the New Jersey Education Association (NJEA) and the Newark Teachers Union (NTU) have offered to buy advertising on this site. I have refused to accept those offers for the very reason suggested by the lying criticism of me–that I would express support for these organizations only because I was paid to do it. No, my friends, this blog doesn’t make any money–whether I have one reader or, as happened last spring with my coverage of Pearson’s spying on New Jersey students, 1.5 million. Bob Braun’s Ledger is brought to you primarily by my Social Security and well-earned pension checks.
People who are motivated by money can’t believe that anyone is different from themselves. Bob Braun is different. He writes what he believes, not because he is paid.
Mike Klonsky reports that Sara Sayigh, the librarian for the DuSable building has been rehired. The Chicago school superintendent Forrest Claypool said “an anonymous donor” had funded the position. Mike suspects that student protests brought about the sudden change.
As one of our readers pointed out recently, the elite of Chicago don’t think that public school children need libraries. But the University of Chicago Lab School–where Mayor Emanuel and Arne Duncan send their children–has many librarians.
Mike Klonsky writes:
“While I’m elated to hear that students at DuSable (I still call it that) have their beloved librarian Sara Sayigh back, CPS’s statement explaining the whole affair, is borderline laughable. An anonymous donor? Really, Forrest Claypool? Are teaching and staff positions at CPS now like endowed chairs at the university, dependent on the benevolence of wealthy patrons? Is that even legal? Will it become part of the next collective-bargaining agreement (if there ever is a next)?
“We’ve already got high schools named after billionaires line Gov. Bruce Rauner, retired ComEd CEO Frank Clark and Exelon’s John Rowe. What’s next? The Ken Griffin Social Studies Teacher at Lindbloom? The Anonymous Donor School Clerk at Bronzeville Military?
“Sayigh’s retention means we’re back to three out of 28 high schools with a student population over 90 percent African-American that have a library staffed by a certified librarian. The others are Morgan Park High School and Chicago Vocational Career Academy.”
Sadly, DuSable is no longer a school. It is a building that houses three privately managed charter schools. They too need a library and a librarian.
This is embarrassing. I am on the faculty at the NYU Steinhardt School of Education as a Reseach Professor. But I did not know that the university would be preparing teachers online. However, the Center for Education Reform knew. It is one of the foremost advocates for privatization in the nation. It supports charters, vouchers, for-profit schooling, and every other form of schooling that is not a democratically-controlled public school.
Here is the press release:
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
December 16, 2015
EXCITING INNOVATION IN TEACHER EDUCATION LAUNCHED AT NYU
Education School to Create School-Embedded Masters
A field marked by continual challenges in delivering rigorous programs to ensure quality teaching for every child is about to undergo a major transformation as the nation’s oldest university-based school of teaching, NYU Steinhardt, launches a path-breaking residency-based online teacher education program.
The yearlong graduate residency program aims to increase the number of teachers prepared for educating students in urban, high-needs public schools. Similar to residency programs in well-respected fields such as medicine, teacher residency programs combine a full-time immersive classroom experience with exhaustive coursework, with resident students gaining more responsibility as they build their expertise.
“We know that teachers, especially teachers going into high-needs schools, need better preparation,” said CER Founder and President Emeritus Jeanne Allen. “Harnessing the power of technology to not only create innovative ways of enhancing teacher development but to do so through such a prestigious institution is incredibly promising on so many fronts. The advent of blended learning programs to enhance both student learning and teacher preparation program is precisely where our nation’s leaders should be moving with policy and practice,” said Allen, who has worked on the program development.
“Now more than ever teachers matter,” said HotChalk CEO and CER board member Edward Fields, whose company has partnered with NYU to create the new school-embedded masters in education. “We are proud to support an outstanding institution with such a clear vision and commitment to educational outcomes.”
Partnering with HotChalk enables Steinhardt to conduct online video observations for teacher residents that provide invaluable real-time feedback, offering a continuous cycle of learning, measuring, and adjusting so that education outcomes are improved not just for teacher residents but their students as well.
The Center for Education Reform
cer@edreform.com ~ http://www.edreform.com
ABOUT CER: The Center for Education Reform (CER), since 1993, aggressively pursues laws that demand flexibility, freedom and innovation, without delay. Visit http://www.edreform.com for more information.
For More Information Contact: Michelle Tigani, 202-750-0016, michelle@edreform.com
This is a golden oldie from Peter Greene that remains relevant today. Actually, it is only a year old. In this post, Peter takes apart an article by Charles Upton Sahm (yes, the same person who wrote a glowing article about Eva Moskowitz’s Success Academy charter chain).
Peter takes apart the standard reformer narrative: the Common Core was written by experts (not); the tests are more rigorous, which is a good thing (not); the Common Core was handicapped by Obama’s support for it.
“These days The Test never leaves the house without “more difficult” by its side. The implication is always that these new tests are more difficult, more challenging and that’s why they bother people. “More difficult” is a useful weasel phrase because everybody assumes that it’s a legitimate “more difficult.” It’s more difficult to go into the boxing ring against an opponent who’s bigger and stronger than you are. Of course, it’s also more difficult to go into the boxing ring with ferrets crazy-glued to your eyebrows and a dozen angry hamsters in your shorts, but people don’t think along those lines because we wouldn’t actually describe the ferret-and-hamster option as “more difficult” but would instead call it “crazy unreasonable stupid.” By constantly describing the new tests as more difficult, writers keep directing peoples’ attention away from the ferrets and hamsters.
“Sahm says that “unfortunately” the debate about the Core is more about politics than education. Well, duh. The Core has been more about politics than education from day one. Why would today be any different. If the Core were about education, the conversation about it would have included educators. But it was created by politicians and businessmen for politicians and businessmen. Honest to Stallone, Charles– teachers have been trying to make the debate about education for several years now, but nobody in power seems to want to do …..
“Sahm does a quick recap of the Standard Issue History of CCSS, starting with “A Nation at Risk” and moving through the governors getting “curriculum experts” and as always I’m amazed at these folks who are unfamiliar with how the internet works. So click here to watch David Coleman explain that the Core was written by a “collection of unqualified people.” So, not curriculum experts. (Also– why do we need curriculum experts to create something that isn’t a curriculum?)
“This is also the CCSS story that notes retrospectively that President Obama’s support in 2009 was a Bad Thing that created a political liability with people on the Right. This part of the narrative is intriguing; I am wondering how, in a non-federalized CCSS alternate universe, the CCSS ever is adopted. First, in that universe, what mysterious force makes the corporate backers/writers of the Core sit back and say, “Yeah, we probably shouldn’t use every tool at our disposal to get every state to adopt these. If just a few adopt them, that will be good enough for us.” Second, in that universe, why do states adopt the CCSS? I mean– who would be selling it? Who would be going state to state saying, “Yes, it will make your schools awesome and only cost you a gazillion dollars to implement, and it’s totally voluntary!”
“CCSS supporters can complain about the damage done to their cause by federal push for CCSS adoption, but without that federal bribery (RTTT) and extortion (NCLB waivers), CCSS would be sitting in a dusty binder somewhere. This is why it’s a political debate, Charles– because it was politically created and politically pushed into states. CCSS has depended on political power for every breath it has taken in its short, wasteful life.
“Sahm goes on to tell us what the standards are supposed to do in math and English (he does not bother to say how we know that the standards will accomplish these things, but it’s a short article). He points out that they are not a national curriculum, just an outline of what students should learn. So, totally different things. And he grabs the low-hanging fruit of debunking the complaint about non-fiction vs. fiction…..
“For the finish, lets’ quote David Brooks’ lamebrained NYT piece and insist that people who don’t love the Core are misinformed and opposing a perfectly sensible program because of hysterical– oh, that word again. Let’s throw in an appeal to the sensible center, and return to our Rocky image of the Core being battered and bruised but still game.
“You know what everybody always forgets about the first Rocky movie? At the end of the big climactic boxing match, Rocky loses.”
The virtual charter chain K12, Inc., held its stockholder meeting and faced a double whammy. Investors complained about the schools’ terrible academic results and voted down executive pay raises.
Meanwhile, teachers from the online chain founded by Michael and Lowell Milken picketed outside.
“The vote was another sign of discontent among shareholders of the controversial company K12 Inc., with governance advisory firm Glass Lewis & Co. citing a “substantial disconnect between compensation and performance results” in its recommendation that shareholders vote against the pay proposal.
“K12, which has made a business for itself out of operating publicly funded online charter schools across the country, is at its lowest stock price in five years, down 75% from a high in September of 2013. In the past few months, it has faced an investigation by California’s attorney general and an onslaught of criticism from the rest of the education world, which has largely turned against online schools and their operators because of their students’ poor performance.
“Glass Lewis gave the company an “F” rating for how it paid its executives compared to peers: K12’s CEO, Nathaniel Davis, was paid $5.33 million in 2015; its chief financial officer was paid $3.6 million.”
Michael Massing, former executive editor of the Columbia Journalism Review, has a fabulous article in the current Néw York Review of Books about the media’s failure to cover the political activities of the 1%.
In the middle of the article, he goes into detail about the millions of dollars that billionaires and hedge fund managers have poured into charter schools and into the campaigns of politicians who support charter schools.
Massing chides the media for its failure to follow the money.
It is great is to see the issues we are familiar with getting attention in a highly respected national publication.
Joanne Barkan has written powerful articles in Dissent about the power wielded by billionaires to control and direct public education. (See here.)
Now she has written an article in The Guardian about the Zuckerbergs’ pledge to place 99% of their Facebook stock (value: about $45-46 billion) in a limited liability corporation, which they will use to influence public policy. Her article has the title “Wealthy Philanthropists Should Not Impose Their Idea of the Common Good on Us.”
She writes:
There’s a strong argument to be made that the private tax-exempt foundation doesn’t fit well in a functioning democracy. As the eminent US jurist Richard Posner wrote: “A perpetual charitable foundation, however, is a completely irresponsible institution, answerable to nobody. It competes neither in capital markets nor in product markets … and, unlike a hereditary monarch whom such a foundation otherwise resembles, it is subject to no political controls either.”
Although the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative isn’t a foundation and will pay taxes, nothing about their project changes the fundamental contradiction of mega philanthropy: the wealthy have the power to impose their personal visions of the common good on everyone else while calling it charity. In the tug-of-war between government by the people and social engineering by multibillionaire philanthropists, Chan and Zuckerberg pull on the side of the powerful social engineers.
However, in the New Yorker, James Surowiecki writes “In Defense of Philanthocapitalism,” a spirited defense of the Zuckerbergs, the Gates, and the other billionaires who are willing to try bold new approaches that government is too timid to try. So I assume he includes the Koch brothers, who use their wealth to reshape the economy to benefit the 1%, and Art Pope, who has used his wealth to hand the state of North Carolina over to the Tea Party, and the Waltons, who use their billions to stamp out unions and public schools.
He writes:
In an ideal world, big foundations might be superfluous. But in the real world they are vital, because they are adept at targeting problems that both the private sector and the government often neglect. The classic mission of nonprofits is investing in what economists call public goods—things that have benefits for everyone, even people who haven’t paid for them. Public health is a prime example: we would all benefit from the eradication of malaria and tuberculosis (diseases that Bill Gates’s foundation has spent billions fighting). But, since the benefits of public goods are widely enjoyed, it’s hard to get anyone in particular to foot the bill.
Ah, yes, what would we do without the Koch brothers, the Walton Family Foundation, and other billionaire foundations that do not believe in the public sector? What would educators do if they didn’t have the Gates Foundation to tell them how to evaluate teachers and how to turn public assets over the unaccountable charter schools and how to teach reading and mathematics? What would Los Angeles do if it didn’t have Eli Broad picking its superintendent and deciding to take control of half the children in the public schools and hand them over to privately managed charters and at the same time underwriting coverage of education in the Los Angeles Times? What would Philadelphia do if it didn’t have local foundations deciding to privatize its public schools? How many other cities have private foundations that have decided to lead the charge for school privatization? How many rightwing think tanks would shrivel and die without the support of the same billionaires and their foundations?
Who should shape the public good? The philanthrocapitalists or the public? Who holds the foundations accountable when they make a mistake? To whom are they accountable? No one. How can they preach accountability to everyone else but not for themselves?
Please read and comment.
Diane Ravitch's blog 