Archives for the year of: 2015
« Older Entries
Newer Entries »

Troy LaRaviere: Chicago Principals Revolt Against Cuts to Special Education

By dianeravitch
October 2, 2015 //
6

Who stands up for the neediest, most vulnerable children in Chicago? Not Mayor Rahm Emanuel. Not the Mayor’s hand picked Board of Education. Not the Superintendent Forrest Claypool, who imposed what he himself calls “unconscionable” cuts to special education.

Who stands up for the children? Educators.

Principal Troy LaRaviere (who was previously warned by CPS about speaking out too much) describes here the principals’ revolt, and the CPS officials’ sneaky effort to announce the cuts in a Friday afternoon (when they would get minimal media attention), with only one day to appeal.

If this what reformers stand for? Hurting defenseless children?

LaRaviere writes:

“Whenever I try to take a break from writing about CPS to focus on other aspects of my professional and personal life, CPS officials do something so profoundly unethical, incompetent and/or corrupt that my conscience calls me to pick up the pen once more. This time, they’ve targeted special education students. Obscured in the latest round of CPS budget cuts is an unprecedented move to cut legally required special education services. Educators are often asked if a school based budget cut will affect students. The answer is always “yes.” Each person in a school provides a service to a group of students. When CPS decides to cut the dollars that fund a school-based position they are, in effect, taking the service away from students.

“One district official was quoted in the Sun-Times stating, “CPS continues to work with our principals to prepare for these adjustments.”

“Adjustments” is CPS’ latest euphemism for cuts to student services. If they keep it up, they’re going to “adjust” students out of their education entirely. CEO Forrest Claypool often repeats a talking point that the cuts CPS will “have to make” are “unconscionable.” If one thinks the cuts are “unconscionable” then one does not give those cuts a false euphamistic name like “right-sizing.” Yes, that’s the actual term they use to describe their efforts to reduce services to special education students. According to the Chicago Sun-Times, CPS took an additional $13.3 million worth of services from CPS students with their latest “adjustments.” The article includes a spreadsheet detailing the cuts to schools across Chicago. For example, Ogden school lost five special education teachers and three special education assistants, while Austin High School lost two teachers and four assistants.

“Chicago’s mayor and CPS officials often cite the need to “sacrifice” in order to “save money” as a justification for such cuts. However, all too often CPS and City Hall pretend not to see opportunities to save money by making those who can most afford it sacrifice. Instead they turn their avaricious eyes toward those who can least afford it: our students. They didn’t make the banks that swindled CPS out of $100 million sacrifice by suing them to recoup their losses; they prefer to make students sacrifice by increasing their class sizes. They didn’t makes SUPES Academy sacrifice by denying the organization a $20 million no-bid contract; they prefer to make students suffer by cutting their sports programs. They didn’t make the scores of basement dwelling for-profit charter school management organizations suffer (88% of charters are in the bottom half of CPS performance in student reading growth); instead they took funds used to provide programming for students in more successful neighborhood schools. They didn’t make Aramark and Sodexo Magic (an Emanuel campaign contributor) suffer by canceling their custodial management contracts when they failed to keep schools clean; CPS and City Hall prefer instead to make special education students sacrifice by cutting their legally required educational services.”

Where are the lawyers?

Categories Budget Cuts, Chicago, Principals, Special Education

BREAKING NEWS: Arne Duncan Resigning, to Be Replaced by John King on Interim Basis

By dianeravitch
October 2, 2015 //
88

Arne Duncan is stepping down. John King, former State Superintendent in New York, will take his place. In New York, King became extremely controversial because of his dogged support for the Common Core, for high-stakes testing, and for a badly flawed teacher evaluation system. King previously worked in “no excuses” charter schools.

WASHINGTON—Education Secretary Arne Duncan, one of the longest-serving
members of President Barack Obama’s Cabinet, will step down in
December, officials said Friday.

In a letter to his staff obtained by the Associated Press, Duncan said
he’s returning to Chicago to live with his family. He said he isn’t
sure what he will do next, but that he hopes his future will “continue
to involve the work of expanding opportunity for children.”

Mr. Obama has tapped John King Jr., a senior official at the Education
Department, to run the department for the remainder of his
administration. Obama doesn’t intend to nominate Mr. King or to
nominate another education secretary during the rest of his
presidency, but will instead ask Mr. King to serve in an acting
capacity, said a White House official, who wasn’t authorized to
comment by name and requested anonymity.

That approach will spare Mr. Obama a confirmation fight over a nominee
in the Senate.

Categories Education Reform

Meet the Chair of the Cuomo Commission: A Textbook Case of “Failing Upward”

By dianeravitch
October 2, 2015 //
14

A reader sent this article about the remarkable and surprising career of Richard Parsons, the businessman who will chair the Cuomo Commission to review the Common Core standards and assessments.

Parsons, the article says, is a glorious exemplar of “failing up,” something that happens only in the business world. He dropped out of high school and got a GED. He dropped out of the University of Hawaii. Nonetheless, he entered the corporate world and moved up and up. He was chairman of the Dime Savings Bank, which failed. He was chairman of AOL Time Warner, which was a disastrous merger. He then became chairman of Citigroup. That did not end well either.

Last month, shareholders finally rebelled against Citigroup, the worst of the Too Big To Fail bailout disasters, by filing a lawsuit against outgoing chairman Dick Parsons and handful of executives for stuffing their pockets while running the bank into the ground.
Anyone familiar with Dick Parsons’ past could have told you his term as Citigroup’s chairman would end like this: Shareholder lawsuits, executive pay scandals, and corporate failure on a colossal scale. It’s the Dick Parsons Management Style. In each of the three companies Parsons was appointed to lead, they all failed spectacularly, and somehow Parsons and a handful of top executives always walked away from the yellow-tape crime scenes unscathed.

This past April, for his final act as Citigroup’s chairman, Dick Parsons made sure that Citi’s top executives were handsomely rewarded for their failures. He arranged a pay package for CEO Vikram Pandit amounting to $53 million despite the fact that Citi’s stock plummeted 44% last year, and has woefully underperformed other bank stocks even by their low standards.

Citigroup, as you might recall, got the largest bailout of any banking institution, larger than BofA’s– $50 billion in direct funds, and over $300 billion more in “stopgap” federal guarantees on the worthless garbage in Citi’s “assets” portfolio. Those are just the most obvious bailouts Citi received—this doesn’t take into account the flood of free cash, the murky mortgage-backed securities buyback programs, the accounting rules changes that allowed banks like Citi to decide how much their assets “should be worth” as opposed to what they’re really worth on their beloved free-market, and so on…
So just as Dick Parsons stepped down as Citigroup chairman last month, shareholders finally rebelled, suing Parsons, CEO Pandit and a handful of executives for corporate plunder.

How to explain his miraculous rise to the top?


Dick Parsons’ biography can be summed up in two phases of his life: before meeting Nelson Rockefeller, and after meeting Nelson Rockefeller.
Before meeting Nelson Rockefeller, Dick Parsons was a self confessed clown from a middle-class African-American family in Brooklyn. “Left to my own devices, I don’t feel any compulsion to strive,” he told to the New York Times. Race was never an issue with Parsons either: ”I don’t have any experience in my life where someone rejected me for race or any other reason.’

So Parsons dropped out of high school with a “C” average, earning a GED certificate. He enrolled in the University of Hawaii for reasons he could never really explain, joined a frat, and became their social chairman. As one of Parsons’ frat brohs recalled to journalist Nina Munk, “Here’s this guy who’s at the bar sixty-seven days in a row and, as you can imagine, he did very poorly in school.”

Parsons did worse than poorly: He flunked out of U. Hawaii. Without earning a degree.

And then slacker Dick Parsons met oligarch Nelson Rockefeller, and from here on out, Parsons lived out a Cinderella fairytale for the One Percenters. As luck would have it, Dick Parsons’ grandfather was once a favorite groundskeeper at the famous Rockefeller Compound in Pocantico Hills and lived in a hut on in the shadow of the oligarchs’ mansion. Soon, Dick Parsons and his wife would move into one of those same groundskeepers huts under Nelson Rockefeller’s patronage.

As Parsons later admitted, “The old-boy network lives…I didn’t grow up with any of the old boys. I didn’t go to school with any of the old boys. But by becoming a part of that Rockefeller entourage, that created for me a group of people who’ve looked out for me ever since.”

Just the right person to lead the Cuomo Commission on the Common Core standards and assessments. Especially given his deep knowledge of standards, assessment, and curriculum.

Categories Common Core, Corporate Reform, Cuomo, Andrew, Standardized Testing

Peter Greene: Kansas Finds Quick, Cheap Way to Evaluate Teachers

By dianeravitch
October 2, 2015 //
8

http://curmudgucation.blogspot.com/2015/09/kansas-solves-teacher-eval-riddle.html?m=1

Categories Kansas, Teacher Evaluations

Newark: Merit Pay Plan Funded by Zuckerberg’s $100 Million Near Collapse

By dianeravitch
October 2, 2015 //
31

Three years after the Newark Teachers Union agreed to a merit pay plan funded by Mark Zuckerberg, founder of Facebook, the union is now resisting renewal of the plan. The new president of the union says it didn’t work. This should not be a surprise. Merit pay has been tried and failed consistently for nearly 100 years. (See the chapter on merit pay in my 2013 book, Reign of Error.) Merit pay failed in Nashville in 2010; it failed in New York City, in Chicago, in Texas, and elsewhere in the past five years. Corporate reformers never admit failure, so they can’t stop trying to revive merit pay, despite the fact that there is neither research nor evidence to support it.

It was hailed as a breakthrough when the bargain was struck: Top-performing teachers in Newark could get bigger paychecks.

The provision in a 2012 contract struck between the state-run school district and the Newark Teachers Union was the first of its kind in New Jersey, and it was made possible because of a massive donation intended to improve education in the city.

But three years later, the contract has expired, and the new president of the local union says that it hasn’t worked and that it’s not a sure thing the teachers union will agree to keep the provision in its current form. Several Newark teachers said that they had real problems with the contract and that the merit pay hasn’t worked, though none were willing to speak on the record for fear of reprisals.

Talks for a deal to replace it haven’t started, and the contract with the merit pay remains in place.

The deal was made possible because of Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg’s $100 million donation to education causes in Newark, announced five years ago. His foundation agreed to pay not only for the cost of the merit bonuses, but also for retroactive raises for educators who had worked two years on a previous contract, going without raises for that duration. The total cost to Zuckerberg for the deal was more than $48 million, or nearly half his contribution. While $30 million of the money contributed by Zuckerberg and matching donors is left, it’s not clear whether it will help pay for a new contract.

For advocates for education reform, it was a big deal. Gov. Chris Christie helped hash out the contract.

Those reformers say that teachers should be paid like many people in other industries are, with paychecks reflecting their results rather than just their experience.

Count on corporate reformers to ignore evidence and to keep doing the same thing over and over again, no matter how many times it fails.

Categories Failure, Merit pay, Newark

Jeff Bryant: The Billionaires’ Misguided War on Mayor de Blasio

By dianeravitch
October 2, 2015 //
26

Jeff Bryant aptly describes the battle for control of public education in New York City. A group of billionaires–actually, nine of them–have formed an organization called “Families for Excellent Schools.” The name, like all of those invented by the corporate reformers, is intended to confuse the public into thinking that the group consists of families who are eager to improve all schools or families who are on the waiting list for a charter school. In fact, the “families” that contribute to this group have one goal: to increase the number of charter schools, without regard to collateral damage to the public schools that enroll the other 1 million children in public schools.

The billionaires, as Bryant shows, have opposed Mayor de Blasio’s programs to expand universal pre-kindergarten, to support struggling schools instead of closing them, to provide more reading specialists and counselors, and to make more AP classes available. They have used their considerable clout to demand more charters and to oppose equitable funding for public schools. A lawsuit that ended years ago called the Campaign for Fiscal Equity directed the state to pay the city billions more to fund public schools, but Governor Cuomo has ignored the CFE decision and pretends that charter schools are THE answer.

Bryant writes:

Understand that de Blasio’s desire to ramp up funding for new education programs comes at a time when powerful forces who control state education policy in New York state are convinced public schools need to make do with less. As a recent article in The Nation explains, New York Governor Andrew Cuomo “has banked his gubernatorial legacy” on refusing to adequately fund his state’s public schools.

Reporter George Joseph traces Cuomo’s stubborn refusal to abide a court-ordered overhaul of the Empire State’s education finances to a “coalition” of extremely wealthy people – principally, only nine individuals – who back an organization, Families for Excellent Schools, and operate a Super PAC that has smashed almost all lobbying records in Albany, the state capital, and influenced elections with massive campaign donations.

Joseph finds that FES – combined with New Yorkers for a Balanced Albany, another powerful organization financed by the same individuals – now largely shapes education policy in the state, a policy that strongly opposes the legally required equitable funding of New York public schools.

“The state owes its schools a whopping $5.9 billion, according to a recent study” Joseph points out. “Yet somehow in this prolonged period of economic necessity, billionaire hedge-fund managers continue to enjoy lower tax rates than the bottom 20 percent of taxpayers.”

The state’s stingy attitude toward education funding flies in the face of recent research studies showing funding levels for education have real consequences for students. Even people who are politically conservative recognize this.

The billionaires say that it is not necessary to “throw money” at the public schools, but meanwhile they don’t blink at spending $40,000 a year for their own child’s education in private schools that offer all the things that poor kids don’t have: small classes, the arts, beautiful facilities, up-to-date technology, no standardized testing, and no teacher evaluation based on test scores.

Instead, they fight doggedly for charter schools, which skim the most motivated students and families from the public schools, further harming them.

Is there a billionaire in the United States who wants to help all children, not just some children? Is there one who will join the fight against privatization of public education?

Categories Charter Schools, Corporate Reformers, New York, Privatization

Bernie and Hillary on Charters

By dianeravitch
October 1, 2015 //
96

Charters kill unions. Ninety percent of charters are nonunion. Their sponsors want it that way..

Personally, I am completely opposed to for-profit charter schools. I think they are an abomination. I believe that every cent paid by taxpayers should be dedicated to the needs of children and their teachers, and not a single cent should be paid to investors.

https://dianeravitch.net/2015/07/12/bernie-sanders-on-education/

Q. What are your views on private school vouchers, tuition tax credits, and charter school accountability and transparency?

BS: I am strongly opposed to any voucher system that would re-direct public education dollars to private schools, including through the use of tax credits. In addition, I believe charter schools should be held to the same standards of transparency as public schools, and that these standards should also apply to the non-profit and for-profit entities that organize charter schools.

This is what was on her blog from our questionnaire for HRC:

https://dianeravitch.net/2015/07/12/hillary-clinton-on-education/
Q. What are your views on private school vouchers, tuition tax credits, and charter school
accountability and transparency?

HRC: I strongly oppose voucher schemes because they divert precious resources away from financially
strapped public schools to private schools that are not subject to the same accountability
standards or teacher quality standards. It would be harmful to our democracy if we dismantled
our public school system through vouchers, and there is no evidence that doing so would
improve outcomes for children.

Charters should be held to the same standards, and to the same level of accountability and
transparency to which traditional public schools are held. This includes the requirements of civil
rights laws. They can innovate and help improve educational practices. But I also believe that
we must go back to the original purpose of charter schools. Where charters are succeeding, we
should be doing more to ensure that their innovations can be widely disseminated throughout
our traditional public school system. Where they are failing, they should be closed.

Categories Charter Schools, Education Industry, For-Profit, Politics

Unions Get Pushback to Endorsement of Hillary

By dianeravitch
October 1, 2015 //
87

The Los Angeles Times reports that some teachers are unhappy with their unions’ early endorsement of Hillary.

She supports unions. But where does she stand on charters? 90% of charters are nonunion. You can’t be pro-union and pro-charter.

Is she close to Eli Broad? For many teachers, that is the kiss of death.

Will she follow the Bush-Obama line?

She has to make clear where she stands.

Categories Charter Schools, NCLB (No Child Left Behind), Obama, Politics, Race to the Top

New Mexico: Teachers Sue to Invalidate Shoddy Evaluation System

By dianeravitch
October 1, 2015 //
18

Politico reports on the lawsuit that teachers have filed against the state’s teacher evaluation system, which bases 50% of a teacher’s evaluation on test scores:


UNIONS SEEKING HALT TO NEW MEXICO TEACHER EVALS: An effort to halt New Mexico’s teacher evaluation system is back in court today for a third day of testimony. The American Federation of Teachers New Mexico and the Albuquerque Teachers Federation filed a lawsuit in February against the state education department and its education secretary, Hanna Skandera, arguing that the evaluation system relies too heavily on student test scores and violates teachers’ constitutional rights. Data reporting errors produced inaccurate evaluations in spring 2014, prompting Skandera to usher in changes [http://bit.ly/1rn00X2 ]. But the most divisive piece – basing 50 percent of teachers’ evaluations on students’ standardized test scores – remained in place. Some New Mexico teachers even burned their evaluations, protesting [http://bit.ly/1AniLTk] inaccuracies as well as what they see as an inherently unfair system. The national affiliate of both local unions, the American Federation of Teachers, has been heavily involved in the case. President Randi Weingarten attended [http://bit.ly/1FIUxWq ] a hearing on the unions’ request for a preliminary injunction in mid-September. She said she hopes the judge will stop the program now, before a trial next spring decides whether the entire evaluation system is valid.

– AFT also released a report on teacher evaluations, highlighting the experiences of 10 districts in New York and Rhode Island that changed their approaches. A long-time crusader against what it sees as the overuse of student test scores in high-stakes decision-making, AFT says evaluation systems must use multiple measures in order to get the most accurate picture of a teacher’s effectiveness: http://bit.ly/1JDHIHS.

– Speaking of teachers, the Education Department has sent its final teacher preparation rule to the Office of Management and Budget for review. [http://1.usa.gov/1VrsDQE] The proposed rule, released [http://politico.pro/1L4IwuU ] last November, aims to drive bad teacher preparation programs out of business. Teachers unions have panned the rule for using student test scores to measure how new teachers are performing in the classroom, although the department says states would be able to use other measures as well, like classroom observations. Other groups have said it would place a huge financial burden on states, which would be tasked with collecting new data on teacher placement, retention and student learning. The department has said the rule would cost states and teacher prep programs $42 million over 10 years. But groups like the California Commission on Teacher Credentialing said it could cost California alone $485 million for just one year. The final rule is expected sometime this month.

To learn more about the lawsuit in New Mexico, read Audrey Amrein-Beardsley’s description of the proceedings here. Beardsley testified for four hours on the deficiencies of the model. Today, Tom Kane (an economist and a champion of VAM) will testify.

Categories New Mexico, Teacher Evaluations

Carol Burris: The Origins of the Opt Out Movement

By dianeravitch
October 1, 2015 //
14

Carol Burris tells the story of the birth of the opt out movement. Contrary to the take in the mainstream media, parents started opt out, not unions. Parents continue to lead opt out. In 2015, the leader of the Néw York State United Teachers, Karen Magee, endorsed opt out shortly before the testing began. The organization and groundwork had already been out in place by parents.

Look for larger numbers of parents opting out in 2016. Thus far, their children have won nothing but more testing and empty pronises.

Categories Opt Out, Standardized Testing
« Older Entries
Newer Entries »