According to the news channels, the Obama administration is vetting Nevada Governor Brian Sandoval for the Scalia seat on the Supreme Court.
This makes no sense. Maybe it is a ploy to show that the Republicans won’t even interview a fellow Republican.
But what if they did? Sandoval is a conservative. He vetoed modest gun control legislation. He supports charters and vouchers. He would tilt the Court to the right for many years.
Is this a joke?
I previously posted about the death of a beloved community public school in Haywood, North Carolina, due to state budget cuts and the opening of a charter school.
Members of the community rallied to support the school, and they put the blame where it belongs: on the politicians in Raleigh, who are responsible for the schools’ funding and for authorizing charter schools to compete with neighborhood public schools. They also recognized that that the charter is funded by out-of-state right wingers whose goal is not to improve public education but to destroy it.
The voters will remember in November. That’s the good news in Haywood. A school board member plans to run against the Republican incumbent.
This comment was posted in response to this morning’s commentary on the neglected schools of Detroit:
“As a long time D.R. blog lurker, I finally decided moved to post. For the past 30+ years my work has been that of an environmental science evaluator of mostly urban public schools on behalf of occupants and the organizations that represent them – not for district management. I think we have missed a very large boat — great leaders – yes!; great staff – yes! but without schools that are in acceptable condition, nothing else matters — great leaders and great staff don’t come to, or else end up leaving schools that are falling apart. It is impossible to teach or to learn effectively in such schools. People are sickened and absent. Books, and other materials destroyed and unavailable. Mold, lead and asbestos, as well as leaks, broken windows, chipping and flaking paint all conspire to make a school unworkable. If we don’t resolve these conditions now, nothing else can be successfully achieved.”
Audrey Amrein-Beardsley and her graduate students analyzed the results of Houstin ISD’s hefty investment in value-added measurement of teachers. Houston spends a cool $500,000 a year to implement VAM.
Is is it working?
No.
Governor Dannell Malloy can’t do enough for the charter industry. He forgives their malfeasance, he gives them more money than the public schools that educate the vast majority of the state’s children, he puts their leaders on the state board of education. The hedge fund managers of Greenwich have been the governor’s reliable financiers, but maybe that is mere coincidence.
The latest appointment raised eyebrows not only because the gentleman runs a charter but because the state department of education system pays him over half a million dollars a year for his services.
Jonathan Pelto thinks that is a conflict of interest.
Charter representatives on the board should recuse themselves in any decision affecting charter schools. Will they? Don’t count on it.
By the way, Malloy is chairman of the Democratic Governors Association.
What at do you think?
This excellent article in the Nashville Post explains why the proposal for vouchers didn’t go anywhere.
Republicans control both houses of the legislature, and the voucher proposal passed easily in the state senate. But it has stalled for four years in the house of representatives. The main sponsor of the bill is Bill Dunn, a Republican from Knoxville. His bill could be introduced later in this session but if he had the votes, he would have introduced it now.
Democrats opposed it, but they didn’t have the votes to derail it. The most important opposition came from rural legislators, even after the sponsor agreed to limit vouchers only to Shelby County, where Memphis is located. The rural legislators know what a foot in the door looks like.
The fight over school vouchers has gone on for the better part of a decade, arguing that low-income kids in failing schools should be able to pursue a private, and presumed better, education using public dollars. But opponents argue such a system would drain money from already struggling public school districts and use that government money to fund tuition at parochial schools.
With the Senate having passed a school voucher bill easily last year, the House version for the first time managed to claw its way through the committee system — including the House Finance subcommittee, done with the help some membership changes and a key absence — and made its way to the House floor for the first time Thursday.
Vouchers has become one of the most heavily lobbied bills on the Hill, with at least a dozens lobbyists working largely in its favor — including seven just from StudentsFirst, the education advocacy group launched by Michelle Rhee. Organizations like StudentsFirst and other interest groups have not been shy donating to political campaigns.
Of course, there is no evidence that vouchers help kids with low test scores thrive; it didn’t happen in Milwaukee or Cleveland or DC or anywhere else, but voucher proponents are undeterred in their determination to allow children to attend religious schools, even if those schools have no certified teachers.
Democrats were jubilant over the bill’s assumed demise. Tennessee Democratic Party Chairwoman Mary Mancini said, “It’s abundantly clear that all public schools in Tennessee simply do not have the same resources. Some are palaces with the most up-to-date technology available while others cannot supply a textbook to every child. Until this inequity is addressed and every child in every Tennessee ZIP code has access to an an equal, quality public education, diverting public dollars away from public schools is not be [sic] an option.”
The House Speaker said she favors the bill because, as everyone knows, private schools have a higher graduation rate than public schools. Note: Private schools do not enroll the same numbers of children from low-income homes, the same number of students with disabilities, or the same number of English language learners, as public schools. The private schools with the highest graduation rates are those that enroll students from high-income families where both parents are college graduates.
Success Academy’s public relations firm (Mercury LLC) must be working overtime to try to outrun the stories about the charter chain’s tactics. While critics have alleged for years that the chain produces high scores by a combination of suspensions, attrition, and high-pressure test-prep, the mainstream media–led by the New York Times– is now all over the story.
George Joseph writes in the Guardian (U.K.) about Eva Moskowitz’s “got to go” list–the kids who need to be suspended and pushed out to protect the brand and the other allegations swirling around the high-test-score boasting charter chain.
Joseph writes:
A Guardian analysis has found that the school system loses children between the third and fourth grade, the first two years of New York state testing, at a rate four times that of neighboring public schools. Success lost more than 10% of its enrolled student population from grade to grade, compared to the average rate of 2.7% at public schools in the same building or nearby during the same years.
The analysis compared Success and traditional public school populations in high poverty neighborhoods and therefore excluded data from one Success Academy site on the Upper West Side where only about 25% of students were classified as “economically disadvantaged”. This school’s relatively well-to-do student population features the only example of a Success Academy class that grew in size from second to fourth grade.
According to Jeff Jacobs, a researcher at Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs, chance alone cannot adequately account for these enrollment drop differences. “Within testing years, the enrollment drop rate observed at Success Academy is greater than the enrollment drop rates at next door public schools 70% of the time. Furthermore, in 61% of these cases, this difference is so large that we can reject the hypothesis that it occurred due to random variation in attrition rates, at the 5% significance level.”
Eva believes that the media is piling on, but she has made herself and her charters a media sensation. Once you set yourself up as the sine qua non of “excellence,” a model of the perfection that can be attained by everyone, you also set yourself up as a target for skeptics. The biggest problem for SA is not its critics, who could be easily ignored, but the former teachers and parents and administrators who spill the beans.
The Patchogue-Medford school district on Long Island in New York adopted a resolution in opposition to the confirmation of John King as U.S. Secretary of Education.
“February 22, 2016
The Board of Education of the Patchogue-Medford Union Free School District would like to go on the record as opposing the confirmation of Dr. John B. King, Jr. as United States Secretary of Education. Dr. King formerly served as Commissioner of Education in the State of New York and based on this tenure in this position we have the following primary concerns:
Dr. King was responsible for the implementation of the No Child Left Behind federal regulations and the introduction of the Common Core Standards in New York State. This was a total failure and caused countless problems in the field of education. All of his actions have now been reversed and/or under review by the Governor, New York State Legislature and the New York State Board of Regents. We are concerned that his failure to successfully implement these programs will now be repeated with a failure to implement the new Every Student Succeeds Act, a far more reaching education law for a much larger constituency.
Dr. King was extremely unresponsive to the input of parents and educational professionals. We are concerned that this failure to consider the data and opinions provided by these groups will continue if he is confirmed as Secretary of Education.
Dr. King has intimated that communities which have low participation levels in state assessments will be subject to an embargo of their federal funding. The lack of participation is the result of parental choice, which is clearly a constitutional right in our country, and are not under the control of local educational agencies. Regretfully our community, and those like it, rely very heavily on federal and state aid to run our district. We have a very large percentage of students who are new to our country and do not speak or read English. Many of our students receive free and/or reduced lunch, as well. We are concerned that this loss of funding, due to circumstances which we do not control, will compromise our ability to educate our students.
We cannot help but conclude that amplifying Dr. King’s abject failure as the leader of the educational establishment in New York State to the federal level is good for no one.
It is our recommendation that the President of the United States nominate, for our nation, a Secretary of Education who is proven leader in education, who has extensive public school experience, and proven success, as a both a teacher and administrator, who will be responsive to others, while being empathetic to the realistic needs of our nation’s students and working with the educational community.
Again, we urge you to oppose the nomination of Dr. John B. King, Jr. as Secretary of Education. We have included a very informative article by Dr. Carol Burris regarding Dr. King with this letter.
Please feel free to contact us with any questions or concerns. We appreciate your thoughtful consideration of our request.
Respectfully,
The Board of Education of the Patchogue-Medford Union Free School District
Drumroll, please!
The National Education Policy Center announces that the Bunkum award for the shoddiest research of 2015 goes to the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools. Take a bow!
Bunkum Award Announcement
National Alliance for Public Charter Schools awarded top prize for shoddy research
Find Documents:
Press Release: http://tinyurl.com/gua9vmv
Bunkum Award Presentation: http://nepc.colorado.edu/think-tank/bunkum-awards/2015
Contact:
William J. Mathis: (802) 383-0058, wmathis@sover.net
BOULDER, CO (February 23, 2016) – With the Oscar celebration next week, and the Emmys and Pulitzers on the way, the National Education Policy Center announces this year’s winner of its Bunkum Award. We invite you to enjoy our 10th annual tongue-in-cheek salute to the most egregiously shoddy think tank reports.
It’s not easy to laugh when data are manipulated and made to fit foregone conclusions or when the research literature is misrepresented or ignored and low-quality or dishonest “evidence” has real impact on policy and on children. As best we can tell, polar bears aren’t laughing at reports from the American Petroleum Institute.
Yet “humor is one of the best ingredients of survival,” according to Aung San Suu Kyi—whose travails have been far weightier than ours. So we will persevere in our commitment to having a bit of fun each year with the evidentiary farce-lympics.
The Think Twice Think Tank Review Project arose as a response to the often-outsized policy influence of glossy, well-publicized reports that have not been vetted by peer-review. These reports regularly wrap themselves in the veneer of research, but they are frequently little more than propaganda masquerading as social science.
This year’s awards announcement, available on the NEPC website, is hosted by Dr. David Berliner, the Regents’ Professor Emeritus and former dean of the College of Education at Arizona State University. Berliner is a member of the National Academy of Education and the International Academy of Education, a Fellow of the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, a past president of the American Educational Research Association, and a widely recognized scholar of educational psychology and policy.
The 2015 Bunkum Winner
This year’s winner is the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools, for Separating Fact from Fiction: What You Need to Know about Charter Schools. The National Alliance (NAPCS) describes itself as “the leading national nonprofit organization committed to advancing the charter school movement.” Separating Fact from Fiction is a fetching, sleek publication adorned with 15 charming photos of smiling children keeping watch over 21 easy-to-digest, alleged “myths” followed by responses that the report generously describes as “facts.” Yet Separating Fact from Fiction might more honestly be titled:
Playing 21 with a Stacked Deck
or
Blackjacked! 21 Attempts to Club Sound Policy.
Before turning to a small sampling of the report’s problems, however, we’ll offer a compliment: To the credit of the report’s authors, the 21 so-called myths do a good job covering many of the important issues raised by the rapid growth of the charter school sector. Alas, this comprehensive coverage is wasted. The framing of the myths is often so crude as to merely set up a straw man, and the presentation of facts in response to those myths is often outright misleading or unresponsive to the report’s own question. The report’s Blackjack-playing authors (who chose not to identify themselves) decided to bamboozle their readers using several celebrated techniques: the palmed card, the false cut, and the sucker’s bet.
The Palmed Card. The first myth listed in the report is “Charter schools are not public schools,” and it’s answered as follows: “As defined in federal and state law, charter schools are public schools.” Indeed, this is a technically true statement. A reader of the report, however, is distracted from the palmed card. The reader would never learn that charter schools live in a highly nuanced and ambiguous part-public and part-private niche. Charter schools receive public funding, students receive a no-tuition education, and charters are subject to certain non-discrimination and testing laws—so they’re public in some respects. But they’re private in other respects. As explained in the NEPC review (internal citations omitted):
Most charter schools are governed by nonprofit boards. It is increasingly the case that charter school buildings are privately owned by the charter’s founders, by an affiliated private company, or by a private trust.
In schools operated by private education management organizations (EMOs), the materials, furniture, and equipment in the schools are usually privately owned by the EMO and leased to the school.
Except for a small number of states that require teachers to be employees of the charter school, it is common for teachers to be “private employees” of the EMO.
Although most charter schools have appointed nonprofit boards intended to represent the public (i.e., taxpayers’) interest, a growing portion of charter schools are operated by private EMOs, and key decisions are made at corporate headquarters, which are often out-of-state. [About half of the nation’s charter school students are enrolled in schools owned and operated by private EMOs.]
Public schools, like other public entities, are subject to transparency laws. Charter schools and their private operators increasingly refuse to share information and data in response to public requests.
False Cuts. Other “myths” discussed in the report falsely suggest that proof is being offered when, in fact, all that’s offered is a bald and sweeping claim, a proclaimed truth or a glowing affirmation. These False Cuts never really rebut the criticisms of charter schools; rather, they simply assert that their self-described myths are not true. For example, when answering the charge of “less qualified teachers,” the report says, “charter leaders aim to hire talented, passionate, and qualified teachers who will boost student achievement and contribute to a thriving school culture.” Similarly, their defense of the “myth” that the charter movement is “anti-union” is that the schools are actually “pro-teacher.”
So they aim to hire good teachers, and they’re pro-teacher as well. One can only imagine how relieved the readers of this report were, particularly those who worried that the NAPCS would announce that charters were anti-teacher and, in fact, aimed to hire untalented, unmotivated and unqualified teachers.
In fact, the report as a whole suffers from evidence getting lost in the shuffle. Its use of the research literature borders on the cartoonish: in examining its 47 endnotes, our reviewers found exactly one article that had been published in a peer-reviewed journal. In contrast, almost two-thirds of the citations were to publications of advocacy organizations. Keeping in mind that charter schools have been as extensively studied as any policy over the past decade, these omissions are astonishing; a search in Google Scholar for “charter schools” yields 41,500 results. As the report has no methods section, the reader is left adrift as to why the report selected the biased set of documents it did and why it ignored a vast and easily accessible body of scholarly literature.
The Sucker’s Bet. Three of the report’s first four myths concern money: “Charter schools get more money than other public schools,” “Charter schools receive a disproportionate amount of private funds,” and “There is a lack of transparency around charter schools’ use of funds.” The gist of the authors’ arguments in response to these “myths” is that charter schools are responsible stewards of unfairly small allocations of public money.
They’re inducing readers to make a Sucker’s Bet—to go all-in because of the amazing efficiency and payoff that charters supposedly deliver. These readers are never told that the key research relied on for these claims had already been debunked. As our review noted, the lesser public funding received by charter schools “is largely explained by charter schools spending less on special education, student support services, transportation, and food services.” There’s nothing nefarious here, except perhaps some deceptive and incorrect calculations. Our reviewer explained:
When comparing public funding of charter schools with that of district schools, it is critical that the portion of ‘pass-through’ funds to charter schools from school districts be subtracted. Otherwise, the district revenues are erroneously and vastly inflated. For instance, if a public school district has the responsibility of providing transportation of charter school students, then the taxpayer funding for that transportation should be attributed to the charter schools, not the public school district. But sloppy calculations do not do this. … Nevertheless, Charter schools can receive … additional (categorical) funding if [they wish by, for example, serving] more children with moderate or severe disabilities and if they start offering programs such as vocational technical programs that would qualify them for targeted funding.
It’s one thing to count your money while sitting at the table—it’s quite another to miscount it and the money of the other player, which is essentially what the study did that the NAPCS relied on. It incorrectly attributed the provision of district-funded activities (e.g., transportation) to the charter, and it incorrectly attributed the revenues spent on these services to the district.
And so on it goes for 21 “myths.” The result is a series of rudderless assertions, insisting that there is nothing to be concerned about in the charter school world, except of course that charters are being unfairly treated. Yet as the NEPC review explains, the actual picture is much more nuanced. The charter sector includes many good people doing good things, many cases that are highly troubling, and a very real need for improved practice and regulation. With charter schools, just as with any policy issue, whitewashing the record does nothing to advance sound public policymaking or to help the charter sector move forward.
The National Alliance for Public Charter Schools earned this year’s Bunkum Award, as the worst example of educational policy research in a think tank report, in part because of the report’s sweep—because of the sheer acreage it unashamedly covers. In a repetitive fashion that fatigues the reader, it sets up and knocks down myth after myth, pretending that it is engaging in a truth-telling mission. This is a shame. Over the years, NAPCS has vacillated between being an honest purveyor of research evidence to being a blind advocate. This time, a useful report was not in the cards.
Watch the 2015 Bunkums Awards video presentation, read the Bunkum-worthy report and the review, and learn about past Bunkum winners and the National Education Policy Center’s Think Twice think tank review project, all by going to
http://nepc.colorado.edu/think-tank/bunkum-awards/2015.
The National Education Policy Center (NEPC) Think Twice Think Tank Review Project (http://thinktankreview.org) provides the public, policymakers, and the press with timely, academically sound reviews of selected publications. The project is made possible in part by support provided by the Great Lakes Center for Education Research and Practice: http://www.greatlakescenter.org
The National Education Policy Center (NEPC), housed at the University of Colorado Boulder School of Education, produces and disseminates high-quality, peer-reviewed research to inform education policy discussions. Visit us at: http://nepc.colorado.edu
The schools of Detroit have been under state control for most of this century. The state has failed miserably to improve education or even to maintain the schools in decent physical condition. No governor or legislator would allow this to happen to their own home district.
The Detroit Free Press published a blistering editorial about the legislature’s malign neglect of the children of Detroit. They like to go on about how terrible the district’s test scores are but forget to acknowledge that the state is in charge and is accountable. Don’t blame the teachers. They work in terrible conditions and are never consulted about the needs of their students. They are akin to nurses in an intensive care unit that have been denied the tools to do their jobs.
The state of Michigan is in charge of Detroit school and the best the legislature can come up with is a bankruptcy plan.
The editorial says the plan, fashioned by Governor Snyder and amended by Republican legislators, is “an insult.”
“The House is thinking that because Detroit Public Schools’ needs are so urgent — the state’s largest school district could run out of cash in April if the Legislature doesn’t act on a reform plan mulled by Gov. Rick Snyder for almost a year — this is a fine time to tie a raft of noxious, anti-union, anti-Detroit addenda to a reform package the Legislature must pass in order to keep the district’s doors open…..
“Are the Republican leaders of the state House of Representatives so craven, so insensible to the fact that their work affects children, that they’d risk the futures of the 47,000 souls enrolled in DPS with a slate of ideologically driven “reforms” sure to divide any vote along party line?…
“The House’s DPS reform bills sticks to the “old company, new company” model advanced by Snyder. The old company would keep DPS’s name, elected school board and operating millage, and exist solely to pay off the district’s debt, while the new company would receive the district’s per-pupil allowance and an additional state subsidy, and would educate Detroit’s children.
“But changes larded on by Republican lawmakers mean this legislation would essentially create a school district in Detroit with lower standards than any district in the state.
“By gutting some provisions of the state law that requires collective bargaining for some portions of teacher contracts, by allowing the new district to hire teachers with “alternate” certification, by tying teacher pay and benefits to nebulously defined performance standards, the bills’ sponsors are saying that Detroit’s children, of all the children in the state, deserve less. Much less. Detroit kids, it seems, don’t deserve the same quality of education as kids in West Bloomfield or Grosse Point….
“It is an undisputed fact that the district has spent the bulk of this century under the guidance of a state-appointed emergency manager. The state bears both moral and legal responsibility for the district’s hefty debts — much of the district’s short-term debt, after all, was incurred during that period. State intervention is predicated on the state’s constitutional responsibility to provide an adequate education for every Michigan child. State intervention came with a promise to fix DPS. But state intervention, indisputably, made the problem worse….
“Here’s our challenge to the lawmakers championing these plans: If these reforms are destined to ensure excellence, pass them statewide.”
Diane Ravitch's blog 