Archives for the month of: March, 2016
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North Carolina Parents: We Don’t Want an “Achievement School District”

By dianeravitch
March 2, 2016 //
4

PublicSchoolsFirst in North Carolina–a parent-led organization– has produced a short video urging the public and the legislature to reject an “achievement school district” modeled on the ones in New Orleans, Tennessee, and Michigan. The video accurately says that none of these models has succeeded. New Orleans is controversial; the one in Tennessee has produced negligible or no gains in test scores; the one in Michigan was an abject failure.

 

The legislature is considering a bill that would select the lowest performing schools in the state and put them into a non-contiguous district, where they would then be turned over to charter operators, some of them for-profit charter chains from out of state. This model has no record of success. The goal of this model, which is promoted by ALEC, is to privatize public schools and eliminate local control.

 

The video recommends that North Carolina continue to implement its home-grown turnaround model, which has shown promising results, protects local schools, and keeps out for-profit charter operators.

 

 

Categories Accountability, ALEC, Education Reform, Michigan, New Orleans, North Carolina, Tennessee

Idaho: Hero Superintendents Say No to the Albertson Foundation

By dianeravitch
March 2, 2016 //
9

A few days ago, I added Boise superintendent Don Coberly to the blog’s honor roll because of his forthright opposition to a campaign intended to discredit public education. It turns out that the superintendent and every member of his school board signed on to a joint response to the J.A. and Kathryn Albertson Foundation’s efforts to diminish public regard for public education.

 

Superintendent Coberly was not alone.

 

A long list of Idaho superintendents also spoke out and I now add them to this blog’s honor roll. They spoke out against a well-funded campaign to slander the public schools of the state and thereby to persuade the public to support privatization.

 

The Idaho-based Albertson Foundation has run a propaganda campaign called “Don’t Fail Idaho,” attacking the SAT scores of the public schools. The superintendents have issued statements supporting their schools against this campaign of misinformation.

 

Here is a great statement by Superintendent Wendy Johnson of the Kuna School District. It includes graphs that show the plans of the district’s graduates. (Added bonus: She quotes yours truly. Smart woman! Well-read, too!)

 

Here is another statement, signed by 13 superintendents.

 

They wrote:

 

In recent weeks, many of your readers may have seen an advertisement presented by the “Don’t Fail Idaho” campaign which dramatically drops four Idaho students in the middle of the desert and leaves them there with one student left on the bus, forlornly waving to those that were “left behind.” The claim of this advertisement is that four out of five students are not prepared for life after high school.

 

As superintendents of many schools in this area, we feel it is important to defend our districts against a blatant attempt to undermine support for the public school system that serves this area. The “Don’t Fail Idaho” campaign and its parent organization, the J.A. and Kathryn Albertson Family Foundation, have based their claims on SAT data which is a predictor of a student’s performance in the first semester of their first year in a four-year institution. This data is tremendously narrow and does not reflect what is happening in our schools and with our students.

 

Our students leave our high school campuses and embark on multiple career and college paths. Some choose junior colleges. Some choose two-year technology programs. Some attend technical schools and academies. Some start their own businesses or attend management schools. The SAT has no predictive power for these viable avenues. Those that choose a four-year university may be subject to those national statistics, but we teach our students that they can beat those odds every day, and they do.

 

In just the first semester of the 2015-2016 school year, 10 of our high schools had 1,082 students enrolled in dual credit courses through Idaho State University earning 3,577 credits in that time. That is only a portion of what we offer our students. We also offer courses from CSI, CWI, BSU, and U of I, not to mention the AP and professional technical certificate bearing courses. In addition, according to the NAEP (the nation’s report card), Idaho ranks higher than 22 other states in math and reading for 2015.

 

Is there room for improvement in our schools? Certainly. We embrace that challenge and continue in our commitment to improve our schools and the experience that our students gain while attending. While we recognize the J.A. and Kathryn Albertson Family Foundation and its dedication to helping students in Idaho succeed, we ask that the foundation ceases this divisive campaign and support Idaho’s students in a way that does not cut down the very teachers, paraprofessionals and administrators who have dedicated their lives to improving the lives of the students in Idaho. Growth and economic development in Idaho is dependent upon all of us working together. We ask that the J.A. and Kathryn Albertson Family Foundation work with us in our efforts to educate all students.

 

If the “Don’t Fail Idaho” organization continues to drop those students in the desert, rest assured that our districts will pick up those remaining students and place them at the doorstep of their pathway to a successful future.

 

 

Wayne Rush, another Idaho superintendent, released his own statement:

 

 

My first reaction when I saw the ad was to yell at the television. What would bring anyone to produce advertisements declaring that 80 percent of Idaho’s teens are not prepared for life after high school? If you have not seen the ad, it shows a school bus carrying five students, four are left at the side of the road somewhere in Idaho’s desert and one remains on the bus. The announcer says, “4 out of 5 Idaho teens aren’t prepared for life after high school. If we don’t work together to change education we are all going nowhere.” The logo “Don’t Fail Idaho” appears. When you go to their website, you find that the Idaho Business for Education (IBE) and the J.A. and Kathryn Albertson Family Foundation (JKAF) are misusing SAT data and a State Board of Education goal to make this ridiculous claim.

 

It makes me very sad that the J. A. and Kathryn Albertson Family Foundation is undermining Idaho’s public education and the state as whole to promote its agenda. I worked for the JKAF for more than six years and know the love and commitment that Joe and Kathryn Albertson had for Idaho’s youth. They and their family have given so much to our state and I am forever grateful. However, this campaign leaves me perplexed as to why they would twist data to put Idaho, our schools, teachers, and our youth in the worst possible light.

 

The College Board (which produces the SAT) and universities that use these scores have never made the claim that not reaching a benchmark score on the SAT means you are not prepared for life after high school. The College Board states, “The SAT Benchmark score of 1550 is associated with a 65 percent probability of obtaining a first-year GPA of B minus or higher at a four-year college.” A test is one predictor of college success, but not the best. The courses our students take like dual credit and career and technical courses (such as auto, business, and engineering) are much better predictors of success after high school.

 

I am proud of our community, parents, students, teachers, and staff for the efforts each has made in providing a high quality education here in Gem County. Our staff works every day in preschool through high school to prepare our students for a successful future. They are continually improving teaching and learning for the advancement of our students.

 

These SAT scores come from a recent effort by Idaho and the Emmett School District to increase the number of students that are going on to some form of post-secondary education, whether trade school, two-year, or four-year college. The state now requires students to take a college entrance exam, like the SAT to graduate from high school. The state will pay for all juniors to take the SAT assessment and 88 percent of Idaho’s juniors are now taking this exam. Emmett School District has chosen to have the entire junior class take the exam. This is a great step to encourage students to attend postsecondary education and to help us align our curriculum to ensure students are college and career ready.

 

We gain a lot of good information from this assessment. This fall, our teachers dove deeply into the results to discover areas where we need to improve. It also allows our students to see how they perform compared to average scores from students enrolled in colleges and universities they are interested in attending.

 

It does make a difference when school districts and our state make bold moves to improve education. The College Board reported that in Idaho, “In 2013, 1,740 students met the benchmark. In 2015 that number of successful students more than doubled, with 4,250 meeting the benchmark.” We ought to be proud of the progress we are making not running advertisements saying we are failing.

 

To prepare students for life after high school, our teachers provide college-level, dual credit courses for our high school students. Just this fall, our students completed 168 courses earning 504 college credits through the University of Idaho, Boise State University, Northwest Nazarene University, and the College of Idaho. They were successful in courses such as college level math, chemistry, psychology, medical terminology, biology, history, and political science. We have had many students complete over 30 college credits before they graduate from Emmett High School. These students are clearly ready for college.

 

In addition, our students are participating in clubs, drama, music, sports, as well as many other community activities and events that help prepare them for life after high school. Our high school won first place in 3A State Football this fall and our girls just took 3rd place in the state basketball tournament. These students are learning what they can accomplish through grit and team work.

 

Idaho, our teachers and staff, and our students are not failing Idaho. We roll up our sleeves every day and work hard to prepare for a bright future.

 

Ironically, some of these statements were published in the Idaho Education News, which is funded by the Albertson Foundation.

 

Another irony, Joe Albertson, who founded the grocery store chain that is the basis of the family fortune, was a 1925 graduate of Caldwell High School in Caldwell, Idaho. A public school.

Categories Charter Schools, Corporate Reform, Education Industry, Honor Roll, Idaho, Online Learning, Privatization, Testing, Virtual Charter Schools

New York Principal to National PTA: Yes, We Will Opt Out

By dianeravitch
March 2, 2016 //
14

After a representative of the National PTA wrote an article critical of parents who opt out and praising the value of data-driven decision making, Tim Farley responded. Tim is a principal in New York, a father of four young children, and a board member of NYSAPE (New York State Allies for Public Education), which led  the state’s historic opt out movement.

 

Tim Farley points out the absurdity of the National PTA’s priorities for assessment:

 

*ensure appropriate development

 
*guarantee reliability and implementation of high quality assessments

 
*clearly articulate to parents the assessment and accountability system in place at their child’s school
*bring schools and families together to use data to support student growth and learning
But Farley has different priorities:

 

“As the parent of four school-aged children, the PTA’s recommendations seem to fall short of what they should be advocating for:

 
*smaller class sizes

 

*enriching curricula that includes music and the arts

 
*funding schools fully, equitably, and fairly
supporting teachers in the classroom

 
*decoupling student test scores from teacher effectiveness ratings

 
*stopping the unfettered collection of our children’s personally identifiable information

 
“The National PTA needs to put the “P” and the “T” back into the PTA instead of being a propagandist for Bill and Melinda Gates. If they do not, they run the risk of the PTA standing for “Profits and Testing Association.”

Categories Education Reform

England: Why Teachers Are Abandoning the Profession

By dianeravitch
March 2, 2016 //
17

The schools in England are experiencing a “brain drain,” not unlike schools in the United States, and the reasons are not all that different. It is not just the pay, although low pay compared to other professions doesn’t help. It is the degradation of the profession by the government and the media. More teachers are leaving the schools than are graduating from teacher preparation institutions.

 

Francis Gilbert, a lecturer in secondary English at Goldsmiths, University of London, writes that:

 

Over the past decade, teachers have had to endure constant, chaotic policy change. These have included changes to school structures, through the introduction of academies and free schools, changes to the curriculum and exams, changes to the inspection framework, changes to policies for children with special needs, and much more.

 

Central government has put unprecedented pressure on schools to attain “top” exam results, with those schools failing to achieve certain benchmarks threatened with takeover or closure.

 

The issue here is that even the government itself has pointed out that many of these exams are “not fit for purpose”: they do not lead to productive learning in the classroom, but rather mean that teachers are forced to teach to the test.

The high-stakes nature of England’s current testing system means that teachers I’ve worked with and interviewed feel oppressed by the mechanistic ways in which they are obliged to assess students. The bureaucracy involved in creating the data needed for assessment can be very time-consuming.

 

This pressure comes to a head with visits from the schools inspectorate Ofsted. Teachers often work in fear that they will be judged as failing by the inspectorate or even by someone acting out the role of inspector – school senior leadership teams frequently run “Mocksteds” whereby teachers have to undergo a “mock” Ofsted, usually run by senior staff.

 

Government policies have encouraged candidates to see the profession as a short-term career option. Teach First is a classic example of this: the very name “Teach First” suggests that its graduate trainees should try teaching “first” and then move on to something better.

 

“Teach First” is the British version of TFA. Its recruits are likelier to leave the classroom more often than a traditionally trained teacher, who is in teaching as a career.

 

He adds:

 

There are other pressures too, and the expectations of parents and students have become increasingly unrealistic. Education has become marketised: teachers are expected by the government, parents and many students to be more like “customer service agents” delivering a product – a good grade for a student – rather than entering into a meaningful dialogue with learners and their carers about the best ways to learn.

 

Parents and students have come to expect “results on a plate” and can become very angry with teachers who “don’t deliver”. Over the last few years, pedagogues have endured rising numbers of unwarranted complaints from parents and students. I know of a brilliant, experienced teacher who was verbally abused and threatened at a recent parents’ evening by an angry mother who felt that this teacher should have “got” a better result for her child. The onus has shifted away from students to work for themselves and instead has been placed on the teacher to do the work for the student.

 

The pundits have taken to referring to teachers as “lazy” and “incompetent.”

 

It all sounds sadly familiar.

 

This is the work of GERM, the Global Education Reform Movement, the oligarch’s effort to turn schooling into a free market and to reduce the status of teaching so that costs may be cut by pushing out experienced teachers.

 

This is foolish, stupid, mad. The corporate reformers have bamboozled the public, and they are destroying education. No teachers, no education. A parade of new teachers, inferior education.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Categories International, Teachers and Teaching

Pennsylvania: Opt Outs Expected to Grow, Thanks to a Documentary

By dianeravitch
March 2, 2016 //
11

After a showing of Shannon Puckett’s powerful documentary “Defies Measurement,” the opt out movement in Pennsylvania got a large boost. Shannon, an experienced teacher, made the film with the help of Kickstarter, and has made it available for free online.

 

After they saw the film, parents asked for yard signs declaring their opposition to the state tests, and organizers ran out of them.

 

The more people see this documentary and others showing the punitive nature of these tests (why should little children take standardized tests that last for several hours? Why can’t their reading and math skills be divined in a 45- minute test?), the more they want to withhold consent.

 

The more parents understand that these tests provide no useful information about their child (how does it help to know what percentile rank your child is in compared to children of the same age in other districts and states? How does the teacher learn more about her students when she can’t see the questions and the scores arrive when the student is no longer in her class?), the more they want to opt out.

 

The more parents understand that the tests are about profits, not education, the more they will opt out.

 

Go online for a viewing of “Defies Measurement” and help your friends and neighbors understand why they should say no and fight for their children.

 

“State Sen. Andy Dinniman (D., Chester), who cosponsored the bill delaying the Keystones, said he has watched a surprising bipartisan consensus emerge as parents in more affluent suburban districts complain about the number of days devoted to testing, while poverty-stricken communities say they lack the money to implement the changes.

 

“It wasn’t helping anyone,” Dinniman said of the Keystone requirement. “All we were doing was stamping failure on the backs of students in impoverished areas where there weren’t any resources to pass these exams.”

 

 
Read more at http://www.philly.com/philly/education/20160228_As_protests_rise_over_high-stakes_tests__more_students_likely_to_opt_out.html#GvVVJZ2LRcR4q2Kl.99

Categories Opt Out, Parents, Pennsylvania, Standardized Testing

What Presidential Candidates Tweeted in the 19th Century

By dianeravitch
March 1, 2016 //
3

This is funny. What would presidential candidates have tweeted about their opponents in the nineteenth century, if Twitter existed?

Categories Education Reform

NYC Comptroller Issues First Charter School Audit: $135,000 Unaccounted For

By dianeravitch
March 1, 2016 //
40

New York City Comptroller Scott Stringer has released the first of a series of charter school audits. His audit team found that a charter school in the Bronx had not documented $135,000 in expenditures.

 

$6,000 for ice cream. $16,000 for unlimited MetroCards. $7,000 so the principal could travel to Boston, Albany and Las Vegas.
“If you’re going to go to Vegas, you better document it,” said City Comptroller Scott Stringer.
Over a two-year period, officials at the South Bronx Charter School for International Cultures and the Arts spent more than $135,000 without the proper authorization or documentation, according to city auditors.

 

Until now, the city’s charters have audited themselves. Eva Moskowitz led a legal battle to prevent external audits, and she prevailed in court. But the legislature passed a law authorizing the city comptroller to audit the charters since they are publicly funded.

 

The Success Academy charters will be audited. The report is supposed to be released later this year.

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Education Reform, Funding

New York Times: Testing “Joy and Grit” in the Classroom

By dianeravitch
March 1, 2016 //
59

Just when you think American education can’t get any nuttier, along comes another crazy idea.

 

The New York Times today reports on the project underway in California to test “joy and grit” in the classroom. It is only a pilot for what soon will be a national and international program to test soft skills. Think of the data! Parents will soon have data points about their children’s grit. Think of the data-based decision making!

 

Angela Duckworth, whose work in social-emotional learning has promoted the importance of “grit” (along with Paul Tough’s book “How Children Succeed”), resigned from the committee overseeing the project.

 

“I do not think we should be doing this; it is a bad idea,” said Angela Duckworth, the MacArthur fellow who has done more than anyone to popularize social-emotional learning, making “grit” — the title of her book to be released in May — a buzzword in schools.

 

She resigned from the board of the group overseeing the California project, saying she could not support using the tests to evaluate school performance. Last spring, after attending a White House meeting on measuring social-emotional skills, she and a colleague wrote a paper warning that there were no reliable ways to do so. “Our working title was all measures suck, and they all suck in their own way,” she said.

 

And there is little agreement on what skills matter: Self-control? Empathy? Perseverance? Joy?

 

“There are so many ways to do this wrong,” said Camille A. Farrington, a researcher at the University of Chicago who is working with a network of schools across the country to measure the development of social-emotional skills. “In education, we have a great track record of finding the wrong way to do stuff.”

 

Schools began emphasizing social-emotional learning around 2011, after an analysis of 213 school-based programs teaching such skills found that they improved academic achievement by 11 percentile points. A book extolling efforts to teach social-emotional skills in schools such as the KIPP charter network and Horace Mann in New York, “How Children Succeed” by Paul Tough, appeared the next year.

 

Argument still rages about whether schools can or should emphasize these skills. Critics say the approach risks blaming the victim — if only students had more resilience, they could rise above generational poverty and neglected schools — and excuses uninspired teaching by telling students it is on them to develop “zest,” or enthusiasm. Groups that spent decades urging the country toward higher academic standards worry about returning to empty talk of self-esteem, accepting low achievement as long as students feel good.

 

 

But teaching social-emotional skills is often seen as a way to move away from a narrow focus on test scores, and to consider instead the whole child. It may seem contradictory, then, to test for those skills. In education, however, the adage is “what’s measured gets treasured”; states give schools money to teach the subjects on which they will be judged.

 

Next year, the National Assessment of Educational Progress, a test of students in grades four, eight and 12 that is often referred to as the nation’s report card, will include questions about students’ social-emotional skills. A well-known international test, PISA, is moving toward the same.

 

The biggest concern about testing for social-emotional skills is that it typically relies on surveys asking students to evaluate recent behaviors or mind-sets, like how many days they remembered their homework, or if they consider themselves hard workers. This makes the testing highly susceptible to fakery and subjectivity. In their paper published in May, Dr. Duckworth and David Yeager argued that even if students do not fake their answers, the tests provide incentive for “superficial parroting” rather than real changes in mind-set.

 

But Martin West, a supporter of school choice and high-stakes testing, defended the value of testing soft skills.

 

Pearson and the other giants of the testing industry must be delighted. More tests!

Categories Education Industry, Education Reform, Testing

John Merrow: Who’s Making the Big Bucks in Charter World?

By dianeravitch
March 1, 2016 //
17

John Merrow decided to calculate which school leader was making the most money based on the number of students enrolled.

 

Carmen Farina pulls down about $.20 per child, $.40 if you include her pension.

 

“New York’s most prominent charter school operator is, of course, Eva Moskowitz, the founder and CEO of Success Academies. She has received a significant pay raise and now makes $567,000 a year, as Ben Chapman reported in the New York Daily News. Success Academies enrolls 11,000 students, the same number as in Chicago’s Noble Network.

 

“Let’s do the math. 567,000 divided by 11,000 equals 51.35, meaning that Ms. Moskowitz is earning $51.35 per student, nearly two-and-one-half times what Mr. Milkie is paid per student.

 

“If Carmen Fariña were running Success Academies instead of the nation’s largest school district, at her current pay rate of 40 cents per student she’d be earning $4400 a year!

 

“Put another way, Eva Moskowitz is being paid about 128 times more per student than Chancellor Fariña.”

 

But guess what? Eva is not the highest paid charter leader.

 

Who could it be?

 

“Like Eva Moskowitz’s Success Academies, this network loses a lot of students, but, unlike Success Academies, the remaining students here perform poorly. Here’s the percentage of students in one school who scored ‘proficient’ in English Language Arts, by grade: 5th-8%; 6th-12%; 7th-11%; and 8th-28%. In another school, 4%, 20%, 17% and 30% .

 

 

“In Math: 5th-6%; 6th-36%; 7th-52%; and 8th-48%. In another school, 27%, 37%, 39% and 34%. (And as the NAEP scores below suggest, those high-ish math scores may be illusory.)

 

 

“Scores on the NAEP, the National Assessment of Educational Progress, were unimpressive. In 4th grade, 36% scored ‘proficient’ in Reading and 35% in Math. In 8th grade, 33% scored ‘proficient’ in Reading and 31% in Math. In another of her schools the respective numbers are 36%, 35% 33% and 31%.

 

“This same charter network has famously high turnover rates among teachers too. In the most recent report, 38% of teachers departed, meaning that 4 out of every 10 teachers left. In another school, 31% left. One thing that students in high-poverty schools need is continuity, which they apparently do not get in this network.

 

“Oh, by the way, the CEO who makes all that money also has her own car and driver, according to Ben Chapman of the Daily News.

 

“I am referring to Dr. Deborah Kenny, the founder of Harlem Village Academies, a network of just five schools and 1400 students. Somehow, I suspect she’s happy to have Eva Moskowitz taking all the flack in the media about harsh discipline and high turnover rates, because that means her network’s performance is not being scrutinized. It clearly should be.”

 

 

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Education Reform, Funding

Peter Greene: The Flawed Premises of Reform

By dianeravitch
March 1, 2016 //
22

Peter Greene here takes apart the fundamental ideas behind the reformers’ devotion to accountability and shows why it is not working and will never work.

He analyzes an article in the Washington Post by Checker Finn and Mike Petrilli, former and current CEO of the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, to explain the issue. Finn and Petrilli have written a somewhat triumphant analysis of the “success” of reform in the past decade. They are huge fans of Arne Duncan and Race to the Top. They think that Common Core was a great step forward. They admire the federally-funded tests for the Common Core, PARCC and SBAC. They are delighted that states have raised the passing marks on their tests so it is much harder for students to pass them. (Most states reported that a majority of students “failed” the first and even the second administration of the new tests. At this rate, most students will never get a high school diploma.)

They are delighted with the more rigorous standards and tests: We’ve been known for ages as education gadflies, and we still find plenty to fault when it comes to policy and practice in the United States. But let us be clear: Despite what you might hear from opt-outers and other critics, U.S. standards, tests and accountability systems are all dramatically stronger, fairer and more honest than they were a decade ago. You might even call it progress.

Needless to say, Peter Greene, a veteran teacher in Pennsylvania, does not see the situation in the same way. He finds one sentence by Finn and Petrilli that encapsulates the flawed premises of “reform”:

At the core of the good idea was the common-sense insight that if we want better and more equitable results from our education system, we should set clear expectations for student learning, measure whether our kids are meeting them and hold schools accountable for their outcomes, mainly gauged in terms of academic achievement.

Greene says that Common Core was the result of trying to “make expectations clear.” He writes:

“the way to make expectations clear is to make them specific, and before you know it, you have one-size-fits-all standards, and one-size-fits-all standards suck in the same way that making all US school students wear a one-size-fits-all uniform and eat one-size-fits-all food.

It is like saying that we can fix the divorce problem in this country by setting clear expectations for getting married and holding everyone to those expectations. Fordham sages tried to get around this with their “tight-loose” formulation, but they failed. Meanwhile, the standards themselves are amateur-hour constructions that take a definite side in arguments that experts don’t find at all as neatly settled as the standards assume (e.g. is reading a complex relationship between reader and text, or a set of skills and behaviors– the Core insists on the latter, but actual educators favor the former).

Can we really measure what our children are learning? Greene thinks not.

It really is as simple as that– we do not have a large-scale, standardized instrument that can measure all learning for all students in a standardized, one-size-measures-all manner. Instead of asking, “What’s the best way to measure critical thinking” test manufacturers have asked “What’s something we could do on a standardized mass-administered test that would pass for a critical thinking measure?”

Why not hold schools accountable for outcomes?

Greene writes:

“Outcomes” just means “test scores,” and that, again, is such a truncated, inadequate vision of the mission of US public schools. Ask a taxpayer, “What are you paying schools and teachers to do?” I doubt that you will hear the answer, “Why, just to have students get good test scores. That’s it. That’s what I’m paying them to do.”

And then Peter sums up and explains why “reformers” think that their approach is just “common sense”:

The notion that all of these things– the clear and specific standards being measured by a test leading to “accountability” measures taken against the schools that come up short– are common sense? Well, we have to call them “common sense” because we can’t call them “evidence based” or “scientifically proven” or even “sure seemed to work well over in Location X” because none of those things are true. They haven’t worked anywhere else, and now that we’ve been trying it for over a decade, we can see pretty clearly that they don’t work here, either.

The best we get from reformsters is a circular argument– “this tool is a valid measure and means of improvement, because when I measure the progress of this tool by using this tool, I see success.”

There are other unfounded assumptions underlying the reformster approach that depend on these other bad assumptions. For instance, the whole idea that the power of the free market can be unloosed to improve education rests on the idea that we can measure definitively which are the best schools producing the best students who are taught by the best teachers. But we can no more do that than we can list the hundred best marriages in America, or the hundred best friends.

They remain convinced that we must have one-size-fits-all standards so that we can measure all students against them so that we can compare all students and schools so that we can…. what? We still don’t have a real answer. It’s common sense. It’s something you just have to do, because not doing it clashes with reformsters beliefs about how the world is supposed to work. They literally do not understand how education works, and when they approach the world of education, they feel like OCD sufferers in a museum where all the paintings are hung crooked. They want to “fix” it, and they want to ask the people who work there, “How can you possibly function like this?” They can’t see that the paintings aren’t crooked at all.

The whole reformster approach is based on measuring a cloud with a meter stick, measuring the weather with a decibel meter, measuring love with a spoon.

Reformsters want to drive the school bus by setting a brick on the gas pedal and strapping the steering wheel into place, and every time the bus hits a tree, they say, “Oh, well, we just need a next-generation brick, and to fine-tune where we strap the steering wheel into place.” They will tweak and improve and re-tweak, and they will keep failing because their approach is fundamentally wrong.

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Common Core, Corporate Reformers, Education Industry, Privatization, Testing
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