Archives for the month of: May, 2016
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Did PARCC Take Down Your Tweet or Post?

By dianeravitch
May 19, 2016 //
39

Here is a list of the complaints filed by PARCC to take down statements on social media that PARCC claims are a violation of their copyright.

 

In some cases, they demanded the severing of links to posts they didn’t like. In others, they objected to descriptions of test passages. The passages are copyrighted, the descriptions are not.

 

There is a legal question about fair use: Under copyright law, it is legal to quote from copyright material if the quotation is short and relevant to public discussion. Whether this is applicable to standardized tests has not been determined.

 

From the point of view of what is reasonable, parents and teachers should know what their students have been asked by a testing corporation. How else can they learn from the tests if they don’t know their contents? The infamous “Pineapple” question of a few years back was revealed by leaks, not by disclosure. The item was so ludicrous that it became an embarrassment for Pearson. #pineapplegate became a media sensation, written up in every major newspaper, and parodied on the John Oliver show.

 

Without disclosure, Pineapple stories may proliferate, to the detriment of our students.

Categories Education Industry, Testing

Nevada: Judge Upholds Voucher Plan, Even Though State Constitution Bans Funding Religious Schools

By dianeravitch
May 19, 2016 //
33

Here is an exercise in creative and highly political decision making from the bench.

 

District Judge Eric Johnson upheld the state’s voucher plan and ruled that it does not violate the state constitution.

 

In an order dismissing a lawsuit challenging the legislation, District Judge Eric Johnson upheld the constitutionality of Senate Bill 302 as a program “neutral with respect to religion” because parents — not state actors — decide whether they will use an education savings account, or ESA, to pay for tuition at private and religiously affiliated schools.

 

Johnson also ruled a provision in the Nevada Constitution that charges state lawmakers with encouraging education “by all suitable means” permits the ESA program in addition to the public school system.

 

SB 302, passed in the 2015 Nevada Legislature, offers parents about $5,100 in per-pupil state funds to spend on private school tuition, home school expenses and other educational services if they pull their children out of a public school.

 

“The state has no influence or control over how any parent makes his or her genuine and independent choice to spend his or her ESA funds,” Johnson wrote in his decision.

 

“Parents, if they choose to use the ESA program, must expend the ESA funds for secular education goods and services, even if they choose to obtain those services from religion affiliated schools,” he added.

 

His ruling does not guarantee parents immediate access to the ESA program because a Carson City judge in January issued an injunction against its implementation in a separate case challenging SB 302.

 

Most of the money allocated to the Education Savings Account program will be spent in religious schools. But, not to worry, the instruction in religious schools will be secular, not sectarian. Got it?

 

Let’s see what the Nevada state constitution says.

 

Article 11 of the Nevada constitution declares:

 

Sec: 9.  Sectarian instruction prohibited in common schools and university.  No sectarian instruction shall be imparted or tolerated in any school or University that may be established under this Constitution.

 

Section Ten.  No public money to be used for sectarian purposes.  No public funds of any kind or character whatever, State, County or Municipal, shall be used for sectarian purpose.
[Added in 1880. Proposed and passed by the 1877 legislature; agreed to and passed by the 1879 legislature; and approved and ratified by the people at the 1880 general election. See: Statutes of Nevada 1877, p. 221; Statutes of Nevada 1879, p. 149.]

 

Do you see any ambiguity here? Do you see a constitutional clause that is permissive? Is the phrase “No public money to be used for sectarian purposes” ambiguous?

 

You be the judge.

 

 

 

Categories Nevada, Vouchers

New York: State’s Top Education Officials Announce Short-Sighted Plans to Address Teacher Shortage

By dianeravitch
May 19, 2016 //
18

The New York State Commissioner of Education MaryEllen Elia and the President of the State University of New York Nancy Zimpher announced a plan to recruit more teachers. The teacher educators at SUNY immediately blasted the proposal.m as deeply flawed.

 

The elements of the plan are not especially original. Recruit more teachers of color. Internships in schools. Career ladder. Etc.

 

The problem with the plan is that it does not address the root causes of the teacher shortage. The root causes are state and federal policies that discourage and demoralize teachers.

 

Nothing was said about eliminating the edTPA or making it optional; the test has a disparate impact on teachers of color and is opposed by many who prepare teachers.

 

Nothing is said about the other tests for future teachers that have a disparate impact on teachers of color.

 

Nothing is said about the state’s teacher evaluation system, based on test scores, which is unreliable, unstable, and invalid. In the case of Sheri Lederman, decided recently, the judge tossed out her evaluation because of its inaccuracy. Many teachers are leaving the profession because of this system.

 

Nothing is said about the nonstop testing and test prep that demoralizes teachers and wastes instructional time.

 

Elia and Zimpher are trying to fix a major problem while ignoring the root causes. That won’t work.

 

The union that represents the faculty and staff of SUNY released the following statement:

 
“A report by SUNY’s TeachNY Advisory Council on teacher education is flawed, incomplete and fails to tap the experience of SUNY education professionals who teach and mentor future teachers across the state, according to United University Professions President Frederick E. Kowal, Ph.D.

 

“The report, heralded by SUNY as a “historic partnership” between SUNY and the State Education Department, glosses over glaring problems with the state’s teacher certification exams and their impact on teacher shortages and the lack of diversity in teacher ed programs. The study ignores recent changes implemented by the state Board of Regents and inappropriately cites reform groups such as the National Council on Teacher Quality as experts.

 

“Some of the report’s recommendations directly conflict with actual experiences of SUNY teacher educators. Also missing: mentions of outstanding practices and new teacher ed developments already underway in the field.

 

“TeachNY is a smoke screen that bolsters the failed policy of former Commissioner John King, which SUNY Chancellor Nancy Zimpher appears to endorse,” said Kowal. “It is insulting to SUNY’s teacher education faculty and staff, and seriously out of touch with the widespread rejection of the top-down reform agenda that has undermined the work of educators and their students.

 

“This report is pretentious and overreaches in an attempt to design standards for a profession that is highly regulated,” Kowal continued. “This report is one more misguided critique that is disconnected from reality.”
“Kowal said that UUP and NYSUT attempted to work with SUNY on the report, but pulled away when teacher education professionals were given no real voice in vetting the council’s recommendations. The report’s findings lack a “full range of input” from council meetings, he said.

 

“In March 29 and May 6 letters to Chancellor Zimpher, Kowal and NYSUT President Karen E. Magee requested that UUP and NYSUT be removed from the report.
“We cannot and will not endorse a report that is so flawed and one-sided, yet purports to be a legitimate collaboration between SUNY leadership and teacher educators,” said Kowal. “As written, this study goes out of its way to avoid the professional expertise and actual experiences of teacher educators, while thwarting attempts by our members to address real issues that need fixing.”
“UUPs’ many concerns with the study include:
A failure to acknowledge recent Board of Regents actions to extend teacher certification exam safety nets for the third year in a row and the need to address problems that led to the extensions;
Problems with SUNY’s promotion of a 3.0 GPA admission requirement for undergraduate and graduate teacher ed programs, and failure to analyze the potential barrier this requirement creates for underrepresented and disadvantaged students who have the potential to develop and excel with appropriate mentoring and support;
A failure to discuss problems with the state’s flawed teacher certification process and how the process has impacted declining teacher ed program enrollments;
The lack of focus on diversity in the teaching force and the need to recruit underrepresented groups into the teaching profession;
Legitimizing reform groups such as the NCTQ by citing them as experts when they command little respect among education professionals;
Supporting Simulating Teaching as a way to expand clinical experiences for student teachers even though there is no research to back the program’s effectiveness, while neglecting to analyze current obstacles to expansion of actual clinical experiences;
Accepting the state’s flawed Annual Professional Performance Review system without regard to recent Board of Regents implementation changes; and
Advocating for expansion of private alternatives to public education, a complex subject that requires far more extensive analysis than the TeachNY study.

 
“Hopefully, the chancellor will see the error of her ways and we can work together to produce a viable, workable report that takes a 360-degree view of this important issue,” Kowal said.”

 

 

 

 

Categories Accountability, New York, Teacher Education, Teacher Evaluations, Teacher Shortage

Video: How Charter Schools Hurt Public Schools

By dianeravitch
May 19, 2016 //
22

Do you have 3 minutes towatch a video?

 

Watch this graphic video and share it with your friends when they ask you what a charter is.

 

It explains in clear visuals how charters operate and how they hurt public schools by draining away the students chosen by the charter and the resources that previously funded the community’s public school.

 

The he video was commissioned by the Network for Public Education. Help it go viral. Share it. Tweet it. Put it on Facebook.

Categories Budget Cuts, Charter Schools, Class size, Corporate Reform, Education Industry, Funding

New Study: How Charter Schools Affect Public Schools

By dianeravitch
May 19, 2016 //
39

As the charter industry grows, many observers have wondered how their expansion affects the public schools in the same district. A new study published by the National Center for the Study of Privatization in Education at Teachers College, Columbia University, addresses that question.

 

Policymakers have assumed that the charter sector would provide healthy competition for district public schools. The promise originally was that they would spur innovation and efficiency, and at the same time would be accountable for results. We know from the example of Milwaukee, which has had charters and vouchers for 25 years, that none of these promises were true. Nonetheless, the claims still are repeated and all too often believed by a gullible media and public, which seldom if ever hears critical views.

 

The present study should be distributed to every news outlet, so they understand the collateral damage that charters inflict on public schools.

 

“Little scholarship has been devoted to the impact of charter schools on, one, how much revenue school districts collect through local property taxes and, two, how school districts budget that revenue.

 
“With “The Effect of Charter Competition on Unionized District Revenues and Resource Allocation,” Jason B. Cook fills this void. Cook, a doctoral student in economics at Cornell University, focuses on Ohio, home to a high concentration of both online and brick-and-mortar charter schools, and examines school budget data in the state from 1982 through 2013. In addition to confirming in detail that charter competition has reduced federal, state, and local support for district schools, Cook finds that charter competition has driven down local funding by depressing valuations of residential property and has led school districts to redirect revenue from instructional expenditures (in particular, teacher salaries) to facility improvements. Cook complements these two important findings with thorough explanations.”

 

 

 

 

 

Categories Accountability, Budget Cuts, Charter Schools, Education Reform, Funding, Ohio, Teacher Pay

Peter Greene: Erie, PA, Considers Closing All Its High Schools

By dianeravitch
May 18, 2016 //
34

Peter Greene reports on the latest terrible news from Pennsylvania. Because of the highly inequitable funding formula for the state, because of the legislature’s inability to pass a budget for almost a year, because of the burgeoning charter movement, school districts across the state are in dire condition.

 

Erie is considering closing all its high schools and sending its students to other districts. The decision may be made today. Peter predicts that the end result of this crisis could be the end of public education, as the free-market mania consumes everything in its path:

 

The district is looking at a $4.3 million gap, and like many districts in PA, it has no possible response except to cut, “including eliminating sports, extracurricular activities, art and music programs, district libraries, and the district’s police department.” Plus cutting various administrative positions out the wazoo.

 

 

PA Auditor General Eugene DePasquale has taken a look at Erie finances and determined that the crappy state funding formula and the loss of money to charters are a huge part of the problem. DePasquale has actually been saying this a great deal, all over the state, because from Erie to Philadelphia, bad funding and a terrible charter law are guttting school finance.

 

 

It is, of course, the same death spiral visible across the country. If Erie does hang in there, how well can the public schools compete with the charters if the public schools must cut all sorts of services? This is one of the most baloney-stuffed parts of the Free Market Competition Mantra– competition will spur Erie schools to become greater and more competitive by stripping them of the resources they need just to function. Is that how it’s supposed to work?

 

 

No, this is how charter eat public schools from the inside out, like free market tapeworms. The more the eat, the weaker public schools become, and the weaker public schools become, the more charters can attack them and eat more….

 

Particularly in the long term, closing down the high schools and farming out the students qualifies as a viable solution. It also qualifies as a breakdown of the public education system. If the schools shut down (a process that would take over a year), what happens to the students? While there would be public and charter schools that could, maybe, take those students, there’s no guarantee that there would be enough capacity to absorb those students and more importantly, none of those schools would have an obligation to absorb the Erie students (and Erie’s only remaining obligation would be to pay tuition– it would actually be to their benefit if a student is not placed anywhere). Whether the student is expensive to teach or a behavior problem or can’t get transportation or the receiving schools are just out of desks and don’t want to hurt their own programs through overcrowding, there will be students that nobody takes responsibility for….

 

The bulldozing of public schools in order to make room for the free market presumes that the free market has the chops to absorb what the public system turns loose. What if we burn down the public school to make room for a shiny charter, and all we end up with is a vacant lot? The biggest danger of a botched conversion to a charter choice system is not that we’d end up with a bad charter choice system, but that a city could end up with no system at all.

 

 

Categories Budget Cuts, Pennsylvania, Privatization, School Choice

The Latest News from the Privatization Sector

By dianeravitch
May 18, 2016 //
18

Politico reports on the latest news from school choice advocates:

 

 

 

STUDIES OF SCHOOL CHOICE: Two advocacy groups are out with papers today expounding on the benefits of school choice. The Friedman Foundation for Educational Choice says in its effort that more than a dozen empirical studies have found that school choice improves student outcomes. And nine out of 10 studies say school choice can improve racial segregation, moving students from more segregated schools into less segregated ones. The report: http://bit.ly/1TiRZzn. The conservative American Legislative Exchange Council is introducing three tools – peer reviews, branding and consumer reports – that parents can use to optimize education savings accounts. The paper: http://bit.ly/1TeOVcP.

 

 

Don’t expect to learn from either the Friedman Foundation (so-named for libertarian economist Milton Friedman, a voucher advocate) or ALEC (the far-right corporate-funded group that promotes deregulation of every government function) to say anything about Milwaukee. Milwaukee has had vouchers and charters for 25 years. There is no evidence that the children of Milwaukee have benefited by their choices. Despite the failure of choice to improve education, Governor Scott Walker wants to expand school choice and eliminate public schools altogether. The irony is that the students in public schools repeatedly have outperformed the students in choice schools, even though the public schools have a disproportionate share of students with disabilities and others that are not chosen by the choice schools. Chances are that Walker and the legislature will keep some public schools to use as a dumping ground for the students unwanted by the charters and voucher schools.

 

 

– On a related note: The National Alliance for Public Charter Schools and The Eli and Edythe Broad Foundation named the finalists for the 2016 Broad Prize for Public Charter Schools today: Success Academy in New York and IDEA Public Schools and YES Prep Public Schools in Texas. The $250,000 award will be given to the best-performing charter management organization on June 27 at the National Charter Schools Conference in Nashville, Tenn.

 

 

Isn’t that great news? I am rooting for Eva and Success Academy charters. If she wins, she can use the money to buy a four-year supply of beanies or T-shirts for future political rallies. The $250,000 won’t be enough to pay for both. Or she can hire a private investigator to track down the high-level official inside her organization who leaked important documents to the media, including the internal report that alleged cheating, teacher churn, and central staff turnover.

 

The spending included $71,900 for the beanies and $62,795 for the T-shirts, according to receipts submitted to Success’s board of directors.

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Corporate Reformers, Harlem Success Academy, Milwaukee, Privatization, School Choice, Vouchers, Walker, Scott

Andy Hargreaves: Why England’s Schools are in Trouble

By dianeravitch
May 18, 2016 //
9

Andy Hargreaves, Professor at Boston College and recipient of many honors, including the Grawemeyer Award, writes here about the problems of English schools, which he attributes to its reckless pursuit of free-market policies, akin to those now dominant in the U.S. In this article, which appeared in the Times Education Supplement (U.K.), Hargreaves blames the free-market  strategy of “reform,” which demoralizes teachers and damages the profession.

 

He writes:

 

Britain has a teacher recruitment crisis. But it is not truly British. The complaint is much more spectacular in England. In Scotland, teaching is an attractive profession and while recruitment levels are disappointing, the issue is not as profound. The Scottish system is creaking; the English system has fallen over. What explains the difference?

 

 

The answer is simple. Scotland values a strong state educational system run by 32 local authorities that is staffed by well-trained and highly valued professionals who stay and grow in a secure and rewarding job. Teachers serve others, for most or all of their working life, in a cooperative profession that supports them to do this to the best of their abilities.

 

 

England no longer values these things. About half of its schools are now outside local authority control. England offers a business capital model that invests in education to yield short-term profits and keep down costs through shorter training, weakened security and tenure, and keeping salaries low by letting people go before they cost too much.

 

 

By comparison, Scotland models what is called professional capital: bringing in skilled as well as smart people; training them rigorously in university settings connected to practical environments; giving them time and support to collaborate on curriculum and other matters; and paying them to develop their leadership and their careers so that they can make effective decisions together and deliver better outcomes for young people.

 

 

In December, the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) published its review of Scotland’s Curriculum for Excellence. I was one of four people on the review team. Like any system, Scotland’s isn’t perfect. But there is a strong foundation to build on – with a priority placed on valuing and developing teachers’ professional judgment.

 

 

The defenders of the status quo of market reform claim that teachers are overpaid; that they don’t improve over time; and that collaboration is over-rated.

 

All of this sounds very familiar to Americans. We have heard the same buzzwords of efficiency and outcomes and metrics used to demean the teaching profession, and now we are surprised when experienced teachers leave and new teachers do not appear to take their place. Perhaps this is the intended effect, because the manufactured teacher shortage creates market opportunities for vendors of technology to replace the missing classroom teachers.

 

 

 

 

 

When first minister Nicola Sturgeon opened the International Congress for School Effectiveness and Improvement in Glasgow in January, she underlined the importance of the “professional judgment” of teachers. From Glasgow to Stornoway, teachers told our team that teaching today had been like a “breath of fresh air”, which replaced a system of “counting minutes and percentages” that had offered “no room for movement”.

 

 

While Scotland is in the vanguard of global educational improvement, England is in the guard’s van, at the back. Worldwide, England’s business capital view is now on the run. The evidence of high-performing nations such as Canada, Singapore and Finland hasn’t been on its side, and countries like Sweden that followed the free-school business model, and saw their results collapse, are reversing course.

Categories Education Reform, International, Teacher Shortage, Teachers, Testing

Militant Union Leader Re-Elected in Massachusetts

By dianeravitch
May 18, 2016 //
8

Barbara Madeloni, the firebrand insurgent who won the presidency of the Massachusetts Teachers Association, was re-elected last week on a platform of fighting high-stakes testing and charters.

 

Madeloni first rose to prominence in 2012 when she fought the EdTPA, the Pearson test required for certification. She refused to administer it to her students and lost her job (she later regained it, then took an unpaid leave, then lost it again, but may be rehire again, or maybe not.)

 

At that time, she said about teacher certification:

 

““This is something complex and we don’t like seeing it taken out of human hands,” said Barbara Madeloni, who runs the university’s high school teacher training program. “We are putting a stick in the gears.”

 

Last week, the MTA filed an amicus brief as part of a lawsuit to stop the legislature from lifting the cap on charter expansion.

 

Charter advocates filed a lawsuit last year claiming that the state’s cap on charter schools violates the civil rights of students who could then not have an opportunity to attend a charter. The state attorney general, Maura Healey, filed a motion to dismiss and the Massachusetts Teachers Association just filed an amicus brief in support of the AG’s motion to dismiss. The MTA brief confronts the lie behind the charter advocates’ ‘civil rights’ argument.

 

For her fight for public schools, students, teachers, education, and democracy, I am glad to place Barbara Madeloni on the honor roll.

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Education Industry, Honor Roll, Massachusetts, Privatization, Resistance, Standardized Testing, Support for public schools, Teacher Education, Teachers and Teaching, Unions

Mercedes Schneider: EdWeek Dredges Up 7-Month-Old Study of PARCC to Prove Its “Validity”

By dianeravitch
May 18, 2016 //
16

Mercedes Schneider noticed that Education Week published an article about a study that was released in October 2015. The study claimed that the PARCC test predicted success in college. Our new not-best friend Laura Slover, the CEO of PARCC, tweeted that the study demonstrated the sucess of the PARCC test at showing who was prepared for college.

 

Except, Mercedes says, it doesn’t and it didn’t.  She points out that the participants in the study were already enrolled in college, so the tests predicted nothing about their college readiness.

 

She writes:

 

Moreover, even though there exists no study concerning the predictive validity of PARCC, some states have bypassed this astounding fact to make passing PARCC a graduation requirement. (There is a lawsuit over PARCC as a graduation requirement in New Jersey, where SAT and ACT are currently acceptable options. Maryland also uses PARCC as a graduation requirement “for students enrolled in PARCC-aligned courses.” Rhode Island is facing using PARCC as a 2017 graduation requirement, though the commissioner of education does not seem to want to do so.)

 

A PARCC spokeswoman said that the consortium plans to conduct a longitudinal study in the next two years.

 

Mercedes responds:

 

High-stakes sale first, then validation research in the years to follow.

 

 

Categories Common Core, Education Industry, Testing
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