This is a stunning, and yet completely predictable, story: The state of Massachusetts took charge of four schools with very low test scores (so-called “failing schools”).
It handed them over to turn-around corporations. So far, turmoil, disruption, and failure. Will anyone be held accountable? Has any state ever taken over a low-scoring school and “turned it around” successfully?
Here is what happened, as reported in the Boston Globe:
The Dever Elementary School in Dorchester has cycled through five principals over the past two school years and is seeking another one. Discipline is a constant problem. Some teachers are fleeing, and many students don’t show up. Most who do perform poorly.
This is not what was supposed to unfold when the state stepped in and took over the school in 2014. Education Commissioner Mitchell Chester had spoken boldly about the need for aggressive change, calling the Dever’s low performance “an injustice” while adding, “I know we can do better.’’
The promised turnaround has not happened — at least not yet — and the troubling picture raises questions about whether state education agencies can do a better job than local districts in lifting up schools stubbornly stuck at the bottom. In the Dever’s case, the state recruited as a receiver a local nonprofit, the Blueprint Schools Network, that had never run a school….
Imagine that! Giving a struggling school to a company that had never run a school. That makes sense (not).
The state education department has paid $1.3 million so far to Blueprint in management fees. In addition, the Boston school system funds Dever’s operating budget, which was $4.6 million this year. The school also received $585,000 in state and federal grants this year.
Blueprint took on a big job two years ago when it stepped inside the Dever, tucked between the University of Massachusetts Boston and a mixed-income housing development. The school had been struggling for more than a decade with low MCAS scores. Nearly 70 percent of students live in homes receiving welfare benefits and almost half lack fluency in English.
Blueprint immediately made waves by asking teachers and staff to reapply for their jobs and dismantling a popular dual-language program, prompting many middle-class families to leave. Only two teachers out of 47 stuck around….
Blueprint’s philosophy is based on five principles that Harvard economist Roland Fryer Jr. identified in researching New York charter school success: excellence in leadership and instruction; daily tutoring; increased instructional time; setting high expectations; and using data to improve instruction.
Fryer served as Blueprint’s president for a short time when it was founded in 2010, and last year Governor Charlie Baker appointed him to the state Board of Elementary and Secondary Education….
The current principal–the fifth–lives in Florida. The company pays for her housing and for travel.
Connie Helton, who lives in Florida, is serving as interim principal. In an unusual move, Blueprint is paying her rent at a nearby apartment, totalling $10,000 so far, even though the principal’s job pays $140,000 annually. No other principal in the Boston Public Schools receives a housing allowance.
Blueprint also paid for two trips that Helton made to Florida to visit her family, costing less than $1,000.
Spengler said Helton was best suited to step in because she had been working with the Dever for Blueprint. He said a new leader should be selected soon.
“We know finding a leader is critical to long-term success,” said Spengler, adding, “I can’t say enough about the teachers who have taken this on every day. They are incredibly mission driven, and they are incredibly committed to those students.’’
But many of the teachers Blueprint brought in are leaving, too. Last year, 16 teachers departed, including four let go for performance issues and another four whose positions were cut. More plan to leave this year. Blueprint said it won’t have final numbers until this summer.
Several teachers, who declined to be identified because they were not authorized to speak, described a school skidding off course. Although Blueprint has adopted an online platform to track student behavior, discipline continues to be a problem.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Failing schools don’t get any better but handing the reigns over to a private organization accomplishes two amazing things that could not happen if it remained a public school:
1. charter management organizations and their CEOs and favorite employees get very, very rich.
2. teachers and other employees who were previously paid a middle class wage with good benefits get replaced with lower paid teachers
The reformers truly believe that as long as a few people can get very rich and as long as those greedy teachers can be pushed out so that America has even fewer middle class jobs, they are doing good!
Copied and pasted from my comment on the post: Russ on Reading, June 21, 2016 at 12:57 pm
Here is a quite egregious story of what has happened at a Boston elementary school which was placed into receivership by the MA DESE:
http://www.bostonglobe.com/metro/2016/06/20/can-state-receivership-save-failing-boston-school/kTrOSrEsvoDiTBDECRP76M/story.html#comments
All the pitfalls of handing off the responsibility of educating our most vulnerable students are here:
The entity charged with the turnaround had NEVER lead a school previously.
They’ve churned through 5 principals in two years – the present principal has her Boston rent paid for and the network has been flying her back and forth from her Florida home. She was chosen because of her experience in Denver (???!!!).
All teachers and staff had to reapply for their jobs, with new (uncompensated) responsibilities including a longer day – of 47 teachers, only 2 returned under the new regime – as a charter managed operation, they can and have hired non-certified “teachers”. According to state date, only 12 of the 50 teachers are older than 40, indicating few long term experienced staff.
The children who attend this zoned public school, run by a charter management organization, are some of our city’s poorest, coming from homes of generational poverty. 56% do not speak English at home. 18% have IEP’s. Nearly all are black or brown. The state labels 86.7% of them as high needs.
Teachers lack basic supplies, yet:
“Blueprint bought 650 Chromebooks, at a cost of $176,000, but teachers say the school’s network keeps crashing. Meanwhile, teachers say the school is running short on basic supplies, prompting them to raise hundreds of dollars on the Web to buy boxes of paper.”
Those readers who remember the kindergarten suspension debacle at the Holland UP Academy, in which 68 of 117 kindergarteners were suspended last school year, will not be surprised to find out that this is the same outfit.
And Roland “Two-Tier” Fryer is involved:
“Blueprint’s philosophy is based on five principles that Harvard economist Roland Fryer Jr. identified in researching New York charter school success: excellence in leadership and instruction; daily tutoring; increased instructional time; setting high expectations; and using data to improve instruction.
Fryer served as Blueprint’s president for a short time when it was founded in 2010, and last year Governor Charlie Baker appointed him to the state Board of Elementary and Secondary Education.”
Read this article in the context of the pro-charter reporter James Vaznis of the pro-charter Boston Globe, who constantly criticize the hard work teachers do every day to gain some insight into how bad things must really be. Read this article and weep for the most vulnerable children our public schools serve. Read and understand that the one opportunity these young vibrant children have at being educated by dedicated, knowledgable professional teachers and leadership invested in the community has been squandered by a political agenda. Read it and rage.
Christine,
You beat me to it!
Thanks for the link!
Diane
But he added, “Our mission is to change life outcomes [for students] by dramatically changing schools for the better.”
Insisting that a bunch of teachers re-apply for their jobs (firing them) is pretty dramatic and the ‘receivership’ has indeed changed life outcomes, but I don’t know if these kinds of actions have made the school better.
Sometimes my soup just needs salt. Then, it’s better.
Also, I noticed the ‘tutors’ in the article photo have A’s on their shirt sleeves. I have one on mine right now as well because I am an AmeriCorps volunteer and I am assuming they are as well. I would say that most of us (as AmeriCorps volunteers) are well-intentioned, but not at all qualified for the demands of that kind of situation… many TFAers are also AmeriCorps volunteers. I do wish to add, however, that I am also an experienced, certified teacher. IF I were to take on that kind of ‘tutoring’ position in a school such as this and IF I were successful, it would be because of my education and experience as a teacher, not because of my minimal training and good intentions as a national community service volunteer.
All they had to do was look at the string of failures in this fool’s errand approach:
Roosevelt Long Island, NY
Jersey City, NJ
Paterson, NJ
Camden, NJ
Newark, NJ
The solutions to improving “academic outcomes” in cities like these have nothing to do with standards, curricula, scope and sequence, pedagogy, programs, or teachers. The solutions are beyond the will of every hypocritical politician who ever said otherwise.
Must add Denver to the list of blueprint failures. I believe Denver was the second district after Houston to contract with them, this is spite of the failing data already on the books from Houston. When Dr. freyer appeared at a Dps board meeting in The fall of 2013, he admitted getting reading scores up was much more difficult than math scores. But we in Denver have witnessed failure in both academic subjects with Blueprint tutors. As for there leadership tenet, look no further than a kdvr.com February 25, 2015 story to see the high moral principles for their principals: grade changing excused and encouraged by the Blueprint mentor!
This is not surprising. Blueprint’s board includes the controversial free market blogger and author, Steven Levitt, who described Fryer as like a brother. Levitt posted “Levitt and Fryer Go Ghetto”, which reader comments indicated, was found to be offensive. Freakonomics, known for bizarre correlations presented, as if, they prove points, has multiple critics, as did Levitt’s global warming opinion. A blog post, describing MIT research about Medicaid and poor pregnant women was cited w/o questions regarding potential relevant contributing factors. The blog’s post, to bring attention to the alarmist pension paper of Joshua Rauh, was expected.
Pensions were the attack, target du jour, at the time
Pete Seeger’s lyrics come to mind:
Oh, when will they ever learn?
Oh, when will they ever learn?
Schools will not “turn around” nor will improvements be sustained by external “take-overs.”
Students will not become more successful in a sustainable way without making the conditions of the lives more humane.
Instead, we need to invest and trust.
Click to access The-Better-Way-to-Improve-Education.pdf
“Blueprint for failure”
A Blueprint for failure
That’s all that it is
There’s nothing to hail here
Cuz failure’s their biz
And next door in RI, more teachers caught disparaging students and teachers
http://www.valleybreeze.com/2016-06-21/cumberland-lincoln-area/teachers-suspended-after-making-nasty-comments-about-their#.V2mxSzVe-aq
They don’t have money for teachers, but they are paying RENT for out of state administrators? Why’d they need out of state administrators – no one in state was qualified? This is some scary stuff, that, likely, will be followed in other towns, other states, as the newest, bestest, reform.
Hi Diane I’m a teacher from a rural public school (low socio economic area) in Country Victoria, Australia. I have read some of your books and followed this blog for while now. The blog has been amazing in that it has directed me to other research etc. I find sometimes I am just over whelmed with so much information. Public education is also under attack here in Australia and I feel we are headed in the same direction that the US went down some 15 years ago. I’m not sure if you have heard of JOHN HATTIE, an educational researcher working out of Melbourne University, he was the main advisor in a film called “Revolution School” that screened recently here. It basically showed how the the school went from a LOW performing one to a HIGH performing one (based mainly on better results and better attendance). Hattie’s main reason for the school turn around was the improvement in TEACHER QUALITY. On reading the post below I can’t help feel that the 5 principles Fryer identified as success for charter schools (Excellence in leadership, daily tutoring, increased instructional time, setting high expectations and using data to improve instruction) is also what the film promotes. It all sounds great but I know it isn’t. Can you please give some insight into what’s WRONG.
Regards Peter O’Brien From: Diane Ravitchs blog <comment-reply@wordpress.com> Reply-To: Diane Ravitch’s blog <comment+p6kq961q12jbh280_m030qho@comment.wordpress.com> Date: Wednesday, June 22, 2016 at 4:02 AM To: Peter O’Brien <obrien.peter.m@edumail.vic.gov.au> Subject: [New post] Boston Globe: The Failure of State Takeover in Massachusetts
dianeravitch posted: “This is a stunning, and yet completely predictable, story: The state of Massachusetts took charge of four schools with very low test scores (so-called “failing schools”). It handed them over to turn-around corporations. So far, turmoil, disruption, and f”
sprouty2,
Not Diane, but Duane here! To answer your question: Formulate your own insights by reading as much as you can. Do not depend on others for those insights. The others can provide the facts, information and even opinions but you’re the one who has to develop your own insights.
For a starter, look to one of your countrymen, Noel Wilson. Read the two works cited below. It will help clarify that what we are focusing on is the wrong thing. And as Russ Ackhoff states, “when you do the wrong thing righter you get wronger”. So that identifying the correct problem is the starting point. Again see Wilson’s work:
From ” A Little Less than Valid. . .”:
“To the extent that these categorisations are accurate or valid at an individual level, these decisions may be both ethically acceptable to the decision makers, and rationally and emotionally acceptable to the test takers and their advocates. They accept the judgments of their society regarding their mental or emotional capabilities. But to the extent that such categorisations are invalid, they must be deemed unacceptable to all concerned.
Further, to the extent that this invalidity is hidden or denied, they are all involved in a culture of symbolic violence. This is violence related to the meaning of the categorisation event where, firstly, the real source of violation, the state or educational institution that controls the meanings of the categorisations, are disguised, and the authority appears to come from another source, in this case from professional opinion backed by scientific research. If you do not believe this, then consider that no matter how high the status of an educator, his voice is unheard unless he belongs to the relevant institution.
And finally a symbolically violent event is one in which what is manifestly unjust is asserted to be fair and just. In the case of testing, where massive errors and thus miscategorisations are suppressed, scores and categorisations are given with no hint of their large invalidity components. It is significant that in the chapter on Rights and responsibilities of test users, considerable attention is given to the responsibility of the test taker not to cheat. Fair enough. But where is the balancing responsibility of the test user not to cheat, not to pretend that a test event has accuracy vastly exceeding technical or social reality? Indeed where is the indication to the test taker of any inaccuracy at all, except possibly arithmetic additions?”
A Little Less than Valid: An Essay Review
Click to access v10n5.pdf
“Educational Standards and the Problem of Error” found at: http://epaa.asu.edu/ojs/article/view/577/700
Brief outline of Wilson’s “Educational Standards and the Problem of Error” and some comments of mine.
1. A description of a quality can only be partially quantified. Quantity is almost always a very small aspect of quality. It is illogical to judge/assess a whole category only by a part of the whole. The assessment is, by definition, lacking in the sense that “assessments are always of multidimensional qualities. To quantify them as unidimensional quantities (numbers or grades) is to perpetuate a fundamental logical error” (per Wilson). The teaching and learning process falls in the logical realm of aesthetics/qualities of human interactions. In attempting to quantify educational standards and standardized testing the descriptive information about said interactions is inadequate, insufficient and inferior to the point of invalidity and unacceptability.
2. A major epistemological mistake is that we attach, with great importance, the “score” of the student, not only onto the student but also, by extension, the teacher, school and district. Any description of a testing event is only a description of an interaction, that of the student and the testing device at a given time and place. The only correct logical thing that we can attempt to do is to describe that interaction (how accurately or not is a whole other story). That description cannot, by logical thought, be “assigned/attached” to the student as it cannot be a description of the student but the interaction. And this error is probably one of the most egregious “errors” that occur with standardized testing (and even the “grading” of students by a teacher).
3. Wilson identifies four “frames of reference” each with distinct assumptions (epistemological basis) about the assessment process from which the “assessor” views the interactions of the teaching and learning process: the Judge (think college professor who “knows” the students capabilities and grades them accordingly), the General Frame-think standardized testing that claims to have a “scientific” basis, the Specific Frame-think of learning by objective like computer based learning, getting a correct answer before moving on to the next screen, and the Responsive Frame-think of an apprenticeship in a trade or a medical residency program where the learner interacts with the “teacher” with constant feedback. Each category has its own sources of error and more error in the process is caused when the assessor confuses and conflates the categories.
4. Wilson elucidates the notion of “error”: “Error is predicated on a notion of perfection; to allocate error is to imply what is without error; to know error it is necessary to determine what is true. And what is true is determined by what we define as true, theoretically by the assumptions of our epistemology, practically by the events and non-events, the discourses and silences, the world of surfaces and their interactions and interpretations; in short, the practices that permeate the field. . . Error is the uncertainty dimension of the statement; error is the band within which chaos reigns, in which anything can happen. Error comprises all of those eventful circumstances which make the assessment statement less than perfectly precise, the measure less than perfectly accurate, the rank order less than perfectly stable, the standard and its measurement less than absolute, and the communication of its truth less than impeccable.”
In other words all the logical errors involved in the process render any conclusions invalid.
5. The test makers/psychometricians, through all sorts of mathematical machinations attempt to “prove” that these tests (based on standards) are valid-errorless or supposedly at least with minimal error [they aren’t]. Wilson turns the concept of validity on its head and focuses on just how invalid the machinations and the test and results are. He is an advocate for the test taker not the test maker. In doing so he identifies thirteen sources of “error”, any one of which renders the test making/giving/disseminating of results invalid. And a basic logical premise is that once something is shown to be invalid it is just that, invalid, and no amount of “fudging” by the psychometricians/test makers can alleviate that invalidity.
6. Having shown the invalidity, and therefore the unreliability, of the whole process Wilson concludes, rightly so, that any result/information gleaned from the process is “vain and illusory”. In other words start with an invalidity, end with an invalidity (except by sheer chance every once in a while, like a blind and anosmic squirrel who finds the occasional acorn, a result may be “true”) or to put in more mundane terms crap in-crap out.
7. And so what does this all mean? I’ll let Wilson have the second to last word: “So what does a test measure in our world? It measures what the person with the power to pay for the test says it measures. And the person who sets the test will name the test what the person who pays for the test wants the test to be named.”
In other words it attempts to measure “’something’ and we can specify some of the ‘errors’ in that ‘something’ but still don’t know [precisely] what the ‘something’ is.” The whole process harms many students as the social rewards for some are not available to others who “don’t make the grade (sic)” Should American public education have the function of sorting and separating students so that some may receive greater benefits than others, especially considering that the sorting and separating devices, educational standards and standardized testing, are so flawed not only in concept but in execution?
My answer is NO!!!!!
One final note with Wilson channeling Foucault and his concept of subjectivization:
“So the mark [grade/test score] becomes part of the story about yourself and with sufficient repetitions becomes true: true because those who know, those in authority, say it is true; true because the society in which you live legitimates this authority; true because your cultural habitus makes it difficult for you to perceive, conceive and integrate those aspects of your experience that contradict the story; true because in acting out your story, which now includes the mark and its meaning, the social truth that created it is confirmed; true because if your mark is high you are consistently rewarded, so that your voice becomes a voice of authority in the power-knowledge discourses that reproduce the structure that helped to produce you; true because if your mark is low your voice becomes muted and confirms your lower position in the social hierarchy; true finally because that success or failure confirms that mark that implicitly predicted the now self-evident consequences. And so the circle is complete.”
In other words students “internalize” what those “marks” (grades/test scores) mean, and since the vast majority of the students have not developed the mental skills to counteract what the “authorities” say, they accept as “natural and normal” that “story/description” of them. Although paradoxical in a sense, the “I’m an “A” student” is almost as harmful as “I’m an ‘F’ student” in hindering students becoming independent, critical and free thinkers. And having independent, critical and free thinkers is a threat to the current socio-economic structure of society.
Why on earth would anyone assume an economist would be able to add anything of value to public education? The economists who have pushed their way in have all been disastrous failures, more interested in proving Friedman’s harebrained theories true than in educating children.
Economics is not a profession. It has no code of ethics, not even, “first, do no harm.” Many economists are paid gunslingers. Many are ideologues. And, many have serious conflicts of interest.
From the Globe article:
“The school had been struggling for more than a decade with low MCAS scores. Nearly 70 percent of students live in homes receiving welfare benefits and almost half lack fluency in English.”
The two could not be related could they?
How obvious does it have to be before people like Mitchell Chester understand?
For a state that brags about how smart it’s people are, Massachusetts sure has a lot of dumb people making decisions.
“Roland ‘Nobel-less Ed lab’ Fryer” (apologies to the late great Warren Zevon, RIP)
Roland was a warrior from the land of the Crimson sun
An econ man for hire, fighting to be done
The deal was made at Harvard on a dark and stormy day
So he set out for the White House to join the Edu-fray
Through merit pay and testing he fought the Edu-wars
With his finger on the figure, knee-deep in the scores
For days and nights he battled, the unions and their ties
He tried to earn his living, with some help from Condi Rice
Roland the Ed Lab Fryer
Roland the Ed Lab Fryer
His comrades fought beside him, Raj Chetty and the rest
But of all the Ed Lab hires, Roland was the best
But his merit-pay experiment went belly-up to hell
That son-of-a-gun experiment, blew up his Nobel
Roland “Nobel-less Ed Lab” Fryer, Harvard’s bravest hire
They can still see his Nobel-less body stalking through the night
In the brilliant flash of Roland’s Blueprint fire
In the brilliant flash of Roland’s Blueprint fire
Roland “Nobel-less Ed Lab” Fryer
Roland “Nobel-less Ed Lab” Fryer
Roland “Nobel-less Ed Lab” Fryer
Talkin’ about the man, Roland “Nobel-less Ed Lab” Fryer
Dever’s teachers use Donors Choose as a donation-seeking website. One teacher wrote that she needed paper. “Her students understand the value of paper as a resource.” So while Blueprint spends $1.3 mil. on management fees, out of $5 mil. in tax dollars, a teacher had to beg for paper and, children had to prove that they value alms, like paper?
(BTW, in an interview, a Donors Choose executive said she was recruited from her position as a TFA state chair.) So, Donors Choose rakes in a fee from the donations that they receive, asks for additional money from donors and, buys paper for the kids? With what’s left over they create programming for 1 hour of primetime television, on each of 3 networks? Or, did a separate benefactor, like Gates, provide the money for the TV program? Just incredible.
I’ll bet all of that fun network stuff was really worth it.
Yes, everyone thinks they know all about how the classroom works. After all, haven’t they had 12-13 years of “experience/observation?” Not as easy as it looks? That must mean you had very good teachers. What? Can’t turn it around overnight? Huh. Guess it’s not just about how many tests you can give, grade, and interpret, either.
After teaching thirty-six years I could share the secret, but are they listening? The secret is (insert whisper here) humanity. Engage, persuade, encourage, enrich, scaffold, share good literature that models good choices and great writing and treat everyone like they matter. Most importantly, model the FUN FACTOR!!! That’s life and it should also be school. Seriously.