Archives for the month of: February, 2017
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The True Genius of Donald Trump: Branding

By dianeravitch
February 22, 2017 //
6

It is important to bear in mind that in one respect Trump is a true genius: Branding.

He created the TRUMP brand. He puts the brand on buildings that he doesn’t own; he outsources the brand and monetizes it. There are apartment buildings that he didn’t build, doesn’t manage, and doesn’t own branded TRUMP. As he showed during the primaries, he has TRUMP wine, TRUMP steaks, TRUMP everything.

He branded his opponents in the Republican primaries to ridicule them: “Little Marco,” “Low Energy” Jeb, “Lyin’ Ted.” Anyone who was within reach of him got branded and demeaned.

Then in the general, it was “Crooked Hillary.” How many times did he say that phrase? Hundreds of times? Thousands of times? He said that within the first week of his presidency, he would direct his Attorney General to appoint a special prosecutor to investigate her many crimes. What was the chant at his rallies and the National Republican Convention: “Lock her up!”

Now he is in the process of demonizing the mainstream media: the New York Times, the Washington Post, CNN, ABC, NBC, CBS: they are all liars, the reporters are the most dishonest people in the world, they spew “fake news.” They lie. All of this from an administration that lies every day and calls its lies “alternative facts.”

Now we see a presidency that has a curious connection to the rest of the world. Trump demeans our allies but says nary a critical word about Putin. Strange.

During the campaign, James Comey announced that the FBI was investigating Hillary’s emails because she used a private server and might have compromised national security. In June of 2016, he announced that the investigation was over and that no prosecutor would prosecute her based on the evidence at hand. Then, as we all know, Comey announced 10 days before the election that the investigation was being reopened because of the discovery of emails on the computer of Anthony Wiener, husband of Huma Abedin, Hillary’s close associate. Three days before the election–after millions of early votes had been cast–Comey once again cleared Hillary. His intervention in the election was unprecedented for any FBI director.

He said he had to intervene because he promised to keep Congress informed.

What he never told Congress was that the FBI was simultaneously investigating links between the Trump campaign and Russian government operatives.

Why did he report on one investigation, but not the other?

What were the contacts that the FBI was investigating?

Why were campaign staff communicating with Russian officials?

Will the FBI investigation be controlled by Attorney General Jeff Sessions, one of Trump’s closest allies?

Why was Hillary smeared as “Crooked Hillary” every day of the general election, but there is no special prosecutor?

Is it true that the President uses an Android cellphone that is not secured?

Is it true that Trump discusses matters of high national security in the restaurant of his private club?

Is it true that the top officials in the Trump administration use private email servers?

Is it true that this administration is “running like a finely-tuned machine”?

We will have to leave these questions for historians to figure out.

Since Trump filed for the 2020 campaign on Inauguration Day, the nation will be in campaign mode nonstop for the next four years.

Categories Ethics, Lies, Trump

When Accountability is Both Unaccountable and Meaningless

By dianeravitch
February 22, 2017 //
20

Blogger Stonepooch.com explains why high-stakes tests do not provide accountability and undermine the very purpose of education. After a bit of digging, I learned that said blogger has been teaching middle school English for 30 years in public and private schools.

Here is an excerpt:

If you don’t count undeserving people in high places or a burgeoning education reform industry of paid tweeters, bloggers and think tank thinkers, high stakes testing, known ironically as accountability, is currently among the most unaccountable of unaccountable things in American education today. It is unaccountable in the very thing that it purports to account for: the measurement and evaluation of learning, teachers and schools. It does none of these things well.

The most obvious reason for this is that staked testing shifts the priority from what will help a child to what will help the adults that teach her. High stakes advocates will argue that a high stake is the best way to insure that adult and child concerns are identical. But, in practice, this turns out to be untrue. A high stake explicitly reduces the child to evidence of adult performance. Students aren’t first; scores are first.

It’s a simple arithmetic. Most skills in the Common Core (or local variant) are untested; a teacher is valued through skills that are tested. Therefore, tested skills are more important than untested skills regardless of their value to the student. A stake advocate may argue (disingenuously) that a good teacher will always prioritize the student’s need, and that may be true… but only if those needs are not in conflict with the goals established for them by the state. That would be silly.. possibly even insubordinate. A lesson that prioritizes untested skills and opportunities is of low priority interest to administrators and a risk for a teacher whose goal must be to prove her value each year. The best advice to is to remove untested content in order to produce better scores. Test advocates will argue… “oh, but there is all that other criteria that counts in teacher evaluation”, but this too is an invalid argument. Regardless of the quality of other measures, the ultimate measure of the school is in its scores. If test scores are high, the teacher has met the criteria that measures the district, school and principal.

If this sounds like a corruption of mission, it is, and there is loads of evidence that a high stake corrupts the mission of schools …whether through carrot and stick incentives which encourage unethical behavior (Washington DC and Atlanta), through the demoralizing impact of indiscriminate goal setting or through the valuing of students by their scores. This last is especially true for those schools that pick, choose and remove students at will. For such schools, a child who is unlikely or unable to meet a given criteria, or who develops or produces later than the mean, is a risk for all the adults working there. In essence, the state has defined every child as an added measure in support of the teacher, the school or the franchise.

Stonepooch goes on to explain that Eva Moskowitz’s Success Academy charter chain is a good example of the meaninglessness of high-stakes testing. Her students get high scores on state scores, but very few have ever won admission to a selective high school. Why? Preparing for one test does not prepare for other tests. The tests don’t measure anything of lasting importance.

Real accountability begins at the top, not the bottom. The people who control the money control policy. If they don’t like the results, they should change their policies or fire themselves. At the very least, they should take the tests they mandate and publish their scores.

Categories Accountability, Testing

Pennsylvania: John Eichelberger is Public Enemy #1 of Public Schools and Chair of the Senate Education Committee

By dianeravitch
February 22, 2017 //
18

Peter Greene describes the leading foe of public education and teachers in Pennsylvania. He is John Eichelberger. He is chair of the Senate Education Committee. Everything he proposes is toxic to public schools.

“In 2011, when Betsy and Richard DeVos were looking to finance a push for vouchers in Pennsylvania, Eichelberger was just the man to take point. Taking point included pushing the narrative that Pennsylvania’s schools were a terrible, failing mess. (It’s also worth noting that the DeVos push for vouchers included allies who were explicitly in favor of shutting down “government schools” entirely.)”

Recently, Eichelberger proposed an end to sick days for teachers. He thinks that they should get sick during their summer break. If they get sick during the school year, tough.

“Eichelberger also revealed that he would like to look at getting rid of some state universities, with Clarion and Cheney likely targets for “the chopping block.” Why does he think they are unnecessary? Because now we have lots of community colleges, and those should be good enough. Besides, enrollments down. When asked if he saw any correlation between lowered enrollment, slashed state support for the university system, and increased tuition to make up the difference, he said no, that didn’t look like a meaningful connection to him.

“Oh, but it gets even better,

“Eichelberger also took the occasion to complain about “inner city” education programs that were trying to get minority students into colleges where they just failed anyway, so let’s just put them in a nice vocational program instead and be done with it. Yes, that’s right. In 2017 an elected state senator is suggesting that there’s no point in trying to get black and brown kids to succeed in college, because you know how Those People are.”

Eichelberger must have majored in Neanderthal Studies.

He should be voted out of office. At the next election.

Categories Accountability, Corporate Reformers, Education Industry, Education Reform, Pennsylvania, Privatization

Florida: How Charter Schools Are Used to Hide Dropouts and Game the System

By dianeravitch
February 22, 2017 //
21

Heather Vogell and Hannah Fresques published an important piece of investigative journalism that appears in ProPublica and USA Today about a new twist on the charter scamming in Florida. The scam is the result of Jeb Bush’s high-stakes accountability system, which incentivizes schools to get rid of low-performing students in order to maintain their letter grades and rankings.

Here is the shorthand: School officials nationwide dodge accountability ratings by steering low achievers to alternative programs. In Orlando, Florida, the nation’s tenth-largest district, thousands of students who leave alternative charters run by a for-profit company aren’t counted as dropouts. Is this why nationwide graduation rates are going up? Is this what Arne Duncan claimed credit for?

It begins like this:

TUCKED AMONG POSH GATED COMMUNITIES, and meticulously landscaped shopping centers, Olympia High School in Orlando offers more than two dozen Advanced Placement courses, even more afterschool clubs, and an array of sports from bowling to water polo. U.S. News and World Report ranked it among the nation’s top 1,000 high schools last year. Big letters painted in brown on one campus building urge its more than 3,000 students to “Finish Strong.”

Olympia’s success in recent years, however, has been linked to another, quite different school five miles away. Last school year, 137 students assigned to Olympia’s attendance zone instead attended Sunshine High, a charter alternative school run by a for-profit company. Sunshine stands a few doors down from a tobacco shop and a liquor store in a strip mall. It offers no sports teams and few extra-curricular activities.

Sunshine’s 455 students — more than 85 percent of whom are black or Hispanic — sit for four hours a day in front of computers with little or no live teaching. One former student said he was left to himself to goof off or cheat on tests by looking up answers on the internet. A current student said he was robbed near the strip mall’s parking lot, twice.

Sunshine takes in cast-offs from Olympia and other Orlando high schools in a mutually beneficial arrangement. Olympia keeps its graduation rate above 90 percent — and its rating an “A” under Florida’s all-important grading system for schools — partly by shipping its worst achievers to Sunshine. Sunshine collects enough school district money to cover costs and pay its management firm, Accelerated Learning Solutions (ALS), a more than $1.5 million-a-year “management fee,” 2015 financial records show — more than what the school spends on instruction.

But students lose out, a ProPublica investigation found. Once enrolled at Sunshine, hundreds of them exit quickly with no degree and limited prospects. The departures expose a practice in which officials in the nation’s tenth-largest school district have for years quietly funneled thousands of disadvantaged students — some say against their wishes — into alternative charter schools that allow them to disappear without counting as dropouts.

Keep reading. It is a shocking story, especially in light of the fact that Betsy DeVos is so impressed with Florida’s “success” that she wants to use it as a model for the nation. She surely can’t use her home state of Michigan as a model in light of its precipitous decline in national rankings on NAEP. What Florida and Michigan have in common, however, are for-profit charter chains, where the owners profit handsomely but the kids do not.

Categories Accountability, Betsy DeVos, Charter Schools, Corporate Reformers, Education Industry, Florida, For-Profit, Fraud, Graduation rates, Hoax, Privatization

BREAKING NEWS! Trump Opposes Anti-Semitism

By dianeravitch
February 21, 2017 //
48

Today, while visiting the African American Museum in D.C., Trump said he thinks that anti-Semitism is “horrible.”

This was in response to an alarming rise in threats directed at Jewish community centers across the nation and to vandalism at a Jewish cemetery in St. Louis, where headstones were overturned.

Trump said he speaks out against anti-Semitism whenever he has the chance but he did not do so at his press conference when a young Jewish journalist asked him to speak out against the growth of anti-Semitism. Instead, Trump berated the reporter, reacted personally, and said he was “the least anti-Semitic person” ever, in non-response to the question.

This followed the strange White House statement commemorating the Holocaust that failed to mention the six million Jews who perished.

Although His beloved daughter Ivanka to Jared Kushner, who is Jewish, Trump has a Jewish problem. Maybe he doesn’t want to offend his alt-right buddies, like Steve Bannon, or David Duke.

Categories Bias, Education Reform, Religion

Who Profits from For-Profit “Higher Education”? Squalor, at the Expense of Students

By dianeravitch
February 21, 2017 //
3

This is a story I published last June.

It is more timely than ever now that Trump and Devos, both of who love the for-profit sector, have taken charge of the federal role in education.

For shame!

Categories For-Profit, Fraud, Higher Education

For-Profit “Universities” Set to Cash in During Trump Era

By dianeravitch
February 21, 2017 //
7

During the Obama years, it appeared that the federal government was going to start cracking down on the for-profit “higher education” industry, which typically gets horrible results and loads students with debt. (As I have reported in the past, former officials of the Obama Department of Education bought control of one of the nation’s largest for-profit college chains.)

But with the election victory of Donald Trump, sponsor of the fraudulent Trump University, the stock prices of for-profit education corporations went through the roof. Why would anyone expect a man who profited as founder of Trump University to crack down on others doing the same?

The New York Times reports:

Since Election Day, for-profit college companies have been on a hot streak. DeVry Education Group’s stock has leapt more than 40 percent. Strayer’s jumped 35 percent and Grand Canyon Education’s more than 28 percent.

You do not need an M.B.A. to figure out why. Top officials in Washington who spearheaded a relentless crackdown on the multibillion-dollar industry have been replaced by others who have profited from it.

President Trump ran the now-defunct Trump University, which wound up besieged by lawsuits from former students and New York’s attorney general, who called the operation a fraud. Within days of the election, Mr. Trump, without admitting any wrongdoing, agreed to a $25 million settlement.

Betsy DeVos, the newly installed secretary of education, is an ardent campaigner for privately run schools and has investments in for-profit educational ventures.

Please notice the use of the present tense “has.” Betsy DeVos did not divest her holdings in for-profit entities that are in direct conflict with her duties as Secretary of Education. Apparently in the Trump regime, ethics laws have been suspended for everyone, at least at the cabinet level.

While Ms. DeVos’s nomination attracted a flood of attention, most was focused on the K-through-12 system and the use of taxpayer-funded vouchers for private, online and religious schools. Higher education was barely mentioned during her confirmation hearings.

Yet colleges and universities are the institutions most directly influenced by the federal government, while public schools remain largely in the hands of states and localities. So it is in higher education that the new administration’s power is likely to be felt most keenly and quickly.

Under the Obama administration, the Education Department discouraged students from attending for-profit colleges, arguing recently that the data showed “community colleges offer a better deal than comparable programs at for-profit colleges with higher price tags.”

The for-profit sector has about 8 percent of those enrolled in higher education, according to the Education Department, but it has 15 percent of subsidized student loans.

While some career training schools delivered as promised, critics argued that too many burdened veterans, minorities and low-income strivers with unmanageable tuition debt without equipping them with jobs and skills that would enable them to pay it off.

After years of growing complaints and lawsuits, the agency moved aggressively to end abusive practices that ranged from deceptive advertising to fraud and cost students and taxpayers billions of dollars.

Two mammoth chains collapsed — Corinthian Colleges in 2015, and ITT Technical Institute in 2016 — leaving thousands of students stranded without degrees and in debt. Overall enrollment in for-profit institutions declined from 2.4 million in 2010 to 1.6 million in 2015 as hundreds of campuses closed. And as the largest provider of student loans, the federal government was left to bail out the defrauded.

Please open the article and check out the links.

Categories Accountability, For-Profit, Fraud, Higher Education

Texas: Pastors Leading the Fight Against Vouchers!

By dianeravitch
February 21, 2017 //
18

There is a wonderful organization in Texas called Pastors for Texas Children, led by the indefatigable Pastor Charles Foster Johnson of Fort Worth.

Their members span the state, and they have worked with public schools and parents to oppose vouchers, which would destroy many communities and defund their community’s public schools.

Pastor Johnson recently sent out this letter:

Pastors for Texas Children is a three-year-old organization that mobilizes the faith community for public education assistance and advocacy. Our website is http://www.pastorsfortexaschildren.com

Our goal is to connect every single local congregation to every single public school in wrap-around care and school improvement assistance – especially high-need schools in poor neighborhoods. We do this always under the authority of the local superintendent and principal – and always scrupulously adhering to the principles of religious liberty and church/state separation.

We believe fully in the First Amendment prohibition against any religious instruction in our public schools. But we also believe that faith communities should be 100% behind public education as a core institution of democratic society and the common good.

In addition to this local school assistance, we also advocate for good and just public education policy in state government. We favor full funding for our schools, particularly universal Pre-K instruction, and we oppose any privatization of our public schools, especially vouchers. We have become a significant voice in preventing a voucher bill from passing in Texas.

We presently have 2000 partners in our organization representing 1000 congregations, and are rapidly expanding. Our movement has spread to Oklahoma where Pastors for Oklahoma Kids has just been established. We are holding conversations with ministers in several other states, and hope to spread our mission nationwide.

If you are interested in helping us do this– or connecting us to your minister and or congregation– please do not hesitate to call the Rev. Charles Foster Johnson, executive director, at 210-378-1066 or email him at charlie@charlesfosterjohnson.com

We at the Network for Public Education have offered our full assistance to Pastor Johnson and his group. Our Texas members have generated hundreds of letters to their legislators. We are delighted to see that this movement to strengthen separation of church and state has spread to Oklahoma. We hope that faith leaders in communities across the nation reach out of Pastor Johnson and learn how to create an effective organization in their own state. A group like this could do a world of good in the South and the Midwest, especially in communities where the public school is the hub of the community and where competition will defund the public schools.

I can’t think of anything more effective than having faith leaders insisting on separation of church and state. Thoughtful faith leaders know that they should retain their autonomy and that federal and state money will in time erode their religious freedom. If churches need federal or state money to survive, they don’t have a strong base of support among their members, and they will pay a steep price for public aid.

Categories Religion, Separation of church and state, Texas

New Study: Michigan Test Score Gains are Lowest in the Nation

By dianeravitch
February 21, 2017 //
16

Will Betsy DeVos do to the nation what she has done to Michigan?

A new study by Professor Brian Jacob of the University of Michigan demonstrates that Michigan’s gains on the National Assessment of Educational Progress were the lowest in the nation. Now we know why DeVos was unable to explain the difference between “growth” and “proficiency” at her Senate hearings. She really has no idea that her own state has been stagnant as her philosophy of choice took hold. Brookings has not yet posted the study online. But the Detroit News reported its results and interviewed Jacob about his findings.

A new analysis of results of a national educational test shows Michigan students have continually made the least improvement nationally of scores since 2003.

The study, by University of Michigan professor Brian A. Jacob, of scores of the National Assessment of Education Progress (NAEP), also found that Michigan students were at the bottom of the list when it comes to proficiency growth in the four measures of the exam.

That analysis comes less than six months after the release of the Michigan’s Talent Crisis report by Education Trust-Midwest that found Michigan’s students are falling far behind their peers across the nation. The ETM report found that Michigan is in the bottom 10 states for key subjects and grades, including early literacy.

Fourth-grade scores have been stagnant. In eighth-grade, Michigan has not kept pace with gains made by other states.

Jacob, a nonresident senior fellow at the Brookings Institute, said there is no single explanation of the Michigan rankings.

“I believe that there are a number of factors responsible for Michigan’s weak performance: a lack of adequate state and local funding for schools, the highly decentralized nature of governance that makes it difficult for the state Department of Education to develop coordinated reforms, the lack of regulation and accountability in the charter sector, and the economic and political instability that have plagued Detroit and other urban areas in the state,” he said.

“Another reason is the relatively decentralized nature of education in Michigan,” he added. “The long tradition of local control in the state has made it harder for the state Department of Education or others to establish coordinated policies.”

Jacob said those factors particularly affect Detroit. “The political and financial instability of Detroit over the past decade or two undoubtedly had a major impact on student performance in the city and surrounding areas,” he said.

As expected, Republican officeholders said that throwing money at the problem won’t help. Obviously, charters don’t help either, since they are flourishing and unaccountable and not producing better results than public schools.

Categories Accountability, Betsy DeVos, Charter Schools, Michigan, NAEP

Gene V. Glass: The Department of Education’s “Gold Standard” Produces “Fool’s Gold”

By dianeravitch
February 21, 2017 //
13

Gene V. Glass is one of our nation’s most distinguished education researchers.

This post is an important analysis of the failure of the U.S. Department of Education’s Institute of Education Sciences, which was reorganized during the George W. Bush administration.

As a new administration moves into the US Department of Education, the opportunity arises to review and assess the Department’s past practices. A recent publication goes to the heart of how US DOE has been attempting to influence public education. Unfortunately, in an effort to justify millions of dollars spent on research and development, bureaucrats pushed a favorite instructional program that teachers flatly rejected.

The Gold Standard

There is a widespread belief that the best way to improve education is to get practitioners to adopt practices that “scientific” methods have proven to be effective. These increasingly sophisticated methods are required by top research journals and for federal government improvement initiatives such as Investing in Innovation (i3) Initiative to fund further research or dissemination efforts. The US DOE established the What Works Clearinghouse (WWC) to identify the scientific gold-standards and apply them to certify for practitioners which programs “work.” The Fed’s “gold standard” is the Randomized Comparative Trial (RCT). In addition, there have been periodic implementations of US DOE policies that require practitioners to use government funds only for practices that the US DOE has certified to be effective.

However, an important new article published by Education Policy Analysis Archives, concludes that these gold-standard methods misrepresent the actual effectiveness of interventions and thereby mislead practitioners by advocating or requiring their use. The article is entitled “The Failure of the U.S. Education Research Establishment to Identify Effective Practices: Beware Effective Practices Policies.”

The Fool’s Gold

Earlier published work by the author, Professor Stanley Pogrow of San Francisco State University, found that the most research validated program, Success for All, was not actually effective. Quite the contrary! Pogrow goes further and analyzes why these gold-standard methods can not be relied on to guide educators to more effective practice.

Researchers have told us that we need “randomized comparative trials” to reach “research-based conclusions.”

In fact, says Glass and the article he cites, this is not what happens. And the results of these trials turn out to be easily manipulated and falsified.

He writes:

Key problems with the Randomized Comparative Trial include (1) the RCT almost never tells you how the experimental students actually performed, (2) that the difference between groups that researchers use to consider a program to be effective is typically so small that it is “difficult to detect” in the real world, and (3) statistically manipulating the data to the point that the numbers that are being compared are mathematical abstractions that have no real world meaning—and then trying to make them intelligible with hypothetical extrapolations such the difference favoring the experimental students is the equivalent of increasing results from the 50th to the 58th percentile, or an additional month of learning. The problem is that we do not know if the experimental students actually scored at the 58th or 28th percentile. So in the end, we end up not knowing how students in the intervention actually performed, and any benefits that are found are highly exaggerated.

The sad part of the story is that we now have a new administration that is both ignorant of research and indifferent to it. DeVos has seen the failure of school choice in her own state, which has plummeted in the national rankings since 2003, and it has had no impact on her ideology. Ideology is not subject to testing or research. It is a deep-seated belief system that cannot be dislodged by evidence.

Categories Betsy DeVos, Data, Research, U.S. Department of Education
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