Archives for the month of: March, 2017
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Brookings Sullies Its Reputation By Aligning with DeVos Agenda for Privatization

By dianeravitch
March 29, 2017 //
35

The Brookings Institution used to be referred to as a liberal think tank. In reality, it was a nonpartisan think tank that hired former high-level officials from both Democratic and Republican administrations and produced valuable studies and reports. As I was ending my time in the first Bush administration in late 1992, the president of Brookings came to my office at the US Department of Education and invited me to accept the Brown Chair in Education Policy. Since I did not want to live permanently in DC, I declined his offer but agreed to be a Senior Fellow. I was in residence at Brookings until 1995, wrote a book on national standards, then returned to Brooklyn. I continued to be a Non-Resident Senior Fellow until 2012, when I was summarily fired from my unpaid position by Grover Whitehurst, who joined Brookings as chair of the Brown Policy program after serving as director of education research in the George W. Bush administration. Perhaps it was happenstance, but the email from Whitehurst came a few hours after the online release of my blistering critique of Mitt Romney, whom Whitehurst was advising. Whitehurst fired me because, he said, I was “inactive.”

Whitehurst served for a few years as head of the Brown Center but was quietly removed as the Chair. Now, he uses Brookings and its prestige to promote the Republican agenda of privatization.

Here is the latest, in which Whitehurst plugs charters because “We do not know how to create or sustain uniformly great neighborhood schools.” He should have added that “We also don’t know how to create or sustain uniformly great charter schools.” There is no existence proof, even though charters choose their students and exclude students with serious disabilities and ELLs and push out behavior problems. Residents of Clark County, Nevada, may be surprised to see that he raised their grade, since most charters in Nevada are failing schools, concentrated in Clark County, and the funding for the voucher program (which he hails) has been halted by state courts. Columbus, Ohio, got good marks even though the scandal-ridden charters in Ohio have become a bad joke.

To make sure that everyone noticed that Brookings was linking its reputation to the most controversial, least qualified member of the Trump cabinet, DeVos was invited to speak at the press conference on the only subject she knows: the glories of school choice.

The press release reads:

School Choice Increasing Nationally; Secretary DeVos to Speak at Release of Brookings’ Annual School Choice Rankings
Proportion of large school districts allowing choice has nearly doubled since 2000; Denver wins top spot for large districts for second year in a row

Rankings from Brookings’ 2016 Education Choice and Competition Index (ECCI)—an annual ranking of school choice in the nation’s 100 largest school districts—will be unveiled today at a Brookings event featuring keynote remarks by U.S. Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos. You can watch a livestream of the Secretary’s remarks at 9:30 AM EDT.

In a summary of the results (PDF), ECCI’s author and Brookings Senior Fellow Grover J. “Russ” Whitehurst highlights the growth of choice across the nation’s school districts according to trends tracked by ECCI, many of which can be observed since 2000. Whitehurst notes that the proportion of large school districts allowing choice has nearly doubled over the past 16 years. That coincides with other measures of the growth of school choice, including that the number of large districts for which charter school enrollment is at least 30 percent of total public enrollment has increased from one to ten.

Whitehurst writes: “There is no question empirically that opportunities for parents to choose among traditional public schools for their children, to choose a charter school, and to receive a financial subsidy to attend a private school have grown leaps and bounds in the last 15-20 years. The traditional school district model is no longer the monopoly it used to be.”

The ECCI is not designed to answer causal questions about what system or education delivery mechanism works best, but to reveal what’s happening on the ground by providing a snapshot of choice and competition in each district and allowing for comparisons of specific policies and practices across districts. The rankings are based on objective scoring of 13 categories of education policy and practice. School choice options considered by the rankings include: the opportunity of choosing any traditional public school in a district (open enrollment), charter schools, magnet schools, virtual schools, and affordable private schools.

Whitehurst notes that critics of school choice often assert that the alternative to choice is to assure that every public school is of high quality, but that “universal access to a great neighborhood school is a pipedream.”

“We do not know how to create or sustain uniformly great neighborhood schools. There is no existing proof that we do, and there is strong empirical evidence that the performance of schools varies substantially everywhere there are large numbers of schools to compare…School choice is one way of addressing the reality of the normal curve of school performance by giving parents the opportunity of moving their children out of schools that are in the lower tail of the distribution.”

Students in the nation’s 100+ largest school districts are overwhelmingly (91 percent) in public schools, with 56 percent of the ECCI districts allowing choice within the traditional public schools. According to Whitehurst, “advocates of school choice should take note of the reality that for the foreseeable future the greatest opportunities for the expansion of choice are in the public school sector through furthering the reach of open enrollment.”

Denver, which received the highest score on this year’s ECCI, and the Recovery District serving New Orleans are the only two districts in the ECCI that receive grades of A on school choice. Both are characterized by: open enrollment and a centralized assignment process requiring a single application from parents for all public schools; a good mix and utilization by parents of alternatives to traditional public schools; rich information to parents to support school choice, including a school assignment website that allows parents to make side-by-side comparisons of schools; funding that follows students to the school in which they enroll; a fair and efficient formula for matching school assignments for students to the expressed preferences of their parents; and provisions for transportation of students to schools of choice outside their neighborhoods.

Notably, Camden City School District in New Jersey and Clark County School District in Nevada saw substantive enough changes to move them from receiving an F in the previous year to a B- and C-, respectively. Clark County’s increase in score was largely due to Nevada’s Educational Choice Scholarship program, which was enacted and launched in 2015. Camden, NJ experienced a dramatic increase in score and grade on the 2016 ECCI by virtue of rolling out a new process for school search, application, and assignment.

New to the top 10 list this year are Columbus, Ohio, and Chicago, while Baltimore and Tucson dropped off. Chicago showed a score increase due to its decision to include data on student growth among the information on school performance provided to parents on its website. The score for Columbus increased, in part, because the district documented a student-based funding formula for schools.

Almost one-quarter, or 26 of the 112 school districts scored on the 2016 ECCI, received a grade of F, meaning that families have very little in the way of school choice other than what they can exercise by choosing to live within the geographical assignment zone of their preferred public school. Or, if they do provide school choice, the process is hidden from parents.

You can learn more about the 2016 ECCI rankings by exploring an interactive breakdown of results or reading a report of topline takeaways (PDF).

CONTACT
Delaney Parrish
Assistant Director of Communications, Economic Studies
202-797-2969 | DRParrish@brookings.edu | @DParrish
BROOKINGS
1775 Massachusetts Avenue NW
Washington, DC 20036

Categories Accountability, Betsy DeVos, Charter Schools, Corporate Reformers, Education Industry, Nevada, Privatization, School Choice, Vouchers

Peter Greene: What Two Decades of Testing Have Produced

By dianeravitch
March 29, 2017 //
10

http://curmudgucation.blogspot.com/2017/03/the-lost-years.html?m=1

Peter Greene asks a crucial question: What have we gained–or lost–because of our society’s obsession with standardized testing for at least the last two decades?

When did it start? Before No Child Left Behind was signed into law in January 2002, but not with the same intensity or the high-stakes that took hold since 2002, when the power of the federal government was used to pummel state’s and districts to comply with federal mandates.

This is one of Peter Greene’s most powerful posts. I urge you to read it.

Greene writes:

“After years of hearing how kindergarten has been turned into the new first grade, you’d think at the other end of the K-12 pipeline we would find highly advanced students. And yet– not so much

“I am not going to report a ton of research on this, because the available research is bogus and part of the actual test-centric problem. What I can tell you is what I, as an actual real live classroom teacher who knows actual real live classroom teachers, see and hear.

“This is the result of accelerated early instruction done primarily in the service of test-centric schooling (“We have to get them started early– otherwise how will they be ready for the Big Standardized Test??”)

“It is lost years.

“By the time these same start-em-early push-em-hard students arrive at high school classrooms, they are behind compared to the students that we saw twenty-five or fifteen or even ten years ago. They know fewer things, have fewer skills, and express lower academic aspirations.

“Why? I can offer a couple of theories.

They have learned to hate reading.

“They have learned that reading is this thing you do with short, disconnected, context-free selections, and when you read, you are not looking for something that sparks interest or enjoyment or curiosity or wonder or the pleasure of feeling your brain expanded and grown. You read so that, in a moment, you’ll be able to answer the questions that someone else wrote– and by “answer” we mean from the potions given the one answer that someone else has decided is “correct.” There will be no expression of your own personal insights, and never the possibility that there’s more than one way to understand the text. It is a stilted, cramped way to approach reading, and it means that students grow up with a stilted, cramped notion of what reading even is, or why human beings actually do it.

“With some luck, some students will still discover the joy and, yes, utility of reading– but they will discover outside of school, and they will not expect that the kind of reading that they love has anything to do with the test-centered “reading”: they are required to do in school. That higher level course has additional “reading”? Then I surely don’t want to sign up for that. And since the real task here, the real point of the whole exercise is not the reading, but the answering of questions about the reading– well, I bet I can find a time-saving way to cut that corner. Because after enough years of this, many students conclude that “reading” is something to actively avoid.

“There’s no pleasure there, no discovery, no ideas to mull and discuss, no characters who help us pick apart the thorny questions of how to be human in the world. Just clues for answering the BS Test questions.

“Their years are shorter.

“The school year is now shorter. It is shorter by the number of days involved in the BS Test. It is shorter by the number of days spent on pre-testing and practice testing. It is shorter by the number of days spent on instruction that is only being implemented because it will help get them ready for the test.

“By the time we’ve subtracted all those days, the school year is a few weeks, a month, maybe even more than a month shorter. It was only 180 days to begin with. The test-centric school has amped up a feature of education that has always frustrated teachers– the 180 day year is a zero sum game, a bathtub full to the absolute rim with water. You cannot add something without removing something else. A really feisty or frustrated teacher might turn to an administrator who just said “Add this to your class” and say, “Fine– what exactly do you want me to stop teaching?” But mostly we’re expected to just make do, to perform some sort of miracle by which we stuff ten more rabbits into the hat.

It doesn’t work. Every year students get less actual instruction than they used to, which means their teacher next year finds them a little bit behind, so the school year that used to start on Day One now starts on Day Thirty after the students are caught up– and then it ends on Day 160 because, you know, testing. So the following year those students are that much more behind. And so on, and so on, and so on.

“In the end, kindergarten may be the new first grade, but for many students, twelfth grade is the new eleventh grade.

“There are certainly students who escape this effect, and there are certainly clever teachers who mitigate it. But mostly the injection of toxic testing into the bloodstream of US education has had the predictable effect– it has weakened and damaged the entire body…We have wasted over fifteen years of education; some students have seen their entire schooling consumed by test-centric baloney.

“Yet we keep plowing on, keep committing to Testing Uber Alles. We are losing students, losing education opportunities, losing the chance to awaken some young humans to what they could be and could become– instead, we are still trying to mash their spirits flat under the heavy testing hand. We are losing years that we cannot get back, cannot give back, and this is not okay.”

Categories Accountability, Common Core, Corporate Reformers, Education Industry, NCLB (No Child Left Behind), Race to the Top, Testing

Leonie Haimson Is Collecting Comments on the New York ELA

By dianeravitch
March 29, 2017 //
6

The state Common Core tests that children in grades 3-8 in New York are supposed to take are shrouded in secrecy.

Last year, a teacher posted a couple of items to show how confusing and tricky they were, and the testing company went on a tear, threatening legal action against the teacher and against the blogger who posted the questions. They went to Twitter and had tweets referring to the post deleted. They went to WordPress, which hosts this blog, and removed my description of the events.

Nonetheless, Leonie Haimson has invited teachers, parents, and students to comment on the tests. You can find her invitation and responses here.

Categories Accountability, Common Core, Testing

An 8-Year-Old Child Writes Betsy DeVos: “I Love My Public School”

By dianeravitch
March 29, 2017 //
14

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/8-year-old-sends-heartfelt-message-about-her-public-school-to-betsy-devos_us_58d3ed5ce4b0b22b0d1a9076

A second-grade student wroteto Betsy DeVos to tell her that she loves her public school. She pleaded with DeVos,

“Please leave are [sic] public schools alone do not tear it down ever.”

Willa is a second grader. She is the daughter of a journalist, who posted Willa’s message on Instagram.

Do you think Betsy DeVos will get Willa’s card? Do you think DeVos will be moved by Willa’s message? Do you think she has ever seen a public school like Willa’s? DeVos seems to think that public schools are a dead end, a place where children are forced to go unwillingly. Maybe she should visit Willa’s school to understand why she loves it.

Wouldn’t it be wonderful if one million school children wrote to DeVos and told her why they love their school?

Categories Betsy DeVos, Closing schools, Privatization, Resistance

Ralph Ratto: Today I Am Ashamed to Be a Teacher

By dianeravitch
March 29, 2017 //
47

Ralph Ratto is an elementary school teacher in New York and a frequent blogger.

He describes yesterday as “one of the darkest days in education.”

Testing started yesterday. Now that the tests are untied, some children will struggle for six hours a day for six days to satisfy some adult idea that they need to be compared. Their ordeal has nothing to do with education.

“Our children will struggle with questions that have more than 1 plausible answer. They will have to select the best plausible answer. Questions will ask them, for example, to analyze paragraphs 3, 14 , 24 & 26 and then choose the answer that best describes their relationship. They will be forbidden to give their opinion in an essay as they regurgitate details to fulfill the task at hand.

“When we look at past tests, we can almost guarantee some passages will be purposely confusing due to the use of names and customs they are not familiar with. This makes it extremely difficult for them to utilize their own schema to decode the information provided. Some passages are above grade level and there are also field questions that are not counted are part of these tests.

“Teachers must sit by as our students struggle for hours. We will observed children get physically and emotionally ill taking these tests. We are forbidden to assist or even discuss the tests…

“Folks, this is institutional child abuse! I have written about this and about how this is the time of year that I am ashamed to be a teacher. We all should be ashamed, when we make these children take these tests to fulfill a political agenda and provide absolutely no valid data that helps children excel.”

Categories Childhood, Common Core, Testing

Good News: Charter School Growth Is Slowing

By dianeravitch
March 29, 2017 //
7

Citing an article in Education Week, The National Center for the Study of Privatization in Education at Teachers College notes that charter school growth is slowing.

“Charter school growth is slowing down, reported Education Week. The decline since 2012, when 640 new charters opened, has been steady. In 2013, 501 new charters were launched; in 2014, 404; and in 2015, 329. Citing a study by the National Association of Charter School Authorizers, the newspaper noted that large charter authorizers have seen a marked drop in charter applications, from an average of 18 in the 2011-12 school year to 7 in the 2015-16 school year.

“One explanation offered by Education Week for the slowdown is that national charter management organizations (CMOs) “may have reached capacity.” In addition, it should be pointed out that charter schools have run into mounting resistance, as illustrated by the NAACP’s call for a moratorium on charter school growth in October 2016 and by the decisive rejection a month later of a referendum in Massachusetts to lift the cap on charter schools, with 62 percent of voters opposing the measure and 38 percent supporting it.

“Yet while the number of new charter schools has ebbed, total enrollment in charter schools continues to climb, especially in such states as Minnesota, reported The Minneapolis Star-Tribune. Although enrollment in traditional district schools grew by 2 percent over the past five years, stated the newspaper, enrollment in charter schools ballooned. More specifically, there were 41,604 students in Minnesota charter schools in 2012-13 and 53,960 in 2016-17. Grade additions in existing charter schools may explain much of this growth. New charter schools would explain the remainder.”

Another possibility is that parents are wishing up and realizing that the charters have no secret sauce, perform no miracles, and lack many of the programs in the public schools. They may have also experienced high teacher turnover in charters or seen the instability of charters, which open and close at will.

Categories Charter Schools, Education Industry, Privatization

To New York Parents: A Warning about the Common Core Tests

By dianeravitch
March 29, 2017 //
14

Students in New York sat for the ELA Comin Core tests on Tuesday. The test will continue for three days, an ordeal lengthier than graduate school exams.

Leonie Haimson invited teachers and parents to share their stories about the test, which is otherwise blanketed in deep secrecy.

Testing expert Fred Smith sent this comment:

Thank you, Leonie for inviting the comments of observers who otherwise have been silenced by SED and DOE from breathing a word about the exams.

I’m sure we will find that the improved 2017 ELA exams have the same flaws as the ones Pearson has produced since 2012.

To me, the following exchange on your blog concerning field testing is particularly important because it succinctly describes what is wrong with field testing—both embedded and stand-alone field testing—which continue to plant the seeds that perpetuate bad exams. Yet, SED has run interference for the publisher, selling our kids out so tests can be developed on their backs.

”

Anonymous said…

Field testing questions embedded within today’s test hurt students. Fifth grade students deal with 5 passages. The entire third passage and the seven questions that followed were different across the various test forms, indicating that the whole text and question set will not count towards student scores. Why waste students’ time with it on an ACTUAL exam? Field test questions are notoriously ambiguous because their validity is still being assessed. My students struggled with the third passage and expended a lot of stamina on it, which hurt them on the last two passages. If we must field test passages, can we not at least place those questions LAST. I had a boy still testing at 2 pm. He spent an hour on the third text (which gained him no points) and was forced to randomly fill in bubbles for the last two stories (which do count!) in order to finish by day’s end. Where’s the logic? Why don’t we do separate field testing like a few years ago?”

Blogger Leonie Haimson said…

“The problem with separate field testing is that students don’t take it seriously and thus the results aren’t as reliable. However, having really hard questions as embedded field test questions on some exams and others easier is unfair to the students struggling with the hard questions. And the tests shouldn’t be so long! This tests endurance more than comprehension.”

Fred Smith continues:

Each year since 2012, the core-aligned test years, questions have been tried out without informing parents that their children were being used as unknowing subjects for commercial purposes. SED and DOE have gone out of their way to leave parents out of the loop for fear they would object—and say NO! And they might exercise their right to OPT OUT.

Note: Educational Testing Service, a testing giant, recently acquired Questor which had been awarded a 5-year contract in 2016 to succeed Pearson in furnishing the statewide exams. It now appears that Questor merely served as a pass-through window, allowing Pearson to exit and be replaced by ETS. Both companies have played a major role in promoting the Common Core and the riches it opens up to them in marketing related educational material. (Yet, even ETS, which administers the SAT, makes test-takers aware that parts of that exam are experimental.)

Leonie, please include the following link to an opinion piece I wrote on the grim reality of a state testing program that has been abetted by SED and DOE through their efforts to suppress information. They treat parents with disdain. Diane Ravitch ran it yesterday.

Fred Smith: The Pathetic Lies of the New York State Education Department, in Service of the Testing Regime

It expands on the above.

Fred

__,_._,___

Categories Common Core, New York, Testing

Laura Chapman: Congress Votes to Eliminate Internet Privacy

By dianeravitch
March 28, 2017 //
14

Laura Chapman writes about breaking news:

“Pending a signature by Trump, Republicans have succeeded in making internet privacy a relic of the past. Last week the Senate passed a bill that will give internet service providers (ISPs) the automatic right to make a profit from every bit of data that you and your family, including children, place on your computer through an internet service provider such as Verizon, Comcast, AT&T Inc., or Charter Communications Inc.

“At around 3 pm today, (March, 28, 2017) House Representatives voted to kill legislation intended to enhance internet privacy.

“Moreover, the just-passed legislation makes it a “forever after” impossibility for the restoration of the Obama legislation or anything similar to it. Even if there is a massive breech of ISPs data (e.g., your SS number, credit card information, banking accounts and transactions, health records, your child’s school records and internet activity) the ISP is no longer obliged to notify you.

“House Republicans argued that breeches of privacy can be managed on a “case-by-case-basis.” In other words, the user of the ISP service hires a lawyer and hopes to get satisfaction through a court action. The House Republican argument also featured claims about regulatory overreach stifling innovation and boosting the economy. http://thehill.com/policy/technology/326145-house-votes-to-send-bill-undoing-obama-internet-privacy-rule-to-trumps-desk

“If you are a techie, you might think there is a work-around. This article casts some doubt on that. https://www.wired.com/2017/03/vpns-wont-save-congress-internet-privacy-giveaway/

“It is not clear to me how this bill intersects with The Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA)–the Federal law that protects the privacy of student education records. The law is supposed to apply to all schools that receive funds under “an applicable program” of the US Department of Education. Since the USDE is being “deconstructed” and the edtech industry and its supporters want internet-based everything, I imagine that lobby will be thrilled with this legislation.

“Further, it is not yet clear how this bill intersects with the privacy and security standards for medical information provided in the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA), administered by the US Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), now under the leadership of longstanding Republican Thomas E. Price, M.D.

“I listened to the House Republicans and Democrats go back and forth about the bill. None mentioned the ripple effects across other federal agencies.

“Some internet gurus think that the bill also has major implications for national security, making theft and marketing of ISP data lucrative.

“The purpose of this bill was to enable ISPs to seek profits from their data. ISPs operate as monopolies in many regions. They gather your clicks, record your dwell times and all other data that gets you access to the other “retail” tier of the internet—Google, Bing, and specific websites, The ISP lobby wanted the gravy train of profits enjoyed by the “retailers.”

Categories Education Reform, Privacy and Privacy Rights, Republicans, Technology

What Opportunities Do Charter Schools Provide That Would Not Exist Without Charter Schools

By dianeravitch
March 28, 2017 //
48

Bill Phillis of the Ohio Coalition for Equity & Adequacy–a retired educator who served as deputy commissioner of education for the state of Ohio- asks the question that is the title of this post.

And he answers:


What educational opportunities do charters provide that would not exist if there were no charters?

Sometimes public school advocates say, “I don’t have a problem with charters, but…” A short quiz is an appropriate way to think about what the charter industry has contributed to the improvement of educational opportunities and results.

ο What innovations and best practices have Ohio charters demonstrated that are worthy of replication in the real public school system?

ο What additional and/or high quality educational opportunities are charters providing for regular, disadvantaged, career/technical students and those with disabilities that are not available in the real public school system?

ο What extracurricular activities do charter schools offer that the real public school system does not?

ο Have charters demonstrated stronger academic performance than the real public school system?

ο Have charters demonstrated a lower cost for school administration than the real public school system?

ο In view of more than 200 charter school closings in Ohio, have charters provided more stability for students than the real public school system?

ο Have the threads of fiscal fraud and corruption, funds wasted in charter closings, nepotism, inordinate profits and towering administrative salaries inherent in charterdom established a new normal in school operation?

Ohio taxpayers have been forced to invest in this $9 billion charter experiment. Truthful answers to the above questions reveal that they have, in large part, been bilked; but state officials in charge of the Statehouse continue to throw more money at this failed venture.

If you want to contact Bill for information or to support his activities, he can be reached at:

Ohio E & A, 100 S. 3rd Street, Columbus, OH 43215
ohioeanda@sbcglobal.net

Categories Academic Freedom, Accountability, Charter Schools, Corporate Reformers, Education Industry, Ohio, Privatization

Memphis: Under-Enrolled Charters Cancel Contracts, Dropping Out

By dianeravitch
March 28, 2017 //
16

Two charter schools in Memphis are breaking their ten-year contracts, leaving Memphis because of under enrollment.

http://www.chalkbeat.org/posts/tn/2017/03/27/heres-why-charter-operators-exiting-tennessees-turnaround-district-can-walk-away/

Some residents don’t understand how a charter school can break a ten-year contract.

Apparently the contracts were written on the assumption that the charters would be flooded with applications. They are not.

“Contracts signed by both Gestalt Community Schools and KIPP contain no penalties for exiting the Achievement School District before agreements run out, according to documents obtained by Chalkbeat.

“And by design, that’s not unusual in the charter sector. For better or worse, operators are given that autonomy, according to Dirk Tillotson, a lawyer and founder of a charter incubation organization in California.

“There hasn’t been much attention paid to closures in the law,” Tillotson said of charter laws nationwide. “The laws are more forward-looking than backward-looking when things might blow up.”

“That lack of clarity has suddenly started to matter a lot in Memphis, where charter schools are struggling to attract enough students to stay viable. Both KIPP and Gestalt blame their impending pullouts on under-enrollment — a challenge faced by more than half of the 31 Memphis schools operated by the ASD.”

No miracles.

The bloom is off the rose.

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Corporate Reformers, Education Industry, Failure, Memphis, Privatization, Tennessee
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