Archives for the month of: June, 2017
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Stuart Egan: North Carolina Legislature Attacks Teachers’ Benefits Again

By dianeravitch
June 27, 2017 //
2

Which state legislature is working hardest to destroy public education and reduce the status of the teaching profession?

Unless you can make a better case, the winner is North Carolina.

The state legislature was swept by Rightwing extremists in 2010, and they promptly gerrymandered the state to protect their supermajority. Even when the public elected a Democratic governor in 2016, the legislature set about stripping the governor of his powers. Recently, the Supreme Court of the United Dtates rejected the state’s gerrymandered districts, clearly intended to disenfranchise black voters.

Now the legislature is back to attacking the teaching profession, in hopes of making it extinct in the state.

NBCT high school teacher Stuart Egan reports:

“The powers that rule in the North Carolina General Assembly have been waging a war against public schools in our state for the last four years. Under the guise of “reform,” GOP conservatives driven by ALEC-crafted policies have successfully enabled and instituted privatization efforts in many forms: unregulated charter school development, expansive growth of unproven vouchers, underfunding traditional public schools, and even propped an educational neophyte as state superintendent who has passively allowed the very department that is set to protect public schools to be heinously undercut.

“However, the latest move against public schools in North Carolina might signal the next step in overhauling education in the Old North State – the systematic elimination of the veteran teacher.

“Let me rephrase that.

“A gerrymandered lawmaking body has passed a budget that further indicates that many lawmakers in Raleigh will go to any length to poach the educational profession of veteran teachers.

“In the last four years, new teachers entering the profession in North Carolina have seen the removal of graduate degree pay bumps and due-process rights. While the “average” salary increases have been most friendly to newer teachers, those pay “increases” do plateau at about Year 15 in a teacher’s career. Afterwards, nothing really happens. Teachers in that position may have to make career-ending decisions.

“Without promise of much pay increase and no graduate degree pay bumps, those teachers may have to leave a profession they not only excel in and love, but serve as models for younger teachers to ensure professional integrity, the kind that was allowed to shine in a North Carolina of yesteryear when Republican governors and lawmakers were in the forefront of making sure public schools were a strength. And those teachers will not have due-process rights that would allow them to speak up about issues like compensation for fear of reprisal.

“Student will suffer; communities will suffer.

“The taking away of retiree state health benefits for teachers hired after January of 2021 is a step to create a system where students are more or less taught by contractors because the endangered species known as the “veteran teacher” will come to the point of extinction.”

Categories Education Reform, North Carolina, Privatization, Teachers

“Democracy”: The Problem with Ranking High Schools by AP Coursetaking

By dianeravitch
June 27, 2017 //
39

A reader who takes the sobriquet “Democracy” adds this comment about Jay Mathews’ high school rankings, as critiqued by Carol Burris:


I can appreciate Carol Burris’s critique of Jay Mathews Challenge Index. But her criticism falls way short. Advanced Placement is NOT what Mathews – or Burris – thinks it is. And Burris is wrong; Mathews should NOT make two Challenge Index lists; he should make none at all.

The Challenge Index has always been a phony list that doesn’t do much except to laud AP courses and tests. The Index is based on Jay Mathews’ dubious assumption that AP is inherently “better” than other high school classes in which students are encouraged and taught to think critically. The research on AP makes clear that it is more hype than anything else.

Let’s examine only a few of the ludicrous statements that Mathews makes, and then dig into the research on AP.

Mathews: “AP courses mimic introductory college courses in state universities. The final exams are written and graded by outside experts and thus are immune to the tendency in high schools to go easy on students…”

Oh, dear God. The truth is that AP courses do not come close to replicating college courses.

As one student remarked, after taking the World History AP test, “dear jesus… I had hoped to never see “DBQ” ever again, after AP world history… so much hate… so much hate.” And another added, “I was pretty fond of the DBQ’s, actually, because you didn’t really have to know anything about the subject, you could just make it all up after reading the documents.” Another AP student related how “high achievers” in his school approached AP tests:

“The majority of high-achieving kids in my buddies’ and my AP classes couldn’t [care]. They showed up for most of the classes, sure, and they did their best to keep up with the grades because they didn’t want their GPAs to drop, but when it came time to take the tests, they drew pictures on the AP Calc, answered just ‘C’ on the AP World History, and would finish sections of the AP Chem in, like, 5 minutes. I had one buddy who took an hour-and-a-half bathroom break during World History. The cops were almost called. They thought he was missing.”
The “outside experts” Mathews cites as the “graders” of AP exams are mostly high school AP teachers who read (rapidly) AP essays (the rest of the exams are machine scored). One of these “experts” discussed the types of essays he saw:

“I read AP exams in the past. Most memorable was an exam book with $5 taped to the page inside and the essay just said ‘please, have mercy.’ But I also got an angry breakup letter, a drawing of some astronauts, all kinds of random stuff. I can’t really remember it all… I read so many essays in such compressed time periods that it all blurs together when I try to remember.”

Many colleges and universities are finding that AP courses offer relatively little to students. A very large number of colleges restrict AP credit to test scores of only a 4 or 5 (for example, Baylor, Boston University, Chicago, Colorado, Northwestern,William and Mary). And many limit the number of credits that can be used. More (Boston College, MIT, Michigan, Washington University) are limiting scores to 5s or or not allowing AP credit whatsoever. As one AP test grader said, “the scores signify less and less. Anything under a 5 should be suspect. I wouldn’t give anyone college credit for an AP test grade if I had anything to do with it.”

Here’s another Mathews doozy:

“The growth of AP…participation has also been fueled by selective college admissions offices using that as a measure of a student’s readiness for higher education.”

Yet, more and more colleges are finding that AP is – in fact – NOT a measure of much of anything, except of a student’s desire to ge into the college of his or her choice, It’s a game.

The primary reason many students take AP is not to “learn” or to gain “college readiness,” but to game the admissions process. Students feel like they have to put AP on their transcripts or they won’t get into the college of their choice. It’s all about “looking good,” and boosting the grade point average.

One very honest AP teacher wrote recently that “Our district has told the counselors to promote the AP program with scare tactics that they will not get into the college of their choice, the district has incentivized taking the courses with up to 4.5 G.P.A. credit.” Yet, research chows clearly that the more weight AP courses are given, the less predictive power the weighted GPA has for college success. Dumb, dumb, dumb, dumb, dumb.

And, Mathews gives us this pearl:

“The National Math and Science Initiative has spent more than $200 million encouraging schools to add AP courses and motivate students to pass them, while training more teachers.”

The National Math and Science Initiative (NMSI) pushes for more STEM training in public schools, and purports “to bring best practices” to classrooms in order to “to reverse the recent decline in U.S. students’ math and science educational achievement.” NMSI claims to be the only group in the U.S. that “rigorously researched and replicated math and science programs that have produced immediate and sustainable results.” Three big problems present themselves though. First, there is no STEM crisis in the U.S., far from it. Second, there has been no “recent decline” in math and science achievement, And third, the “proven program” cited by NMSI most often is Advanced Placement, and the research just doesn’t support the claim.

Researchers Lindsay Lowell and Hall Salzman note in “Into the Eye of the Storm, that there is no STEM crisis in the U.S. They point out that “the math and science performance of high school graduates is not declining and show improvement for some grades and demographic groups.” They add that on the Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS) “there has been no decline and even some improvement” in U.S. student scores. And they add this:

“The weight of the evidence surely indicates not decline but rather indicates on ongoing educational improvement for U.S. students. This improvement is not only in math and science but in all subjects tested and, importantly, occurs at the same time as a greater and more diverse proportion of the population is remaining in school…The notion that the United States trails the world in educational performance misrepresents the actual test results and reaches conclusions that are quite unfounded.”

Moreover, Lowell and Salzman make clear that there is no shortage of STEM workers. in fact, “the U.S. has been graduating more S&E [science and engineering] students than there have been S&E jobs” for quite a while, and “addressing the presumed labor market problems through a broad-based focus on the education system seems a misplaced effort.” They add that “policy proposals that call for more math and science education, aimed at increasing the number of scientists and engineers, do not square with the education performance and employment data.”

Beryl Lieff Benderly wrote this stunning statement recently in the Columbia Journalism Review:

“Leading experts on the STEM workforce, have said for years that the US produces ample numbers of excellent science students…according to the National Science Board’s authoritative publication Science and Engineering Indicators 2008, the country turns out three times as many STEM degrees as the economy can absorb into jobs related to their majors.”

This STEM focus may be trendy, but it is based on a fallacy. It’s a myth.

The National Math and Science Initiative is funded by the Gates and Dell Foundations (which seem to have a distaste for public schools), by defense contractors like Northrop Grumman and Lockheed Martin (which have laid off STEM workers), by ExxonMobil (which has funded and disseminated disinformation on climate change), by JP Morgan Chase (which sold toxic securities, defrauded the public, and helped to cause the Great Recession), by Boeing (which is subsidized by US taxpayers, pays a lower tax rate than most American workers, and has laid off thousands of STEM employees), and by the College Board, maker of the PSAT, SAT and AP courses and tests.

Meanwhile, some of the world’s biggest banks and trading companies gamed a “market” of some nearly $400 trillion interest-rate trades, and not in favor of the public. And, more recent disclosures reveal that traders and bankers have rigged the foreign exchange (FX) market, one that involves daily transactions of nearly $ 5 trillion, which is “the biggest in the financial system.” As one analyst noted, this is “the anchor of our entire economic system. Any rigging of the price mechanism leads to a misallocation of capital and is extremely costly to society.”

We have a person in the White House who ran a decidedly racist, xenophobic, and misogynist campaign, and who was helped into office by Russian intelligence agencies who hacked, leaked and falsified documents to harm his opponent, and who has fired the FBI director in an overt attempt to quash investigations into subversion of democracy. Yet, Jay is still pumping out drivel about America’s “best” schools based on a deeply flawed Index that he cooked up and that has no basis in research.

Sadly, Burris seems to support his mania over AP.

The Challenge Index is based mostly on the number of AP tests that a school gives. And the research on AP finds it to be more hype than useful educational tool. It’s past time to let it go. But will educators release it?

Categories Competition

Massachusetts: State Commissioner Mitchell Chester Dies

By dianeravitch
June 27, 2017 //
4

State Commissioner Mitchell Chester died unexpectedly at the age of 65. He was battling cancer.

Although I disagreed with his reliance on corporate reform policies, I regret his untimely passing. R.I.P.

Categories Education Reform

NPR on New Voucher Studies: With Enough Time, Students in Voucher Schools Catch Up with Public Schools

By dianeravitch
June 27, 2017 //
23

Cory Turner and Anya Kamenetz of NPR look at two new voucher studies: one from Indiana, the other from Louisiana. The common thread is that voucher students lose ground academically in the first couple of years. Then, in the third or fourth year, they make up their losses and catch up with their public school peers.

The Indiana study, not yet peer-reviewed, found:

“The researchers studied student data for the program’s first four years and noticed an interesting pattern. If students stayed in their voucher schools long enough, the backslide stopped and their performance began to improve.

“The longer that a student is enrolled in a private school receiving a voucher, their achievement begins to turn positive in magnitude — to the degree that they’re making up ground that they initially lost in their first couple of years in private school,” Waddington tells NPR. “It’s like they’re getting back to where they started” before they enrolled in a private school.

“New voucher students fell statistically significantly behind their public school peers in math after switching. On average, those losses continued for two years in private school before students began making up ground. In the fourth year, those who were still enrolled in a voucher school appeared to catch up.

“In ELA, voucher students also lost ground but, ultimately, surpassed their public school peers by the fourth year.

“This pattern may give new hope to voucher supporters, but it comes with an important caveat: Many students did not stay in the system long enough to see this improvement, instead bouncing back to public schools, especially the lowest-achieving voucher students.”

So the lowest-achieving students returned to public schools, and the better-performing students showed gains. Hmm. No miracles there.

The study also found that vouchers are used by 3% of Indiana students. Half of them had never attended a public school. In other words, the voucher was used to pay tuition for students already attending a nonpublic school.

The other study, reported here yesterday, found a similar pattern of losses followed by a recovery.

Remember we were told for years that vouchers would “save poor kids from failing public schools”? It turns out that this was speculation. It hasn’t happened. The students in voucher schools are not posting amazing gains. It takes four years in a voucher school to catch up to their public school classmates, and modest gains are registered by those who survive.

Categories Indiana, Louisiana, Vouchers

Conservative Scholars Disappointed by “Narrow” Supreme Court Ruling

By dianeravitch
June 27, 2017 //
27

While supporters of public education were appalled by the Supreme Court decision awarding public funding to religious institutions, conservatives were disappointed that the decision did not go far enough to clear away any barriers to vouchers.

Martin West, a professor at Harvard, expressed his chagrin in this article in Education Next. West was mentored at Harvard by choice advocate Paul Peterson. Peterson has trained a generation of younger scholars who reflect his views on school choice, including West, the late John Chubb, Terry Moe, Jay Greene and Patrick Wolf of the University of Arkansas. Peterson is known for his influential protégés, who have formed a powerful cadre favoring school choice.

Now that the Court has a clear majority of five conservative justices, will separation of church and state survive? Not clear. One more Trump appointment to the Supreme Court, and Petersen, West, et al, can throw a party to celebrate their success at undermining public education in America and enabling every religious school–schools that teach creationism, schools that exclude children of other faiths, schools that exclude children with disabilities, schools that discriminate against LGBT children, schools that offer subpar education, schools that have no certified teachers–to get public funding. What a victory. Sad.

Education Next is funded by rightwing foundations and the reliably conservative Hoover Institution.

Categories Education Reform

Peter Greene: The Supreme Court Knocks a Big Hole in the Wall That Separates Church and State

By dianeravitch
June 27, 2017 //
50

Peter Greene reviews yesterday’s decision by the U.S. Supreme Court, which said that the state must make public funding available to religious institutions so as not to discriminate against them. The case involved the Trinity Lutheran Church in Missouri, which sought public funding to resurface the playground of its preschool. Initially, the state said the money was only available to public schools, because a prohibition in its state constitution. After the case advanced, the state relented and paved the playground, which made the case moot. But the Court ruled anyway, 7-2, that the state had to fund the church playground.

The Founders were very clear about the importance of not entangling church and state. The First Amendment explicitly says “Congress shall make no law” establishing any religion. It is not a big logical leap to extend that Amendment to say “Congress shall make no law” establishing many religions. Religious liberty is best preserved by keeping church and state separate.

Greene writes:

What matters in a case like this is the reasoning. Here’s the oft-quoted excerpt from the majority:

“The exclusion of Trinity Lutheran from a public benefit for which it is otherwise qualified, solely because it is a church, is odious to our Constitution … and cannot stand,” wrote Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr.

As Bloomberg notes, this is a big deal:

“It’s the first time the court has used the free exercise clause of the Constitution to require a direct transfer of taxpayers’ money to a church. In other words, the free exercise clause has trumped the establishment clause, which was created precisely to stop government money going to religious purposes. Somewhere, James Madison is shaking his head in disbelief.”

A portion of the majority made an attempt to mitigate the effects of the decision with a small footnote (the full opinion is here).

[The footnote: “This case involves express discrimination based on religious identity with respect to playground resurfacing. We do not address religious uses of funding or other forms of discrimination.”]

That note may be meant to indicate that the ruling is meant to be narrow– but not all of the seven justices who ruled against the state signed off on this footnote.

Reading through the decision leaves little mystery about where the majority are headed. The church argued that it was being disqualified from a public benefit for which it was otherwise qualified. The majority agrees:

“The State has pursued its preferred policy to the point of expressly denying a qualified religious entity a public benefit solely because of its religious quality. Under our precedents, that goes too far.”

And just in case that’s not clear enough, here’s Justice Gorsuch, joined by Justice Thomas, explaining why they don’t agree with footnote three. They argue that there is no point in distinguishing between religious purposes and activities, and that the exercise clause does not care, either.

“…the general principles here do not permit discrimination against religious exercise– whether on the playground or anywhere else.”

In other words, giving public tax dollars to a church-run private school would be just fine. In fact, it’s hard to know exactly where the court would draw the line. If an organization is in the community, competing for community funds for an activity, you can’t rule them out just because they are a religious organization. If a church wants money to pave a playground or run a school, you can’t deny them just because they’re a church.

The dissenting opinion sees this pretty clearly:

To hear the Court tell it, this is a simple case about recycling tires to resurface a playground. The stakes are higher. This case is about nothing less than the relationship between religious institutions and the civil government—that is, between church and state. The Court today profoundly changes that relationship by holding, for the first time, that the Constitution requires the government to provide public funds directly to a church.

That sounds about right. With this decision, the wall between church and state is pretty well shot, and there is nothing to stand in the way of, say, a federally-financed multi-billion dollar program that would funnel money to private religious schools. Trump and DeVos could not have a brighter green light for their voucher program.

I’ll argue, as always, that churches will rue the day the wall is taken down. The separation of church and state doesn’t just protect the state– it protects the church, too. When you mix religion and politics, you get politics. And where federal money goes, federal strings follow. Sooner or later the right combination of misbehavior and people in federal power will result in a call for accountability for private schools that get federal money– even religious schools. And as the requests for private religious vouchers roll in, folks will be shocked and surprised to find that Muslim and satanic and flying spaghetti monster houses of worship will line up for money, then the feds will have to come up with a mechanism for determining “legitimacy” and voila! That’s how you get the federal department of church oversight. Of course, this will only happen once we’re finally tired of the idea that charter and voucher schools don’t have to be accountable for anything to anyone…

Categories Religion, Separation of church and state, Supporting public schools

New York: Cuomo Will Call a Special Session to Renew Mayoral Control with No Perks for Charters

By dianeravitch
June 26, 2017 //
20

The New York Times reports that Governor Andrew Cuomo plans to call a special session of the Legislature to extend mayoral control of the NYC public schools for one year.

Mayor de Blasio hoped to win more than one year, but the governor and Republican-controlled State Senate like to torment him. Cuomo likes to cut him down to size, and the Republicans are angry that he helped Democrats who wanted to gain control of the State Senate.

According to the report, there won’t be any expansion of charter schools in the bill. This is a favorite cause of Senate Republican leader John Flanagan of Long Island, who loves charter schools, as long as they are not in his district.

Categories Bill de Blasio, Charter Schools, Cuomo, Andrew, New York City

New Voucher Study in Louisiana by Arkansas Researchers

By dianeravitch
June 26, 2017 //
20

Voucher advocates have been reeling by the convergence of recent studies showing that children who take vouchers lose ground academically.

A new study of vouchers in Louisiana conducted by pro-choice researchers from the University of Arkansas (Walton-funded researchers) has found that if students stay in the voucher program longer than one year, they eventually get the same test scores as students attending public schools. Also, those who enter with disabilities miraculously get better, even though these schools seldom have special education services.

Categories Education Reform

Jay Mathews: I Goofed on My High School Rankings!

By dianeravitch
June 26, 2017 //
35

Jay Mathews invented a high school ranking program that relies on certain criteria, especially the number of students who take AP and IB tests. The data are self-reported by the schools.

Carol Burris warned Jay that some of his rankings were highly improbable, especially those reported by the IDEA charter chain. She was right. Carol thinks that the temptation to “juke the stats” is too powerful. Jay thinks that there was an honest error.

Jay writes:

“When I started what The Washington Post now calls the America’s Most Challenging High Schools list, I was told not to trust data from schools and school districts. They’re sloppy and sometimes dishonest, people said. It won’t work.

“That was 19 years ago. The doubters were wrong. The educators I deal with have proved to be unfailingly honest. Mistakes are rare. But the biggest so far just happened. The IDEA Public Schools charter network in Texas told me it provided incorrect numbers of Advanced Placement tests at six of its schools for the 2017 list published in May.

“As a result, the five IDEA schools that were in the top 10 have dropped several places on the corrected list. “We messed up,” said IDEA founder and chief executive Tom Torkelson.”

Actually, IDEA has a documented history of overstating its success. Ed Fuller, a professor at Penn State formerly at the University of Texas, debunked the IDEA claim that 100% of its graduates were accepted into four-year colleges.

Ed Fuller wrote on his blog:

“IDEA Charter School markets itself as a college preparatory education organization with goals of enrolling 100% of graduates in four-year universities and have 100% persistence and graduation rates in college.[1] Indeed, in the introduction of the most recent annual report, Dr. Tom Torkelson, CEO of IDEA Public Schools, makes the following statement:

“IDEA puts students on path to succeed in an increasingly competitive global marketplace by providing a rigorous college preparatory education and preparing our low-income, Hispanic and minority students in under-served communities across Texas to apply, matriculate and succeed in a the four year college or university of their choice. To date, 100% of IDEA graduates have been accepted to a four-year college or university and our student (sic) are demonstrating remarkable staying power: 92% are either still in college or have graduated.[2]

“Further, on page six of the report, the claim is made that, “ . . . for the fifth year in a row, 100% of IDEA graduates enrolled in four-year colleges and universities, fulfilling IDEA’s mission of College For All Children.”[3]

“Yet, these claims are demonstrably false, the report fails to cite any data sources or studies that substantiate the claims, and the report fails to report publicly available data on the performance of students in four-year universities. The remainder of this short report substantiates my claims made about statements included in the IDEA annual report and provides data from the Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board about the Performance of IDEA Public School graduates in Texas four-year universities.”

Fuller goes on to show that 100% of IDEA graduates did not enroll in four-year colleges, and many of these students performed very poorly in college.

Given IDEA’s history of boasts and overstatements, why should Jay Mathews accept its self-reported data?

How many other self-reported errors are hidden in those rankings? Carol wonders if Jay is rewarding charters that push kids out who can’t or won’t take the AP courses. She thinks he should create two separate lists: one for charters, which have the power to choose and exclude their students; another for public schools that accept all students. I would suggest a third category: selective public schools. How can anyone fairly compare a comprehensive high school that accepts all who apply, with a selective high school that admits only those who pass an examination? How can anyone fairly compare charter schools with high attrition rates–weeding out low performers– to those public schools that enroll students with disabilities and students who are learning English, as well as children who are homeless.

I don’t see the purpose of ranking selective high schools and non-selective high schools. I’m having trouble understanding the value of the rankings no matter how they are reported.

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Corporate Reformers, Education Industry, Testing

Breaking News from the Supreme Court

By dianeravitch
June 26, 2017 //
55

The Supreme Court ruled today by 7-2 that Missouri could not deny funding for the resurfacing of a church playground when the state was funding the resurfacing of public school playgrounds. The court apparently overturned the state constitution’s prohibition on funding religious institutions in any manner. If this ruling overturns state constitutional amendments prohibiting the funding of sectarian (religious) schools, it clears the way for state funding of capital cost of religious schools, and very possibly, for vouchers. (Ironically, before the decision, Missouri had already reversed course and resurfaced the church’s school playground.)

“The court ruled 7-2 that religious institutions may not be excluded from state programs with a secular intent — in this case, making playgrounds safer.


“Missouri’s state constitution, like those in about three dozen states, forbade government from spending any public money on “any church, sect, or denomination of religion.”


“Trinity Lutheran Church in Columbia, Mo., wanted to participate in a state program that reimburses the cost of rubberizing the surface of playgrounds. But the state said that was not allowed. The exclusion has raised big questions about how to uphold the Constitution’s prohibition on government support for religion without discriminating against those who are religious.
Missouri’s state constitution, similar to those of about three dozen states, directs that “no money shall ever be taken from the public treasury, directly or indirectly, in aid of any church, sect, or denomination of religion.”

“
Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr., who authored the opinion, wrote, “The exclusion of Trinity Lutheran from a public benefit for which it is otherwise qualified, solely because it is a church, is odious to our Constitution … and cannot stand.”
The two dissenting votes came from Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Sonia Sotomayor.”

In another decision, the Supreme Court agreeed to hear a case in which a baker refused to make a cake for a gay couple, because of his relious views. Given the decision today about the Missouri case, this Supreme Court might decide that discrimination based on religious principles is constitutional.

Categories Education Reform, Religion, Separation of church and state
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