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Samuel Abrams Responds to Barron’s Takedown of His Book and the Editor Makes a Snarky Comment

By dianeravitch
September 11, 2017 //
18

Samuel Abrams, veteran high school teacher and now Director of the National Center for the Study of Privatization in Education, at Teachers College, Columbia University, wrote an excellent book about the perils of for-profit schooling. Most of the book tells the story of the rise and calamitous fall of the Edison Project. The business magazine Barron’s published a scathing review of the book by anti-public school ideologue Bob Bowdon, whose film “The Cartel” compared the New Jersey teachers’ union to the mafia.

Samuel Abrams wrote a response to the review. Here is the original letter, followed by the heavily edited published version:

The original letter to the editor:

To the Editor:

In faulting me in his review of Education and the Commercial Mindset for focusing on the failure of Edison Schools rather than the success of National Heritage Academies (NHA), Bob Bowdon misses a central point of my book (“Balancing the Books: Slurring Charter Schools,” Sept. 4).

Edison was the standard-bearer of a movement hailed by Wall Street analysts in the 1990s to outsource the operation of public schools to for-profit educational management organizations (EMOs). Analysts forecasted that Edison and similar EMOs surfacing in its wake would run 10 to 20 percent of the country’s public schools by 2010 and reward investors handsomely. By 2010, the portion of public schools run by EMOs was 0.7 percent and has not changed since. Moreover, investors in Edison saw the stock plummet 90 percent from when it was taken public with much fanfare by Merrill Lynch in 1999 to the time it was taken over in 2003 by the private equity firm Liberty Partners, which, in turn, sold the company in 2013 for 80 percent less than it had paid.

While NHA has indeed tripled in size since 2001 to 84 schools today, as Bowdon writes, this growth along with that of other for-profit EMOs such as the Leona Group and Mosaica constitutes a blip relative to what analysts had predicted.

Furthermore, in contending that I ignored the consistent proliferation of charter schools, Bowdon misses another central point of my book. As I wrote in my prologue, “With the number of charter schools as a whole—from solo operations to network members—growing from 2 in Minnesota in 1992 to 6,440 across 42 states and the District of Columbia by 2013, the appeal and force of educational outsourcing cannot be questioned.”

Finally, in dismissing my argument that the complexity of primary and secondary schooling does not afford parents the transparency essential to conventional contract enforcement, Bowdon cites the complexity of Android and Apple smartphones as proof that complexity itself presents no barrier to the commercial model. Bowdon thus misses yet a third central point of my book.

While smartphones as well as their networks are clearly complex, they are discrete goods and services, respectively, and consequently comport with the commercial model because their effectiveness may be easily judged. In the case of primary and secondary schooling, however, the immediate consumer is a child or adolescent while the parent is at a necessary distance. School districts are accordingly well justified in outsourcing discrete services like busing or food preparation to commercial operators but not a complex service like school management. The implicit information asymmetry in the latter case generates significant potential for moral hazard.

Samuel E. Abrams

New York, N.Y.

Here is the heavily edited and sharply reduced version that Barron’s published, along with a defensive comment by the book editor:

Missing the Point

To the Editor:

In faulting me in his review of Education and the Commercial Mindset for focusing on the failure of Edison Schools rather than the success of National Heritage Academies, or NHA, Bob Bowdon misses a central point of my book (“Slurring Charter Schools,” Balancing the Books, Sept. 2).

Edison was the standard-bearer of a movement hailed by Wall Street analysts in the 1990s to outsource the operation of public schools to for-profit educational management organizations. Analysts forecasted that Edison and similar EMOs surfacing in its wake would run 10% to 20% of the country’s public schools by 2010 and reward investors handsomely. By 2010, the portion of public schools run by EMOs was 0.7% and hasn’t changed since. Moreover, investors in Edison saw the stock plummet 90% from when it was taken public with much fanfare by Merrill Lynch in 1999, to the time it was taken over in 2003 by the private-equity firm Liberty Partners, which, in turn, sold Edison in 2013 for 80% less than it had paid.

Samuel E. Abrams
New York City

Editor Gene Epstein replies: Bowdon wrote that Edison was a case of “switching a government-run monopoly for a privately run monopoly.” That was the reason he dismissed Edison for not being an example of competitive alternatives to government-run schools. Abrams misses this central point, apparently expecting Bowdon to be impressed by the fact that Edison was “hailed by Wall Street analysts.”

Categories Corporate Reformers, Education Industry, Education Reform, For-Profit, Privatization

Testing Expert: The Common Core Would Be Dead Without Continued Gates Funding

By dianeravitch
September 11, 2017 //
32

I have written several books about the rise and fall of fads in education. One that has risen and should have fallen by now is the Common Core. Why does it persist? Trump promised to kill it, but Betsy DeVos has done nothing to discourage states that use it. Many states have rebranded the CC and call it something else like “Florida Standards” or “New Generation Standards.” But it is the same old Common Core.

Richard Phelps, testing expert, explains why the Common Core persists. As long as Bill Gates keeps funding it, it survives. He points out that the Gates Foundation has been the source of funding and advocacy for the Common Core standards. If CC were a normal educational fad, it would have died by now due to overwhelming opposition from parents and its demonstrated ineffectiveness.

But Bill Gates not only funded the creation of the Common Core, he has funded advocacy groups to support it and funded news media to write favorable articles, even if they have to beat the bushes to find a supportive voice.

Gates is not ready to write off his investment yet, as he did with his failed effort to impose cookie-cutter small schools ($2 billion) and his failed effort to evaluate teachers by test scores of students (full cost unknown, but surely hundreds of millions, mostly passed on to taxpayers by embedding the Gates quixotic idea into the Race to the Top).

Yet Common Core lives on, even if on life support. The life support is dollars.

“The amounts are huge. A search in the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation website for grant awards with the keyword “Common Core” returns 257 results accumulating more than $300 million.
Substituting the Common Core euphemism “college and career readiness” uncovers another $130 million for another 52 grantees.

Even more Common Core money has been sent under vague explanations such as “for general operating support” to organizations whose only relationship with the Gates Foundation is to promote Common Core…”
“Journalism in general may be suffering, but coverage of education issues has grown, in part thanks to you know who.

Gates generously funds all of the mainstream education press: Education Week, the Hechinger Report, the Education Writers Association, Chalkbeat, and EdSurge, as well as National Public Radio and the Public Broadcasting System…”

“(Common Core) is so unpopular and unwieldy it would probably have expired a few years ago if not for Gates Foundation support.”

Categories Accountability, Common Core, Education Industry, Gates Foundation, Bill Gates, Testing

Bruce Baker on the Hoax of Tech-Based Solutions to the Cost of Education

By dianeravitch
September 11, 2017 //
15

Bruce Baker of Rutgers University shows in this post that the dream of cutting costs by replacing teachers with computers has been oversold and is a fantasy. It lures entrepreneurs and snake-oil salesmen into education but there is no evidence to support the claims.

Baker traces the latest iteration of the myth of cutting costs and achieving efficiency. Open the link to see the graph that promised huge savings:

“Modern edupreneurs and disrupters seem to have taken a narrow view of technological substitution and innovation, equating technology almost exclusively with laptop and tablet computers – screen time – as potential replacements for teachers – whether in the form of online schooling in its entirety, or on a course by course basis (unbundled schooling).[ii] For example, the often touted Rocketship model (a chain of charter schools), makes extensive use of learning lab time in which groups of 50 to 70 (or more) students work on laptops while supervised by uncertified “instructional lab specialists.”[iii] Fully online charter schools have expanded in many states often operated as for-profit entities.[iv] The overarching theme is that there must be some way to reduce the dependence on human resources to provide equal or better schooling, because human resources are an ongoing, inefficient expense.

“In 2011, on the invitation of New York State Commissioner of Education John King (later, replacement of Arne Duncan as U.S. Secretary of Education), Marguerite Roza, at the time a Senior Economic and Data Advisor to the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation,[v] presented the Productivity Curve illustration (Figure 11) at a research symposium of the New York State Board of Regents.[vi] Roza used her graph to assert that, for example, for $20,000 per pupil, tech-based learning systems could provide nearly 4x the bang for the buck as the status quo, and double the bang for the buck as merely investing in improved teacher effectiveness.

“The most significant shortcoming of this graph, however, was that it was entirely speculative[vii] (actually, totally made up! Fictional!) – a) not based on any actual empirical evidence that such affects could be or have anywhere been achieved, b) lacking any definition whatsoever as to what was meant by “tech-based learning systems” or “improve teacher effectiveness”, and c) lacking any information on the expenditures or costs which might be associated with either the status quo or the proposed innovations. That is, without any attention to the cost effectiveness frameworks I laid out in the previous chapter. The graph itself was then taken on the road by Commissioner King and used in his presentations to district superintendents throughout the state![viii]”

We now know from experience and evidence that fully online schools produce worse results with no savings in cost or efficiency (the cost savings are turned into profits for inferior education).

A very important post.

Categories Funding, Gates Foundation, Bill Gates, John King, Technology

John Thompson Reviews John Merrow’s “Addicted to Reform,” and Loves It!

By dianeravitch
September 11, 2017 //
17

John Thompson, historian and teacher in Oklahoma, Reviews John Merrow’s ADDICTED TO REFORM:


In “Addicted to Reform: A 12-Step Program to Rescue Public Education”, John Merrow lets it all out. Merrow, the winner of the George Polk Award and two George Foster Peabody Awards, leads us down “Memory Lane,” republishing his astonishing journalism that predates “A Nation at Risk,” and its warning against “a rising tide of mediocrity.” He also recalls successful innovators such as James Comer, E.D. Hirsch, Deborah Meier, and Henry Levin.
ADDICTED TO REFORM by John Merrow | Kirkus Reviews
But Merrow shows how high stakes testing dramatically increased our output of mediocre and even worse lessons for our kids. He tells us how the bubble-in reform “mania” got to a point where a principal told his teachers to “motor down,” to stop teaching 11th grade material to high-performing freshmen in order to prepare for the 9th grade test. Even more despicable was cancelling an annual kindergarten play so five-year-olds could spend more time becoming “college and career ready.”

The veteran reporter, with four decades of experience at NPR and PBS, reviews the way that test and punish “went into high gear during [the] Bush and Obama” administrations, when “‘regurgitation education’ became the order of the day.” Accountability-driven, competition-driven reformers turned schools into dreary places for “parroting back answers, while devaluing intellectual curiosity, cooperative learning, projects, field trips, the arts, physical education and citizenship.”

Merrow recalls the legacies of “blindly worshipping test scores.” Under Arne Duncan, Joel Klein, and Michelle Rhee, et. al and with funding by the “Billionaires Boys Club,” test scores became more than “the holy grail.” Merrow concludes, “Test scores are their addiction, the equivalent of crack cocaine, oxycodone, or crystal meth.”

Given Merrow’s influential coverage of corporate reform abuse in Washington D.C., it is no surprise that his discussion of Rhee is especially important. High stakes testing like the DC-CAS is always a bad idea, Merrow concludes, but in D.C. “it was an open invitation to disaster.” It was a part of a mentality where, for instance, D.C.’s director of professional development said that 80% of the district’s teachers lacked the skills or motivation to be successful in the classroom.

This narrow viewpoint, which was brought nationwide by “Waiting for Superman,” “The 74,” and other corporate-funded public relations assaults on public education, has “poisoned learning by turning it into a ‘gotcha game.’” But, Merrow concludes that our schools won’t “be out of the woods” until we “stop belittling and sometimes humiliating” teachers.

Merrow dissects the “heroic teacher” meme that set educators up to fail in their single-handed fight against the legacies of poverty. He cites teachers’ accounts of how “the testing mania has caused people to lose their minds.” Teachers explain how they “are becoming more like McDonald’s workers.” And, as another teacher explains, “I’m still in the classroom, but I miss teaching. It’s all about testing.”

The result of the lavishly-funded, data-driven mandates to transform “teacher quality” is that only prison guards, child care workers, and secretaries have higher attrition rates. A seemingly conservative estimate is that 81% of teachers believe that schools have too much testing and, that helps explain why about 60% of teachers say they are losing enthusiasm for the job, with nearly half saying they would quit if they could find a higher-paying job.

Merrow offers a 12-Step plan to reverse the harm inflicted by corporate school reform. In doing so, he often reminds us that it wasn’t just a misguided ideology and hubris that led sincere reformers astray. He notes the profit motives that undoubtedly influenced edu-philanthropists and charter providers, motivating them to ignore the overwhelming evidence of the unintended harm they were dumping on children.

For instance, Merrow speculates that if Jesse James would come back, today he’d become a charter operator in North Carolina. Similarly, huge administrative costs richly reward charter operators. The New York City Schools Chancellor is compensated at a rate of 40 cents per student, but charter leader Eva Moskowitz earns $51.35 per student, and Deborah Kenny is compensated at a rate of $375 per student.

The part of Addicted to Reform that taught me the most was Merrow’s account of Big Pharma’s influence on special education practices. I had no idea that it was once claimed that some ADD treatments were “safer than aspirin.” But the lessons that I most needed to learn are included in Merrow’s account of the “Buy Now, Pay Later” economics of Ed Tech. His bottom line isn’t surprising, “harnessing technology, … to raise test scores, makes education worse, not better.”

On one hand, the solutions in the 12-Step Program to Rescue Public Education are modest. However, their strengths are rooted in what our democracy already knows how to do. We don’t need a new Common Core, Merrow says, to teach us how to respect the science that calls for high-quality early education, or to bring exploratory learning back into classrooms. By now, there is a widely held understanding that due to reform, “Students have been the losers, sentenced to mind-numbing schooling. Teachers who care about their craft have also lost out.”

The big winners have been the testing companies. But the grassroots Opt Out movement has led the counterattack. The refusal to take these punitive tests has empowered students and patrons, while revealing some of the darkest sides of the reform addiction. For instance, when 90% of students opted out in a Connecticut school, the administration forced opt outers to attend classes where there would be “no new learning” allowed.

And that brings us back to why Merrow was right to use the word “addiction” to diagnose the failure of reform. Merrow shows how corporate reform began as a fundamentally anti-intellectual movement (by admittedly smart people who knew little of the institution they sought to transform) and ended up defending policies that are sometimes irrational and/or cruel. Somehow, they couldn’t see the damage done by shaming poor children of color into increasing their “outputs.” These social engineers imposed the stress of testing to overcome the stress of poverty, and consciously contributed to increased segregation in order to reverse the legacies of segregation.

And many reformers are still convincing themselves that they haven’t created a disaster. It would be hard to explain such a continuing debacle without using Merrow’s language of addiction, as well has his guide to following their money.

Categories Accountability, Common Core, Corporate Reformers, Education Industry, Testing

Trump’s War on Science

By dianeravitch
September 10, 2017 //
42

We need science more than ever, as our world is rocked by natural and people-made disasters.

Yet two words are banned the Trump administration: climate change.

Read the editorial that appeared in today’s’ New York Times.

The government is controlled by men (mostly) who are contemptuous of science and knowledge. Maybe this explains their war on education. They have reached the top without brains, why pay to develop them in young children?

The Times’ editorial reads:

“The news was hard to digest until one realized it was part of a much larger and increasingly disturbing pattern in the Trump administration. On Aug. 18, the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine received an order from the Interior Department that it stop work on what seemed a useful and overdue study of the health risks of mountaintop-removal coal mining.

“The $1 million study had been requested by two West Virginia health agencies following multiple studies suggesting increased rates of birth defects, cancer and other health problems among people living near big surface coal-mining operations in Appalachia. The order to shut it down came just hours before the scientists were scheduled to meet with affected residents of Kentucky.

“The Interior Department said the project was put on hold as a result of an agencywide budgetary review of grants and projects costing more than $100,000.

“This was not persuasive to anyone who had been paying attention. From Day 1, the White House and its lackeys in certain federal agencies have been waging what amounts to a war on science, appointing people with few scientific credentials to key positions, defunding programs that could lead to a cleaner and safer environment and a healthier population, and, most ominously, censoring scientific inquiry that could inform the public and government policy.

“Even allowing for justifiable budgetary reasons, in nearly every case the principal motive seemed the same: to serve commercial interests whose profitability could be affected by health and safety rules.

“The coal mining industry is a conspicuous example. The practice of blowing the tops off mountains to get at underlying coal seams has been attacked for years by public health and environmental interests and by many of the families whose livelihoods depend on coal. But Mr. Trump and his department heads have made a very big deal of saving jobs in a declining industry that is already under severe pressure from market forces, including competition from cheaper natural gas. An unfavorable health study would inject unwelcome reality into Mr. Trump’s rosy promises of a job boom fueled by “clean, beautiful coal.”

“This is a president who has never shown much fidelity to facts, unless they are his own alternative ones. Yet if there is any unifying theme beyond that to the administration’s war on science, apart from its devotion to big industry and its reflexively antiregulatory mind-set, it is horror of the words “climate change.”

“This starts with Mr. Trump, who has called global warming a hoax and pulled the United States from the Paris agreement on climate change. Among his first presidential acts, he instructed Scott Pruitt, the Environmental Protection Agency administrator, to deep-six President Obama’s Clean Power Plan, aimed at reducing carbon dioxide emissions from coal-fired power plants, and ordered Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke to roll back Obama-era rules reducing the venting from natural gas wells of methane, another powerful greenhouse gas.

“Mr. Trump has been properly sympathetic to the victims of hurricanes Harvey and Irma, but the fact that there is almost certainly a connection between a warming earth and increasingly destructive natural events seems not to have occurred to him or his fellow deniers. Mr. Pruitt and his colleagues have enthusiastically jumped to the task of rescinding regulations that might address the problem, meanwhile presiding over a no less ominous development: a governmentwide purge of people, particularly scientists, whose research and conclusions about the human contribution to climate change do not support the administration’s agenda.

“Mr. Pruitt, for instance, is replacing dozens of members on the E.P.A.’s scientific advisory boards; in March, he dismissed at least five scientists from the agency’s 18-member Board of Scientific Counselors, to be replaced, according to a spokesman, with advisers “who understand the impact of regulations on the regulated community.” Last month the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration dissolved its 15-member climate science advisory committee, a panel set up to help translate the findings of the National Climate Assessment into concrete guidance for businesses, governments and the public.

“In June, Mr. Pruitt told a coal industry lobbying group that he was preparing to convene a “red team” of researchers to challenge the notion, broadly accepted among climate scientists, that carbon dioxide and other emissions from fossil fuels are the primary drivers of climate change.

“Andrew Dessler, a professor of atmospheric science at Texas A&M University, called the red team plan a “dumb idea” that’s like “a red team-blue team exercise about whether gravity exists.” Rick Perry, the energy secretary, former Texas governor and climate skeptic, endorsed the idea as — get this — a way to “get the politicians out of the room.” Given his and Mr. Pruitt’s ideological and historical financial ties to the fossil fuel industry, it is hard to think of a more cynical use of public money.

“Even the official vocabulary of global warming has changed, as if the problem can be made to evaporate by describing it in more benign terms. At the Department of Agriculture, staff members are encouraged to use words like “weather extremes” in lieu of “climate change,” and “build soil organic matter, increase nutrient use efficiency” instead of “reduce greenhouse gases.” The Department of Energy has scrubbed the words “clean energy” and “new energy” from its websites, and has cut links to clean or renewable energy initiatives and programs, according to the Environmental Data & Governance Initiative, which monitors federal websites.

“At the E.P.A., a former Trump campaign assistant named John Konkus aims to eliminate the “double C-word,” meaning “climate change,” from the agency’s research grant solicitations, and he views every application for research money through a similar lens. The E.P.A. is even considering editing out climate change-related exhibits in a museum depicting the agency’s history.

“The bias against science finds reinforcement in Mr. Trump’s budget and the people he has chosen for important scientific jobs. Mr. Trump’s 2018 federal budget proposal would cut nondefense research and development money across the government.

“The president has proposed cutting nearly $6 billion from the National Institutes of Health, the nation’s single largest funder of biomedical research. The National Science Foundation, a government agency that funds a variety of scientific and engineering research projects, would be trimmed by about 11 percent. Plant and animal-related science at the Agriculture Department, data analysis at the Census Bureau and earth science at the National Aeronautics and Space Administration would all suffer.

“It is amazing but true, given the present circumstances, that the Trump budget would eliminate $250 million for NOAA’s coastal research programs that prepare communities for rising seas and worsening storms. The E.P.A.’s Global Change program would be likewise eliminated. This makes the budget director, Mick Mulvaney, delirious with joy. He complains of “crazy things” the Obama administration did to study climate, and boasts: “Do a lot of the E.P.A. reductions aim at reducing the focus on climate science? Yes.”

“As to key appointments, denial and mediocrity abound. Last week, Mr. Trump nominated David Zatezalo, a former coal company chief executive who has repeatedly clashed with federal mine safety regulators, as assistant secretary of labor for the federal Mine Safety and Health Administration. He nominated Jim Bridenstine, a Republican congressman from Oklahoma with no science or space background, as NASA administrator. Sam Clovis, Mr. Trump’s nomination to be the Agriculture Department’s chief scientist, is not a scientist: He’s a former talk-radio host and incendiary blogger who has labeled climate research “junk science.”

“From the beginning, Mr. Trump, Mr. Pruitt, Mr. Zinke and Mr. Perry — to name the Big Four on environmental and energy issues — have been promising a new day to just about anyone discomfited by a half-century of bipartisan environmental law, whether it be the developers and farmers who feel threatened by efforts to enforce the Clean Water Act, oil and gas drillers seeking leases they do not need on federal land, chemical companies seeking relaxation from rules governing dangerous pesticides, automakers asked to improve fuel efficiency or utilities required to make further investments in technology to reduce ground-level pollutants.

“The future ain’t what it used to be at the E.P.A.,” Mr. Pruitt is fond of saying of his agency. These words could also apply to just about every other cabinet department and regulatory body in this administration. What his words really mean is that the future isn’t going to be nearly as promising for ordinary Americans as it should be.”

Categories Ignorance, Science, Trump

Cartoon: A Message from Heaven to the White House

By dianeravitch
September 10, 2017 //
14

I hope you can open this. It worked for me. It captures the near-apocalyptic moment we are in.

 

https://s2.washingtonpost.com/9c3c/59b3c9b2fe1ff671d4f277d5/Z2FyZGVuZHJAZ21haWwuY29t/15/29/2160de31454b787c80a706dd1b1faf11

Categories Environment

Bad News for Bridge International Academies

By dianeravitch
September 10, 2017 //
26

The Liberian government received a report on the various for-profit corporations providing schooling. The bottom line: scores went up, but the cost of services varied dramatically. The most expensive of all the providers was Bridge International Academies, the for-profit corporation that is funded by Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, and other luminaries of the tech sector. Their costs were so much higher than that of any other service that it is doubtful that they are sustainable.

The so-called Partnership schools received double the funding of the public schools: $100 instead of only $50. And the Ministry of Education made sure that the Partnership schools were well-supplied with teachers, including the best-trained.

Four of the networks managed to produce results for less than $100 per pupil. Bridge, however, cost more than $1,000 per pupil, a figure dramatically higher than any other network, and their results were not markedly better.

Will Nicholas Kristof reconsider his fulsome praise for Bridge International Academies? The skeptics were right to be concerned about sustainability and scalability. Why did the billionaires think it was a good idea to try to turn a profit off the backs of the poorest people in the world? These Silicon Valley geniuses may be good at selling product, but they are not very good at creating or providing an education system.

Download the brief here.  Download the report here.

 

Categories Education Industry, Education Reform, For-Profit, International, Privatization

North Carolina: Margaret Spellings and Board of UNC Kill Center for Civil Rights

By dianeravitch
September 10, 2017 //
10

North Carolina was once the most progressive state in the South. Since the Tea Party swept the Legislature, the state is in a race to wipe out every last vestige of its social progress.

The Board of Governors of the University of North Carolina selected former Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings as the president of the state system. Faculty objected, since Spellings has no advanced degrees or research or scholarship. It was a purely political decision.

Now the board, presumably with Spellings’ approval, has voted to abolish its Center for Civil Rights. This may be outrageous but it is also appropriate, since the very concept of civil rights has been downgraded in the state and by the Trump administration.

“After months of contentious back-and-forth, the UNC Board of Governors voted this morning to ban the UNC Center for Civil Rights from doing legal work on behalf of the state’s poor and minority populations. The ban would effectively neuter the Center from providing legal representation to those who cannot afford it—groups it has been advocating for since it was founded by the famed civil rights attorney Julian Chambers in 2001.

“Since then, however, the UNC Board of Governors has taken a turn to the right. That’s because board members are elected by the state legislature, which, since 2010, has been controlled by Republicans. In many ways, the reorientation of the board’s political makeup is a reflection of the state’s dramatic rightward shift over the past seven years, which has made its imprint on everything from the redistricting process to, now, the law school’s ability to sue on behalf of the indigent and the poor.

“The Center for Civil Rights is not the only progressively-oriented UNC body that has taken hit as of late, however. In 2015, the Board voted to close the law school’s Poverty Center, which, true to its namesake, focused on the state’s low-income populations. The General Assembly also recently slashed the law school’s budget by $500,000.

“The Center’s opponents say that it’s inappropriate for one body of the state, such as the UNC system, to sue another; proponents say marginalized communities that would likely be unable to afford legal support in civil rights cases rely on its work. Over the years, the Center has litigated a long list of cases that are almost all related to low-income African-American communities: school segregation, racial discrimination in affordable housing, victims of the state’s eugenics program, and more.”

In the perspective of the UNC, the poor don’t deserve legal representation, at least not legal representation funded by the state.

Let them eat cake. But they should pay for it themselves.

Categories Civil Rights, North Carolina, Poverty

Tim Slekar: Scott Walker Continues His Crusade to Eliminate the Teaching Profession

By dianeravitch
September 10, 2017 //
17

Tim Slekar, dean of education at Edgewood College and a fighter for teachers and public schools, reports here on Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker’s latest salvo in his campaign to eliminate the teaching profession.

He writes:

“Wisconsin’s Joint Finance Committee passed Scott Walker’s budget proposal dealing with teacher education on a 12- 4 party line vote. While the entire proposal is a partisan disaster that continues the dismantling of Wisconsin’s public school system—one item is worth highlighting.”

Future teachers need no student teaching experience. They can completely bypass traditional professional education.

“The American Board for Certification of Teacher Excellence will be granting teaching licenses in Wisconsin.

“What does it take to earn a teaching license through the American Board for Certification of Teacher Excellence (ABCTE)?

$2100
A computer.
Web access
?

“That’s it! You never need to step foot in a college classroom or a classroom full of children. This is truly “fast-track” alternative teacher certification. Who needs to work with kids or learn how to interact with other human beings? That’s so “traditional.””

The ABCTE was created by Kate Walsh, who also founded the National Council for Teacher Quality, whose purpose is to undermine teacher education programs. It is a standardized test that involves no practical or theoretical knowledge of teaching. NCTQ eventually sold off its ownership rights to this shoddy program.

Professor Kenneth Zeichner of the University of Washington, an expert on teacher education, had this to say about ABCTE:

“”Wisconsin is considering allowing the American Board for Certification of Teaching Excellence to operate within its boundaries. This program, which was started by Kate Walsh and the National Center for Teaching Quality as an alternative to the push by the profession to implement a national board certification, is a totally online program that requires teachers to pass 2 online exams about subject matter knowledge and professional teaching knowledge. There is no student teaching/internship/or residency experience or assessment of teaching competence, and graduates become teachers of record in classrooms with “other people’s children.” I have been a critic of what I consider to be substandard programs like Relay and TNTP that I believe do a poor job or preparing professional teachers who will stay in teaching for more than a few years. ABCTE is worse. No real preparation and they end up teaching in schools where students need the very best teachers. Shame on you, Scott Walker, Alberta Darling, and the rest of the WI alt right.”

Categories National Council on Teacher Quality (NCTQ), Online Education, Teacher Education

Laura Chapman: Why The Gamification of Education Fails

By dianeravitch
September 10, 2017 //
19

I wrote a post about my experience playing “Words with Friends” and how my intrinsic desire to play the game was undermined by the offer of digital badges.

How “Words with Friends” Proved to Me that Edward Deci Is Right about Motivation

Laura Chapman wisely related my e periencevto the growing trend to introduce video games into the classroom and incentivize students with digital badges.

She writes:

“The “gamification of education” is one aspect of the effort to shove apps and software into schools, call it personalized learning while teaching lessons about competition not unlike those Diane reports in this blog.

“Here is a recent study, and not the only one, where the gamification feature does not produce gains in learninng.

Computers & Education

Volume 80, January 2015, Pages 152-161 by Michael D. Hanus and Jesse Fox

“Gamification, the application of game elements to non-game settings, continues to grow in popularity as a method to increase student engagement in the classroom.

“We tested students across two courses, measuring their motivation, social comparison, effort, satisfaction, learner empowerment, and academic performance at four points during a 16-week semester.

“One course received a gamified curriculum, featuring a leaderboard and badges, whereas the other course received the same curriculum without the gamified elements.

“Our results found that students in the gamified course showed less motivation, satisfaction, and empowerment over time than those in the non-gamified class. The effect of course type on students’ final exam scores was mediated by students’ levels of intrinsic motivation, with students in the gamified course showing less motivation and lower final exam scores than the non-gamified class.

“This suggests that some care should be taken when applying certain gamification mechanics to educational settings.

“I scanned several other studies. Middle school students, for example, showed initial interest in game-like presentations of content, but they lost interest in the “do this and get a badge, or try again” formula thinly disguised as quests or adventures.

“Younger students in gamified classrooms are learning less about content and more about their status relative to peers in a computer display and dashboard environment that is the equivalent of a class list with stars for “good students” and nothing at all for others. The great variation is gold, silver, and bronze stars. The badge system for “competency based personalized education” is marketed as if revolutionary. I think not.”

Categories Education Industry, Education Reform, Teachers and Teaching
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