Archives for the month of: December, 2017
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Tom Ultican: Don’t Be Hoaxed by Bad Education Policies Based on Junk Science

By dianeravitch
December 18, 2017 //
9

Tom Ultican writes a warning about a program called the National Math and Science Initiative.

“The National Math and Science Initiative (NMSI) was founded by a group of Dallas area lawyers and businessmen. Tom Luce is identified as the founder and Rex Tillerson, the CEO of ExxonMobil and present US Secretary of State, provided the financing…

“Tom Luce is a lawyer not an educator but his fingerprints are all over some of the worst education policies in the history of our country. His bio at the George W. Bush Whitehouse archives says, “… Luce is perhaps best known for his role in 1984 as the chief of staff of the Texas Select Committee of Public Education, which produced one of the first major reform efforts among public schools.” The chairman of that committee was Ross Perot.”

Luce can claim credit for Texas’ expensive and wasteful obsession with testing and data. Hundreds of millions of dollars—maybe billions—were squandered by Texas in pursuit of data and scores. Thanks, Tom Luce.

Ultican writes:

“Mark Twain said, “To a man with a hammer, everything looks like a nail.” For Ross Perot, the founder of Electronic Data Systems the problems in education looked like data problems. He and his Chief of Staff, Tom Luce, decided standardized testing and data analysis were the prescription for failing public schools. Unfortunately, standardized testing is totally useless for analyzing learning and public schools were not actually failing.

“Tom Luce was also directly involved in implementing NCLB (a spectacular education reform failure) while serving at the US Department of Education.”

So Luce helped deploy billions of dollars more in data gathering.

Now the NSMI is promoting Luce’s philosophy of teach to the test and bribes.

The fact that these policies have failed dramatically for 15 years at the national level and for 30 years in Texas does not slow the momentum of their advocates.

Categories Accountability, Data, Education Industry, Hoax, Merit pay, NCLB (No Child Left Behind), Privatization, Standardized Testing, STEM, Texas

Columbus Dispatch Editorial: Will the ECOT Saga Please End?

By dianeravitch
December 18, 2017 //
10

One of the most remarkable turnarounds in the nation happened in Ohio. There have been so many charter scandals that the major newspapers have become skeptical, as well they should be. They have noticed the scams, frauds, phantom schools, phantom students. They’ve noticed how many charters get scores lower than the public schools they were supposed to compete with.

They are no longer entranced by the marketing of the charter school industry.

In Ohio, the biggest scandal is the Electronic Classroom of Tomorrow, known as ECOT.

This editorial appeared in the Columbus Dispatch. The editorial board is no longer fooled by the charter industry.

It was founded in 2000. It developed some very bad habits that cheated the public of millions of dollars.

“Alas, the school’s owner, who had no background in education, began to realize that education is really hard. And keeping the attention of at-risk students is really, really hard. The owner began to realize that many students who signed up for his school almost never logged in. Didn’t show up. His virtual classroom was half-empty. But tracking down these students and hounding them to get online and learn something would be time-consuming, expensive and, in many cases, nearly impossible.

“The owner quickly realized something else. Keeping an honest account of how many students were logging in to meet state attendance requirements would reduce the amount he could charge the state — by millions of dollars. Every year. The owner made an unfortunate choice. He decided to charge the state for a full year of instruction for each student signed up, even if a student logged in for only a few minutes each month.

“This is the sad story of ECOT — the Electronic Classroom of Tomorrow, Ohio’s largest online charter school. Since its founding in 2000, the school consistently has billed the state for students whose participation it could not document.

“In November 2001, then-State Auditor Jim Petro determined ECOT received $1.7 million for students not enrolled. Despite these early warnings, ECOT continued to charge Ohio’s taxpayers for phantom students, in increasing numbers.

“State audits from 2000 to 2016 revealed how lucrative this pattern has been for ECOT owner Bill Lager. Although organized as a nonprofit, ECOT contracts with two Lager-owned, for-profit entities for management and software services. From 2000 to 2016, ECOT paid the two businesses a tidy $192.8 million.

“At long last, in 2016 the Department of Education had had enough. It began insisting on honest accounting. After reviewing log-in durations and offline documentation for the 2015-2016 school year, the department concluded ECOT had reported 15,322 full-time students, while only 6,313 could be verified. The State Board of Education required ECOT to repay about $60 million of the $108 million it had received.

“This upset the owner. So he sued the state and its taxpayers, claiming the education department has no right to look under the hood, no right to check whether students actually are logging in. Fortunately, this argument was rejected by both the Franklin County Common Pleas Court and Court of Appeals. The case now is before the Ohio Supreme Court.”

ECOT has the lowest graduation rate in the nation.

How much longer will the taxpayers of Ohio allow this “school” to collect millions for students who never participated in class?

Categories Charter Schools, Education Industry, Fake, For-Profit, Fraud, Ohio, Privatization, Virtual Charter Schools

Australia Bans Computer Scoring of National Tests

By dianeravitch
December 18, 2017 //
16

In a step towards common sense, Australia has determined to prohibit computer scoring of national tests.

Now the next step towards common sense would be to get rid of the national tests.

One great piece of news for Australia is that the Finnish education expert Pasi Sahlberg has taken a position at the Gonski Institute of Education at UNSW in Sydney.

GERM and NAPLAN won’t survive Pasi’s onslaught of brilliance and direct talk for long.

Categories Education Reform

Did Bob Corker Change His Vote for Self-Enrichment?

By dianeravitch
December 17, 2017 //
16

Why did Senator Bob Corker Change his vote?

http://www.ibtimes.com/political-capital/tax-bill-john-cornyn-says-tax-cut-potentially-benefiting-bob-corker-was-part

Why would Republicans pass a tax bill that is wildly unpopular?

Who benefits?

Remember next November.

Categories For-Profit

Susan Ochshorn: A Battle for the Heart and Soul of American Education: Meier v. Moskowitz

By dianeravitch
December 17, 2017 //
30

[I am reposting since I just discovered that I put the wrong link in the original post. Sorry, Susan!]

Susan Ochshorn of ECE PolicyWorks and a new member of the board of the Network for Public educatio, writes here about two polar opposites: Deborah Meier and Eva Moskowitz.

Ochshorn compares the biographies, the lives, and the education philosophy of these two people.

She begins with Meier, an advovate, like Ochshorn, for children’s right to play:

“More than two decades ago, Deborah Meier warned that the idea of democracy was in peril. “Is it ever otherwise?” she asked in the preface to The Power of Their Ideas, her elegantly argued manifesto for public education. A self-described preacher on its behalf, she has spent half a century nurturing “everyone’s inalienable capacity to be an inventor, dreamer, and theorist—to count in the larger scheme of things.”

“I met Meier in the mid-aughts, when I joined a grassroots campaign she spearheaded in New York City to restore creative play and hands-on learning to preschools and kindergartens. This éminence grise of progressive early childhood education and the small-schools movement (for which she received a MacArthur fellowship in 1987) had begun her career as a kindergarten teacher at the Shoesmith School in Kenwood, a diverse neighborhood wedged between the University of Chicago’s Hyde Park and an impoverished black community.”

When she turns to Moskowitz, she sees a power-hungry woman who uses children for her own purposes.

“The Education of Eva Moskowitz” is a torturous read. After 359 pages of copious detail, an internal structure that defies chronology, zig-zagging across Moskowitz’s life, the evisceration of journalists, politicians and “union flacks,” as she refers to people and organizations fighting for social justice, and anyone else who has crossed her, my mind was numb. Not to mention her hubris, greed, narcissism, humorlessness and lack of self-awareness…

“His hypocrisy would have been comical if the fates of real children weren’t at stake,” Moskowitz writes of Mayor Bill de Blasio, her adversary in building an empire. Ah, yes, the children. “While it can be frustrating to teach them because they don’t know how to behave,” Moskowitz writes in a chapter called “Weevils” (an infestation she attributes to snacks from the Department of Education), “the upside is that they are virtually a blank slate…. if you take advantage of that fact to teach them to become good learners, that investment will pay dividends for years to come.”

“Apparently, Moskowitz isn’t aware that the tabula rasa theory of the English empiricist John Locke has been discredited by decades of neurological and developmental science. As Berkeley psychologist Alison Gopnik writes in The Philosophical Baby, “Their minds seem drastically limited; they know so much less than we do. And yet long before they can read and write, they have extraordinary powers of imagination and creativity, and long before they go to school, they have remarkable learning abilities.”

“Moskowitz and other charter network operators such as KIPP’s David Levin have cast their “No Excuses” schools in the mold of Harvard psychologist B.F. Skinner, whose radical behaviorism ignores internal processes—thoughts, feelings, and neurophysiological processes—emphasizing the relationship between observable stimuli and responses. Through a process called operant conditioning, behavior is modified by positive and negative reinforcement. (See Pavlov and his dogs.)

“With harsh discipline, and incentives offered for good behavior and high scores on practice tests, Moskowitz remains convinced she can close the achievement gap between her students, the vast majority of whom are black or Latino living in poverty, and their more affluent, white peers. Her methods are abusive. Students’ every movement is monitored. Daydreaming is prohibited. Children are shamed, their lackluster performances on weekly spelling and math quizzes posted in a red zone on charts in the hallway.”

As we view these two, we see a struggle for the heart and soul of American education, or for the hearts and souls of our children. Big money is betting on Moskowitz. She is the darling of Wall Street, DFER, and other corporate titans. The survival of our democracy and humane ideals is riding on Meier’s vision.

Categories Charter Schools, Childhood, Citizenship, Corporate Reform, Democracy, Discipline and Suspensions, Education Industry

ACLU Slams Charter Industry in Arizona for Discriminating Against Students They Don’t Want

By dianeravitch
December 17, 2017 //
13

The American Civil Liberties Union issued a blistering report about the charter industry in Arizona, claiming that charters choose their students, instead of the other way around.

The title of the report is Schools Choosing Students: How Arizona Charter Schools Engage in Illegal and Exclusionary Student Enrollment Practices and How It Should Be Fixed

The 26-page report begins:

In the 1990s, Arizona became one of the nation’s rst adopters of charter schools. The vision was to give parents more academic choices for their children and to provide learning environments more tailored to students’ individual needs. In many cases, however, Arizona’s charter school program has had the opposite result: Charter schools are choosing students who fit their mold.

Indeed, more than two decades after charter schools emerged in Arizona, admission policies and procedures at many of the state’s charter schools unlawfully exclude some students or create barriers to their enrollment. Many schools have been able to get away with exclusionary practices for years without accountability.

Though charter schools operate independently, they are part of Arizona’s
public education system and use taxpayer funds. As such, they are required to “enroll
all eligible pupils who submit a timely application.”1 If more students apply than
can be accommodated, schools can randomly select students through a lottery system.2

Arizona charter schools are also forbidden from discriminating against students on the basis of “ethnicity, national origin, gender, income level, disabling condition, proficiency in the English language or athletic ability.”3

But an analysis of Arizona charter schools’ enrollment materials shows many schools have policies and procedures that are clearly illegal or exclusionary. Speci cally, out of the 471 Arizona charter schools that were analyzed,
at least 262, or 56 percent, have policies that are clear violations of the law or that may discourage the enrollment of certain students.

Do you think that Betsy DeVos cares? Will the Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights take action to reduce and eliminate illegal discrimination?

Categories Accountability, Arizona, Charter Schools, English Language Learners, Privatization, Special Education

Laura Chapman: Bill Gates and the Art of the Deal

By dianeravitch
December 17, 2017 //
27

Laura Chapman sees the latest Gates plan for school reform as yet another effort by Gates to control and remake public education for his own gratification. She describes his plan for “networks” as another stab at philanthrogovernance.

She writes:


I think that the Gates initiatives announced in several venues and examined by Kevin Welner of the National Education Policy Center are really more of the same old effort by Bill Gates to establish philanthrogovernance as a national norm. Gates wants to micromanage and standardize education. He is not alone. In fact, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation is almost always joined by other foundations in so-called “collective impact” efforts.

Gates has said he wants to invest in more than one “Network for School Improvement” defined as “a group of secondary schools working both collectively and individually with an intermediary to use a continuous improvement process to improve student outcomes through tackling problems of the same kind across the network.”

From Gates’ examples, “an intermediary” turns out to be any non-governmental agency that can enlist the cooperation of school officials, especially superintendents, in outsourcing major decisions about school policies and practices to other agencies, including universities, consultants of all kinds, and others in a tangled web of sometime dubious deals and partnerships a plenty.

Consider his models for future funding. One is the “California Office to Reform Education” known as CORE. CORE is a non-governmental administrative office set up to receive private funding, then put that money into schemes that will standardize practices in eight California districts. CORE’s bait persuaded the superintendents of Fresno, Garden Grove, Long Beach, Los Angeles, Oakland, Sacramento, San Francisco and Santa Ana to sign a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) that they would standardize their practices and have a common assessment. CORE operates with funding from these foundations: Stuart, William & Flora Hewlett, and SD Bechtel, Jr, (Stephen Becktel Fund). Add the Bill and Melinda Gates foundation which alone has sent over $7.6 million to CORE.

The superintendent’s initial bait for signing the CORE District MOU was the prospect of being exempt from Race to the Top accountability, and dodging some oversight by the California Board of Education. CORE lives on.

Worst of all: CORE Districts have agreed to expand testing. In addition to student test scores, attendance and the like, the new metrics include results from dubious surveys from students, teachers, parents, and non-teaching staff.

Then all of these metrics are hashed and mashed into ratings of schools and those ratings are fed directly from the CORE district to the website GreatSchools. That website sells school data to Zillow, aiding the practice of redlining. The Gates foundation has sent over $9.3 million to fund the operation the GreatSchools marketing website. Find the other funders at the website. The 2013 CORE District MOU can be seen on page 189 of this document: https://www2.ed.gov/policy/eseaflex/approved-requests/corerequestfullredacted.pdf

Gates also thinks that “LIFT Education Tennessee ”is an exemplary network. In this case, superintendents who were willing to accept outside management of their work helped to create LIFT. LIFT is an umbrella organization of 12 geographically separated districts ranging in size from four schools to 221 schools, that work together “on common problems of practice.” The website shows what this means: Participants in the network push the Common Core and use criteria for effective Common Core teaching adapted from the Student Achievement Partners Instructional Practice Guide Version 1.4 – revised 8/1/16. See https://lifteducationtn.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/LIFT-Instructional-Practice-Guide-K-5-Literacy.pdf

Gates also thinks Chicago’s Network for College Success is exemplary. This network is supported by 13 foundations, and it has six “partners.” Some partners are local and not surprising (e.g., Chicago Public Schools and University of Chicago Consortium on School Research). Others deserve some scrutiny. For example, Targeted Leadership Consulting is an executive coaching consultancy located in California and Hawaii. A Denver-based consultancy called The School Reform Initiative offers three tiers of services from consultants who are ready ”to develop our core practices within your educational setting.” Another partner is the Reading Apprenticeship at WestEd, a combination of online and on-site strategies for teaching reading developed with a SEED grant from USDE, and priced by WestEd at $3,500 per participant for a combination of outside coaching on “close reading” (as in the Common Core), but with greater attention to developing content knowledge.

Partners proliferate. Another “partner” is the To&Through Project which seems to be an administrative umbrella and fiscal manager for two other partners. One is the Urban Education Institute’s “UChicago Impact,” the producer of a 100-item online “5Essentials School Improvement Survey” of teachers, students, and parents. The survey results are said to predict “school success” through research-tested diagnostic analysis.

Schools find reports from their surveys on the web along with recommended strategies for improvement. One remedial strategy is writing SMART goals (specific, measurable, achievable, results-focused, and time-bound). SMART goals are a vintage 1980s corporate management technique attributed to George T. Doran, a consultant and former Director of Corporate Planning for the Spokane Washington Water Power Company. Here are the UChicago Impact survey questions (now required in Illinois, and marketed elsewhere). http://help.5-essentials.org/customer/en/portal/articles/800770-illinois-5essentials-survey-questions.

There is one more partner in the layers of Chicago networks that Gates admires: the Network for College Success (NCS), housed at the University of Chicago School of Social Service Administration. Among other activities, NCS has a Freshman OnTrack Toolkit, and provides To&Through training institutes to all Chicago public high schools. The aim is to get ninth graders on track for college.

According to NCS, a student in Chicago is considered On Track if he or she has accumulated five full credits (ten semester credits) by the end of ninth grade (freshman year) and has no more than one semester F in a core subject (English, math, science, or social science). Additional criteria are no suspensions and low or no absence. This tool kit was funded by the Carnegie Corporation of New York, John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, and Spencer Foundation. In my judgment, the toolkit is a proxy for a dedicated team of school counselors assigned to ninth graders. The meaning of college-ready is totally disconnected from encouraging students to think about a major for college and how that might influence the courses you should take in high school. Don’t be a ninth grader who dreams of studying the arts in college. Studies in the arts do not count in this scheme. https://ncs.uchicago.edu/sites/ncs.uchicago.edu/files/uploads/toolsets/NCS_FOT_Toolkit_URAD_SetA_0.pdf

The To&Through Project project is funded at least $30K by contributions from eleven sources, all deep pocket family foundations in Chicago, along with Boeing Company.

Gates wants to normalize philanthrogovernance especially of a kind that imports corporate management schemes into schools. Gates is determined to undermine the public governance of schools at the state, local, district, and school levels. He is really fond of enlisting superintendents who are willing to outsource school and district governance. Only one signature and the deal is done. Long before Trump, Gates mastered the art of deal.

Categories Gates Foundation, Bill Gates

Broward County, Florida: Another Charter School Scandal

By dianeravitch
December 17, 2017 //
2

In Broward County, a charter school was under investigation for inflating enrollment to get more money and for spending taxpayer money on personal items. So it converted to a voucher school, where it is under investigation again.

“A Broward charter school once accused of inflating its enrollment numbers to get state dollars now faces more allegations of fraud after it closed and re-opened as a private school.

The Broward County School District was trying to shut down Pathway Academy charter school in Lauderdale Lakes in 2016 when Principal Yudit Silva decided to convert it to a private school called New Horizons. The school served the same students at the same location. It collected about $20,400 in state dollars through two voucher programs serving students with disabilities.

But a state judge says the school should now be cut off from all state money after it used questionable means to apply for vouchers through a program called the Florida Tax Credit Scholarship, which provides tax incentives for businesses to pay for low-income students to attend private schools.

The state found that 39 parents at New Horizons turned in identical forms for the scholarship, all listing themselves as single, their birthplace as Miami and their income as zero, Administrative Law Judge John G. Van Laningham wrote this week..

“Obviously, to be a single parent without any income is to experience extreme poverty,” the judge wrote. “While it is theoretically possible that all 39 of the subject parents were destitute, this is highly improbable.”

The school denies the allegations and plans to provide a detailed response before a final decision is made by the Department of Education, said Christopher Norwood, who is providing legal assistance to the school.

Categories Charter Schools, Florida

Jersey Jazzman: What We Discovered About “Reform”in Newark: A Summary

By dianeravitch
December 17, 2017 //
4

Mark Weber, aka Jersey Jazzman, worked with Bruce Baker at Rutgers University to review the progress of the “reforms” (aka privatization and disruption) in Newark. This post is the first in a series that will summarize their findings.


The National Education Policy Center published a lengthy report written by Dr. Bruce Baker and myself that looks closely at school “reform” in Newark. I wrote a short piece about our report at NJ Spotlight that gives summarizes our findings. We’ve also got a deep dive into the data for our report at the NJ Education Policy website.

You might be wondering why anyone outside of New Jersey, let alone Newark, should care about what we found. Let me give you a little background before I try to answer that question…

In 2010, Mark Zuckerberg, the CEO and founder of Facebook, went on the The Oprah Winfrey Show and announced that he was giving $100 million in a challenge grant toward the improvement of Newark’s schools. Within the next couple of years, Newark had a new superintendent, Cami Anderson. Anderson attempted to implement a series of “reforms” that were supposed to improve student achievement within the city’s entire publicly-financed school system.

In the time following the Zuckerberg donation, Newark has often been cited by “reformers” as a proof point. It has a large and growing charter school sector, it implemented a teacher contract with merit pay, it has a universal enrollment system, it “renewed” public district schools by churning school leadership, it implemented Common Core early (allegedly), and so on.

So when research was released this fall that purported to show that students had made “educationally meaningful improvements” in student outcomes, “reformers” both in and out of New Jersey saw it as a vindication. Charter schools are not only good — they don’t harm public schools, because they “do more with less.” Disruption in urban schools is good, because the intractable bureaucracies in these districts needs to be shredded. Teachers unions are impeding student learning because we don’t reward the best teachers and get rid of the worst…

And so on. If Newark’s student outcomes have improved, it has to be because these and other received truths of the “reformers” must be true.

But what if the data — including the research recently cited by Newark’s “reformers” — doesn’t show Newark has improved? What if other factors account for charter school “successes”? What if the test score gains in the district, relative to other, similar districts, isn’t unique, or educationally meaningful? What if all the “reforms” supposedly implemented in Newark weren’t actually put into place? What if the chaos and strife that has dogged Newark’s schools during this “reform” period hasn’t been worth it?

What if Newark, NJ isn’t an example of “reform” leading to success, but is instead a cautionary tale?

These are the questions we set out to tackle. And in the next series of posts here, I am going to lay out, in great detail, exactly what we found, and explain what the Newark “reform” experiment is actually telling us about the future of American education.

Categories Corporate Reform, Education Industry, New Jersey, Newark, Privatization, Research

Center for Disease Controls Told to Ban Such Words as “Fetus,” “Vulnerable,” and “Transgender”

By dianeravitch
December 17, 2017 //
31

The Trump administration has ordered the Centers for Disease Control to remove certain words from its budget documents.

This is typical rightwing magical thinking. If you don’t name something, it doesn’t exist. They assume. I wrote called “The Language Police” about the efforts by pressure groups to control the language in texts and on tests, which reached elaborate and ridiculous heights.

“The Trump administration is prohibiting officials at the nation’s top public health agency from using a list of seven words or phrases — including “fetus” and “transgender” — in official documents being prepared for next year’s budget.

“Policy analysts at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta were told of the list of forbidden words at a meeting Thursday with senior CDC officials who oversee the budget, according to an analyst who took part in the 90-minute briefing. The forbidden words are “vulnerable,” “entitlement,” “diversity,” “transgender,” “fetus,” “evidence-based” and “science-based.”
In some instances, the analysts were given alternative phrases. Instead of “science-based” or ­“evidence-based,” the suggested phrase is “CDC bases its recommendations on science in consideration with community standards and wishes,” the person said. In other cases, no replacement words were immediately offered.”

Ten years ago, I wrote a book about censorship of textbooks and tests by the education publishing industry. It is called “The Language Police: How Pressure Groups Restrict What Students Learn.” There are hundreds and hundreds of words and images that are banned from educational materials, to placate some pressure group from the right or the left or from some interest group. Every publisher has a guidebook of banned words, phrases, and images. The guides have been circulated from publisher to publisher, and they look very much alike. Children will never see a story in a school book that shows mother in the kitchen cooking, although she may see mother driving a truck. They will never see old people walking with a cane or rocking on the porch, although they may see them up on the roof hammering in a loose shingle. The list of words and images that are banned are hilarious and also frightening. Look around and you will see how ineffective this censorship has been in changing attitudes and even language.

I can safely predict that Trump’s ban on the chosen words, plus “climate change,” will change nothing. People will still use the words, and the underlying phenomena will still exist.

Categories Ignorance, Language
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