Archives for the month of: January, 2018

Linda Lyon, retired Air Force Colonel and President of the Arizona School Boards Association, responds again to our reader Charles, who tried to convince her of the virtues of privatization.

She writes:

“Dear Charles,

You’ve obviously given a lot of thought to your position on school privatization. At 666 words, you covered a lot of ground. I do though, agree with some of your points.

Yes, children can be educated in a diversity of environments and yes, some rich liberals send their children to exclusive private schools. So do, rich conservatives. I believe that anyone has the right to send their child to any school they want, (provided the education is adequate), as long as they pay for it. When my tax dollars are paying for it, I want full accountability, transparency and to know the return on investment. Yes, legislation could be enacted to provide more accountability and transparency, but that isn’t the direction our state legislatures and now, the federal government are headed.

Yes, when the number of students in a school decrease, the fixed costs also eventually decrease. The problem is, the decrease happens over time and the costs are not scaled back with each student that leaves. That means remaining costs must be spread out over fewer students which means larger class sizes, outdated curriculum, older technology and buses and inadequately maintained facilities.

But, you start to lose me when you say that privatizing our schools will not reduce the size of our government. In Arizona alone, we have 60,000 public school teachers. These are government employees. If every public district school is outsourced, that would result in 60,000 fewer government jobs. The goal of the privatizers isn’t though, to save taxpayers money, or to produce better education for our children. In my opinion, it is to increase profits and reduce our ability to self-govern.

You also say you, “cannot fathom the connection between publicly-operated schools and our democratic republic.” Are you really serious? America’s system of public education, where all children are educated (not just the elite), played an important role in creating the greatest middle class in the world and was critical to making the American Dream possible. As for pointing to our current government leaders, (who you infer went to private schools), as proof of the superiority of that option, current events tell me that’s not a real strong argument.

You are correct that non-public (that would be private) schools do not have to accept all applicants. Therein lies the rub! Just as with our military, our public schools provide for the common good. That means, as John Dewey said, “What the best and wisest parent wants for his child, that must we want for all the children of the community. Anything less is unlovely, and left unchecked, destroys our democracy.” I believe the relentless effort to privatize our public schools reduces the opportunity for EVERY child to be all they can be. This ultimately robs our nation of potential and is in the end, unpatriotic.

Linda M. Lyon, Colonel (ret.), USAF”

Categories Education Reform

Yohuru Williams Is Not Related to Milton Friedman

By dianeravitch

January 23, 2018 //

This morning, while eating breakfast at the Sofitel Hotel in Seam Reap, Cambodia, I noticed that I had accidentally posted about Milton Friedman, the libertarian economist who is considered the father of the voucher movement. It was in draft form and not ready for posting, but there it was. I personally believe that libertarianism is a high form of selfishness: I’ve got mine, pull up the ladder.

Then I read Yohuru Williams’ wonderful article about the hoax of school choice. I hurriedly posted it, as I had to join my group to learn about noodle making at a family “factory.”

I mistakenly called him Yohuru Friedman, which insults him and compliments the late Milton, who lacked Yohuru’s kindness, compassion, humanity, and yes, keen intellect. Friedman’s intellect worked in service of greed. Yohuru’s works on behalf of the Common good.

Apologies to Yohuru.

Categories Education Reform

Yohuru Williams: The Inconvenient Truth About School Choice

By dianeravitch

January 23, 2018 //

Dr. Yohuru Williams, scholar and dean of the University of St. Thomas in Minneapolis, writes in The Progressive about the sleight of hand played by advocates of school choice.

The choice they offer is actually a “Hobson’s Choice,” meaning no choice at all. If you leave your public school, you defund it, harming the education of those who remain. You won’t get a voucher large enough for the best private schools. You may get into a charter school but there is no assurance they will keep you.

It is a hoax. It is backed by the Koch brothers, the DeVos family, evil ALEC, and others who long to destroy the public sector.

Categories ALEC, Betsy DeVos, Charter Schools, Education Industry, Hoax, Privatization, School Choice

Milton Friedman, the Father of School Choice

By dianeravitch

January 23, 2018 //

Carol Burris comments on Milton Friedman:

“It is important to understand the belief system that undergirds the School Choice movement. It is not about limited choice for students in struggling schools, it is about the dismemberment of the public school system, along with other public systems like Social Security and Medicare.

The father or school choice is Libertarian economist, Milton Friedman. who proposed the idea of school vouchers in 1955. Friedman believed that the free market system should be the provider of schooling (and just about everything else.) He believed that Social Security should be shut down because it created welfare dependency, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) should be eliminated and that the licensing of doctors should be abolished because he thought the American Medical Association was a monopoly.

At the opening of the CATO Institute, the premier Libertarian think tank, Friedman told the audience that he did not believe in democracy.

In this video entitled “The Enemies of School Choice,” Friedman claims that vouchers “would solve all of the critical problems” faced by schools. According to Friedman, school vouchers would eliminate discipline problems, reduce segregation and solve the problem of school busing. He presented no evidence, just claims based on his disdain for any government regulation.

Friedman referred to public schools as government schools. He and his wife Rose founded the Friedman Foundation for Educational Choice, rebranded as EdChoice. EdChoice has become a powerful force along with Betsy De Vos’s American Federation for Children for pushing the school choice voucher agenda. ”

Categories Education Reform

Duane Swacker on Teaching and Learning

By dianeravitch

January 23, 2018 //

Duane Swacker is a retired teacher in Missouri. He shares his wisdom here.

“Anyone who has taught for a decent length of time, oh minimum 5-10 years understands this process and more likely than not has done something very similar. And it does mean taking the time to listen to the student on a one on one basis (somehow making time to do so without it being so intrusive as to turn off said student).

“One student, whom I still see in the local small town bar every couple of months, a certified heavy equipment operator, struggled with my class-Spanish as a freshman. His mom and I did all kinds of things to try to get him interested. I know, because he told me, that the reason he did any work at all was because I took the time to talk with him about. . . outdoors, fishing, hunting. See he was and still is a country boy through and through and I (who has a lot of country boy in me) enjoyed talking to him about his adventures out in the woods and on the farm.

“Every year I had the students prepare authentic type dishes from different Spanish speaking countries (no, not tacos, burritos and that stuff, food really good recipes). I let the students pick the recipes, with my approval. This student picked out a recipe for a braised saffron rabbit dish from Spain. I asked if he had the half dozen rabbits in the freezer and he said, “nah, I’ll go out and get em this weekend.” And he did and with his mom’s help (I supplied the saffron as it is more expensive than gold) they prepared the dish. And it was exquisite.

“He came back for level 2 after having gone from a low D in first semester and did a lot better in attempting to learn that second year.

“No doubt that the very basic human connection is one of the most important in the teaching and learning process and why smaller class sizes are the real, and perhaps only, reform that we really need.”

Categories Class size, Teachers and Teaching

The AFT and BATS Invite You to Write a Report Card for Betsy DeVos

By dianeravitch

January 23, 2018 //

How would you grade the job that Betsy DeVos has done so far?

The AFT and the BadAss Teachers Association invite you to chime in by filling out her report card.

Categories Betsy DeVos, Education Reform

Durham Superintendent: Charters Are Resegregating Our Schools

By dianeravitch

January 23, 2018 //

The loss of white students to charter schools in Durham contributes to the resegregation of the District.

“New Superintendent Pascal Mubenga warned Tuesday night that Durham Public Schools will resegregate itself if it continues to lose students to charter schools.”

Durham parents want assurance that the public schools will continue to offer the arts, IB, and other specials. But the drain on resources puts these courses at risk.

It is expensive to maintain a dual school system.

http://www.heraldsun.com/news/local/counties/durham-county/article195112159.html#storylink=cpy

Categories Arts Education, Education Reform, North Carolina

Linda Lyon Responds to a Reader about Fiscal Responsibility and Public Schools

By dianeravitch

January 23, 2018 //

Linda Lyon, a retired Air Force colonel and president of the Arizona School Boards Association, responds to a reader who supports school choice, charters, vouchers, and home schooling.

She writes:

”Yes Charles, you are correct that the military industrial complex does provide a valuable service to our military mission. There are many functions that are not a core competency of the military (such as building airplanes) that have made sense to be outsourced. But, outsourcing the defense of our nation is not one of those functions. Where we’ve done that, as with Blackwater, it has not ended well.

“Of course education is “built” on a mix of public and private. After all, our public district schools don’t publish their own textbooks, or build their own buses or computers. But, as with the military, the core mission of our districts — to educate ALL our children, should not be outsourced. I maintain this function, to ensure it remains a common good, should not be privatized.

“I believe you intimate that when private schools siphon funding away from our district schools, it doesn’t matter because the student (and presumably the cost to educate them) goes with them. Unfortunately, all the costs don’t follow. Research shows that about 19% of the fixed costs (utilities, facility maintenance, administration, teachers, etc.) remain.

“Ultimately, your “tell” about your perspective is that you used the term “government run schools.” This tells me that you believe government is the problem and that privatizing our schools is the answer to reducing the size of our government. I believe our public district schools, are critical to the good functioning of our democratic Republic in that they are the only schools that truly take all comers, are totally transparent and accountable, and represent their communities through locally elected governing boards. I believe that anyone’s right to “choose” where they send their child to school, should not be more important than my right to know how my tax dollars should be spent and what the return on investment is. I believe in REAL fiscal responsibility…that we get what we pay for.”

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Education Industry, Privatization, School Choice, Vouchers

The Myth of Miracle Schools

By dianeravitch

January 23, 2018 //

I wrote this article for the New York Times in 2011, before I started the blog. I heard too many claims by corporate reformers about schools that had gone from failure to dramatic success in one or two years. With a bit of digging, the miracles disappeared. I should add that it was while researching this article, I met two new friends who were as interested in this issue as I was: Gary Rubinstein, the TFA renegade who became a career math teacher in New York City, and Noel Hammatt in Louisiana, who was familiar with state manipulations of data.

Here it is:

TEN years ago, Congress adopted the No Child Left Behind legislation, mandating that all students must be proficient in reading or mathematics by 2014 or their school would be punished.

Teachers and principals have been fired and schools that were once fixtures in their community have been closed and replaced. In time, many of the new schools will close, too, unless they avoid enrolling low-performing students, like those who don’t read English or are homeless or have profound disabilities.

Educators know that 100 percent proficiency is impossible, given the enormous variation among students and the impact of family income on academic performance. Nevertheless, some politicians believe that the right combination of incentives and punishments will produce dramatic improvement. Anyone who objects to this utopian mandate, they maintain, is just making an excuse for low expectations and bad teachers.

To prove that poverty doesn’t matter, political leaders point to schools that have achieved stunning results in only a few years despite the poverty around them. But the accounts of miracle schools demand closer scrutiny. Usually, they are the result of statistical legerdemain.

In his State of the Union address in January, President Obama hailed the Bruce Randolph School in Denver, where the first senior class had a graduation rate of 97 percent. At a celebration in February for Teach for America’s 20th anniversary, Education Secretary Arne Duncan sang the praises of an all-male, largely black charter school in the Englewood neighborhood of Chicago, Urban Prep Academy, which replaced a high school deemed a failure. And in March, Mr. Obama and Mr. Duncan joined Jeb Bush, the former governor of Florida, to laud the transformation of Miami Central Senior High School.

But the only miracle at these schools was a triumph of public relations.

Mr. Obama’s praise for Randolph, which he said had been “one of the worst schools in Colorado,” seems misplaced. Noel Hammatt, a former teacher and instructor at Louisiana State University, looked at data from the Web site of the Colorado Department of Education.

True, Randolph (originally a middle school, to which a high school was added) had a high graduation rate, but its ACT scores were far below the state average, indicating that students are not well prepared for college. In its middle school, only 21 percent were proficient or advanced in math, placing Randolph in the fifth percentile in the state (meaning that 95 percent of schools performed better). Only 10 percent met the state science standards. In writing and reading, the school was in the first percentile.

Gary Rubinstein, an education blogger and Teach for America alumnus who has been critical of the program, checked Mr. Duncan’s claims about Urban Prep. Of 166 students who entered as ninth graders, only 107 graduated. Astonishingly, the state Web site showed that only 17 percent passed state tests, compared to 64 percent in the low-performing Chicago public school district.

Miami Central had been “reconstituted,” meaning that the principal and half the staff members were fired. The president said that “performance has skyrocketed by more than 60 percent in math,” and that graduation rates rose to 63 percent, from 36 percent. But in math, it ranks 430th out of 469 high schools in Florida. Only 56 percent of its students meet state math standards, and only 16 percent met state reading standards. The graduation rate rose, but the school still ranks 431st, well below the state median graduation rate of 87 percent. The improvements at Miami Central are too small and too new to conclude that firing principals and teachers works.

To be sure, the hyping of test-score improvements that prove to be fleeting predated the Obama administration.

In 2005, New York’s mayor, Michael R. Bloomberg, held a news conference at Public School 33 in the Bronx to celebrate an astonishing 49-point jump in the proportion of fourth grade students there who met state standards in reading. In 2004, only 34 percent reached proficiency, but in 2005, 83 percent did.

It seemed too good to be true — and it was. A year later, the proportion of fourth-graders at P.S. 33 who passed the state reading test dropped by 41 points. By 2010, the passing rate was 37 percent, nearly the same as before 2005.

What is to be learned from these examples of inflated success? The news media and the public should respond with skepticism to any claims of miraculous transformation. The achievement gap between children from different income levels exists before children enter school.

Families are children’s most important educators. Our society must invest in parental education, prenatal care and preschool. Of course, schools must improve; every one should have a stable, experienced staff, adequate resources and a balanced curriculum including the arts, foreign languages, history and science.

If every child arrived in school well-nourished, healthy and ready to learn, from a family with a stable home and a steady income, many of our educational problems would be solved. And that would be a miracle.

Categories Accountability, Testing