Archives for the month of: March, 2018
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Center for American Progress: The Highly Negative Effects of Vouchers

By dianeravitch
March 22, 2018 //
48

 

The Center for American Progress published a useful review of voucher research, which concludes that going to a voucher school is equivalent to losing 1/3 of a year of schooling. Over the past year or so, I have posted the individual studies of vouchers as they appeared, and it is helpful to have them summarized in one place.

The authors of this research review—Ulrich Boser, Meg Bender, and Erin Roth—are senior analysts at CAP. They have done a good job in pulling together the many studies and analyzing the negative effects of vouchers on children. Researchers do not agree on the wisdom of converting test score gains or losses into “days of learning,” a strategy invented by researchers at CREDO, but the authors here use the device against the choice advocates who use it to bash public schools.

CAP is a puzzle to me. Throughout the Obama years, it was a safe haven and cheerleading squad for everything associated with the Obama administration, including the failed, odious, and ineffective Race to the Top.

As this carefully researched paper makes clear, CAP opposes vouchers. But where is CAP on charters? Is it still defending the Obama-Duncan line that school choice is good and traditional public schools are not? Is it willing to do the same research-based review of charters that it did of vouchers?

Does CAP still believe in school choice? Does it support half of the Trump-DeVos agenda? Or will it help return the Democratic Party to its roots by acknowledging the importance of strong public schools, democratically governed, subject to state and federal laws, doors open to all?

 

 

Categories Accountability, Betsy DeVos, Charter Schools, Democrats, Privatization, Race to the Top, School Choice, Supporting public schools, Vouchers

No, I Do Not Endorse Ted Dintersmith or His Views on Education

By dianeravitch
March 22, 2018 //
28

 

Every so often, it becomes necessary to clear up a misperception.

In this blog, I am quoted as being a big admirer of Ted Dintersmith, a venture capitalist who has portrayed himself as an education reformer.

The blogger cites a post I wrote in 2015 about an interview of Dintersmith by Jennifer Berkshire. I was impressed by his support for project-based learning.

I wrote:

“Dintersmith is a huge supporter of projects driven by students’ passions as opposed to adults compelling students to do what they expect of them. This is good news! A venture capitalist who has seen the light.

“I am currently reading the book and enjoying it.”

When I make mistakes, I own up to them. I did start reading Dintersmith’s book. I did enjoy it at first. But I stopped  reading the book because I concluded that the underlying message was actually bashing public schools for being “obsolete” (Bill Gates’ favorite term).

Then Dintersmith began emailing and calling. He wanted my endorsement. I said no. He sent me a video based on the book. I didn’t watch it. He kept emailing. He wanted to meet. I didn’t have time.

I concluded that Dintersmith was promoting himself as an educational guru based on his business experience, and we have had too much of that already. We don’t need more business and corporate leaders—with no experience in schools—redesigning American education.

Maybe he is a good man, and I am being unfair.

But I am not a member of his fan club.

 

Categories Education Reform

Why Cynthia Nixon Has a Chance to Beat Andrew Cuomo

By dianeravitch
March 21, 2018 //
44

 

This is a good article in the New York Daily News by Alyssa Katz, of the Daily News about Cynthia Nixon’s challenge to Andrew Cuomo in the Democratic primary in New York.

She says that Cynthia Nixon should not be written off.

Cuomo has raised $30 million, almost all of it from fat cats and Wall Street.

Nixon, unlike Cuomo, is a genuine progressive.

Cuomo has helped Republicans retain control of the State Senate, even though Democrats have a numerical majority. Cuomo has allied himself with a breakaway group of rightwing Democrats (the Independent Democratic Caucus), who side with the Republicans and keep the Republicans in power. At Cuomo’s last election, he persuaded the Working Families Party to endorse him by promising to help Democrats win back the Senate. The day after he won the WFP endorsement, he broke his promise. That is why the leader of the State Senate is a rightwing Republican, John Flanagan, who defeats every progressive measure.

Nixon promises to change Albany’s culture of corruption. One of Cuomo’s closest aides was recently convicted of taking bribes.

She is way ahead of Cuomo on education issues. She went to public school, and she sends her own children to public schools. She understands that the state has failed to fund the public schools in response to court orders. She knows that Cuomo does the bidding of the charter industry, who have given generously to Cuomo. She knows that Cuomo supports vouchers, in a blatant appeal to religious groups. She remembers that Cuomo promised to “break up the public education monopoly” by funding billionaire-backed charters.

Cynthia is intelligent, quick on her feet, and unafraid of Cuomo, who likes to bully people.

At Cuomo’s last Democratic primary four years ago, Zephyr Teachout won 34% of the vote, with no money or media exposure or  name recognition. She swept upstate New York. Now she is treasurer of Cynthia Nixon’s campaign.

If Nixon can win Teachout’s 34% by building on her New York City appeal, and add to it with the free media and name recognition that Teachout never had, Cuomo should worry.

 

 

Categories Charter Schools, Corporate Reformers, Cuomo, Andrew, Education Industry, New York, Privatization, Vouchers

Arizona SOS Defeats Koch Brothers in Court!

By dianeravitch
March 21, 2018 //
6

 

Arizona SOS beat the Koch brothers and DeVos money in court!

Arizona SOS gathered enough signatures to force a referendum on the expansion of vouchers in the state, and the Koch brothers underwrote a legal effort to knock the referendum off the ballot. Democracy frightens them.

Today, the Arizona Supreme Court Rules that the referendum can go forward.

The vote would not kill the voucher program but block the Legislature’s efforts to expand it, thus siphoning more money from the public schools that enroll most students.

 

Categories Arizona, Education Industry, Education Reform, Privatization

DeVos’ School Safety Commission is a Sham: No Students or Educators Included

By dianeravitch
March 21, 2018 //
48

 

Betsy DeVos has been put in charge of a task force to make recommendations on school safety. The only members are Cabinet members. No students, teachers, principals, or Superintendents will be on the task force or commission. Anyone who has worked in the federal government will tell you that Cabinet members are very busy people, and they are surrounded by yes-men and -women and assistants and speech writers. In their own domains, they are sovereign. They will give very little time or attention to this sham assignment. This is a farce. Chances are that the report has already been drafted by an NRA member of Betsy’s staff.

Politico reported this morning:

WHY TRUMP’S SCHOOL SAFETY COMMISSION OMITS STUDENTS, TEACHERS: The new White House commission on school safety will consist of just four Cabinet secretaries – prompting concerns from parents, students, teachers and school administrators who feel they should play a bigger role. But the Trump administration says it’s about getting to work quickly.

– Education Secretary Betsy DeVos on Tuesday testified during a hearing of the House Appropriations subcommittee that oversees education funding. While she was there to discuss the Trump administration’s fiscal 2019 budget proposal, she offered new details about the commission’s makeup. DeVos will chair the commission, which was recently unveiled by the White House in response to the school shooting in Parkland, Fla., last month that left 17 people dead. Attorney General Jeff Sessions, Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar and Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen will join her, she told lawmakers.

– “Is that it? Just four Cabinet secretaries? No experts? No Democrats?” asked Rep. Katherine Clark (D-Mass.). DeVos replied, “This is an urgent matter and we want to ensure that we’re able to move and operate as quickly as possible and without getting bogged down by a lot of bureaucracy.”

– What does DeVos mean by “bureaucracy”? Keeping the commission to just four federal officials who have jurisdiction over school safety issues means the group can “get up and running as quickly as possible,” said Education Department spokeswoman Liz Hill.

– “Advisory commissions with non-Federal employees have to follow Federal Advisory Committee Act rules, which adds significant bureaucratic bloat,” Hill said in a statement. “FACA imposes many bureaucratic hurdles, such as requiring a charter that must be approved by the General Services Administration and the appointment of an Agency Committee Management Officer and a Designated Federal Officer, as well as other requirements that would delay the start of this important effort.”

– Input from students, parents and teachers “will be critical,” Hill added. “The Commission will receive input from and hold meetings over the coming weeks and months with students, parents, teachers, schools safety personnel, administrators, law enforcement officials, mental health professionals, school counselors and others holding a wide variety of views.”

– Still, education groups want to ensure they’re heard. “It is critical that parents have a seat at the table whenever decisions are made that impact their children, and particularly on the critical issue of school safety,” said Jim Accomando, president of National PTA, which represents parent-teacher associations nationwide.

– “As school building leaders, principals must be heard on school safety and student well-being issues,” said L. Earl Franks, executive director of the National Association of Elementary School Principals. Noelle Ellerson Ng, associate executive director for policy and advocacy at AASA, The School Superintendents Association, said that “by keeping it only to Cabinet members, it’s necessarily political … I would venture a guess that the commission described by Secretary DeVos today isn’t set it up to be super productive.”

Categories Betsy DeVos, Fraud, Guns in Schools, Safety

San Antonio: Carpe Diem Charter School Will Close in June

By dianeravitch
March 21, 2018 //
7

 

The Carpe Diem charter school in San Antonio announced that it was closing its doors in June. The charter chain relies heavily on “personalized learning” and “blended learning,” which means a lot of instruction takes place on computer screens. It failed to meet academic standards two years in a row and was not likely to improve in its third year.

Carpe Diem was part of the initial cohort of schools recruited by Choose to Succeed, a school choice campaign that sought to attract high-performing charter districts to San Antonio. While the other Choose to Succeed districts — KIPP San Antonio, BASIS, Great Hearts Academies, IDEA Public Schools and Rocketship Education — built campuses across the city, Carpe Diem floundered. Its enrollment hovered between 200 and 250 students at its single campus on the West Side.

Former Mayor Julian Castro embraced charter schools and promised to have a large proportion of the students in the city enrolled in them. He created the campaign that welcomed the big corporate charter chains to San Antonio. The new Mayor, Ron Nuremberg, is not hostile to charters but has emphasized that charters should be complements to high quality public schools, not replacements.

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Education Industry, Privatization

Arthur Camins: The Only Way to Get Real Change is to Vote for People Who Value Democracy and the Common Good

By dianeravitch
March 21, 2018 //
39

Arthur Camins reminds us that the best way to reclaim the society we want is to vote for people who care about improving our democracy and the common good.

At present, we are stuck with politicians backed by the NRA, the Koch brothers, and big corporate interests.

The challenge is to vote for the candidate who represents who we want to be, not the candidate with the most money.

The change we want comes down to a single word: VOTE.

Call out what democratic decision-making for the common good looks like: the right to vote; freedom from fear of gun violence; affordable health care; decent food, clothing and shelter, good schools, a decent life in retirement, wages that enable people to pay their bills, a clean safe environment, mediating climate change, fair justice, family planning (include abortion) for EVERYONE.

FOR EVERYONE, no matter what, because that is how we act on our values.

These are uniting issues.

Say it out loud: A Doing good deed for ourselves and others as individuals are not enough.

Say it out loud: We can only achieve what we value for EVERYONE when we restore government an agent of the common good.

We can only achieve what we value for EVERYONE with a united integrated struggle.

Categories Democracy

Michigan: Business Leaders Examine Academic Crisis and Conclude: Do More of the Same

By dianeravitch
March 21, 2018 //
6

 

Michigan has a major problem. Test scores on NAEP and state exams have fallen signicantly over the past decade for every demographic, the state spends $1 Billion on charter schools with no accountability, Detroit is the worst performing city in the nation on NAEP.

The leaders of the state’s business community looked at the crisis and decided that the state needs to stick to its current policies and do more of the same. but with greater intensity.

Clearly, the business elite decided to ignore studies such as this one by Professor David Arsen of Michigan State University, which concluded that state policies promoting competition and choice were causing fiscal stress and instability in traditional districts. Even a small parasite can do terrible damage to a large body.

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Competition, Detroit, Education Reform, Funding, Michigan

Choice Advocates: Test Scores Don’t Really Matter All That Much

By dianeravitch
March 21, 2018 //
31

 

Ever since the School Choice Movement got momentum in the early 1990s, its proponents have claimed that charters and vouchers would “save poor kids from failing schools.” Their metric, of course, was scores on standardized test scores, and they welcomed No Child Left Behind and its successor Race to the Top. They were certain that choice schools—free to select their students, free to kick out students, free from bureaucracy, free from unions, free to pay differential pay to teachers—would prove their value by generating sky-high test scores.

There are some charter schools that get high scores, but most don’t. Most studies find that some charters get high scores, some get the same scores as nearby schools, and some are far worse than the so-called “failing schools.”

Recent voucher studies have converged on the finding that students who use vouchers actually lose ground as compared to their peers who won a voucher but didn’t use it. The more optimistic say that the voucher students make up the lost ground in 3-4 years, but they don’t take into account the attrition of the weakest students from the voucher schools.

A new paper by three school choice advocates concludes that test scores are not the best measure of success (whoa! Who knew?). Other long-term impacts, they say, matter more, like graduation rates. Why are they moving the goal posts? Voucher programs show no academic gains, but they do show higher graduation rates, so that’s what really matters. There is a trick here, however. Every voucher program has a high rate of attrition, which pro-choice researchers ignore or downplay. The “higher graduation rates” in evaluations of voucher programs in Milwaukee and D.C. do not acknowledge the high number of kids who started ninth grade and didn’t make it to the end of twelfth grade.

Patrick Wolf of the Department of Educational Reform at the University of Arkansas (funded primarily by the Walton Family Foundation) conducted the official evaluations of both Milwaukee and the District of Columbia. In his initial report about Milwaukee, he wrote that the attrition rate was 75%, but decided that was an error and revised the attrition rate to 56%. Either number is huge. Huge and huger. 

The survivors had a higher graduation rate than the students in the Milwaukee Public Schools, which included the kids who dropped out of the voucher schools.

Wolf’s D.C. evaluation does not break out the attrition rate, but it is likely to be significant. William Mathis of the National Education Policy Center reviewed Wolf’s Congressionally mandated evaluation of the D.C. voucher program but could not determine with certainty how many students had dropped out before graduating, but it appears to be nearly three-quarters.

All of this is background to Secretary Betsy DeVos’ nonchalant response to the latest [2017] negative evaluation of the D.C voucher program.  She never expected vouchers to raise test scores, she says. And it doesn’t matter.

 

 

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Education Industry, High School Graduation, Privatization, Testing, Vouchers

The New Yorker: China Is Developing a Social Credit Rating for All Its Citizens.

By dianeravitch
March 21, 2018 //
16

 

Jiayang Fan, a staff writer at the New Yorker, describes China’s plan to develop a social credit rating for every one of its citizens.

When she was a child in school in China, children earned red stars for behavior and accomplishment, which were publicly displayed. Now the State proposes a similar though far more complex rating system. The State

”aims to compile a comprehensive national database out of citizens’ fiscal, government, and possibly personal information. First publicized, last year, in a planning document published by the State Council, S.C.S. was billed as “an important component part of the Socialist market-economy system,” underwriting a “harmonious Socialist society.” Its intended goals are “establishing the idea of a sincerity culture, and carrying forward sincerity and traditional virtues,” and its primary objectives are to raise “the honest mentality and credit levels of the entire society” as well as “the over-all competitiveness of the country,” and “stimulating the development of society and the progress of civilization….

“According to the planning document, S.C.S. will be used “to encourage keeping trust and punish breaking trust.” Doctors, teachers, construction firms, scientists, sports figures, N.G.O.s, members of the judicial system, and government administrators will face special scrutiny. It is conceivable that the data generated through smartphones, apps, and online transactions will be marshalled in the service of this overarching and uncomfortably broad aim. More unsettlingly, the algorithm used to calculate the score of an individual or organization might be withheld by the government from the individual herself….

“The opacity of its infrastructure is disquieting. What safeguards will be put in place to prevent the database from being rigged? Will the very corruption that the social-credit system is meant to counter infect the system itself? Who will oversee the overseers of the operation? How will privacy, long under siege in contemporary China, be protected? And will punishment for political discontent be delivered through dismal credit scores? If S.C.S. becomes a mechanism of financial and social integration, it is hard to imagine how it could avoid becoming an instrument of mass surveillance.”

 

Categories Accountability, International, Privacy and Privacy Rights
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