Two researchers review a report recommending the widespread adoption of “no-excuses” methods and find the evidence inconclusive.
A. Chris Torres of Michigan State University and Joann W. Golann of Vanderbilt University review a report on “Charter Schools and the Achievement Gap.”
They write:
“A recent report, ‘Charter Schools and the Achievement Gap,” finds that, though charter schools on average perform no better than traditional public schools, urban “no-excuses” charter schools—which often use intensive discipline to enforce order—demonstrate promising re- sults. It recommends that these schools and their practices be widely replicated within and outside of the charter school sector. We find three major flaws with this conclusion. First, the report’s recommendations are based solely on the academic success of these schools and fail to address the controversy over their use of harsh disciplinary methods. No-excuses dis- ciplinary practices can contribute to high rates of exclusionary discipline (e.g., suspensions that push students out of school) and may not support a broad definition of student success. Second, the recommendation that schools replicate no-excuses practices begs the question of what exactly should be replicated. It does not confront the lack of research identifying which school practices are effective for improving student achievement. Third, the report does not address many of the underlying factors that would allow no-excuses schools and their practices to successfully replicate, such as additional resources, committed teachers, and students and families willing and able to abide by these schools’ stringent practices. Thus, while the report is nuanced in its review of charter school impacts, it lacks this same care in drawing its conclusions—greatly decreasing the usefulness of the report.”
How many parents are eager to subject their children to harsh discipline?
Diane Ravitch's blog 
And I assume the tests are the measure of academic success!!!
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>
And that assumption is one based on onto-epistemological falsehoods and the quite purposeful misuse and abuse of the word “measure”.
The most misleading concept/term in education is “measuring student achievement” or “measuring student learning”. The concept has been misleading educators into deluding themselves that the teaching and learning process can be analyzed/assessed using “scientific” methods which are actually pseudo-scientific at best and at worst a complete bastardization of rationo-logical thinking and language usage.
There never has been and never will be any “measuring” of the teaching and learning process and what each individual student learns in their schooling. There is and always has been assessing, evaluating, judging of what students learn but never a true “measuring” of it.
“But, but, but, you’re trying to tell me that the supposedly august and venerable APA, AERA and/or the NCME have been wrong for more than the last 50 years, disseminating falsehoods and chimeras??”
Who are you to question the authorities in testing???
Yes, they have been wrong and I (and many others, Wilson, Hoffman etc. . . ) question those authorities and challenge them (or any of you other advocates of the malpractices that are standards and testing) to answer to the following onto-epistemological analysis:
The TESTS MEASURE NOTHING, quite literally when you realize what is actually happening with them. Richard Phelps, a staunch standardized test proponent (he has written at least two books defending the standardized testing malpractices) in the introduction to “Correcting Fallacies About Educational and Psychological Testing” unwittingly lets the cat out of the bag with this statement:
“Physical tests, such as those conducted by engineers, can be standardized, of course [why of course of course], but in this volume , we focus on the measurement of latent (i.e., nonobservable) mental, and not physical, traits.” [my addition]
Notice how he is trying to assert by proximity that educational standardized testing and the testing done by engineers are basically the same, in other words a “truly scientific endeavor”. The same by proximity is not a good rhetorical/debating technique.
Since there is no agreement on a standard unit of learning, there is no exemplar of that standard unit and there is no measuring device calibrated against said non-existent standard unit, how is it possible to “measure the nonobservable”?
THE TESTS MEASURE NOTHING for how is it possible to “measure” the nonobservable with a non-existing measuring device that is not calibrated against a non-existing standard unit of learning?????
PURE LOGICAL INSANITY!
The basic fallacy of this is the confusing and conflating metrological (metrology is the scientific study of measurement) measuring and measuring that connotes assessing, evaluating and judging. The two meanings are not the same and confusing and conflating them is a very easy way to make it appear that standards and standardized testing are “scientific endeavors”-objective and not subjective like assessing, evaluating and judging.
That supposedly objective results are used to justify discrimination against many students for their life circumstances and inherent intellectual traits.
Well said, Duane! I was about to skim, figuring you were headed into oft-repeated territory, but this is a new twist & I like it!
I head into that “oft-repeated territory” because I figure two things: 1. that there are probably new readers everyday, and 2, If you repeat the truth often enough maybe some will come to believe it!
They find the evidence “inconclusive?” The evidence is unambiguous. “No excuses” schools should be closed. The emotional abuse implicit in their policies is arguably worse than corporal punishment. Even if (and the “if” is highly suspect) their nasty practices produced a temporary blip in test scores, it is not justification for the long-term harm done to children. Even absent the abuse, their “pedagogy” is training children, not educating them. I could add much more, but most of Diane’s readers are the choir and need no more preaching. I do offer to send any reader a copy (I printed in my book) of an actual disciplinary policy from Democracy (oh, the irony) Prep. Email me at stevehutnelson@gmail.com if you’d like a copy as evidence of the shaming, shunning and humiliation some folks think young children of color need and deserve.
“Preform better” is the kind of problematic term any movement to truly improve schools must address in a most serious manner. This takes me back to my comments regarding goals; what is it that a truly successful student looks like. What does he or she know and with what kind of understanding? What is the successful student able to do. Importantly, in what ways can the student think: creatively, independently, imaginatively, critically? That the student does “well” on the kind of measures typically used to determine how students en masse are “achieving” is a fraudulent and inhumane way to go about determining achievement and doing well in school does not necessarily mean that students have been well educated, have a meaningfully good education. In the schools discussed here, students apparently do “well” by doing what they are told to do and do what they are told because they fear punishment. What a model! What incentives to learn! And what a way to teach students that it is a good thing to bow to authority, here authority that is of the illegitimate kind, that forces blind obedience rather than wins over trust by proving that what it asks truly in the best interests of those being asked to comply.
Amy Gutman’s book, Democratic Education offers up a powerful theoretical basis for good schools with good goals. Education in a democracy has to promote not only democratic values but offer through curriculum and methods used the kind of education that allows one to participate effectively in a democratic society. The ability to think independently, to form one’s own ideas about what is and should be are critical to effective citizenship in a democracy. Independent thinking and critical thinking cannot be nurtured under an authoritarian regime where students are forced to take as correct whatever it is they are told, where they are told not to question authority.
lafared,
“That the student does “well” on the kind of measures typically. . . ”
One of these days, years?, we will quit using words that the meaning is so bastardized as to not be valid. In this case “measure”. The more we use these bastardized words, the more they are reinforced as being real. See my above post for the onto-epistemological problems with the term “measure” as used in education discourse.
Other than that, excellent post!
The review quoted does not address another fundamental question: Why are no-excuses practices being recommended for charter schools that serve poor and underrepresented populations but not for schools the serve more privileged children? What differential assumptions and expectations does that reveal? What values?
It reveals the mindset of a colonial power.
Arthur:
As the hedge fund charter supporter Whitney Tilson once said, it’s because poor children of color “need it.” His daughters went to a posh Upper Eastside private school where such practices would be cause for termination. Disgusting, condescending, racist are three words that come to mind.
Arthur,
No-excuses promoters use racism to get away with their abhorrent practices. If you look at a charter network like Success Academy, you will see that the schools with poor students and virtually no white ones sometimes have suspension rates of 18% or even 24% — for Kindergarten and First grade students!
Eva Moskowitz says those suspension rates are necessary due to the violent natures of those non-white children — Moskowitz says her teachers are blameless and the fault lies entirely with the extraordinarily high number of poor, non-white kindergarten children supposedly doing violent things.
But when middle class and affluent students — many of them white — get the same treatment, then they complain and it is the teachers and principal’s fault. You don’t see the high suspension rates for 5 year olds in Moskowitz schools with disproportionate numbers of middle class kids instead of poor kids. Never.
“No excuses” means something very different — even within the same charter network — when the students are white and middle class.
There is another charter chain with such over the top results. It is called BASIS and their charters are in states like Arizona.
Like Success Academy, BASIS’ stellar test scores come with extraordinarily high attrition rates. The only difference is that the kids leaving include many white and middle class kids.
BASIS doesn’t criminalize their behavior. BASIS doesn’t excuse their high attrition by claiming that the white parents have raised extremely violent children and those white parents prefer terrible failing schools to good schools because they are simply ignorant and give up their spots.
BASIS acknowledges they are a school that does not welcome students who are not highly motivated and high achieving.
If BASIS suspended huge numbers of young white children and claimed their parents had raised violent children, there would be an outcry. So BASIS honestly acknowledges they don’t welcome kids who can’t perform at the level required.
No excuses charters do not. They use these “studies” to promote the lie that they welcome all students and the one who get punished are the violent ones and the ones who drop out just have ignorant parents and it has nothing to do with how their kids are treated.
And they get away with it because they depend on the racism of their board and overseers not to question the racism implicit in what they want the public to believe.
What made me shiver was that the report being reviewed [“Charter schools and the Achievement Gap,” written by Sarah Cohodes at Teachers College (Columbia University)and published in the Journal “The Future of Children,” which is associated both with Princeton University and the Brookings Institution] “recommends that these schools and their practices be widely replicated both within and outside of the charter sector.” (all emphases mine.)
“No excuses” schools offer no miracles and nothing that can be replicated on a large scale. Only under the idealized circumstances of choosing the best and brightest and eliminating those that fail to make the grade do they get their so called test based results. In public education we are obliged to serve all students; we cannot stack the deck to produce test scores.
No excuses discipline perpetuates the theme of separate and unequal that is the underlying principle of “reform.” It is an expression of colonialism in modern times designed to subjugate and punish rather than teach responsibility. No excuses discipline is an offensive practice which assumes that minority children need to trained rather than educated.
Thank you for this. These kind of horrific studies would be laughed out of any scientific journal for fraud.
If these faux researchers were studying the effects of a new treatment for Parkinson’s Disease — paid for by a drug company — they would claim that this new drug was showing amazing results based on the following study:
Start out with two “randomly selected” groups of Parkinson patients.
“Control group” contains randomly selected patients.
“Charter drug” group contains ONLY the patients who enroll in the study — and before the study begins, those patients must attend meetings in which an unknown number of them “unaccountably” give up their coveted spot for this miracle drug. What happened at these meetings to cause an unknown number of “randomly selected” patients not to be part of that “Charter drug” group? Were they told they are not suitable candidates, which would make the whole idea of a “control group” to compare them to completely fraudulent? Remember that the “control group” is not allowed to require 3 pre-enrollment meetings in which they have the freedom to discourage all patients they believe are not “suitable” for the study.
Then the “study” begins. The researchers see that even with up to half of the “randomly selected” patients not enrolling in the study after meeting with the drug company doctors, the study is still losing patients! Huge percentages of patients who enrolled are leaving this study and refusing to take this drug that has guaranteed 100% success!
Are the researchers curious about why the group of patients in the “charter drug” group keeps getting smaller and smaller? No! Not at all! They don’t even want to KNOW how many patients left the study! It isn’t RELEVANT! Who cares?!
What matters is whether the patients who remain in the charter study improve! And they do! Even if there are only a handful left! And look, the patients in the control group don’t have 100% cure rates so obviously it is a perfectly scientific study. Not.
What a sham. These researchers would be drummed out of academia and forced to apologize for touting results that were manipulated by dumping patients who didn’t do well on the “miracle drug”.
Because any researcher not owned by the drug company would ask a simple question:
If this new drug is so wonderful, why would all those patients be dropping out of the study?
And one more thing: The patients in the “charter drug” study are lavished with the best facilities and meals and extras that money can buy. Everything that should make patients want to remain to be cured and have the best luxuries money can buy.
The patients in the control group are in broken down facilities with little money.
And yet these faux researchers insist that high attrition for patients in the “charter drug” study is completely irrelevant and must not be examined closely.
Fraud.
^^To understand how fraudulent this is, read this sentence from the the link:
“the report begins by explaining the advantages and disadvantages of lottery and observational studies, which are considered the most methodologically rigorous quantitative designs available to study charter school impacts. Lottery studies allow researchers to compare the outcomes of those who were offered a seat in a charter school to those who were not. Observational studies match pairs or groups of students who theoretically differ only by their charter attendance.”
Now imagine I changed the wording to describe the testing of a new drug for Parkinson’s:
“Lottery studies allow researchers to compare the outcomes of those who were offered a chance to take the “charter medication” to those who were not. Observational studies match pairs or groups of patients who theoretically differ only by their taking the “charter medication”.
Now imagine my scenario above in which the drug company claimed that they were comparing those “offered a chance” to take this medication with those who were not “offered a chance” to take it. But they refused to tell you how many of those “offered a chance” actually took the medication and how many did not!
And they refused to say how many who did start to take the medication dropped out.
We would all wonder why the study would hide all those numbers so that others could see if their data was manipulated or not.
Good analogy.
The only “no excuses” schools that “outperform” public schools are those whose attrition rates don’t stand up well to scrutiny. It’s not the “no excuses”, it’s the kicking out of any “low performing” students.
I agree. The problem is that faux scholars who write studies like “Charter Schools and the Achievement Gap” use all sorts of gobbledygook to explain that have designed the study so that attrition is completely irrelevant.
They won’t even tell the public how many students leave. Often you have no idea whether this “charter group” being compared to some control group is a tiny number of students.
They hide all the relevant data as if knowing the exact number of students who are in the charter group is top secret.
Every scientific study published in legitimate scientific journals subject to peer review includes all the hard numbers of patients. Nothing is hidden or questions would be asked.
For these charter school studies almost everything is kept hidden and readers don’t even know how large each group is!
Puzzling that Eva Moskowitz’s first charter school started with 100 students, accepted no new students after third grade, eventually had 17 high school graduates.
What public school closes enrollment after third grade?
On point… & I guess we’re noting that Success Academy is, in fact, one of these “no-excuses” charter-chains. Certainly seems to be the case — at least in their all-minority/low-SES schools– judging from their ‘oops’ media reports, & Gary Rubenstein’s blog, & Glassdoor.com teacher revelations.
And, once ‘all’ schools emulate the no-excuses model, what happens to all the students who are pushed out as a result of the disciplinary process? What would be available for them? Currently, they return to a neighborhood public school.
On Thu, Apr 19, 2018, 11:02 AM Diane Ravitch’s blog wrote:
> dianeravitch posted: ” Two researchers review a report recommending the > widespread adoption of “no-excuses” methods and find the evidence > inconclusive. A. Chris Torres of Michigan State University and Joann W. > Golann of Vanderbilt University review a report on “Ch” >
No doubt, school officials will keep enough public schools to accept the kids expelled or rejected by the charters
Really, & no different from the charter model overall, no-excuses or not: they cannot exist w/o the no-fault public school back-up, there as receiver/ holding pen for the newly-arrived in district, as receiver of those not accepted/ wait-listed by their charter preference, as accepter of those suspended or expelled (or ‘counselled out’ just before testing week), as only provider for LD/ED too expensive for charters to teach, & as catch-basin for refugees of charters gone belly-up mid-yr due to fraud/ mismgt/ no vetting by state…
“How many parents are eager to subject their children to harsh discipline?”
From what I’ve read about the four different parenting methods, about twenty percent.
“Authoritarian parenting is characterized by adherence to rules, a dominating style, and a great deal of control. The authoritarian parent may be punitive and is likely to believe in the “spare the rod, spoil the child” rule. Research suggests that as teenagers, children of authoritarian parents may lack some of the critical social and communication skills that are so important for leadership. Moreover, children raised by authoritarian parents tend to become authoritarian themselves, both in their interpersonal relationships and as parents.”
https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/cutting-edge-leadership/201410/how-does-your-parenting-style-affect-your-kids
“That doesn’t bode well for a child’s health outcomes, especially if she’s growing up in an otherwise stressful environment. As I note in this article, studies suggest that responsiveness and warmth can protect kids from the effects of toxic stress. …
“Kids from authoritarian families are less resourceful, less socially-adept, and more likely to become involved in bullying.”
.
https://www.parentingscience.com/authoritarian-parenting.html
From what I’ve read about Trump’s father, he was an abusive authoritarian parent just like Trump has been for his children … just one bully raising another bully.
Yet I suspect it is not those particular parents who sign up for the ‘no-excuses’ charters. They already have their kids under their thumbs. I picture single moms in a chaotic nbhd environment, who must work all hrs so cannot monitor, & fear their kids will be swept into crime/ gangs in their absence (& in the absence of a strong paternal role model). They hope a ‘no-excuses’-style school will impose structure missing in family life, &/or reinforce structure they can only hope to instill a couple of hrs/day.
I don’t understand why adults BULLY kids into learning. Kids are learning machines; it’s their nature. Bullying is a SICKNESS … name it.
Hey, they could be like the district referenced in another post that gives out free breakfast and lunch during testing season, going so far as to give that breakfast during the first hour.
If you can’t bully them, bribe em, eh!
I don’t think those adults really try to bully kids into learning.
They try to bully the ones who struggle to learn into leaving.
The ones who remain don’t need bullying. And if they prove their mettle, they often don’t get bullied by the teachers the same way. Instead they are lavished with praise.
The reason the parents of the kids who remain are satisfied is because the kids who remain are not the victims of bullying because those kids perform academically.
That is why every study of no-excuses charters finds that they only work in urban areas.
That isn’t because kids in urban areas need bullying to do well.
It is because kids in urban areas can be bullied to leave charters and when their parents complain to the overseers they are completely ignored or told that their child is the problem.
Charters that try this with middle class kids — especially when many of them are white — get in trouble because their complaints are taken more seriously.
http://www.nydailynews.com/new-york/education/parents-slam-charter-boss-boot-camp-discipline-school-article-1.3580283
And that’s why no-excuses doesn’t seem to have success in affluent suburbs. Because no-excuses has always been the way that charters target their lowest performing and unwanted students to get rid of them.
And when charters try that with white, middle class kids, their parents complain and their white overseers believe them instead of what those overseers do when the parents complaining are poor and African-American. In that case, they ignore the parents’ complaints and get away with it.
I read an interesting article about police presence in poor neighborhoods of color. It made the argument that although relations between these communities and police were poor, many residents wanted a heavy police presence around to separate the law abiding from the criminal, to prevent a dangerous neighborhood from becoming completely unruly. It got me thinking about the presence of charter schools in poor communities of color. Parents who send their children to the schools defend the policies. These schools seem to serve the same purpose as the police. It’s a means by which the ruly can be separated from the unruly and a potentially dangerous school situation can be prevented from descending into a chaotic one. I’m not defending these kind of schools but it gave me some perspective on why people tolerate it.
An interesting exchange. NYCPSP elucidates that wkg/mdl-class parents (say, Success Academy parents) tolerate racist bullying charter-school policies that free their kids to negotiate school w/minimum interference from disruption, while Beth elucidates that their rejectee families tolerate other bullying no-excuses schools (say, KIPP) as a way to preserve their kids from the utter chaos of.. I guess, the zoned schools in the poorest nbhds– I’m guessing, overcrowded, poorly-mgd classrooms, w/halls & outer perimeter subject to ‘street’ rules…
I think my point wasn’t quite clear.
It isn’t the UNRULY students who are targeted in no-excuses charter schools. It is the ones who aren’t performing “up to snuff” academically. The lie pushed by these no-excuses charters is that these kids aren’t performing “up to snuff” because they are “bad” and they are treated the way “bad” kids are — targeted for punishment and publicly humiliated.
Is anyone shocked that many of these kids would eventually “act out”?
The parents who tolerate it do so because their children perform academically well-enough to avoid the bullying.
Their children are being told over and over that the children targeted who leave are “bad” (as we witnessed in the Success Academy video, where the girl who was perfectly behaved but did not come up with the right answer was punished and sent to the “calm down” chair as if it were she who had acted out.) Since the parents are not in the room, and their child is not the target, they are satisfied and see no need to ask questions UNTIL their child struggles with something and becomes the target themselves.
The question is whether, if your high performing child is in a well-funded school that is treated her like a princess – if she forgets to fold her hands perfectly no one notices – because she is academically superior, do you care enough to worry about what happens to the kids put on “got to go” lists to save money that can be lavished on your kid?
No-excuses has nothing to do with weeding out behavioral problems. That may happen in some parochial schools whose goal is not to have 100% passing rates but to teach only kids who behave well. That’s why the few parochial schools that do “opt in” and have their students take state tests do not have particularly good test scores.
No-excuses is all about using white people’s racism to get away with practices that target low-performing — and not “violent” — students.
Sarah Cohodes hears a charter school leader explaining that her charters with no white kids had to suspend extraordinarily outrageous numbers of 5 and 6 year olds because they were “violent” and Sarah Cohodes says “of course they were violent — sounds right to me!!”
Because it is a school with no white kids, Sarah Cohodes says “yes, the suspensions are due to the very violent Kindergarten children who enroll so I won’t question them and what this says about how certain types of children are treated. And I won’t question why huge numbers of students leave.
Imagine if Sarah Cohodes was comparing two suburban elementary schools, both serving white students. One of the schools is getting 100% passing rates for their 3rd graders and one is not. The school getting 100% passing rates suspends 20% of their students aged 5 to 8 and says those students are acting out violently and the school getting lower passing rates suspends almost no very young students.
Does anyone believe Sarah Cohodes would accept without the question that the school suspending 20% of their Kindergarten students was only doing so because they were violent and then say that all suburban white schools should jump on the bandwagon because she knows that 20% of the 5 year olds in those schools act out violently but aren’t being suspended and that’s why those schools can’t get 100% passing rates like the high-suspending schools she loves.
Does anyone believe that if a large number of white, college-educated parents from that suburban school with 20% suspension rates and 100% passing rates were telling Sarah Cohodes that when their children struggled academically, they were punished and humiliated until they acted out, that Sarah Cohodes’ only reply would be “your kids are violent and it’s your fault so I refuse to examine what you are saying or care about it. That school is perfect and should be replicated due to its 100% passing rates.”
I am positive that Sarah Cohodes would say “hmmm… these white middle class parents are telling me that their special needs kids are getting suspended not for being the violent kids that the principal told me they were, but because they struggle to learn and are punished for it. I wonder if there are a lot of missing students in this high suspending school that I am touting as a miracle that will save public education. I wonder exactly how many of the suspended students are missing and how many of the missing students were low performing.”
And the reason Sarah Cohodes would ask herself this is because if she was insisting to those parents and the entiree community that they needed to turn the other school into a high suspending one becasuse she found incontrovertible proof that high suspending leads to high test scores, she would be laughed out of the academically community.
But since she is saying it about the poor African-American and Latino kids, and lots of rich white people want her to say that, she gets away with this study that only a true racist would ever think was properly done. Intentionally ignoring attrition rates, suspension rates, and the kids who leave the schools she touts — because those kids are not white so her mischaracterization of them as violent is not questioned.
Instead what Sarah Cohodes concludes is basically that no-excuses schools don’t work for white kids because white kids don’t respond to it. When her real finding is that no excuses doesn’t work for white kids because researchers like her would never accept without question the claims of the no-excuses charters serving white kids that so many of them are violent in first grade.
Which is why those no excuses charters don’t say that and can’t use those practices for schools serving white kids.
Because THIS is what happens when they do:
“HYSA faculty broke our children’s spirit and erased their self confidence in less than 3 weeks.
Our children who once loved the SA, who were proud of being a part of a great school, rallied in Albany and other events, now simply no longer want to go to school.
Some of our children are getting physically sick, experiencing meltdowns…”
EXPERIENCING MELTDOWNS — when a student whose parent is middle class, often white, and college educated is targeted like this, they “experience meltdowns”. Their parents must be told that the harsh treatment will stop.
When a low-income African-American child is targeted like this, those “meltdowns” are a sign of his natural violent nature that is the fault of his upbringing . His parents are told that their child is so violent that he is suspended.
My point is that no-excuses is not to get rid of violent kids. It is to target low performing kids until they act out. It is the excuse to counsel out low performing kids.
And Sarah Cohodes had all this information but ignored it because she decided that looking too closely at suspensions, attrition, and who exactly gets put on those got to go lists is completely irrelevant and all that matters is the performance of the students who are allowed to remain in the no-excuses charters.
poste at https://www.opednews.com/Quicklink/Report–National-Educatio-in-General_News-Charter-School-Failure_Charter-Schools_Children_Education-180419-315.html#comment697459
Embedded links are at that address;
WLLL… WHAT LEARNING LOOKS LIKE… remember that — because that is what REAL teachers must know! It is what charlatans in the reform (i.e privatization) movement care nothing about. They sell magic elixirs (no evidence required). https://www.opednews.com/articles/Magic-Elixir-No-Evidence-by-Susan-Lee-Schwartz-130312-433.html
Reports, reports reports… so much noise to inundate parents, now that the ‘NO Child Left Behind Act’ did its work…which was to label schools as failing and to blame the teacher… i.e.the professional practitionerwho KNOWS WHAT LEARNING LOOKS LIKE.
Read this from former Asst” Education Secretry Diane Ravitch: * Reign of Error: The Hoax of the Privatization Movement and the Danger to America’s Public Schools. https://www.commonwealmagazine.org/reform-reform
The EDUCATIONAL INDUSTRIAL COMPLEX made war on the teachers over 2 decades, as the media they owned sang the song of ‘those bad teachers’! They bamboozledt he people. https://greatschoolwars.files.wordpress.com/2015/10/eic-oct_11.pdf
http://www.opednews.com/articles/BAMBOOZLE-THEM-where-tea-by-Susan-Lee-Schwartz-110524-511.html
They kicked out hundreds of thousands of experienced, educated and dedicated PROFESSIONALS from the ALMOST SIXTEEN THOUSAND SCHOOL SYSTEMS in 52 states, and POOF!… the real voices that know what must happen in order for a child TO LEARN were gone! https://www.opednews.com/Series/15-880-Districts-in-50-Sta-by-Susan-Lee-Schwartz-140921-34.html?f=15-880-Districts-in-50-Sta-by-Susan-Lee-Schwartz-140921-34.html
Surprise! The schools tanked, and now we have “NO Excuses’ charter schools asking for public tax money to educate citizens who will not be kids for long!!!?
Thjey need to learn skills, and to know real science and history, not from curricula funded by the Koch brothers! https://dianeravitch.net/2014/12/05/north-carolina-plans-to-adopt-koch-funded-social-studies-curriculum
It is ALL about learning, but the national conversation was subverted became all about teaching, http://www.perdaily.com/2011/08/subverting-the-national-conversation-a.html
And, the legislatures usurped the control of the schools, and with nary an educator on board they are ending public education. Here is a link to the Ravitch blog’s posts on what the legislatures are doing.
https://dianeravitch.net/?s=Legislatures
ALL American children are left behind as the PUBLIC EDUCATION is privatized… and sold as”CHOICE!”
No excuses schools is NOT A CHOICE. https://dianeravitch.net/?s=choice
I also told my readers at Oped :
BTW… The Ravitch blog is a treasure. Everyone who wants to know what is happening to our pubic education ,across 52 states should read at least follow her posts.
Her blog (where I also write) is THE ‘GO-TO’, for anyone who is watching the daily demolition of public schools
Many posts also lead to articles by educators across America who inform us to the latest REAL news about schools!
It is where I get the truth about the war on Public Education, that began with an assault on teachers.
The NPE, is the other reliable place for FACTS about the war on public schools, and the plot to end an educated citizenry.Newsletters – Network For Public Education,. OUR CITIZENS need a reliable place for news about EDUCATION & PUBLIC SCHOOLS.
Thank you, Susan.
Nor should we ignore that some teachers in public schools are allowed to create their own fiefdom wherein a very narrow group of strictly defined behaviors are tolerated. These teachers are often lauded as indespensible to the process. The process by which the unruly are kept in school by those who have broader parameters of accepted behavior is one of the problems we face.
One teachers teaches all the smart, well balanced kids and another has to teach the ones he or she does not want. This is an old story.