Archives for the month of: June, 2018
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North Carolina: $44.8 Million for Vouchers, No Accountability, Phony “Research”

By dianeravitch
June 13, 2018 //
12

The News and Observer editorial board in North Carolina published a sharp critique of the state voucher program and a very flawed study of it.

The state gives a voucher worth $4,200 per student. The students who get vouchers do not take the state’s standardized tests. A recent “study” claimed that they were making progress, but the voucher schools and public schools don’t take the same tests, and the students in the study were not representative of the program.

“Two researchers from N.C. State’s College of Education and a third from the Friday Institute for Educational Innovation at N.C. State set out to explore this yawning accountability gap in the nation’s least regulated voucher program. They recruited 698 student volunteers in grades 4 through 8 from public and private schools to take the Iowa Test of Basic Skills in the spring of 2017. After students were sorted and some eliminated by various factors, the final comparison involved 245 students in private school and 252 in public schools. More than 7,000 students received Opportunity Scholarships in the 2017-18 school year.

“The students getting Opportunity Scholarships showed a “positive, large and statistically significant” edge on the exams, the researchers said. But that conclusion came with multiple caveats. For one, half the private school students were from Catholic schools, which represent only 10 percent of the more than 400 schools receiving vouchers. In addition, the researchers stressed how a lack of common testing requirements for public schools and voucher-receiving private schools limits the applicability of their findings.”

Most of the students in the voucher program attend evangelical Christian schools, which typically use textbooks that deny evolution and teach bigotry and invalid history based on the Bible.

Voucher proponents are cheering the results. The program is budgeted to grow by $10 million per year until 2028, when it will cost $145 million annually.

“The law creating the program contains virtually no requirements that private schools receiving public dollars account for the quality of their curricula or the performance of their students. That is in sharp contrast to Republican lawmakers’ enthusiasm for tying public school teachers’ salaries to student performance and slapping letter grades on every public school based on test results…

“We still haven’t measured the impact of vouchers. And we still don’t know if they work.”

Categories Accountability, Education Reform

LINK Added! Philadelphia: Non-Diverse Charter School Appeals Against Conditions on Its Renewal, Wants to Maintain White Majority

By dianeravitch
June 13, 2018 //
8

Ah, remember the old days of saving poor black kids from failing schools?

Here is a charter school in Philadelphia that won a renewal on the condition that it attempt to achieve greater racial diversity and get rid of financial conflicts of interest. The charter school is opposing the conditions on its renewal. Too onerous! So what if its schools are majority white in a district that is 14% white? So what if its owners and directors have conflicts of interest? Why should that matter?

The SRC approved the new charter on April 26 after originally denying it on Feb. 22. The conditions were significant – reducing the enrollment total by a third, requiring the school to give preference to students from nearby zip codes with high non-white populations, and changing policies to conform with various state laws.

Franklin Towne’s existing two schools, which enroll 2,100 students in grades K-12, are 70 and 83 percent white, although they are located in a diverse section of the city. In the School District overall, only 14 percent of students are white.

The SRC also imposed conditions on Franklin Towne’s operational structure, which the District’s Charter Schools Office, in evaluating the application, found rife with conflicts of interest among its schools, its boards, its management organization, and its landlord.

Why not just copy the Minneapolis-St. Paul model and have charter schools that are all white, and others that are all-black? Do you have a problem with that?

Charters are more segregated than public schools. We know that. Who will have the nerve to oppose it when the Founding Fathers of charters in Minneapolis-St. Paul think that segregation and non-union charters are just fine, even, well, “progressive.”

Apparently, if you are part of the charter movement, separate but equal is a swell doctrine.

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Education Industry, Minneapolis, Philadelphia, Privatization, Segregation

What to Do About NYC’s Exam for Admission to Three Elite High Schools

By dianeravitch
June 13, 2018 //
43

Mayor de Blasio wants to eliminate the exam that determines admission to three top-tier high schools and replace them with another formula that includes state test scores.

I have long been opposed to the dependence on one single standardized test for admission to these schools. No college uses such a narrow, archaic method of admitting students.

My view is that multiple measures make sense: the current test, an essay, teacher recommendations, rank in class, whatever.

Here is a brave article by a recent graduate of Stuyvesant who looked at the admission process for other elite high schools.

Danielle Eisenman, now a student at Harvard, writes:

“Let my people study.”

“A movement to keep the Specialized High School Standardized Admissions Test as the sole criterion for admission to specialized high schools appropriated the line, “Let my people go,” from the African American spiritual, “Go Down Moses.”

“The protesters — mostly low-income, first- and second-generation Asian immigrants — wish to prevent Mayor de Blasio from dismantling what they consider a meritocratic system. They blast de Blasio’s plan, which would instead admit a set percentage of the highest-performing students from each city middle school, as discriminatory; another popular sign says, “End racism.”

“As Kenneth Chiu, NYC Asian-American Democratic Club member, said in an interview on NY1, “They never had this problem when Stuyvesant was all white. Now, all of the sudden, they see one too many Chinese, and they say, ‘Hey, it’s not right.’” (Stuyvesant today is 74% Asian.)

“My mom, a Chinese immigrant, also supports the SHSAT. When I told her I was writing this article, she texted me, “Everyone I know will hate you,” telling me instead to write in support of the test.

“Though I sympathize with these concerns, the appropriation of “Let my people go” reveals how the campaign to keep the SHSAT reeks of irony and ignorance. De Blasio wishes to admit more black and Latino students, who, despite making up 67% of New York City’s public school system, represent just 10% of students offered enrollment in specialized high schools. Stuyvesant is only 0.69% black and 2.8% Latino. It’s hypocritical for protesters to invoke slavery, an experience that belongs to black Americans, when they’re advocating to keep in place a system that denies disadvantaged black Americans an opportunity for social mobility.

“Defenders of the current system, hailing the test as establishing a level playing field, argue that if more black and Latino students truly wanted to attend specialized high schools, they could just study harder. I have repeatedly heard my classmates champion this mindset, implying that black and Latino students are not as hardworking, and, even more disturbingly, not as smart as their Asian counterparts.

“The SHSAT, however, does not measure work ethic or intelligence, but a student’s ability to answer over 100 tedious multiple choice questions in under three hours. It tests for access to tutors and cram schools that teach students the skills they need to answer the questions without thinking.

“I flunked my first practice tests. After a prep class and some tutoring sessions, however, I knew all the tricks. If I hadn’t had access to that class, I likely would not have gotten into Stuy.

“The exam only tests for reading comprehension and math skills — no critical thinking, ambition, creativity or other qualities that predict success at specialized high schools….”

The legislature is unlikely to allow any change.

Categories Education Reform, New York City, Testing

Trump is No Reagan

By dianeravitch
June 12, 2018 //
49

Bret Stephens, the New York Times’ conservative columnist, wrote this about the Trump-Kim summit:

An optimistic take on Donald Trump’s historic meeting Tuesday with Kim Jong-un is that it’s Geneva Redux — a reprise of the 1985 summit between Ronald Reagan and Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev that established their rapport, fundamentally altered the tenor of relations between the superpowers and led within a few years to the end of the Cold War.

Let’s hope so. Because another take is that it’s the Plaza Redux, meaning the 1988 real estate debacle in which Trump hastily purchased New York’s Plaza Hotel because it looked like an irresistible trophy, only to be forced to sell it at a loss a few years later as part of a brutal debt restructuring.

The case for Geneva Redux, made this week by Peter Beinart in The Atlantic, sees parallels between Trump and Reagan, Republican presidents whose hawkish rhetoric and ignorance of policy details disguised an inner pragmatism and visionary imagination.

“Trump’s lack of focus on the details of denuclearization may be a good thing,” Beinart writes. “Like Reagan, he seems to sense that the nuclear technicalities matter less than the political relationship.”

It’s true that Reagan was able to raise his sights above the technical arcana to something few others could see. To wit: The Cold War didn’t need to last forever. The security paradigms that defined it weren’t immutable laws of history. Personal chemistry with a Soviet leader could go a long way to changing the relationship.

Could the same scenario unfold with North Korea? Probably not — for reasons that would have been obvious to most conservatives before their current Trump derangement.

First, Trump isn’t Reagan. Reagan generally acted in concert with allies. Trump brazenly acts against them. Reagan’s negotiation method: “Trust but verify.” Trump’s self-declared method: “My touch, my feel.” Reagan refused to give in to Soviet demands that he abandon the Strategic Defense Initiative. Trump surrendered immediately to Pyongyang’s long-held insistence that the U.S. suspend military exercises with South Korea while getting nothing in return. Reagan’s aim was to topple Communist Party rule in Moscow. Trump’s is to preserve it in Pyongyang.

Second, Kim isn’t Gorbachev. Gorbachev was born into a family that suffered acutely the horrors of Stalinism. Kim was born into a family that starved its own people. Gorbachev rose through the ranks as a technocrat with no background in the regime’s security apparatus. Kim consolidated his rule by murdering his uncle, half brother and various ministers, among other unfortunates. Gorbachev came to office intent on easing political repression at home and defusing tensions with the West. Kim spent his first six years doing precisely the opposite.

Third, Kim knows what happened to Gorbachev, whose spectacular fall served as a lesson to dictators everywhere about the folly of attempting to reform a totalitarian system. Kim may pursue a version of perestroika to stave off economic collapse, but there will be no glasnost. The survival of his regime depends domestically on state terror and internationally on his nuclear arsenal. He will abandon neither.

Fourth, the timetables are incompatible. Trump wants a foreign policy “achievement” by the midterms, and maybe a Nobel Peace Prize sometime before the 2020 election. Kim plans to be ruling North Korea when one of Chelsea Clinton’s kids is president. Trump’s incentive will be to make concessions up front. Kim can renege on his promises much later.

Fifth, Trump is a sucker. Kim is not. Say what you will about the North Korean despot, but consolidating power in his vipers’ nest regime, fielding a credible nuclear arsenal, improving his economy without easing political controls, playing nuclear brinkmanship with Trump and then, within weeks, getting the prestige of a superpower summit are political achievements of the first order. Machiavelli smiles from the grave.

As for Trump, the supposed success of the summit after the debacle in Quebec appeals to innate love of drama. He is where he loves to be: at the center of a stunned world’s attention.

But he is also in the place where he always gets himself, and everyone else in his orbit, into the worst trouble: panting for the object of his desire. That’s been true whether it’s the Plaza Hotel, Stormy Daniels and now the “ultimate deal” with Pyongyang. Oilman T. Boone Pickens had the smartest line on this when on Monday he tweeted: “Negotiating advice 101. When you want to make a deal real bad you will make a really bad deal.”

I’d be happy to be proved wrong. I would be thrilled to learn that Kim is a farsighted reformer masquerading, out of desperate necessity, as a thug and a swindler. It would also be nice to think that Trump is playing geopolitical chess at a level plodding pundits can scarcely conceive. Political commentators should always maintain a capacity for surprise and an ability to admit mistakes.

For now, however, it’s hard to see what the Singapore summit has achieved other than to betray America’s allies, our belief in human rights, our history of geopolitical sobriety and our reliance on common sense. For what? A photo op with a sinister glutton and his North Korean counterpart

Categories Education Reform

The Video That Trump Showed to Kim

By dianeravitch
June 12, 2018 //
7

Trump is bizarre. He attacks our allies and befriends dictators.

Dana Milbank had a great piece in the Washington Post today titled “Finally, a President with the Guts to Stand up to Canada.”

“Trump bravely punished Canada by withdrawing the United States from the communique of the weekend’s Group of Seven meeting, which was hosted by Trudeau. The communique Trump rejected is loaded with objectionable provisions such as “a clean environment,” “a healthy, prosperous, sustainable and fair future for all,” “quality work environments,” “a more peaceful and secure world” and “ending violence against girls and women.” In other words, it was like all the other bad, terrible, crazily made, one-sided, miserable deals that make us the laughingstock of the world — such as the North American Free Trade Agreement, the Trans-Pacific Partnership, NATO, the Paris climate accord and the Iran nuclear deal.
..

“The communique was particularly hostile to Trump in its call for “Russia to cease its destabilizing behavior to undermine democratic systems,” condemnation of Russia’s “illegal annexation of Crimea” and commitment to “a strong stance against human rights abuse.” Such language targets the very countries Trump has been courting. In a further insult, the other G-7 leaders had no enthusiasm for Trump’s call for readmitting Russia, which was kicked out of the club for invading Ukraine. The G-7 leaders instead scowled at Trump, called his actions a “disappointment” and criticized his “fits of anger.”



“Inexplicably, these foreigners are not putting America First. That’s why Trump needs to quit the group and make his own G-8 — the Great Eight — with more sympathetic world leaders:

“
Rodrigo Duterte of the Philippines, who enjoys “a great relationship” with Trump as he deploys extralegal killing squads.


“North Korea’s Kim Jong Un, who is “very open” and “very honorable” in running the most repressive regime on Earth.


“Egyptian dictator Abdel Fatah al-Sissi, who established himself as a “fantastic guy” with his bloody crackdown on dissidents.


“The Saudi regime, which has been “tremendous” as it purges business leaders and critics.
Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who is “getting very high marks” as he jails opponents.

“
China’s premier, Xi Jinping, who did something “great” in making himself president for life.


“And, of course, Russian President Vladimir Putin, “getting an A” for his leadership and receiving a congratulatory call from Trump after his “election.”

“
There is no room in this G-8 for Britain, France, Germany, Italy or Japan — and certainly not Canada. Canadians say “Sorry” for everything. But Trudeau not only failed to apologize to Trump, he won praise from his political opponents for defying Trump. This is a clear and present danger to the United States. Given Canadians’ well-known instability — their currency is called the “loonie” — there can be only one solution: We are going to build a wall from Maine to Alaska — and Ottawa is going to pay.”

When Trump met with Kim, he showed him a video about how to make North Korea rich. All that excellent waterfront property just ripe for condos!

Our new best friend, the repressive Kim!

Categories Education Reform

Ohio: No Charter School Transparency

By dianeravitch
June 12, 2018 //
11

Denis Smith is a retired educator who worked in the state charter school office. This opinion piece was published by the Columbus (Ohio) Dispatch.

Is the Public Records Act working in Ohio, particularly when it comes to receiving information about charter schools? If one recent example is typical of compliance with the statute, the answer is probably no.

According to the attorney general’s website, “When it receives a public-records request for specific existing records, the public office must provide inspection of the requested records during regular business hours or provide copies within a reasonable period of time.”

The key question, of course, is who provides the definition of a reasonable period?

On May 2, William Phillis, executive director of the Ohio Coalition for Equity & Adequacy of School Funding, filed a public-records request with three organizations that are central to the state’s charter-school industry. These entities include the Ohio Department of Education, which provides the overall legal oversight, and two of the largest charter-school sponsors, or authorizers, as they are also known.

The first sponsor addressed was the Educational Service Center of Lake Erie West. Like ODE, the ESC of Lake Erie West, formerly known as the Lucas County ESC, is a public agency fully accountable under the Public Records Act. Some readers may recall the ESC as the long-time sponsor of the now-defunct ECOT, the Electronic Classroom of Tomorrow.

Phillis also sent a records request to an additional sponsor, the Buckeye Community Hope Foundation, which, unlike ODE and the educational service center, is a nonprofit organization.

The nature of the public-records request was to examine correspondence between the sponsors, the Ohio Department of Education, and the schools regarding compliance, reviews by the sponsors, governance and overall school performance.

In particular, the two sponsors are responsible for providing oversight and ensuring legal compliance with a chain of 17 schools that operate under the names Horizon Science Academy and Noble Academy and are affiliated with the management firm Concept Schools, based in Chicago.

These schools, which are associated with the Turkish cleric Fethullah Gulen, have been the subject of controversy for years. For example, three of the Ohio schools in the Gulen chain were the targets of an FBI raid in 2014, and that investigation appears to be ongoing.

On a national level, the Gulen schools are known for their practice of hiring Turkish nationals to fill teaching positions at some of their schools. One investigation found that in Ohio alone, 657 H-1B visa applications, which are designed to enable the temporary use of skilled workers, were filed by the management organization in a 15-year period. In theory, every guest international teacher replaces a qualified American teacher, all at taxpayer expense.

In the area of management and governance, there are concerns, as the Akron Beacon-Journal reported earlier, that these “schools are run almost exclusively by persons of Turkish heritage, some of whom are not U.S. citizens,” of money transfers to individuals in Istanbul, Turkey, and other issues, some of which appeared in state audits. Additional questions involve a foundation with ties to the chain for its practice of offering trips to Turkey for public officials. Former Ohio Speaker Cliff Rosenberger was one individual awarded all-expense-paid travel prior to his accession to the House leadership.

The ever-developing ECOT scandal has validated the need for more-active oversight of all state charter schools, and the Horizon-Noble Gulen chain is a clear example of additional monitoring that must be performed by the state and the two authorizers, which receive millions in state tax dollars for such purposes.

An extended period of time has elapsed since the Ohio Coalition requested the public records. On June 4, the Buckeye Community Hope Foundation did respond through an attorney. “The Buckeye Community Hope Foundation is not a public entity subject to public records,” was part of its reply to Phillis. As of this writing, there has been silence from the two public entities. This is unacceptable and violates the spirit and the letter of the statute.

As the ECOT debacle has shown, there is a major problem with the management and governance of Ohio charter schools, and the public has a right to know more about questions surrounding one of the national charter school chains operating in Ohio.

For years, the American Society of News Editors has sponsored an event called Sunshine Week in honor of the public’s right to know about their government. Schools are a basic part of our system of self-governance. We cannot allow this public-records request to be ignored by those who otherwise benefit from the receipt of public funds.

“Sunlight is said to be the best of disinfectants,” Louis Brandeis once said. Ohio citizens need to insist that the Public Records Act must be the vehicle to provide answers to lingering questions about how our tax money is expended for what should be a proper public purpose.

http://www.dispatch.com/opinion/20180608/denis-smith-charter-schools-are-withholding-public-records

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Education Industry, Privatization

Humor: Testing Expert James Popham Spoofs “Tractable Teacher Evaluation”

By dianeravitch
June 12, 2018 //
18

 

If you think that VAM is a scam, you will enjoy this. 

It is a hilarious spoof of the junk now sold to schools.

James Popham is one of the nation’s most knowledgeable testing experts.

In this video, he offers a deal you can’t refuse.

He is selling products to evaluate teachers, from the Tractable Teacher Evaluation Company.

If you are familiar with the value-added model, you will enjoy his “Value Added Mystery Measure,” which he describes as “completely incomprehensible.” Methinks he had William Sanders secret formula TVAAS in mind.

Categories Education Reform, Testing, VAM (value-added modeling)

California: Charter Forces Licking Their Wounds After Wasting $23 Million on Lousy Candidate for Governor

By dianeravitch
June 12, 2018 //
19

The charter billionaires pulled out all the stops to push their candidate Antonio Villaraigosa into the governor’s runoff last week, and lost.

Charter school supporters are deciding where to direct their considerable resources after pouring money into the California governor primary to support a longtime ally who failed to move on to November’s election.

The fallout may signal future uncertainty for the school choice movement in a state with some of the most robust charter school laws in the United States.

The front-runner for governor, Democrat Gavin Newsom, could hamper or threaten the progress of charters — privately run schools that use public money and have divided parents and politicians. He has mostly emphasized his support of traditional public schools and called for more charter school accountability.

Newsom’s campaign said it would seek to temporarily halt charter school openings to consider transparency issues but that “successful” charters would thrive under his leadership. In the June 5 race, he beat out former Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, a key ally of the California Charter Schools Association.

The powerful organization and its big-name donors, including Netflix CEO Reed Hastings, former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg and Walmart heir Alice Walton, gave nearly $23 million to support Villaraigosa, who finished behind Newsom and Republican businessman John Cox.

Now, the group said it’s working on a new strategy that could include supporting Newsom or Cox, despite the Republican’s endorsement from President Donald Trump. The heavily blue state is helping lead a national resistance to his administration. The charter Advocates are in a tight spot after running attack ads against both candidates who advanced to the general election.

So look who is standing on principle! The billionaires will either try to buy the friendship of Newsom, with a handsome cash prize, or they will throw in their lot with Trump-loving Cox.

What do they believe in?

Categories Billionaires, Charter Schools, Corporate Reformers, Education Industry, Privatization

Audrey Amrein-Beardsley: Why New Mexico’s Teacher Evaluation System is Ineffective, Invalid, and Biased

By dianeravitch
June 12, 2018 //
5

In December 2015, a state district judge in New Mexico put a halt to the use of New Mexico’s teacher evaluation system, which then State Commissioner Hanna Skandera had imported from Florida. Her replacement since Skandera’s departure, Chris Ruzskowski (former TFA) praised the state’s harshly punitive system as the toughest in the nation. In Skandera’s seven years leading the New Mexico schools, the state NAEP scores were stagnant. They are in the NAEP cellar with the poorest Southern states. None of her “Florida reforms” made any difference.

Audrey Amrein-Beardsley here reviews what is now known about this teacher evaluation program. As is typical, 70% of teachers do not teach the tested subjects. Teachers in affluent districts get higher scores. Teachers who teach the neediest kids get the lowest scores. Caucasian teachers get higher scores than non-Caucasians.

It may soon be a moot issue, as all three Democratic candidates and the one Republican running for Governor have said they would overhaul or discard the flawed evaluation system.

Congratulations to the AFT of New Mexico, which fought this idiotic system in court and halted its consequences.

Categories Albuquerque, Failure, New Mexico, Teacher Evaluations

Andrea Gabor: An Education Reform That Worked–and That Needs to Be Revived

By dianeravitch
June 12, 2018 //
65

Andrea Gabor writes in the Boston Globe about the remarkable success of the Massachusetts Education Reform Act of 1993, which involved a bipartisan agreement: more funding, equalization of funding, in exchange for standards and assessments. Gabor’s new book, After the Education Wars: How Smart Schools Upend the Business of Reform, is officially published today. It is a smart book that deeply understands the futility of the corporate reform movement, which substitutes competition for collaboration and guarantees repeated failures.

She writes:

Twenty-five years after Massachusetts passed a historic education reform law that helped make it the gold-standard for American schooling, the Bay State reforms are coming under scrutiny again — and for good reason.

What happened in Massachusetts is actually a tale of two reforms. The first, signed into law on June 18, 1993, was a bipartisan achievement hammered out by a Republican governor and Democratic state legislators, and informed by a vigorous local debate among educators, parents, and business people who agreed on a “grand bargain”: substantially more state spending for schools in exchange for higher standards and increased accountability.

The law worked initially as intended. It infused over $1 billion in extra education funding — mostly to poor communities. Massachusetts achieved top scores on the National Assessment of Educational Progress, the nation’s report card. By 2000, the gap between NAEP scores of black and white students had actually narrowed.

But tax cuts, the Great Recession of 2008-2009 and the mandates of Race to the Top eroded the state’s gains:

A new 2010 education law only made matters worse. While providing a one-time $250 million cash infusion from the Federal government, the law failed to make up for school-funding inequities, yet imposed dire consequences on schools, districts, and teachers who failed to make test-score gains. It also gutted the much-lauded curriculum standards.

It is time to revisit how the original 1993 legislation worked — and why it remains a model worth building on. The law was a response to a decade of property tax cuts that hit poor communities hardest. A successful class-action lawsuit, led by Brockton students, and decided just days before the Education Reform Act was passed, sought to remedy that inequality, arguing that Massachusetts was not meeting its constitutional obligation to “cherish” education for all students — language written into the state constitution by John Adams.

Support for the plan in 1993 was not only bipartisan but had the support of the business leaders.

They were willing to pay more for better schools, and they wanted strong foundation aid for the poorest schools. In a time of charter-mania, charters were capped at only 25 for the entire state.

Erosion of that support in recent years hit Brockton High School, where the rebellion began, extra hard. What was once a miracle story–the failing school that became one of the best in the state–was upended as funding became unequal again.

In recent years, Brockton has struggled to navigate new state and federal mandates, including new teacher evaluations and a common core-aligned MCAS. In 2016, Governor Charlie Baker and his top education officials imposed a charter school on the community against overwhelming local opposition. During the last school year, Brockton ran a $16 million deficit; the town is now exploring a new funding lawsuit.

It is time to restore equitable funding for schools — the aim of an education-funding bill that just passed the state Senate — and to fully realize the vision of the 1993 reforms. This encompassed not just a rich curriculum, but also a robust role for local school-based decision-making and a wide array of accountability measures, and, as the MBAE pointed out in 1993, “not simply results of standardized tests.” All these measures are needed to return schools like Brockton High to their former levels of fiscal and educational sustainability.

Categories Accountability, Budget Cuts, Equity, Funding, Massachusetts
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