Archives for the month of: June, 2018
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California: 5 Billionaires Trying to Elect a Charter-Friendly Governor and State Ed. Superintendent

By dianeravitch
June 2, 2018 //
11

Imagine this absurd scenario: Five billionaires are pouring huge sums of money into the races for Governor of California and State Superintendent of Instruction. What is their main goal? More charter schools. More and more.

Crazy but true

You would think the main goal of campaign funding would be the economy, or water, or health care,the environment. No, it is charter schools.

Open the link to see who they are.

And be sure to read the comments. One from Lisa Alva could be a post by itself.

It speaks volume about the ultimate goal of the privatizers.

Lisa Alva writes:

Based on my experience, I believe that the goal of this consortium is on-line learning for most California students, supported by expensive software and more expensive hardware that replaces unionized teachers where possible.

I was on the Board of Directors for Villaraigosa’s Partnership for Los Angeles Schools; I was in every meeting of this entity and heard their claims and concerns first-hand, I saw their methods in the planning and implementation phases, I heard their rationales and values. I saw and heard that data and results were the focus that kept money and participation among donors at an acceptable level. I did not ever, ever hear or see efforts to gather information from classroom-level staff; aside from image-building listening sessions, teacher experience was largely unimportant in making decisions or plans.

I worked at a PLAS high school from the inception of PLAS as a teacher and a coordinator. I saw that the so-called “graduation rate” of “80%” that Tuck and Tony V. are claiming was completely gamed using on-line “learning” in credit-recovery classes.

Nothing different was taking place in classrooms.

No students were held accountable for anything.

Students freely web-surfed, copied and pasted their way to diplomas despite the supervising teachers’ best efforts to enforce real learning. Teachers eventually revolted, resulting in tighter standards for enrollment in credit recovery classes, which diminished the “amazing results” significantly.

I saw very expensive executives burn through a revolving door of management, first in the pursuit of immediate impact, and then in pursuit of other employment. Two top executives responsible for the dramatic increase in graduation statistics lasted less than a year in the PLAS; they, like many other PLAS people, now work in San Diego or in private education-related enterprise.

The Tuck-Villaraigosa effort has nothing to do with creating whole, self-actualizing citizens who can handle the challenges of a 21st century workplace and lead happy, fulfilled lives. With John Deasy back in California and Eli Broad’s plan for charterizing California schools in full swing, the automization of public education seems to be a foregone conclusion.

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

Peter Greene: Everything You Need to Know But Were Afraid to Ask about Pennsylvania’s Super Duper Voucher Bill

By dianeravitch
June 2, 2018 //
12

Peter Greene has read the legislative language of SB 2 in the Pennsylvania State Senate so we don’t have to, and he spells out what is in it. You can be sure that there is nothing good for public schools.

An astonishing 15% of the lowest scoring schools are eligible, which is way larger than most states. As Peter points out, even if every school were doing a good or great or awesome job, there will always be a bottom 15% to thrown into the pool of eligible-for-a-voucher.

He writes:

What’s Super-Duper About It?

Vouchers are a policy idea that will not die; let’s just give every student a check and let them enroll at whatever school they want to (and let’s not talk about the fact that they don’t really get to decide because top private schools are expensive and all private schools are free to accept students or not for whatever reason).

But many reformsters see another end game. Why bother with school at all? Let students purchase an English class from one vendor and a math class from another. Get history lessons on line paid for by your educational voucher card account.

ESAs make that splintered version of “education” possible. Instead of saying, “Here’s a tuition voucher to pay your way to the school of your choice,” the state says, “Here’s a card pre-loaded with your education account money. Spend your special edu-bucks however you want to.”

Do you think that legislators in Pennsylvania care that voucher studies for the past few years have consistently shown that kids do worse than the ones who stayed behind in public schools?

Guess not.

Categories Pennsylvania, Vouchers

Mississippi: What Happens When a State Refuses to Fund Its Public Schools

By dianeravitch
June 2, 2018 //
13

Mississippi is usually ranked #49 or 50 or 51 on any measure of poverty or funding for schools. Of course, its students have low scores because standardized tests accurately measure family income.

A state that refuses to fund its schools will have high poverty, a poorly educated citizenry and workforce, and a stagnant economy.

In 2015, educators and parents tried to pass a state referendum to force the Legislature to spend more, but a coalition of very wealthy people from inside and outside the state swamped the voters with propaganda and defeated the referendum. The Koch brothers debated a quarter million dollars (pocket change for them) to ensure that poor black and white children in Mississippi did not get enough funding to offer a decent education.

I recently posted Jeff Bryant’s Report on the pending state takeover of the public schools in Jackson, Mississippi. First, they underfund the schools, then they declare they are failing. And officials who can’t provide a decent education anywhere in the state plan to impose their will on the children of Jackson. You can be sure that their solution is charter schools, not more funding.

A teacher in Jackson wrote this comment after she read Jeff’s article.


Diane, you and I have corresponded several times over the years about the conditions in my school in Jackson. I regret to inform you that the conditions of the physical plant are now beyond words. When I was moved from a classroom with carpet that hadn’t been cleaned in years, a room where I fought respiratory and skin ailments for years, I found my new room infected with black mold. It took a few weeks and a trip to the doctor, but I got that mitigated to the point where I can deal with it.

Then over the Christmas holidays, the city of Jackson suffered a cold snap that destroyed the city water system. Jackson Public Schools had to close for a week due to the water crisis. When we resumed classes, our building’s pipes, I believe had also frozen, leading to a re-occurrence of a sewer line break that has literally rendered the main hall and its classrooms a s—hole. About fifteen years ago, the same situation had occurred when I was also on the main hall. Eventually the district dealt with the situation by going under the building to dig out the contaminated soil and re-plumbing the pipes.

I’ve told everyone who will listen, but the situation only got worse until they finally closed the restroom when the new poop was coming from. Even so, there is always a lingering odor of raw sewage which becomes unbearable after a rain and when the temperature warms up. When I was checking out of my room this week, the stench gagged me, and I swelled up with tears because the whole situation is just so surreal.

The facilities manager was in the building and I told him that I had been trying to decide whose office I needed to visit with a box of poop to put on the desk and ask “How would you like to smell this all day every day?” I told him that it would be his office. He assured me that they will address it this summer.

I also told this story to the principal who related that there is the intent to go back under the building, dig the dirt out again, and once more re-plumb the pipes. If it is effective, then it should hold out long enough to get me through to retirement.

Jackson Public Schools announced this week that they will issue a bond to put money into repairing aging buildings. Our building is one of the oldest in the city, with the distinctions of once having been the only high school in the state for African Americans. We’ll see if our building’s problems will be adequately addressed.

It is absolutely true that the power brokers in this state don’t want to pay for African American children to be educated. When Jackson Public Schools mainly educated the children of the power brokers, the schools were just fine. Now that those children are educated in the private and suburban schools, we see those schools excelling. Meanwhile, the students left in tax-poor JPS are languishing in second-world conditions.

My experience leads me to advocate for a new school funding mechanism that does not put schools at the mercy or benefit of their local tax base. Our country is clearly OK with relegating a third of our children to poverty and its consequences or we would have already done something about it.

(Thank you for letting me rant.)

Lorraine

Categories Charter Schools, Education Reform, Funding, Koch Brothers, Mississippi, Poverty, Privatization, Racism

Mate Wierdl: The Problem with Common Core Mathematics

By dianeravitch
June 2, 2018 //
39

Mate Wierdl is a professor of mathematics in Tennessee and a reader of the blog. He posted this comment:


I think the problems with CC is perfectly described in this blog post which compares a Finnish and a US first grade tests.

First Grade Math Tests in American and Finnish Classrooms

Simply looking at the two tests is enough: you can easily understand the Finnish test without knowing Finnish, while you may have to reread some questions in the US one.

Finnish

US

Click to access the-math-test.pdf

The US early emphasis on word problems to connect math with (fake) real life is one of the basic issues with CC. This corresponds to the close reading nonsense. The other basic issue is insisting on kids’ giving logical , detailed explanations for concepts they can easily understand intuitively (such as, they have no problem understanding the difference between 12 and 21, but CC wants kids to explain the difference every time they see it). This corresponds to poem analysis until the poem is dead—as you guys mentioned it before.

If I had to give a single sentence to describe the problem with the CC math: it wants to take art out of math and replace it with logic.

Probably, the same could be said about ELA, but I am not an expert on that.

Categories Common Core, Education Industry, Education Reform, Teachers and Teaching, Testing

Los Angeles Teachers Rally to Save Public Education

By dianeravitch
June 1, 2018 //
10

This is a very effective short video of a UTLA rally for resources and respect. Alex Caputo-Pearl, president of UTLA, warns that we must save public education from the proliferation of privately managed charters—or lose it within the next five years.

Categories California, Charter Schools, Education Industry, Los Angeles, Privatization

Join Me at the Class Size Matters Dinner in NYC June 19

By dianeravitch
June 1, 2018 //
1

Leonie Haimson is executive director and founder of Class Size Matters. In addition to advocating for reduced class size, Leonie is a nationally recognized defender of student privacy and has won notable battles against data mining. She is also the most effective education activist in the city of New York. I am a member of her board.

I hope you will join us on June 19 for the annual dinner to benefit Class Size Matters.

Please reserve your seat now for our Annual Skinny Award dinner on Tuesday June 19. We will be honoring four tremendous individuals who have given us the “real skinny” on NYC public schools:

Council Member Danny Dromm, Chair of the Finance Committee & former Education Chair

Norm Scott, retired teacher and
blogger/videographer extraordinaire

Fred Smith, testing expert and critic

And a surprise honoree who will be announced at the event!

Join us on June 19, 2018 at 6 PM at Casa La Femme, 140 Charles St. in Greenwich Village, for a delicious three course meal with a glass of wine and great company!

This is always one of the most joyous events of the year, where we celebrate our victories and gain strength for the challenges to come. Buy your tickets today.

Even if you can’t make it, please consider making a contribution at the above link in honor of these terrific awardees, and to support our work going forward.

Hope to see you at the Skinnies, and thanks! Leonie

Leonie Haimson
Executive Director
Class Size Matters
124 Waverly Pl.
New York, NY 10011
212-529-3539

Make a tax-deductible contribution to Class Size Matters now!

Categories Class size, Class Size Matters Org, Education Reform, Privacy and Privacy Rights

An Empire of Death That Made the Sackler Family Billionaires

By dianeravitch
June 1, 2018 //
25

Purdue Pharmaceuticals manufactures Oxycontin. Oxycontin is the most widely used opioid. Opioid abuse has caused at least 200,000 deaths.

The New York Times reports that an internal Justice Department investigation determined that Purdue was warned about the highly addictive nature of its prize product but did not change its marketing and promotion of Oxycontin.

According to Forbes, the Sacklers are now worth $14 Billion. Aside from endowing museums and universities, the Sacklers are major supporters of charter schools. Jonathan Sackler founded ConnCAN in Connecticut and 50CAN to spread the charter school gospel.

Purdue Pharma, the company that planted the seeds of the opioid epidemic through its aggressive marketing of OxyContin, has long claimed it was unaware of the powerful opioid painkiller’s growing abuse until years after it went on the market.

But a copy of a confidential Justice Department report shows that federal prosecutors investigating the company found that Purdue Pharma knew about “significant” abuse of OxyContin in the first years after the drug’s introduction in 1996 and concealed that information.

Company officials had received reports that the pills were being crushed and snorted; stolen from pharmacies; and that some doctors were being charged with selling prescriptions, according to dozens of previously undisclosed documents that offer a detailed look inside Purdue Pharma. But the drug maker continued “in the face of this knowledge” to market OxyContin as less prone to abuse and addiction than other prescription opioids, prosecutors wrote in 2006.

Based on their findings after a four-year investigation, the prosecutors recommended that three top Purdue Pharma executives be indicted on felony charges, including conspiracy to defraud the United States, that could have sent the men to prison if convicted.

But top Justice Department officials in the George W. Bush administration did not support the move, said four lawyers who took part in those discussions or were briefed about them. Instead, the government settled the case in 2007.

Prosecutors found that the company’s sales representatives used the words “street value,” “crush,” or “snort” in 117 internal notes recording their visits to doctors or other medical professionals from 1997 through 1999.

The 120-page report also cited emails showing that Purdue Pharma’s owners, members of the wealthy Sackler family, were sent reports about abuse of OxyContin and another company opioid, MS Contin.

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Education Industry, Privatization

Frank Bruni: Who Killed Aristotle?

By dianeravitch
June 1, 2018 //
63

New York Times opinion columnist Frank Bruni worries about the vocationalization of liberal arts colleges, many of which are racing to turn their curriculum into college readiness pathways.

This is not a new concern. Twenty years ago, classicist Victor Davis Hansen wrote “Who Killed Homer?” about the death of the classics.

What Bruni describes is a giant scythe mowing down liberal arts majors in the pursuit of occupational relevance.

He writes:


History is on the ebb. Philosophy is on the ropes. And comparative literature? Please. It’s an intellectual heirloom: cherished by those who can afford such baubles but disposable in the eyes of others.

I’m talking about college majors, and talk about college majors is loud and contentious these days. There’s concern about whether schools are offering the right ones. There are questions about whether colleges should be emphasizing them at all. How does a deep dive into the classics abet a successful leap into the contemporary job market? Should an ambitious examination of English literature come at the cost of acquiring fluency in coding, digital marketing and the like?

Last Sunday The Chronicle of Higher Education published a special report that delved into this debate. One of the storiesdescribed what was happening at the flagship campus of the University of Illinois and at Assumption College in Worcester, Mass., casting these developments as different harbingers for higher education.

Illinois is pairing certain majors in the liberal arts — for example, anthropology and linguistics — with computer science. Assumption is doing away with a host of traditional majors in favor of new ones geared to practical skills. Goodbye, art history, geography and, yes, classics. Hello, data analytics, actuarial science and concentrations in physical and occupational therapy.

Assumption is hardly an outlier. Last year the University of Wisconsin at Superior announced that it was suspending nine majors, including sociology and political science, and warned that there might be additional cuts. The University of Wisconsin at Stevens Point recently proposed dropping 13 majors, including philosophy and English, to make room for programs with “clear career pathways.”

While these schools are swapping out certain majors for others, some higher education leaders are asking whether such devotion to a single field of study — and whether a college experience structured around that — are the right way to go.

“The future of work calls for something more radical: the elimination of academic majors as we have come to know them,” Jeffrey Selingo, the founding director of the Academy for Innovative Higher Education Leadership, wrote in a column that was part of The Chronicle’s special report. He advocated a college education that spans “all academic disciplines.”

Selingo is the author of several books about the rightful role and uses of college, the most recent of which, “There Is Life After College,” illustrates how thoughtful he can be on these matters.

But I worry that he’s suggesting an either/or where there needn’t be one. I worry that the current conversation about majors is part of a larger movement to tug college too far in a vocational direction.

And I worry that there’s a false promise being made. The world now changes at warp speed. Colleges move glacially. By the time they’ve assembled a new cluster of practical concentrations, an even newer cluster may be called for, and a set of job-specific skills picked up today may be obsolete less than a decade down the road. The idea of college as instantaneously responsive to employers’ evolving needs is a bit of a fantasy…

Part of the skepticism toward traditional majors reflects a correct feeling that at some schools, some fields of study and course offerings are preserved largely because the faculty have a selfish investment in the status quo. If seats in the classroom are perpetually empty and money is sorely needed elsewhere, colleges shouldn’t ignore that.

But it’s a balancing act, because colleges shouldn’t lose sight of what makes traditional majors — even the arcane ones — so meaningful, especially now. And they shouldn’t downgrade the nonvocational mission of higher education: to cultivate minds, prepare young adults for enlightened citizenship, give them a better sense of their perch in history and connect them to traditions that transcend the moment. History, philosophy and comparative literature are bound to be better at that than occupational therapy. They’re sturdier threads of cultural and intellectual continuity.

And majoring in them — majoring in anything — is a useful retort to the infinite distractions, short attention spans and staccato communications of the smartphone era. Perhaps now, more than ever, young people need to be shown the rewards of sustained attention and taught how to hold a thought. That’s what a major does. There’s a reason that it’s often called a discipline.

“Becoming versed in the intricacies of a complex thing is itself a worthwhile skill,” Johnson said. I agree. It also underscores what real knowledge and true perspective are. In a country that’s awash in faux expertise and enamored of pretenders, that’s no small thing.

Students interested in using their education for expressly vocational purposes should have an array of attractive options in addition to college, which isn’t right for everyone and is hardly the lone path to professional fulfillment. Some of those options should be collaborations with employers grooming the work force they need.

But students who want to commune with Kant and Keats shouldn’t be made to feel that they’re indulgent dilettantes throwing away all hope of a lucrative livelihood. They’re making a commitment to a major that has endured because its fruits are enduring.

Categories Education Reform, Higher Education

John Merrow: Which Side Are You On? Whose Side Are You On?

By dianeravitch
June 1, 2018 //
57

John Merrow has seen the light. Once you begin to doubt the testing regime, nothing ever looks the same again. The usual ed reform conversation begins to sound like “how many angels can dance on the head of a pin?” You watch people discussing the data but it no longer makes sense. It once did, but no longer.

In this post, he says there are four groups of people in the conversation about education today.

The DeVos crowd wants to abandon public education.

The reformers are locked into the mindset of No Child Left Behind and Race to the Top. They control the debate and their ideas are stale.

The third group is uninformed and not interested.

The fourth group are progressives, who are trying to imagine a different way to educate children, in which they learn with excitement and purpose.

John thinks of himself as a progressive. I do too.

Where do you stand?

Categories Accountability, Corporate Reformers, Education Industry, Education Reform, Privatization, Testing

John Thompson on Broadies in Dallas and Philadelphia

By dianeravitch
June 1, 2018 //
5

John Thompson has been researching the tenures of Broadie Superintendents, who sem to have been trained to be tough top down administrators.

Here is his latest report:

Researching failed Broad Academy superintendents has been “déjà vu, all over again.” When No Child Left Behind promised 100% proficiency by 2014, education researchers accurately predicted that efforts would be diverted from teaching and learning to statistical gamesmanship. Being fairly new to education policy, I kept asking myself what reformers were thinking: Had they never heard of Campbell’s Law? If they hadn’t read Catch 22, had they not seen the movie, and its portrayal of the real world effects of imposing absurd, unreachable, quantitative growth targets?

Rightly or wrongly, my summary of Mike Miles’ “reign of error” in Dallas emphasized the dismal results he produced, as well as the human costs of his Broad mandates. I should have given more emphasis to Miles’ surrealistic display of hubris, and his weird dance performance, when he announced the new day he was bringing to Dallas schools. Miles seemed like a caricature of Bob Newhart’s performance of “Major Major” in Mike Nichols’ Catch 22 movie. Miles obviously failed to learn from Major Major being told, “You’re the new squadron commander. … But don’t think it means anything, because it doesn’t. All it means is that you’re the new squadron commander.”

https://www.npr.org/sections/ed/2014/10/11/354931351/it-s-2014-all-children-are-supposed-to-be-proficient-under-federal-law

Among the meaningless things that Miles told Dallas was that, by 2020, 90% students would graduate on time, 40% would attain a 21 or higher composite score on the ACT exam or a SAT of 990 on Reading/Math, 75% would be proficient on the “Year 2020 workplace readiness assessments,” and 80% would enter college, the military, or a “career-ready job” straight from high school.

Perhaps the sub-goals were even more illustrative of Miles’ autocratic disconnection from reality. Buy-in would be so great that students in targeted low-performing schools would receive at least 90 minutes of homework every night. By August 2015, he said that 75% of the staff and 70% of the community would “agree or strongly agree with the direction of the district.” At least 60% of teachers on his pay-for-performance evaluation system and 75% of principals would agree that the system is “fair, accurate and rigorous.”

In the real world of 2015, Miles resigned. The Dallas Morning News explained that “in Texas, superintendents are graded by state STAAR results, and DISD scores have stayed flat or dropped under him.” So, what sort of victories could Miles proclaim?

https://www.dallasnews.com/news/education/2015/06/23/dallas-isd-chief-mike-miles-announces-resignation-after-contract-changes-rejected

As he left office, Miles claimed victory in putting the critical pieces needed to transform Dallas into place. Instead of quantifiable gains, he bragged about continued implementation of a rigorous principal evaluation system that uses both performance and student results to measure principal effectiveness; the implementation of the Teacher Excellence Initiative, and fundamentally changing how highly effective teachers are identified and assessed; kicking off an initiative to create 35 choice schools; and increasing the focus on early childhood programs.

In other words, Miles claimed to have produced gains in implementation, innovation, identification, assessment, focus, and kicking things off, but not even he could pretend to have produced concrete, much less measurable, improvements in student learning.

Mike Miles announces resignation as Dallas ISD superintendent

And that leads to the question of whether corporate reformers, especially Broad superintendents, will ever learn the folly of demanding impossible, quantifiable accountability targets. Shouldn’t Philadelphia and its Broad trained leader, William Hite, recall the city’s cheating scandal from 2009 to 2011, when at least 140 educators engaged in improprieties?

I’d say that Philly is another case of déjà vu all over again but – at least for now – Hite seems to be getting away with it. His goals are even more incredible. The goals of his 2015 Action Plan 3.0 are:

• 100% of students will graduate, ready for college and career

• 100% of 8-year-olds will read on grade level

• 100% of schools will have great principals and teachers

• 100% of the funding we need for great schools, and zero deficit

Philadelphia may be on track to meet its 2018 goal of a 66% graduation rate, but those numbers are easily fabricated. They say nothing about the target of 100% college and career readiness. So, what do the reliable NAEP scores say about the district’s student performance?

In 2011, Philadelphia 4th graders scored 8 points lower than other urban districts in math, but in 2017, they scored 17 points lower. During the same period, Philadelphia 4th graders dropped another four points in reading in comparison to other urban schools. In 2011, Philly’s 8th graders scored 9 points lower in math. By 2017, the gap grew to 14 points. The reading score gap increased by 2 points for 8th graders.

https://www.nationsreportcard.gov/profiles/districtprofile/overview/XP?cti=PgTab_OT&chort=1&sub=MAT&sj=XP&fs=Grade&st=MN&year=2017R3&sg=Gender%3A+Male+vs.+Female&sgv=Difference&ts=Single+Year&tss=2015R3-2017R3&sfj=NL

And while we’re at it, where is Philadelphia in terms of 100% school funding and zero deficit?

Just last month, Superintendent William R. Hite Jr. said:

The Philadelphia School District needs to spend $150 million on repairs to its 300 buildings, including money for an expansion of a lead paint abatement program. To do so, the district is banking on almost $700 million in additional funding from the city proposed in Kenney’s budget.

Council, however, has publicly expressed qualms about fulfilling the mayor’s full request for schools, which would almost certainly be tied to a property-tax hike.

Of course, that leads to the next logical conclusion. Perhaps Mayor Jim Kenney should take a page from the Broad playbook. He should tell voters that passing the tax increase will solve 100% of the city’s as well as the schools’ problems.

http://www.philly.com/philly/education/mayor-kenney-william-hite-philly-crumbling-schools-lead-paint-repair-20180522.html

Categories Accountability, Broad Foundation, Failure
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