Which game shall we play: Follow the Money or Connect the Dots?
Only two days ago, the Education Research Alliance at Tulane University released a glowing report about the privatization of public schools in New Orleans.
Only one day later, the U.S. Department of Education awarded the team a grant of $10 Million to continue their work on market-driven school choice.
With $10 Million, maybe they will get around to checking with researchers who don’t agree with their findings, such as those I cited in this post.
And I hope the team at Tulane-ERA will answer this puzzle:
Louisiana is one of the lowest scoring states on the National Assessment of Educational Progress (“The Nation’s Report Card”). Its scores declined significantly from 2015-2017. New Orleans is the largest school district in the state. If its results are amazing, why did the state drop to 48th in the nation in 8th grade reading and 50th in the nation on the 8th grade math on NAEP? This doesn’t add up.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Again, what else do we expect from DeVos. If private schools in a large city had a glowing report do we really believe that she would provide a $10M grant or even smaller to that community. Not in this life time.
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I think you meant “public”
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And the shill for the charter industry, the 74 million just reported again on the miracle.
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If you do test prep for one (state) test, the students don’t learn what they need for any other (NAEP) assessment (or for life). It’s called narrowing the curriculum and it’s much more narrowing than just eliminating history, art, and literature. Overseeing test prep screen time is not real teaching.
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In modern days where Big Money Tech sees the nation as a source for dividing up 1) drones 2) managers and 3) THE RICH, the word “teaching” becomes more and more synonymous with “preparing drones to follow orders or give orders and not question purpose.”
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AGGGGH!
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“market-driven school choice” Aaargh indeed!
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Posted at https://www.opednews.com/Quicklink/NOLA-Research-Unit-Issues-in-General_News-Diane-Ravitch_Education_Money_Money-180718-219.html
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And now we read that it will become even more difficult to research & discover which big pockets DeVos and her “philanthropy” crowd are inviting into their web of public school destruction.
President Trump has removed an old IRS rule that required specific types of nonprofit organizations to disclose the identities of their large donors.
As the Department of Treasury explained on its website:
The Treasury Department and IRS announced today that the IRS will no longer require certain tax-exempt organizations to file personally-identifiable information about their donors as part of their annual return.
https://www.alternet.org/irs-just-made-it-easier-powerful-political-nonprofits-conceal-who-donates-them
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Yes, this IRS ruling is especially appalling now that we know that foreign agents are donating tens of millions of dollars through these organizations and the IRS wants to hide the donors.
I hope the media connects the dots and links this new IRS ruling directly to the Russia investigation. Why are the Republicans so desperate to hide who is funding their campaigns? And why would the IRS suddenly demand that this information be kept hidden at the same time we learn how much Russian money is poured into the NRA?
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So does this mean when big donors claim large donations/deductions on their tax returns, there will be no way to double check whether an organization ever received that donation?
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Another puzzle:
If one believed test scores are bullshit,
(Duane Swacker is right. The standardized testing obsession should grind to a screeching halt.)
what part of screeching halt, exists in USING test scores?
( Louisiana is one of the lowest scoring states on the National Assessment of Educational Progress )
(why did the state drop to 48th in the nation in 8th grade reading and 50th in the nation on the 8th grade math on NAEP? )
This doesn’t add up.
Is the NAEP, somehow the real deal, because (standardized) isn’t part of the
fantasy?
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“(Duane Swacker is right. The standardized testing obsession should grind to a screeching halt.)”
That was Diane’s comment on another post. While I agree that the “obsession” should stop, the statement does not truly convey what I believe which is that “Standardized testing itself should grind to a screeching halt” except for those individual diagnostic standardized tests used to determine whether or not a student has a disability that needs to be addressed/considered in the child’s education.
“Is the NAEP, somehow the real deal, because (standardized) isn’t part of the fantasy?”
I may be wrong but Diane’s concern appears to be with the obsession with testing and not necessarily the tests themselves. Correct me if I am wrong, Diane. It seems what Diane is saying is that since NAEP is not supposed to be high stakes, that schools and students are chosen randomly, etc. . . that it is outside the realm of that “standardized testing obsession”. Again, Diane correct me if I am reading the statement wrong or am reading too much into your statements.
Personally, I do not find NAEP to be any less invalid than all the other standardized tests other than non-individual diagnostic ones (and even those can be problematic in many regards) that are given to, or perhaps better said forced upon the students.
The usage of standardized test scores for anything is completely invalid as proven by Wilson, and until someone can refute or rebut his work, and I’ve not found any in almost twenty years of looking for and asking, begging standardized test supporters for any such work, I have to concur with Wilson and fight against the malpractice of standardized testing that harms so many innocent students.
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Forced or UNforced testing event…
A major epistemological mistake is that we attach, with great importance, the “score” of the student, not only onto the student but also, by extension, the teacher, school and district. Any description of a testing event is only a description of an interaction, that of the student and the testing device at a given time and place. The only correct logical thing that we can attempt to do is to describe that interaction (how accurately or not is a whole other story). That description cannot, by logical thought, be “assigned/attached” to the student as it cannot be a description of the student but the interaction.
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“A major epistemological mistake is that we attach, with great importance, the “score” of the student, not only onto the student but also, by extension, the teacher, school and district. Any description of a testing event is only a description of an interaction, that of the student and the testing device at a given time and place. The only correct logical thing that we can attempt to do is to describe that interaction (how accurately or not is a whole other story). That description cannot, by logical thought, be “assigned/attached” to the student as it cannot be a description of the student but the interaction.”
Well said, no brick.
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That unattributed quote is mine. It comes from my summary of Wilson’s dissertation. The paragraph ends with this final thought: “And this error is probably one of the most egregious “errors” that occur with standardized testing (and even the “grading” of students by a teacher).
Notice that attachment issues are just one of the many onto-epistemological errors and falsehoods identified/shown by Wilson that are involved in the standards and standardized testing regime, each one of which renders using the results of standardized testing COMPLETELY INVALID.
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No wonder it sounded like you! Of particular importance to remember when completing an IEP case study: “Any description of a testing event is only a description of an interaction, that of the student and the testing device at a given time and place.” That point was regularly driven home on the standardized tests my students were required to take. I could almost always predict when a student was going “to tank,” and it had nothing to do with what they knew or did not know.
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I think there are few charter projects in the country like New Orleans that have been so heavily bankrolled by the foundation sector, mostly to ensure pro-charter spin despite flat test scores and egregious practices. There is an entire floor of a downtown office building in New Orleans filled with post-Katrina research and advocacy groups (though they are all essentially advocacy) funded by outside foundations To complete Diane’s links to the Leonhardt column, today not surprisingly, the New Oleans Times-Picayune published a local column touting the findings in Leonhard’s column, as if it were an outside independent finding.
Rather than write about the ERA report when it came out several days ago, the local paper waited a to “launder” the study through the New York Times. All this praise despite the flat district LEAP test scores for four years in a row.
The big mistake the market-based techocrats made was endeavoring to convert the whole system to charters. Now they can no longer raid the public schools for the best students and use the public schools as a dumping ground for challenging students. Any good Ponzi scheme operator knows the universe of marks will eventually dry up and conned inestors will realize that there was no real value created. The problem here is that no trully independent group was checking the balance sheets.
New Orleans has always been a rob-peter-to-pay-paul scam, but unlike other charter scams, the local operators enjoyed the protection of hush money paid as foundation grants.
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Can you and/or Mercedes write a rejoinder op-ed to Leonhardt’s awful column? He’s joined the propaganda apparatus for privatization. Your rejoinder here would blow him and the others out of the water.
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Ira,
I did. Yesterday at 9 am, I debunked Leonhardt. He is in the tank for charters and privatization.
The NY Times will not publish anything I write. But they can’t stop what I write here.
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“The NY Times will not publish anything I write. But they can’t stop what I write here.”
What a sad commentary on the free press.
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