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John Thompson: How a Democrat Won in a Gerrymandered Red, Red District in Oklahoma

By dianeravitch
November 28, 2018 //
3

John Thompson writes here about the surprising victory of Kendra Horn in a Congressional district that had been gerrymandered to remain permanently Republican. I thank John for telling me about Kendra Horn, who is a supporter of public education. On his recommendation and after a review of her website, I was happy to endorse her. When so many political races are decided by razor-thin margins, every endorsement counts. I would like to think that my endorsement caused a few pro-public education voters to pay attention to Kendra Horn. Thompson describes a meeting of the Oklahoma Conservative Political Action Committee, which is horrifying and fascinating in its openly expressed nativism and anti-Semitism, as well as its contempt for public schools and teachers. The feverish and overwrought fear of “socialism” in this very conservative state, whose legislature has long been a subsidiary of the oil and gas industry, is surprising.

John Thompson writes:


Julian Castro says that voters want authentic candidates. America may not need traditional politicians. But we need traditionally sane leaders.

Oklahoma’s election of Kendra Horn to congress is more than one of the nation’s “biggest lurch to the left in America’s 2018 midterm election.” It is also a case study in what it takes to turn a historic Republican district, made safer by extreme gerrymandering, into a sane Blue island in a sea of Trumpism. And its lessons are relevant across the nation.

As political scientist Mike Males says about Oklahoma County:

‘The gerrymandered district combining once-Republican Oklahoma City with two reliably GOP rural counties, went for Donald Trump by 13 points in the 2016 presidential election. It handily elected Republicans to Congress since 1975, including two-term incumbent Steve Russell by margins topping 20 points.’ Fivethirtyeight.com gave Republicans 6-in-7 odds of 2018 triumph.

On the other hand, the Oklahoma Conservative Political Action Committee (OCPAC) has a different view. Although it did not mention Diane Ravitch’s endorsement of Horn, Oklahoma rightwingers have been blaming Jewish billionaires like George Kaiser and Mike Bloomberg. In a recent meeting caught on youtube, scorn was expressed about the “Jerusalem news media,” prompting laughter.

Although they used questionable terminology, the conservative OCPAC started with a valid point. Oklahoma City has attracted large numbers of young professionals. The economic take-off (in a state that has mostly been stagnating,) has been a “magnet for liberals” from east and west coasts. According to one speaker, these “inplants” have prompted something that I have never seen, local television news’ nonstop celebration of pop culture, millennial opinions, and the “feelings” of young people.

Other newcomers, immigrants, were said to be “good neighbors and workers.” But they tell pollsters that they are “for the people” and that is “socialism.” So immigrants are “not bad people necessarily” but they “don’t make good citizens.”

However, OCPAC says that Oklahoma has been producing homegrown socialists. For years, teachers have been “indoctrinating children, making leftists of our children.” Their president said, “Government education is the bane of American civilization.” In 2018, Oklahoma almost saw a “total takeover of state government by the education industry – teachers.” Teachers supposedly registered Republican enmasse in a campaign to “take over” the party.

OCPAC also protests a “massive purge of conservatives” that is fed by dark money, but being implemented by local socialists. Not everyone at the meeting believed that teachers were leading this “massacre.” Former Rep. Mike Reynolds said that educators are just “useful idiots” for trial lawyers who hope to repeal tort reform as they then run the state. Reynolds said that he was expressing opinions, not proven facts, but he believes this assault on conservatives is a part of the efforts of billionaires still angry that the University of Oklahoma returned stolen Nazi art, purchased by a rich Jew. The return was supposedly opposed by Kaiser and an unnamed billionaire.

Given these threats, it was explained that Republicans “can’t leave Oklahoma County whole.” It was argued that 2022 redistricting must incorporate voters from three congressional districts. As in the good old days, Democratic voters in Oklahoma City need to be dumped into districts bordering on Texas, New Mexico, and Colorado!

On the other hand, Males’ analysis of Horn’s victory casts doubt on whether gerrymandering will be enough to defeat Horn, a likable, warm, and diplomatic candidate who walked her district. He explains that between 2014 and 2018, “voter turnout in the district surged by 23 percent for Republicans and a volcanic 110 percent for Democrats, with every precinct showing substantially increased Democratic voting.” He found that Russell won most of the city’s “40 rural White precincts, hard-core Trump territory,” but they became significantly more Democratic. He reports, “Of the 80,000 new voters, Democrats won two-thirds in rural areas, three-fourths in Oklahoma City, and 88 percent in the suburbs.”

Yes, Males shows that millennial districts voted Democratic by margins exceeding 75 percent but he also found that “gated, guarded Gaillardia, 15 miles from downtown, overwhelmingly White and wealthy, tripled its vote for Democrats, while the district’s two arch-red rural counties doubled their Democratic votes.”

I wonder what the defeated congressman Steve Russell thinks about the older population in Gaillardia who voted for the personable Democrat who enjoys listening. Throughout his campaign, Russell couldn’t hide his contempt for those who disagree with him. After the election, he blamed his loss on Millennials and then said about that generation, “time and experience will engage this important population with the values that matter as they marry and raise families. I am optimistic about the potential of our country’s future but saddened by its self-indulgence and lack of respect for one another.”

When asked by NPR’s Robin Young about Russell’s rude words, which she called “a bit of a ‘dis’,” Horn brushed off his animosity and said that we won because we engaged all types of people of all ages, “we changed the way campaigns are run here.”

https://www.thelostogle.com/2018/11/14/steve-russell-blames-campaign-loss-on-millennials/

http://www.wbur.org/npr/670077244/kendra-horn-oklahoma-5th-district

Categories Bigotry, Oklahoma, Republicans

How the Teacher Revolt Promoted the Blue Wave

By dianeravitch
November 28, 2018 //
8

In the immediate aftermath of the midterm elections, first reports asserted that the teachers’ revolt fizzled at the ballot box. So many teachers ran for the state legislature, they said, and only three or four or five won. But consider, the teachers who entered politics were novices, with no money, no experience, no name recognition. Congratulations to those who dared to enter the political arena! Don’t give up!

The Guardian has a very different take on the role of teachers in the recent election.

Midterms show educators have been swept into office in record numbers

A wave of pro-education energy, spurred by the April walkouts, led to election victories in Oklahoma, Arizona and Wisconsin

The Guardian writes:

A new wave of teachers’ strikes could soon hit US schools, with educators in Chicago and Los Angeles considering walkouts. And after the midterm elections, they will have stronger allies.

Across the country, in Arizona, Oklahoma and Wisconsin, teachers made huge gains in the midterm elections – a movement that grew out of the #RedforEd campaign that saw teachers protesting across the country to reverse years of conservative cuts to public education.

Last April, thousands of teachers across the state of Oklahoma went on strike; making increased funding for education and a seat at the table in education a priority. Now, educators have been swept in record numbers into office in Oklahoma. Earlier this month, 16 educators were elected to the Oklahoma state house; bringing the total number of educators in the state legislature to 25.

The wave of pro-education energy helped Kendra Horn become the first Democrat to be elected from Oklahoma’s fifth congressional district in 44 years and the first female Democratic representative to the House from Oklahoma.

Horn, 42, made education funding a central focus of her campaign and had many teachers going door-to-door on her behalf.

“We saw a greater involvement of teachers than ever before during this political process over the last six months when we moved from the walkout to the elections and teachers found their collective voice and they aren’t going anywhere,” said the Oklahoma Education Association vice-president, Katherine Bishop.

Carri Hicks, a fourth-grade teacher from Deer Valley in the suburbs of Oklahoma City, was one of those striking teachers elected to the state senate on 6 November; flipping a seat previously held by a Republican to the Democratic column.

Hicks said that she saw how the issue of education funding was able to win so many voters for the Democrats.

She said many voters had previously had trouble understanding the link between education cuts and the tax cuts the state gave to corporations and the oil and gas industry. That changed after the teachers’ strike.

“I feel like the walkout really brought those inequities to light and people were much more willing to have that conversation because they understood the magnitude,” said Hicks. “You know, finally, having a united front and coming together shed light on some dark places in our public education system and was powerful.”

In Arizona, where more than 70,000 teachers and their supporters marched on the state capitol in April, teachers made big gains at the ballot box; electing a former college educator, Kyrsten Sinema, as senator, defeating a ballot measure that would have expanded education vouchers in the state and making gains in the state legislature.

Teachers also helped elect 31-year-old school speech therapist Kathy Hoffman as Arizona state school superintendent, the first time in 25 years that a Democrat has held the office in Arizona.

Two years ago, after watching the Betsy DeVos confirmation as secretary of education, Hoffman, a member of the American Federation of Teachers, decided to run for Arizona schools superintendent. Hoffman used her network of teacher activists to defeat better-funded opponents, both Democratic and Republican.

Keep reading!

Categories Education Reform, Resistance, Teachers

Jan Resseger: Bruce Baker’s New Book is a Must-Read! “Educational Inequality and School Finance: Why Money Matters for America’s Students”

By dianeravitch
November 28, 2018 //
12

Most people, even educators, don’t pay close attention to school finance because the aid formulas get arcane quickly and the eyes glaze over. But nothing is more important to providing good schooling than having the resources to take care of students, teachers, and facilities. In the past two decades, many states have ignored equitable school funding and have chosen to offer “school choice” instead of paying teachers a living wage. As we learned from the widely circulated report of the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities, a large number of states are spending less on their schools today than they did a decade ago. The states that have starved public schools of adequate funding are the same states that have provided choice. It’s a sort of “Let them eat cake” response when people don’t have bread.

Jan Resseger recently reviewed Bruce Baker’s book on school finance and found it to be important and accessible to lay readers. Baker writes clearly and he knows school finance.

Rutgers University school finance professor, Bruce Baker’s new book, Educational Inequality and School Finance: Why Money Matters for America’s Students, covers the basics—how school finance formulas are supposed to work to ensure that funding for schools is adequate, equitable, and stable.

Baker also carefully refutes some persistent myths—Eric Hanushek’s claim that money doesn’t really make a difference when it comes to raising student achievement, for example, and the contention that public schools’ expenditures have skyrocketed over the decades while achievement as measured by test scores has remained flat.

Baker does an excellent job of demonstrating that far more will be needed for our society appropriately to support school districts segregated not only by race, but also by poverty. The final sections of the book are a little technical. They explain the construction of a more equitable system that would drive enough funding to come closer to what is really needed in school districts serving concentrations of children in poverty.

Baker’s book is especially important for updating a discussion of basic school finance theory to account for today’s realities. He shows, for example, how the Great Recession undermined adequate and equitable funding of public schools despite that states had formulas in place that were supposed to have protected children and their teachers: “The sharp economic downturn following the collapse of the housing market in 2007-08, and persisting through about 2011, provided state and federal elected officials a pulpit from which to argue that our public school systems must learn how to do more with less… Meanwhile, governors on both sides of the aisle, facing tight budgets and the end of federal aid that had been distributed to temporarily plug state budget holes, ramped up their rhetoric for even deeper cuts to education spending… Notably, the attack on public school funding was driven largely by preferences for conservative tax policies at a time when state budgets experienced unprecedented drops in income and sales tax revenue.” (p. 4)

And for the first time in a school finance book, Baker explores the impact of two decades of charter school expansion on the funding of public schools. Although the conventional wisdom promoted by the corporate reformers has said that competition from independent charter school operators would introduce innovation and thereby stimulate academic improvement in public schools, not enough people have seriously considered the fiscal implications of slicing a fixed school funding pie into more pieces. Baker examines these fiscal implications of charter school expansion from many perspectives.

Charters are, first, one of those “false promises of cost-free solutions”: “The theory of action guiding these remedies and elixirs is that public, government-run schooling can be forced to operate more productively and efficiently if it can be reshaped and reformed to operate more like privately run, profit-driven corporations/businesses… Broadly, popular reforms have been built on the beliefs that the private sector is necessarily more efficient; that competition spurs innovation (and that there may be technological solutions to human capital costs); that data driven human capital policies can increase efficiency/productivity by improving the overall quality of the teacher workforce. One core element of such reform posits that US schools need market competition to spur innovation and that market competition should include government-operated schools, government-sanctioned (charter) privately operated schools, and private schools…. (T)here is little reason to believe that these magic elixirs will significantly change the productivity/efficiency equation or address issues of equity, adequacy, and equal opportunity.” (pp. 6-7)

Baker also speaks to the philosophical justification frequently offered to justify the rapid expansion of school choice—that justice can be defined by offering more choices for those who have few: “Liberty and equality are desirable policy outcomes. Thus, it would be convenient if policies simultaneously advanced both. But it’s never that simple. A large body of literature on political theory explains that liberty and equality are preferences that most often operate in tension with one another. While not mutually exclusive, they are certainly not one and the same. Preferences for and expansion of liberties often lead to greater inequality and division among members of society, whereas preferences for equality moderate those divisions. The only way expanded liberty can lead to greater equality is if available choices are substantively equal, conforming to a common set of societal standards. But if available choices are substantively equal, then why choose one over another. Systems of choice and competition rely on differentiation, inequality, and both winners and losers.” (p. 28)

Baker addresses Betsy DeVos’s contention that, “Choice in education is good politics because it’s good policy. It’s good policy because it comes from good parents who want better for their children. Families are on the front lines of this fight; let’s stand with them…This isn’t about school ‘systems.’ This is about individual students, parents, and families. Schools are at the service of students. Not the other way around.” Here is Baker’s answer: “The ‘money belongs to the child’ claim also falsely assumes that the only expenses associated with each individual’s education choices are the current annual expenses of educating that individual…. It ignores entirely marginal costs and economies of scale, foundational elements of origins of public institutions. We collect tax dollars and provide public goods and services because it allows us to do so at an efficient scale of operations… Public spending does not matter only to those using it here and now. These dollars don’t just belong to parents of children presently attending the schools, and the assets acquired with public funding… do not belong exclusively to those parents.” (p. 30)

Are charter schools more efficient at improving school achievement measured by test scores and are they fiscally efficient? “(A) close look at high-profile charters in New York City indicates that their success reflects their access to additional resources and a fairly traditional approach to leveraging them… For each of these major operators… the share of low-income (those who qualified for free or reduced-price lunch ), English language learners, and children with disabilities is lower than for district schools, in some cases quite substantially. On average, these schools are serving far less needy and thus less costly student populations than are the district schools.” Baker provides details of major New York City charter networks’ expenditure patterns; what he finds is that the best-funded allocate their instructional expenses in a similar way to traditional public schools: “Collectively, these figures tell a story of high-profile, well-funded CMOs in New York City leveraging their additional resources in three logical and rather traditional ways by hiring more staff per pupil… by paying their teachers more at any given level of experience and degree; and… by paying them more to work longer school hours, days, and years. In other words, they pay more people for more time.” He concludes: “Researchers, policy makers, pundits, pontificators, and even self-proclaimed thought leaders have yet to conjure some new ‘secret sauce’ or technological innovation that will greatly improve equity, adequacy, and efficiency. Human resources matter, and equitable and adequate financial resources are necessary for hiring and retaining the teachers and other school staff necessary to achieve equal educational opportunity for all children.” (pp. 68-79)

Resseger has more to say about Baker’s analysis of the inadequacy of charter schools as a means to promote equity or even innovation (unless that you think that strict discipline and harsh punishment is innovative).

Based on her incisive review, I am ordering Bruce Baker’s book now. I hope you will do the same.

The name of the game in education is money, and we can’t allow the Reformers to give us the Old Razzle-Dazzle to distract us from what matters most, the money to reduce class sizes, the money to pay teachers a professional salary, the money to have a robust arts program, the money to have up-to-date technology, the money to have a librarian, a school nurse, a social worker, and a psychologist. Money matters. Don’t be fooled into thinking that choice is a substitute!

Those who say that “money doesn’t matter” are always people who already have plenty of money. Bruce Baker explains why it does matter and why we must not be fooled anymore. Every child in this nation should get a good education and that requires money.

Categories Equity, Funding, School Choice

Chalkbeat: “Indiana’s War On Teachers Is Winning”

By dianeravitch
November 28, 2018 //
13

Indiana declared war on its public school teachers when Mitch Daniels was Governor. The war against teachers intensified ubderGo Ernie Mike Pence. Now districts across the state are experiencing teacher shortages.

https://www.chalkbeat.org/posts/in/2018/11/27/indianas-war-on-teachers-is-winning-heres-what-superintendents-say-is-causing-teacher-shortages/

This is what Daniels, Pence, and the Legislature wanted. They drove down the cost of education. They placed their bets on school choice. They call it Reform. They are destroying the teaching profession and public education in the state. And they call it Reform.

In a survey this year, Indiana State University researchers asked Indiana school superintendents if they faced a teacher shortage — and how bad the problem was.

“It’s killing us,” one respondent wrote.

“This situation is getting worse each year,” another said. “Scares me!”

“Indiana’s war on teachers is winning,” a superintendent commented.

Out of the 220 districts that responded to the survey, 91 percent reported experiencing a teacher shortage, with most feeling the pinch in science, math, and special education.

Eighty-five percent of the surveyed districts applied for emergency permits for people who don’t have teaching licenses, or educators who are hired to teach subjects outside their licensure.

Superintendents overwhelmingly said it was difficult to find qualified job candidates, and many mentioned high teacher turnover rates. They often pointed to low pay as the cause, competing against other higher-paying districts or the private sector.

Categories Education Reform

Beto O’Rourke on the Crisis at Our Southern Border

By dianeravitch
November 27, 2018 //
31

I received the following message from Beto O’Rourke. I’m on his mailing list because I contributed to his campaign for the Senate. He makes so much sense that I wonder why the Trump administration doesn’t lead to him. I have to conclude that Trump wants the Crisis, as red meat to feed his base. He thrives on crisis and needs to look like he alone is holding back the brown hordes at the border.

Beto wrote:

It should tell us something about her home country that a mother is willing to travel 2,000 miles with her 4-month-old son to come here. Should tell us something about our country that we only respond to this desperate need once she is at our border. So far, in this administration, that response has included taking kids from their parents, locking them up in cages, and now tear gassing them at the border.

People are leaving violent countries where they fear for their lives. Without money, they are subsisting on hope for their kids, for themselves, that they can get to safety. After being denied the ability to lawfully petition for asylum for the last 10 days, they are desperate.

We choose how to respond to this challenge.

Let’s do this the right way and follow our own laws. Allow asylum seekers to petition for asylum at our ports of entry. They must do so peacefully and follow our laws; but we must also ensure the capacity to effectively and timely process those claims (right now 5,000 waiting in Tijuana and only 40 to 100 are processed a day).

Those who have a credible fear of returning to their home country (as determined by a U.S. judge) will be able stay until their full asylum request has been determined. Those applicants ultimately granted asylum will then live in the U.S., make us a better country for being here, and those who are not granted asylum will be returned to their home country.

Longer term: work with the people of Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador to address underlying conditions that are causing them to flee in the first place. That means addressing effects of our failed past involvement in those countries (in their civil wars, drug trade and drug wars) and the institutional failings in those countries (rule of law).

It won’t be easy and will involve a much greater investment of time, focus and resources. Or we can continue to ignore those countries and their people until they show up at our border.

– Beto

Categories Disruption

Randi Responds to Betsy’s Lies on FOX News

By dianeravitch
November 27, 2018 //
17

Oh, I can’t wait until the House of Representatives begins to question Secretary DeVos about her reversal of civil rights protections, her reversal of federal protections for students with debt incurred at fraudulent for-profit colleges, and her continued efforts to destroy the federal role in protecting students, whether in K-12 or higher education. Instead of protecting those in need, she protects predators. She is a very grizzly Secretary of Education.

She appeared on FOX News today for 10 minutes and attacked public education and teachers’ unions.

Randi Weingarten responded:

For Immediate Release
November 27, 2018

Contact:
Andrew Crook
607-280-6603
acrook@aft.org
http://www.aft.org

AFT’s Weingarten Responds to Betsy DeVos’ Lies on Fox News

WASHNGTON—AFT President Randi Weingarten issued the following statement after Education Secretary Betsy DeVos attacked teachers’ unions today on the Fox Business Network:

“Betsy DeVos is showing her true colors. We are fighting for the safe and welcoming public schools that kids deserve, healthcare protections so people aren’t one pre-existing condition away from bankruptcy, affordable college without life-burdening student debt, and decent wages. Since she is against all of that, Betsy is attacking the unions that create a voice for teachers to advocate on these issues. As secretary of education, it is her sworn duty to help kids and their communities reach their full potential. Comments like these do the opposite, and she knows it.”

Categories Betsy DeVos, Civil Rights, Student Financial Aid and Student Debt, U.S. Department of Education, Unions

Washington, D.C.: Who Should Control Access to Data About the Schools?

By dianeravitch
November 27, 2018 //
6

Thanks to Leonie Haimson, whose comment brought this excellent article by Rachel Cohen to my attention.

There is a political battle going on in D.C. about school data and who controls it.

Another article on the same subject was written by Ruth Wattenberg, a member of the D.C. State Board of Education, who argues that the Mayor must not be allowed to control the data.

Some City Council members have proposed an independent research collaborative, housed in the D.C. Auditor General’s Office, but the Mayor is opposed. She wants to maintain control.

Whoever has the data must be independent, nonpartisan, and trustworthy.

Cohen writes:

In the wake of a series of DC Public Schools scandals, Ward 3 Councilmember Mary Cheh came forward with an idea: an independent research collaborative that would conduct studies on the city’s public schools, including charters. This collaborative, outlined in draft legislation, would have an advisory board comprised of 16 education stakeholders who would drive the research agenda.

Cheh’s concept has precedent. Other cities, like Chicago, San Diego, and Houston, have similar research collaboratives, commonly referred to as “research practice partnerships” or RPPs. Local education advocates and Cheh’s colleagues on the Council have come out in strong support of her proposal.

But Cheh’s plan also has detractors, and many of them are the appointees of Mayor Muriel Bowser. At a six-hour public hearing held on July 13, several officials tapped by Bowser spoke out against this so-called “Education Research Collaborative.”

And at the same hearing, the public learned that the executive branch was exploring the launch of its own separate education research consortium with the Urban Institute, a national think tank located in D.C. The news sparked concerns that Bowser was seeking to undercut the Council’s push for independent oversight.

At the core of all this politicking: Who gets access to data about D.C.’s public schools, and how do they get to use it?

Cheh’s bill, introduced in April, has eight other co-sponsors, a Council supermajority which could override a potential veto from the mayor. The Council set aside $500,000 in its most recent budget for the auditor to “incubate” this pilot research consortium. (That funding becomes available in October, when fiscal year 2019 begins.) It would be launched initially in the Office of the DC Auditor, an agency outside of the executive branch. Supporters say that after a few years they would look for a new home—be it a local think tank, university, or its own independent agency.

The chair of the education committee, At-Large Councilmember David Grosso, has not yet taken a position on the bill, but in May he tried to steer the dedicated $500,000 to after-school programs instead. His effort failed 12-1.

The research collaborative was conceived of in response to the host of education scandals which emerged over the last year, including news that high school graduation rates were massively inflated and that the public schools chancellor knowingly violated a school choice policy he himself wrote. While local and national leaders have long looked to D.C.’s education reforms as a model for the nation, today many parents, community members, and even elected officials have voiced a lack of confidence in the gains reported by the school system, fearing information has become too politicized under mayoral control.

“I call the information that we get from our education agencies ‘PR,’” says At-Large Councilmember Robert White. “It can be very difficult to get hold of unbiased data….”

“Our hope is to get accurate, reliable, credible data, and then to use this data in a research partnership to understand whether the policies we are pursuing are really working,” says Cheh.

The Mayor’s office is fighting the proposal to house the agency in the Auditor’s office. She and her allies claim it would politicize the data and the research. Supporters of the proposal say that it would politicize the office if it is controlled by the Mayor.

The person in whom I have the greatest trust in D.C. is Mary Levy, who has been tracking D.C. data for many years and faithfully reporting what she finds without fear or favor. She opposes letting the mayor control the data.

Mary Levy, a longtime budget analyst for D.C. schools, is more blunt. “This idea is an infant in the cradle,” she tells City Paper. “And if you don’t put it in the auditor’s office it’s going to die in its cradle.”

If the agency controlling the data and research is not trustworthy, the money will be wasted and the residents of the city will remain in the dark.

It is bizarre that D.C., which claimed to be “data-driven” after the onset of the Michelle Rhee era and mayoral control in 2007, continues not to have reliable and accurate data more than a decade later.

Categories Data, District of Columbia

If You Shop at Amazon, Please Designate the Network for Public Education as Your Charity

By dianeravitch
November 27, 2018 //
2

I don’t customarily recommend where you should shop. I hope you shop locally and keep local, independent merchants in business.

If you shop online at Amazon, please use using Amazon Smile. If you do, you can choose the Network for Public Education Fund as your favorite charity and we will receive a donation every time you shop. Here is the link that explains.

https://smile.amazon.com/gp/chpf/about/ref=smi_aas_redirect?ie=UTF8&%2AVersion%2A=1&%2Aentries%2A=0

Categories Network for Public Education

Washington, D.C.: Does Anyone Know if the Reports About Staff Turnover Are Accurate?

By dianeravitch
November 27, 2018 //
9

Valerie Jablow, D.C. parent, blogger, and activist, read two reports on teacher and principal attrition and retention. One of them was prepared by the highly respected D.C. civil rights attorney Mary Levy, who has been tracking data in D.C. for many years. Levy looked at both public schools and charter schools.

One conclusion: staff turnover is startlingly high, especially in schools with the most disadvantaged students.

Overall, our public school teacher turnover rates dwarf national averages and have socioeconomic implications, such that the more at risk students a school has, the higher its teacher turnover. The data examined by Levy from the last 3 years alone show that fully a quarter of our public school teachers leave each year—a much higher rate than other jurisdictions. The result is that over half a decade, most of our publicly funded schools will see the majority of their teachers leave.

Our DC public school principal turnover is high as well, averaging about 25% annually. Although that is closer to the national average for principal turnover, in DC it is (like teacher turnover) also correlated with socioeconomics, such that schools with the most at risk students often have the most principal turnover.

Levy had to hand-calculate some of the data because data-collection is slipshod:

For one, we have this data on teacher turnover in DCPS only because Levy herself has spent years comparing staff rosters for individual DCPS schools and budgets and reported what she found. Consider, for a moment, the painful irony of Levy being commissioned to do a report on teacher attrition in DCPS through a painstaking process of backing out data that the school system may already have in a better format–and, for all any of us knows, could provide in a much easier way.

For another, the charter school data on teacher turnover is suspect, as Levy discovered that a number of charter schools appeared to have confused teacher attrition with retention in their required annual reports.

Thus, whenever the reported teacher attrition rate in a charter school was higher than 50%, Levy painstakingly compared staff rosters from one year to the next in the same school. Roster comparisons were, however, inexact because different schools defined “teacher” in different ways, and the rosters themselves changed in form and format from year to year. (Not to mention that the attrition/retention confusion happened within LEAs–so each school had to be looked at separately.) Nonetheless, Levy recorded how many teachers appeared to stay and leave each year; used that to determine whether the reported high rate of attrition above 50% was accurate; and, if it was not accurate, flipped the percentage.

Imagine that! The schools reporting data often didn’t know the difference between retention and attrition! Are any of the data credible when the people responsible for reporting don’t inow the meaning of basic terminology?

D.C. public schools have been controlled by the mayor and by “reformers” including Michelle Rhee and Kaya Henderson (now looking for a new chancellor since Antwan Wilson left) since 2007, and there in no accurate data collection and analysis program.

Foundations including Gates, Walton, and Broad have poured tens of millions into DCPS, and there is no accurate collection and analysis program.

Whenever D.C. makes a claim about graduation rates, test scores, teacher and principal attrition and retention, they are probably just guessing. Or boasting. They really don’t know.

If you want to learn more, you can attend this meeting:

This Wednesday November 28, from 6 pm-8 pm, the DC State Board of Education (SBOE) and teacher advocacy group EmpowerEd will hold a joint forum on staff retention in DC’s publicly funded schools. The forum will be held at Walker-Jones Education Campus, 1125 New Jersey Ave. NW. RSVP here.

Categories Accountability, Data, District of Columbia, Education Reform, Principals, Teachers

Mercedes Schneider: TFA Is Looking to Hire a New Lobbyist, with Experience

By dianeravitch
November 27, 2018 //
11

Teach for America is advertising for a lobbyist. They want someone with real experience, not like the five weeks of training they think is enough for teachers. I got an email today from a friend who found out why Kansas paid TFA $270,000 to get three TFA recruits: the TFA lobbyist in Kansas sold a legislator on the idea. The legislator is embarrassed by all the publicity and is not likely to offer that bill again.

Mercedes Schneider writes anout TFA ad for a lobbyist. You can bet the lobbyist will be paid more than a TFA teacher.

Categories Teach for America
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