Archives for the month of: December, 2018
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Reader: How to Manipulate Test Scores

By dianeravitch
December 21, 2018 //
24

A reader has collected the ways that test scores can be manipulated to make a school or a district look better or worse:

How to Manipulate Test Scores

1) Manipulate the standards

2) Manipulate the test items

3) Manipulate the cut scores

4) Manipulate the test takers

5) Manipulate the responses (i.e., change the answers, also referred to as, “The DC Rheeform Miracle” a tactic so successful that Atlanta gave it go.)

6) Manipulate the media

Number five is the only overt form of cheating, however, all the other methods are forms of de-facto cheating. Number 1, 2, 3 were used by reformers to prove that our schools were failing; numbers 4, 5. 6 are used by reformers to prove that the charter experiment is working. Six reasons why Common Coercion test-and-punish reform was a criminal enterprise.

Categories Atlanta, Cheating, District of Columbia, Testing

Leonie Haimson: The Expansion of Pre-K in New York City Has Worsened Overcrowding, with No Relief in Sight

By dianeravitch
December 21, 2018 //
19

Leonie Haimson of Class Size Matters has released a report on the unintended consequences of Mayor De Blasio’s rapid expansion of Pre-K, his proudest achievement in education. The plan was rushed ahead with little forethought.

Her report begins:

School overcrowding in NYC has been worsened by the expansion of pre-K and 3-K classes, as detailed in a new report, “The Impact of PreK on School Overcrowding: Lack of Planning, Lack of Space.”

About 575,000 students, more than half of all students, attended schools that were at or above 100 percent capacity in 2016-2017, according to data from the NYC Department of Education. In recent years, overcrowding has worsened significantly, especially at the elementary school level. Nearly 60 percent of elementary schools are at 100 percent or more and 67 percent of elementary grade students attend these schools. This is due in part to the fact that enrollment in these grades has increased faster than new school construction.

The report’s analysis finds that 14,220, or more than half of the pre-K students enrolled in public elementary schools in 2016-2017, were placed in 352 schools that were at 100% utilization or more, thus contributing to worse overcrowding at these schools for about 236,000 students.

In about one quarter (22 percent) of these schools, the expansion of pre-K actually pushed the school to 100 percent or more. As of 2016-2017, 76 elementary schools, with a total of 45,124 students, became overutilized, according to the DOE’s data, because of the additional number of pre-K students at their schools.

In addition, thirty schools with pre-K classes had waitlists for Kindergarten, necessitating that these children to be sent to schools outside their zone and sometimes far from home.

District 20 in southwestern Brooklyn is the most overcrowded district in New York City with a critical shortage of elementary school seats.

The average utilization of elementary schools is 130 percent. Yet the DOE continued to place pre-K classes in already overcrowded District 20 schools, despite the presence of an under-enrolled pre-K center nearby.

Laurie Windsor, the former President of the Community Education Council in District 20 said: “It is appalling how the DOE insists on keeping pre-K classes in elementary schools when there is such severe overcrowding and families are forced to travel for Kindergarten, sometimes quite far away, without available public transportation. Especially egregious is that there are pre-K centers nearby which could absorb these classes easily. This practice has put unnecessary hardships on families and is insensitive to the needs of the community.”

Categories Childhood, Pre-K, K, Class size, New York City

Lisa Eggert Litvin: Teen Suicide and High-Stakes Testing LINK ADDED

By dianeravitch
December 20, 2018 //
24

I’m reposting this because it was inexplicably cut off. Here is the full original…..

A decade ago, California parent Vicki Abeles created a documentary called “Race to Nowhere” about the toxic effects of high-stakes testing. She did it after a friend of her teen daughter committed suicide. Vicki took the show on the road and showed it in hundreds of communities. She wanted to start a grassroots rebellion against high-stakes testing, for the sake of the children. Instead, NCLB continued, unchanged, and Race to the Top ratcheted up the pressure on students and teachers to get higher scores than they did the year before–or face certain shame and punishment.

No matter how many times we tell children “you are more than a score,” our words count less than our actions.

Now Lisa Eggert Litvin explains yet again that high-stakes testing is harmful to the mental health of students.

The transformation of public education isn’t the only factor of course. Parents still get divorced and families still struggle financially and children still bully, with social media making it all worse. But when those issues are coupled with a high-intensity school environment, enforced by tests, with little room for down time, then the hard issues become insurmountable, and children collapse. It makes sense that the AAP report shows suicide and self-harm rates were lowest in the summer, and highest in the fall and spring.

Perhaps worst of all, this test-centric accountability model doesn’t even work. The “achievement gaps” between underserved groups and their peers still exist. In New York City, the gap has increased for African-American and Hispanic students.

It’s time to admit that the testing-based model of the NCLB law and its progeny was a mistake. The early opponents were right: the law is downright dangerous. Let’s press the restart button and re-examine how to help all students achieve. Let’s finally honestly address the roles poverty and family income play. Can it really be any surprise that school districts in affluent neighborhoods have higher test scores than their less affluent counterparts?

So was my childhood perfect? Far from it. But it was emotionally healthier for sure. There is nothing more important than making sure our children are healthy and aren’t filled with anxiety and aren’t harming themselves. Right now, let’s stop the madness of high-stakes testing. Our children are suffering — physically and mentally — and it has to end.

The writer is president of the Hastings-on-Hudson Board of Education and president emeritus of the Hastings-on-Hudson PTSA.

Maybe we have to insist on accountability. Create a score card of teen deaths and pin it on the door of every member of Congress and every legislator who voted to mandate annual testing and high-stakes for students, teachers, and schools. Insist that they take the tests they mandate and publish their scores. If they fail, they must resign.

https://www.lohud.com/story/opinion/contributors/2018/04/04/high-stakes-testing-has-emotional-consequences-too/486105002/

Categories Accountability, Education Industry, Testing

Leonie Haimson Blasts Chalkbeat for Its Biased Coverage of Ed-Tech and “Personalized Learning”

By dianeravitch
December 20, 2018 //
49

Leonie Haimson is one of the nation’s sharpest critic of scams, especially in the area of ed-tech and online learning.

She is outraged that Chalkbeat posted an uncritical article about the scams now sold to schools. He clearly wanted to lump together the critics of Common Core (those “right wingers” [like me]) and the critics of “personalized learning,” who have the retrograde belief that children should be taught by teachers, not computers.

Pay attention to the funders of Chalkbeat (Gates; Walton; Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, and others who are pushing online learning and “personalized learning.”) They are listed at the end of this post. Don’t overlook the Anschutz Foundation. He is an evangelical Christian who produced “Waiting for ‘Superman,'” that anti-public school, anti-union propaganda film.

She writes:

Matt Barnum has posted an article at Chalkbeat on the controversy over online learning. I spent nearly an hour talking to him about its myriad problems, including the negative experiences of parents and students in schools where online learning predominates, serious privacy concerns because of all the data-mining by vendors that is involved, and a serious lack of research evidence — but the only quote he used from our conversation is one sentence: that the Parent Coalition for Student Privacy which I co-chair. has worked with allies in right-wing groups on the privacy issue.
Instead, when I spoke to him about this, I emphasized that the concerns about the expansion of online learning and its impact on privacy was shared by groups and individuals of all political persuasion, left right and center, and many parents with little interest in politics at all. That’s why our campaign against inBloom was so successful, and that’s why in NY State and elsewhere, parents and teachers in all nine states and districts that were participating were able to force them from dropping out of the program to share their children’s personal data and make it more accessible to vendors without parental consent. But he left that part out of my quote and his story as a whole, because it did not fit into his pre-ordained narrative.

Indeed, Barnum seemed eager to mischaracterize the opposition to so-called personalized learning as led by conservatives. He is also quick to frame the pushback vs Common Core in a similar fashion –as driven by many of the same right-wing groups — when one of the most successful protests against the standards occurred here in NY state, led by NY State Allies for Public Education, a coalition of mostly left-wing and politically moderate parents and teachers who also oppose the expansion of ed tech.

Barnum didn’t mention any of the other progressive groups, medical associations, and researchers across the country who are very concerned about the expansion of online learning in schools, including Screens and Kids, Campaign for a Commercial Free Childhood, the ACLU, Commonsense Media, National Education Policy Center, Parents Across America, the Badass Teachers Association and many others.
Nor did he bother to interview any of the many prominent progressive critics of ed tech like Diane Ravitch, Peter Greene or Audrey Watters. Nor did he acknowledge that Silicon Valley parents themselves are increasingly rejecting computerized learning, as reported in the terrific NY Times series by Nellie Bowles.

Instead, he quotes only one non-right wing critic of online learning by name– Merrie Najimy, the President of the Massachusetts teachers – while featuring many paragraphs of rosy spin from defenders of ed tech, like Diane Tavenner of Summit and Bethany Gross of CRPE, both funded by Gates and Zuckerberg.

Barnum cites a CRPE report also paid for by Gates that apparently says, oh yeah, teachers really like personalized learning – while ignoring the survey results in our Educator Toolkit for Teacher and Student Privacy, which showed widespread concern among teachers and administrators alike about the expansion of digital apps and online programs in our schools. He also quotes Randi Weingarten who, surprisingly, has nothing but kind words about the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, which has done absolutely nothing that I can think of to earn her confidence.

Amazingly, Barnum also manages to write an entire piece about edtech and personalized learning, Summit, Gates and Zuckerberg without once mentioning the issue of data privacy, the widespread occurrence of breaches, the potential misuse of algorithms, and the over-reach of student surveillance in schools. The only mention of the word “privacy” is in the one sentence that quotes me about working with conservative allies on the issue.

Quite an achievement and yet more evidence of a serious blind spot in Chalkbeat’s education coverage, reminiscent of their failure to cover the parent opposition against inBloom that started here in New York and led to such a firestorm across the country that more than 120 state student privacy laws have been passed as a result of the inBloom controversy since 2013.

There is more to read, and you should open the link to see her many links to other articles and reports.

Chalkbeat should be ashamed. Its sponsors are showing their hands.

Here is a list of Chalkbeat funders.

Ann & Hal Logan via The Denver Foundation*
Anna and John J. Sie Foundation*
Anna-Maria and Stephen Kellen Foundation
Awesome Without Borders
Azita Raji and Gary Syman
Ben & Lucy Ana Walton*
Better Education Institute, Inc.
Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation
Brett Family Foundation
Brooke Brown via the Carson Foundation*
Buell Foundation
Carnegie Corporation of New York
Carson Foundation
Chan Zuckerberg Initiative
Charles H. Revson Foundation
Charles and Lynn Schusterman Family Foundation
Christopher Gabrieli
CME Group
COGEN Co-working
Community Foundation of Greater Memphis
Community Foundation of New Jersey
Democracy Fund
Donnell-Kay Foundation
Doug and Wendy Kreeger
EdChoice
EDU21C Foundation
Elaine Berman
Eli Lilly and Company Foundation, Inc.
Elizabeth Aybar Conti
Elizabeth Haas Edersheim (In Kind)
Emma Bloomberg
Ford Foundation
Fry Foundation
Fund for Nonprofit News at The Miami Foundation
Gail Klapper
Gates Family Foundation
GEM Foundation
George T. Cameron Education Foundation
Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation partnership with the Knight Foundation
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt (In Kind)
J.R. Hyde III Family Foundation Donor Advised Fund of the Community Foundation of Greater Memphis
Jim and Marsha McCormick
Kate Kennedy Reinemund and Jim Kennedy
Ken Hirsh
Kresge Foundation
La Vida Feliz Foundation
Lenfest Community Listening and Engagement Fund
Lilly Endowment Inc.
Maher Foundation
Margulf Foundation
Mark Zurack
Memphis Education Fund
Naomi and Michael Rosenfeld
Overdeck Family Foundation
Debra and Paul Appelbaum
Peter and Carmen L. Buck Foundation
Polk Bros. Foundation
Quinn Family Foundation
Ralph C. Wilson, Jr. Foundation
Richard M. Fairbanks Foundation, Inc.
Rick Smith
Rob Gary and Chris Watney
Rob Gary via the Piton Foundation*
Robert J. Yamartino and Maxine Sclar
Robert R. McCormick Foundation
Rose Community Foundation
Scott Gleason of O’Melveny & Myers (In Kind)
Scott Pearl
Silicon Valley Community Foundation
Skift (In Kind)
Spencer Foundation
Steans Family Foundation
Sue Lehmann
Susan Sawyers
Thalla-Marie and Heeten Choxi
The Assisi Foundation
The Anschutz Foundation
The Barton Family Foundation, a donor-advised fund of The Denver Foundation*
The Caswell Jin Foundation
The Colorado Health Foundation
The Colorado Trust
The Crown Family
The Denver Foundation
The Durst Organization (In Kind)
The Glick Fund, a fund of the Central Indiana Community Foundation
The Indianapolis Foundation, a CICF affiliate
The John S. and James L. Knight Foundation
The Joyce Foundation
The McGregor Fund
The Moriah Fund
The Skillman Foundation
The Walton Family Foundation
Victoria Foundation
Walentas Foundation Ltd.
Washington Square Legal Services/NYU Business Transactions Clinic (In Kind)
Wend Ventures
Widmeyer, A FinnPartners Company (In Kind)
Will and Christina McConathy*
W.K. Kellogg Foundation
Yoobi (In Kind)

Categories Accountability, Education Industry, Media, Technology

Eve L. Ewing Explains the Racist Purpose of School Closings

By dianeravitch
December 20, 2018 //
8

Eve Ewing has a fabulous bio, as author, academic, playwright, poet, and comic book hero.

She is also the author of the recent book about Rahm Emanuel’s historic closing of 50 schools in a single day, called “Ghosts in the Schoolyard: Racism and School Closings on Chicago’s South Side.” I reviewed it here. It was the first book to my knowledge that tells the story of school closings from the perspective of the students, families, teachers, and communities.

Here she appears on the Daily Show with Trevor Noah.

Speaking of ghosts, she will haunt Rahm Emanuel forever. Her book will be remembered long after he is forgotten.

Categories Chicago, Closing schools, Education Reform, Emanuel, Rahm, Racism

Mauritania: Report on Privatization and Commercialization of Education

By dianeravitch
December 20, 2018 //
12

This came to my email. I thought you might want to know that the battle against privatization of public schools is international.

The Association of Women Head of Families (AFCF), the Coalition of Mauritanian Education Organisations (COMEDUC) and the Global Initiative for Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (GI-ESCR), are publicly releasing today their report submitted to the Committee on the Rights of the Child (CRC) in August 2018, concerning the growth of privatisation and commercialisation of education in Mauritania.

Following the submission of the report to the CRC and Mauritania’s later examination, the Committee expressed deep concern regarding ‘the recent closure with no apparent replacement of six public schools in Nouakchott’ as well as ‘the limited availability of preschool education and primary schools, and the proliferation of private schools’.

Mauritanian civil society calls for support in denouncing the closure of public schools in Mauritania and in appealing for the Mauritanian Government to uphold the right to education.

The report in English, French and Arabic, as well as its summary are available here.

More information on the research project on privatisation and commercialisation of education in Mauritania available here.

Information on privatisation of education in the Francophone area available here.

We hope that you will share the report and its findings widely.

Best,
The Association of Women Head of Families (AFCF), the Coalition of Mauritanian Education Organisations (COMEDUC) and the Global Initiative for Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (GI-ESCR).

Categories Accountability, Education Industry, International, Privatization

Bill Phillis: The Gulen Charters in Ohio

By dianeravitch
December 20, 2018 //
18

Fethullah Gulen is in the news. General Michael Flynn had a deal with Turkey to kidnap and return him to Turkey. It is in the news daily.

But journalists describe Gulen as a simple Muslim cleric in exile. They never mention his $500 million a year empire of charter schools. Is he protected by the CIA? Does anyone care that a Turkish imam now controls nearly 200 “public” schools? Do his Turkish teachers teach civics? Do they understand the U.S. Constitution?

Do journalists ever google his name?

Just wondering.

Bill Phillis is a retired deputy state superintendent of education in Ohio and an expert on school finance.

He is a champion of public schools. He belongs on the honor roll of this blog for his tireless efforts to ward off privatization and support public schools.

In this post, he reports on the current status of the Gulen Charter Schools, the schools associated with a Muslim cleric who lives in seclusion in the Pocono Mountains of Pennsylvania. His organization has established some 200 charter schools, which are organized in chains with different names. They usually deny being Gulen schools but can be recognized by the number of Turkish board members and Turkish teachers.

Bill Phillis writes:

Imam Fethullah Gulen’s charter school footprint in Ohio

By the numbers:
· 17 charters (down from 19)
· 6,500 enrollment
· $50,000,000 annual revenue
· 833 H-1B visa applications 2001-2016
· 38 persons serving on 85 board positions
· 84% of the board members are of Turkish descent

Buckeye Community Hope Foundation sponsors nine of the 17 Gulen charters. The ESC of Lake Erie West sponsors the rest. The charters are located in Cincinnati, Cleveland, Columbus, Dayton, Lorain, Toledo and Youngstown.

Gulenists started two charters in 2000 and added charters as follow:
· 6 in 2005
· 2 in 2007
· 1 in 2008
· 2 in 2009
· 2 in 2010
· 2 in 2011

In 2002, Concept Schools was formed to manage Gulen charters. In 2003, Breeze Inc. was established to serve as a landlord for Ohio Gulen charters. Breeze, since 2005, has collected rent in the amount of three times the purchase price of the property one school uses.

Does this footprint concern any state official, charter school sponsor? The Gulen operation has taken advantage of Ohio’s severely flawed charter law.

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Education Industry, Gulen Charter Schools, Honor Roll, Privatization

Why Is the Teen Suicide Rate Soaring?

By dianeravitch
December 20, 2018 //
25

The latest figures from the Centers for Disease Control and Preventionshow a startling increase in suicide rates, among both who’re and black teens.

“The suicide rate for white children and teens between 10 and 17 was up 70% between 2006 and 2016, the latest data analysis available from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Although black children and teens kill themselves less often than white youth do, the rate of increase was higher — 77%.”

Why are adolescents feeling so stressed and depressed that they would kill themselves?

Categories Students

Kentucky: The Fight for Teachers’ and Other Public Sector Pensions is Far from Over

By dianeravitch
December 19, 2018 //
14

Lessons from Kentucky: Stay informed, stay alert, keep your powder dry, and be prepared to protest again and again.

Last night, the Kentucky legislature adjourned a special session that was supposed to fix the state’s public sector pensions, because they were unable to untangle a complex problem on short notice.

But Randy Wieck warns that the fight is far from over.

Fred Klonsky explains here:

A week ago the Kentucky Supreme Court struck down a pension theft bill that was passed by the Kentucky legislature in the dark of night last March under false pretensions as a sewage bill and signed by Governor Matt Bevin.

Thousands of red-shirted Kentucky teachers hit the streets in protest.

The bill stripped all the ‘local provision of wastewater services’ language out of SB151 and replaced it with language cutting pension benefits and language that would essentially privatize an already massively underfunded pension system.

That bill, SB 151, was the bill that the Kentucky Supreme Court ruled as unconstitutional last week.

No sooner had the Court ruled than I received word from pension activist Randy Wieck. Randy is a Kentucky teacher who has been fighting pension theft for years.

“This is a ruling merely on the method of passing reforms, not the madness of pension theft, ongoing for many years,” wrote Randy.

Randy was right.

Republican Governor Matt Bevin called a pre-Christmas special session of the state legislature on Monday in order to try again to cut public employee pensions.

Two bills were introduced by a GOP committee chair that constituted a revised version of the pension “reform” bill struck down by the Kentucky Supreme Court for violating transparency.

Read on.

Categories Kentucky, Pensions, Teachers

Harold Meyerson: Corporate America’s Highest Priority: Rewarding the Rich

By dianeravitch
December 19, 2018 //
12

A reminder of why workers need unions. To reduce inequality. To give working people a voice. To establish a modicum of balance between haves and have-nots. To temper the greed of the wealthy.

From The American Prospect:

Meyerson on TAP

Corporate America’s Only Priority: Rewarding the Rich. The stock market may be tanking, but investors—make that, major investors—are doing great nonetheless.

How, you may ask, is this possible? It’s because corporations have showered them with heretofore unimaginable dividends and share buybacks.

According to a front-page story in Monday’s Wall Street Journal, “companies in the S&P 500 have spent nearly $421 billion on dividends through November,” which is more than they spent on dividends in all of 2017. And this doesn’t take into account the amount of money corporations are devoting to share buybacks, which is more than twice the amount they’ve shoveled into dividends this year. Indeed, both dividends and share buybacks have already broken their all-time yearly record—and the Journal predicts that next year’s levels will surpass this year’s, notwithstanding the downward direction of the market.

In recent months, both wages and domestic capital investment have inched up, but at nowhere near the level of the increase in the return to shareholders. As the terrific new study by Josh Bivens and Heidi Shierholz of the Economic Policy Institute makes clear, the single most important factor in the past-four-decades’ diversion of business income from workers to shareholders and executives is the success of business’s assault on worker power, and the concomitant success of business’s insistence that government favor the rich over everyone else.

The last time I looked, the theory behind the government’s decision to tax capital gains at a lower rate than income from work was that investors bolstered the economy by investing. Now that corporation’s main mission is to reward investors at the expense of all other conceivable ways to spend its revenues, however, the capital gains tax has become purely a way to reward investors for extracting money from corporations, for siphoning funds from what otherwise might be productive enterprise.

Nice work if you can get it. ~ HAROLD MEYERSON

Categories Economy
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