Gary Rubinstein raises an interesting question: where are the kids who were “saved” by ed reform?
Where are the kids who graduated from Urban Prep in Chicago, the ones that Arne Duncan claimed to “save”?
Where are the kids featured in “Waiting for ‘Superman’”? Remember, they were “saved” from their public schools and a Catholic school by miraculous charter schools.
Then there was the boy saved by a TFA teacher who taught him rugby, which got the boy into college and the teacher on Forbes’ 30 Under 30 list. Apparently, the boy is homeless now.
How long do the “saved” children stay saved?
He asks for your help:
“You’d think that Davis Guggenheim, the director of ‘Waiting For Superman’ would keep in touch with his subjects — see if they graduated high school — see how they’re doing.
“My own private detective skills led me to find one of them, Daisy Esparza, on Twitter. I tried to contact her, but didn’t get a response. The other three, I wasn’t able to find anything. Maybe they are on Instagram. If anyone knows anything — six degrees of separation and all that — leave a comment.”
This article makes me realize the importance e of the need for follow-up of students after they leave high school, at least few of them. This would help in figuring out the benefits they felt they got from particular classes, teachers, etc. they could also describe the subjects and teaching methods which did not help them and what could be done better. Just an idea related to this article.
Sent from my iPad
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The problem is that it’s pretty impossible to quantify “benefit” from specific classes or teachers. I”m a pretty popular teacher at my school (sorry to humble brag), and I get kids coming back all the time thanking me for what I taught them. It’s gratifying, but much of what I teach is piggy-backed on what other teachers did and taught. I get some of the credit, but I’m certainly not the only teacher that impacted them, and what I did comes from a lot of other places and teachers.
My crack research skills have led to my discovery of a June 2014 report — written by pro-corporate-ed-reform douchebag Alexander Russo, and commissioned/published by the alt-right American Enterprise Institute (AEI) — on the impact of WAITING FOR SUPERMAN (WFS):
(The title tips you off …
“HOW WAITING FOR SUPERMAN (ALMOST) CHANGED THE WORLD”
… uhhhh … okay … actually, WFS did nothing of the kind, but … ya know … like … whatever …)
https://www.scribd.com/document/229184454/How-Waiting-for-Superman-almost-changed-the-world#fullscreen&from_embed
It’s basically 28 pages of Russo earning his huge AEI fee as he figuratively goes down on his knees, and then figuratively fellates Davis Guggenheim. (sorry for the graphic metaphor, but it’s pretty spot on … read the report to see what I mean. It’s off the hook.)
Thankfully, however, Russo DOES ask for updates on the kids, and you get this money quote which continues the same Guggenheim weasel-ese wording that Guggenheim used in the WFS’s/his narration (Guggenheim was the narrator of WFS):
x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x
(page 24 on the page, and page 25 of the pfd counter)
“Two other New York City students who didn’t get into their schools of choice onscreen – Bianca Hill and Francisco Regalado were unreachable. Citing privacy concerns, producer Lesley Chilcott declined to provide information about what kinds of schools they were currently attending.
“ ‘We want to respect their privacy and not get into what’s happened to them,’ said Guggenheim. ‘People shouldn’t be worried about Bianca [individually] but rather about the million other kids like her.’ ”
x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x
What a bunch of baloney. Davis Douche-enheim knows full well that if the charters had saved these kids’ lives, or changed their lives trajectory for the better, he would have shared it.
Great question by a great education thinker.
(Here’s a counterexample for those who are interested in the book “Friday Night Lights” from the late 1980’s. Buzz Bissinger, the author, remained in touch and friends with the tragic injured football star, Boobie Miles, through the years. He wrote in 2012 about Miles’ journey 25 years later: http://grantland.com/features/an-excerpt-buzz-bissinger-friday-night-lights/)
“God save the schools”
Save us from the saviors
All the superheroes
Duncan with his waivers
Chetty with his zeros
Save us from the Evas
Billionaires and pols
Save us from the divas
Save us from the trolls
Save us from the testing
Save us from the VAMs
Save us from infesting
Save us from the scams
Save us from the charters
Save our public schools
Save us from the Harvards
Save us from the fools
So good. (And my understanding is that the British are becoming every bit as bad as we are with their policies. Do they have their billionaire Ed Reformists and lackeys?)
One of my favorites of yours, SomeDAM, and that’s saying something! Thank you.
Suggested soundtrack for your poem:
Brilliant song, Greg (lyrics, not music). Who wrote it?
I love the music, but to each his own. The writer is the singer, Karl Wallinger. He is a brilliant songwriter who was a member of The Waterboys and has collaborated with Peter Gabriel. Other great songs of his are Put the Message in the Box, Give It All Away, and the wonderfully concise And God Said. Two of my favorites from The Waterboys are The Whole of the Moon and Fisherman’s Blues. He also collaborated on Peter Gabriel’s project Big Blue Ball from which Altus Silva, Jijy and the title track stand out.
One of your best, SomeDAM!!! BRAVO!!!
The best questions are the ones that seem so obvious once they’ve been posed, even though no one thought to ask before.
Like:
Why is the state allowed to discriminate against some students due to inherent mental capabilities?
Still have that in my “to plagiarize” files from a comment made last year. But I think the answer in this case is: Because they can.
Because they can and do. But why other than they can?
I think it’s because the vast majority of citizens don’t care.
It’s not that they “don’t care”. It’s because they are too busy texting, surfing the internet, playing video games, watching TV screens and so much more that I could add.
The choices of crap to watch is immense compared to when all we had were mostly the shows produced by three major networks.
Many people have become too busy to care. They sleep less, work more — maybe — and are distracted from the blizzard of choices.
The dust never settles and they don’t have time to care.
Because they can. Arne Duncan deregulated SPED regs in 2011. One more reason Arne & his team should be shunned in Democratic circles.
I agree and disagree with you, Lloyd. I agree that they are distracted. I disagree because people like you (and hopefully me and most of the people who comment here) are not. We make an effort to be informed, even with all the distractions of real and unreal life that bombard us constantly…because we care and believe this is important. It means more to disagree with people like you (although we agree much more than we do not) than to agree with those who are distracted because in debating our disagreements, we somehow lurch toward what is meaningful and true to each of us.
The distracted are not the Deplorables. The minds of the Deplorables have been taken over by Fake Fox News viruses, Trojan Horses, cookies, and ransom ware. They no longer have the ability to think for themselves and be distracted. They are an element of the distraction.
You would also think that college professors and employers around the country would be praising ed-reformers for the superior standards that are producing superior students and workers.
All I’ve heard from college professors is how the students aren’t prepared for the higher level math courses. What I KNOW is that many students are skipping the entry level courses (thanks to AP and ACT) and are ill prepared for the 2nd level math courses……many face losing scholarship money. What I KNOW is that employers aren’t happy with the students entering the workforce after college because they don’t know how to think through problems (STEM fields). That should be an indicator that ed reform (common core and the eveil testing) hasn’t worked.
The problem with opinions, like those of the employers. Is that they have complained about the quality of those entering the workforce since WW2. Much like for many decades colleges have been complaining about entering freshman. It is amazing with all this failure around us how we have managed to become a 20 trillion dollar economy. (That thought could be plagiarized).
Of course, that has nothing to do with whether ed reform has succeeded or not. It has a lot more to do with the reliability of those that say education was failing to begin with. In the meantime, the percentage of employers who provide (some ) on the job training has dropped from 80% to 50%, the last time that was measured. Being that it is only measured every 10 years that could well have been before Common Core was implemented. But as the workforce has expanded by 10s of millions of workers; it must mean that workers are coming out of HS and or colleges adequately trained. It could also mean that we have less need for highly skilled workers. What it certainly means is that the job creators feel no need to invest more in training their workers. We already knew that they had less desire to pay the taxes required to fund the Public education of the workforce.
At this point, it is worth noting that the overwhelming number of jobs that are open for all of a few days more because of lack of skills. As detailed in the (BLS ) Job Openings and Labor Transitions report (those 6 million open Jobs). Are in restaurant services, leisure and hospitality and retail services. We seem to have a lack of graduates who can make hospital corners.
“It has a lot more to do with the reliability of those that say education was failing to begin with.” Exactly, Joel. It’s so easy for them to blame based on their bigotry or preconceived opinions. That way they don’t actually have to consider evidence and experience.
Excellent post, Diane. Good Question by Gary R.
Most of the time, these DAZE, I find myself speechless.
the haze is getting thicker…
From a comment left on Gary’s blog… a recommended read:
https://www.chicagotribune.com/news/ct-urban-prep-grads-update-met-0722-20140825-story.html
What happened to the kids who were subject to suspension or expulsion because they were not accepted into college? From this article, it appears that Urban Prep still has not released data on what happened to its graduates. Do they follow them? Do they know? How many of its graduates attended colleges that accept ALL applicants? We don’t know that either
Diane: “From this article, it appears that Urban Prep still has not released data on what happened to its graduates. ”
We can’t make that inference from the article since it was published in 2014. What we do see in the article is an impressive amount of continuing support for various of the school’s graduates who stories were told.
Healthy skepticism requires us to consider the possibility that the article’s author was handed a cherry picked list to work from. But we also need to be willing to give credit where credit is due, as may be the case for stuff like this:
“When he got a call from an Urban Prep counselor asking how he was doing, Williams admitted he was having some trouble keeping up. And in order to graduate in four years, he needed to take summer courses he couldn’t afford. So Urban Prep stepped in and paid for his courses.”
Stephen
If you can find their report, please let Gary know. It is 2018. Surely they know by now what happened to their graduates. And what happened to the students they pushed out.
Urban Prep has lower test scores than the CPS system. How many of its grads are going to open enrollment colleges?
Diane: “If you can find their report, please let Gary know.”
Don’t want to disturb him as he studiously endeavors to ascertain whatever happened to Calvin Gentry, the rugby playing star of the documentary he cited…
https://www.amazon.com/Rugby-Boys-Memphis-Calvin-Gentry/dp/B076ZVDPJY
Meanwhile you, yourself, can if you wish enjoy reviewing KIPP’s results:
https://www.kipp.org/results/national/#question-4:-are-our-students-climbing-the-mountain-to-and-through-college
Here in Boston we have a program supporting district school youth as they go through college… May be worth highlighting on your blog some time if you examine it and find it worthwhile. https://www.successboston.org/
Stephen, so sorry for you that 62% of the voters of your state (Mass) said NO to charter expansion.
They did not want their public schools destroyed because Alice Walton and a dozen other billionaires said so.
It is very telling that the one type of study that billionaires will never fund is a longitudinal study of all the students who originally won the charter lottery for Kindergarten and what happened to them.
It is clear that the billionaires selling this snake oil want to hide this as much as CTC of America wants to hide the patients with advanced cancers whom they refuse to treat or send off to places like Sloan-Kettering so that they can claim superiority with their “99% cancer cure rates if you just go to CTC of America”.
The few studies that touch of this are buried. Here is a glaring example of the kind of studies produced by faux scholars paid handsomely for faux research that helps snake oil salesmen sell their wares.
“Of the lottery winners in the sample (both kindergarten and first-grade entrants), about 82 percent attended a welcome meeting. Approximately 61 percent of lottery winners attended student registration, 54 percent attended a uniform fitting, and 50 percent attended a dress rehearsal. With few exceptions, lottery winners who did not attend an activity did not attend subsequent activities. Ultimately, about 50 percent of lottery winners enrolled in Success Academy schools in the 2010-2011 school year.12 (As explained above, there are various reasons why a student might not have enrolled.)
The above is Rebecca Unterman’s study were she actually tried hard to bury stunningly incriminating facts by implying all kinds of statements that she had no idea was true. The reason this was so incriminating is because it would have been very easily for Rebecca Unterman to learn if the cockamamie reasons she came up with to explain why so many “Waiting for Superman” desperate parents decided NOT to take their lottery spot after attending a meeting were actually true. The ONE reason she pretends could never be the case is that lots of parents were discouraged from taking the spot by the woman who is documented as saying this to one group of parents:
“Ms. Moskowitz asks a lot of participation from parents, as a condition of admitting their children. She told one group, “If you know you cannot commit to all that we ask of you this year, this is not the place for you.”
The fact that Rebecca Unterman could have easily learned that this charter CEO tells parents that this charter isn’t for them unless they are the right kind of parents but instead comes up with ridiculous reasons why half the lottery winners don’t even take their spot demonstrates how terrible the reporting on education reform as been. Not one education reporter bothered to actually follow up.
Rebecca Unterman is the example of how education researchers are so desperate for their paycheck that they will bury whatever they are told to bury. If Unterman had done this in the sciences, ignored the reason why half the supposedly miracle drug study participants declined to be in the study they were supposedly desperate to be in and instead cane up with ridiculous “theories” about why so many patients mysteriously disappeared from the study, she would be drummed out of science forever.
Instead, I suspect she still is overpaid shilling for the education reform doing studies that ignore any information that might not promote what she is paid to insist is a miracle solution.
A second study, by the NYC Independent Budget Office:
On page 9, this study has a chart that mentions in passing the fact that 49.5% of the students who entered charters in Kindergarten were not there by 5th grade. Half were gone. And remember, that is half of the students whose parents weren’t originally “encouraged” not to take their spot because as the charter CEOs like to say “this is not for you” if your kid isn’t good enough and we want to blame someone for why they aren’t learning.
What Gary Rubinstein is asking is what EVERY scientific journal in America would be asking if someone was publishing results of how a new medicine had 99% cure rates.
Every science or medical reporter worth her salt would be asking “why are so many patients that supposedly are desperate for this miracle cure dropping out?”
That is why no legitimate medical journal is publishing articles that explain that every American who doesn’t want to die should be getting all their cancer care at CTC of America with their 99% cure rates.
What is shocking is that truly ignorant education reporters believe in these studies that would never pass muster in any scientific journal.
There are a few studies starting to look at longer term outcomes of attending charter schools. Folks might be interested in “Charter High Schools’ Effects on Long‐Term Attainment and Earnings” published in The Journal of Public Policy and Analysis (its behind a paywall, but the working paper is here: https://caldercenter.org/sites/default/files/WP-103.pdf) and an NBER working paper Charter Schools and Labor Market Outcomes by Will Dobbie and Roland Fryer (https://scholar.harvard.edu/files/fryer/files/charters_7.15.16.pdf)
it stands to reason that if you kick out the “losers,” the survivors will do better.
But all this is irrelevant. Charters enroll 6% of the kids in the country, sucking away resources that impoverish the education of the other 85% in public schools.
teachingeconomist says: “There are a few studies starting to look at longer term outcomes of attending charter schools.”
Do you mean the longer term outcomes of the students who are allowed to remain at charter schools long enough to be able to be included as part of the charter school’s results? No matter how few in number those students may be when compared to the large group of students who won the original lottery for that school and either were discouraged from accepting their spot or drummed out over the years?
I have yet to see any studies that address the huge attrition rate of charters nor any billionaire supported researchers who demonstrate even the least amount of curiosity as to why any school with such supposedly excellent results that parents are supposedly desperate to get their child enrolled in would have such high attrition rates and so many students who win seats who inexplicably decide to give up this coveted seat to the perfect charter and then don’t enroll.
If I told you I had a miracle cure for lung cancer with 99% cure rates with people lining up begging to get this special medicine only available to lucky lottery winners, and it turned out that half the people supposedly begging to get this miracle cure “changed their mind” and chose not to get this cure, and of the ones who did choose to get the cure, 50% or more mysteriously changed their mind after starting on this miracle cure, no legitimate scientific journal would publish any “study” claiming 99% success rates. On the contrary, you’d have researchers lining up to figure out why so many patients were avoiding this supposedly miracle drug like the plague.
But with charters, education reform researchers get away with some of the shoddiest research and some of the most exaggerated and dishonest claims.
Including claiming that lots and lots of parents who jump through hoops to get their child this “99% successful” education then “change their mind” and decide they’d prefer their kid to fail than to take this free offer that they originally wanted for their child.
NYCPSP,
All research on education is riddled with selection issues. Generally the research tries to control for them. Do you think these papers dealt with them badly?
teachingeconomist, I’ll be honest and admit that I didn’t read much more than the abstract and conclusion of the first paper you posted. Too busy watching da Saints come back and win tonight and then celebrating it with beers and tweets.
But one important thing stands out, especially when it compares to my work in cancer advocacy. Both are very similar on the front end by focusing on early results—in education it is unproven or discredited theories that drive policy, in disease it is clinical trials and drug approval. Yet, when that happens, there is little-to-no follow up research. What happens to charter students ten, twenty year out after their so-called educations? The same is true with drug treatments. What happens to the genetics and biology of people who have been under a particular drug regimen 5, 10, or more years after beginning a treatment and still taking it?
I’ve concluded that those who profit off those circumstances revel in this ignorance. As long as they obscure the long-term effects, they can continue to rationalize selling a profitable product.
“All research on education is riddled with selection issues.”
Researchers don’t seem at all interested in learning if there ARE selection issues in charters, but merely want to use some cockamamie invented analysis that supposedly compensates for it.
Why aren’t there studies to learn about whether there are selection issues in charters and how prevalent they are?
Here is a simple question that no one wants to research: Do the highest performing charters that serve low-income students have higher longitudinal attrition rates than mediocre performing charters that serve low-income students? Or do they have much lower attrition rates?
Obviously, a high performing charter that parents are desperate to attend should have very few students giving up lottery spots in the first place. And it should have very few students leaving unless their parents move to a different neighborhood.
If you were studying which of two drugs cured cancer better, and the drug study claiming 99% cure rates lost as many or more patients than the drug study with only 50% cure rates, you’d certainly wonder why so many patients would drop out of a study with 99% cure rates and investigate.
You wouldn’t simply design some ridiculous analysis that supposedly compensates for that. You would see a red flag and investigate.
Unless you don’t really want to know why.
It is astonishing to me that a charter can be held up as high performing without ever having to answer the basic question: How many of the randomly selected 5 year olds who won the lottery for Kindergarten have progressed with that cohort over the next 5 years?
“This new cancer drug was tested and 99% of the patients are doing great 5 years later”. Think about what a lie that is if 200 “randomly selected” patients won a lottery to take that drug, 75 of them mysteriously never began the treatment after meeting with the researchers conducting the study, and another 75 mysteriously dropped out of the study over the next 5 years. So it is only 50 patients left in the study doing great 5 years later. No invented mathematical analysis to compensate for “selection bias” is needed. What is needed is a very hard look at what happened to the 150 patients who are no longer there, and why so many would stop participating in a study where 99% of the patients do so well.
Any study that ignores the rate of disappearing participants is not a legitimate study.
GregB,
I agree long term research is essential, but the problem, of course, is that it takes a long time. A great example of this is the Cambridge Boys Study. You can hear about it here: http://freakonomics.com/podcast/when-helping-hurts/
We will simply have to wait a decade or two before we get any very long term results.
NYCPSP,
It would be helpful if you could spell out the criticisms you have of the effort to control for the selection issues in this paper.
GregB,
Here is another, more optimistic, example of the importance of long term study: https://scholar.harvard.edu/hendren/publications/effects-exposure-better-neighborhoods-children-new-evidence-moving-opportunity
The first works done evaluating the impact of the moving to opportunity experiment did not find a favorable impact on earnings because the studies were done before the youngest children to move had grown up. Now we have information on children who moved at an earlier age, and moving appears to have been very beneficial to those children.
teachingeconomist says: “It would be helpful if you could spell out the criticisms you have of the effort to control for the selection issues in this paper.”
Happy to do so.
Please tell me the number of students overall who are part of this study. Please tell me how many of those students are studied as part of the “charter” group and how many students are studied as part of the public school (or control) test group. Please tell me how many students started out in each of the two groups, and which students’ scores are being counted as part of each group.
Instead, we are given nonsense like the following:
“Consider the following bivariate probit:
where C* and A* are latent variables and X1 and X2 are vectors of exogenous variables. We observe the binary choice, C, indicating charter high school attendance, where C = 1 if C* > 0 and C = 0 if C* ≤ 0. Likewise, we observe the binary outcome, A (attainment of a high school diploma, college attendance, or college persistence, as applicable), where A = 1 if A* > 0 and A = 0 if A* ≤ 0. The error terms, u1 and
u2, are distributed as bivariate normal with mean zero, unit variance and correlation analysis of labor market outcomes, the dependent variable, earnings (E), is continuous:
I doubt very much if you have any idea what this means and if so, I expect you can explain to me exactly what this means in a language that only edu-scholars can understand.
Please do explain how this nonsense totally controls for selection issues as I can’t wait to hear how it works.
NYCPSP,
I do have a pretty good idea about this, largely because econometrics was one of my specialized fields for my PhD.
To get the general idea of whats going on, think about the probability of getting a head on a coin flip. You can not observe a probability of getting a head on a coin flip, but you can observe the outcome of a coin flip as either heads or tails. Suppose you flip a coin five times and observe HHTTH. If the probability of a single head is .1, the probability of you getting this observation would be .1x.1x(1-.1)x(1-.1)x.1 = .00081. If the probability of a single head is .3, the chances of you getting these five coin flips is .3x.3x(1-.3)x(1-.3)x.3 = .01323. Given our observation of the five coin flips, it is more plausible that the probability of getting a head on a single flip is .3 than it is that the probability of getting a head on a single flip is .1. If we assume that the probability of getting a head is .5, the chances of getting our observed coin flips is even higher: .5x.5x(1-.5)x(1-.5)x.5 = .125.
This is what the bivariate probit model does: it finds the probabilities of an event occurring that would make the sequence of event outcomes we observed most likely to have happened.
Is this helpful as a start to understanding how the model works? If so, and with Dr. Ravitch’s indulgence, I can move on to the model as presented.
Since Economics is not a science, then your PhD is about the same as voodoo.
“Don’t let the Nobel Prize fool you. Economics is not a science”
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/oct/11/nobel-prize-economics-not-science-hubris-disaster
This was one of 483-million hits when I searched Google for “Economics is not a science”
The Washington posts also weighted in on this:
“10 reasons why economics is an art, not a science”
FOUR: “Contextualizing data often leads to error. What I mean is that everything economists consider gets forced into their intellectual framework. The imperfect lens of economic theory is less than an ideal way to view the world. Thus, the output of those who see the world this way is similarly imperfect — and as we have seen, occasionally fatally so.”
https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/10-reasons-why-economics-is-an-art-not-a-science/2013/08/08/7c501020-ffb5-11e2-9711-3708310f6f4d_story.html?utm_term=.b7e6cd07915d
For instance, Voodoo Economics
“Though many economists and taxpayers were happy with these changes, many of those changes were not as far-reaching as Reagan had hoped. Some ‘side-effects’ were truly problematic, too. Bank failures increased to their highest rate since the Great Depression, for instance, and interest rates went way up. There was still a very large federal deficit. The savings and loan problem would soon balloon into a $125 billion problem, and despite Reagan’s opposition, the number of new trade barriers Congress erected put about a quarter of U.S. imports under trade restraints. Worst of all may have been the criticism over the tax cuts — many economists argued that higher social security taxes actually increased taxes on the middle class or at best made their tax savings negligible.”
https://investinganswers.com/financial-dictionary/economics/voodoo-economics-5170
Lloyd,
You might have chosen to help move the discussion forward instead of bashing teachers like me.
I don’t think you should take number of Google hits as evidence for anything. Here are some examples of searches I just ran
Why global warming is fake: 212 million hits
Why evolution is false: 250 million hits
Why vaccines are bad: 255 million hits
Do you have something to contribute to the discussion of these papers?
The topic of my comment was that “economics was not a science” and provided links to sources to prove my point. My point was that someone claiming to be an expert in economics is not a scientific expert.
TE’s response was a Red Herring, an attempt to change the subject to global warming is fake, evolution is false, and why vaccines are bad.
TE also alleged, “You might have chosen to help move the discussion forward instead of bashing teachers like me.”
I did not bash any teachers. TE failed in his/her attempted to use language unrelated to the truth of the matter that economics is not a science.
Since economics is not a science, then TE is not an expert of economics as a science. When TE leaves a comment sounding like an expert because TE claims to be an economist, he is only stating his/her objective opinion without any valid scientific evidence to support that opinion since it is based on the art of economics.
“Atul Singh, through his talk, enlightened us about how humans are irrational beings and how treating a subject like economics, which is a complex amalgamation of various factors cannot be called a science.”
Dr. Ravitch,
As a humanist, surely you took offense at Lloyd’s statement “…is not a science, then your PhD is about the same as voodoo” That condemns your PhD just as much as mine.
History is certainly not a science.
Hi Stephen Ronan:
Please be honest with your own teaching conscience and answer to all readers in this blog.
1) What a specific teaching skills (?) from teachers at Urban Prep charters school where a student (after graduated and entering in 1st year in college) needs (according to your pride of about the help from Charter school) –
“Then the charter school hired a writing coach to review Moore’s assignments and tutor him on grammar and punctuation. With that help, Moore was able to pull himself back up.”
2) In parallel example in a reality, all normal human beings at teenager age can walk, talk, dance, sing and learn regardless of being poor, rich, gullible or street wise. WHAT KIND OF SUPERMAN TEACHING SKILL would boost them to become successful athletes in Olympic Games (= famous college)?
In short, at any famous college, the majority of students are smart and have parental support and nurture in both money and love. On the top of all, the best students are full of own ambition and own talent without the need of parents’ or teachers’ assistance. Back2basic
Stephen,
This is not a blog to promote privatization of public schools. If you understand that, you will have better luck getting your comments posted.
I think this is approrate to throw at a “CHOCIE” advocate.
The “skills gap” was a lie
New research shows it was the consequence of high unemployment rather than its cause.
https://www.vox.com/2019/1/7/18166951/skills-gap-modestino-shoag-ballance
Can’t blame the public schools for a skills gap that never existed.
There is no need to replace public schools with autocratic, greed based, profit driven, corporate charter schools that bully children and burn out teachers.
Lloyd: “Can’t blame the public schools for a skills gap that never existed.”
I can blame the public schools here for a manufactured or imaginary skills gap. About half an hour ago I tried to help a woman who speaks fluent French, Mandingo, Kranh and English apply for an $11.50/hour entry-level cafeteria position with the Boston public schools. She has worked for the past eight years for Sodexho and Aramark with glowing reviews. The application was summarily rejected at the start of the process due to the lack of a High School degree or GED.
The public schools didn’t do that. The public teachers didn’t do that.
No Child Left Behind did that and all the other programs from the top with fancy titles.
Common Core crap and high stakes rank and punish tests did that.
Bill Gates is responsible.
The Koch brothers are responsible
The Wal-Mart Walton family is responsible.
Eli Broad helped.
Former Governor Brown contributed to that.
Corporate controlled Democrats are also responsible along with most if not all of the Republicans and their deplorable supporters.
The list of autocrats and the elected representatives they own is too long.
“The public schools didn’t do that. The public teachers didn’t do that”
Mmm, some evidence in support of your assertion…
Having repeatedly encountered: “Thank You For Your Interest. Based on the answers you provided to the questions on the previous screen, you do not meet the minimum qualifications for the position you selected. Please visit the Boston Public Schools openings page and select another position,” I thought of calling AFSCME, but first phoned Boston Public Schools’ human services directly:
Me: blah, blah… “the posting just says High school diploma or G.E.D preferred, but as soon as we say ‘no’…”
Him: “it kicks you out?
Me: “yes”
Him: “You have to say ‘yes'”
Me: “OK, thanks”
Him: “You’re welcome”
The software vendor done it.
Ronan, I am convinced you are a Russian agent, a paid troll, lurking on this site in an attempt to cast doubt and sow discord among those who are fighting to save America’s public schools.
You, along with Trump and many in the GOP, are supporting Putin’s goal to destroy not only America’s federal government and its public sector, but also the nation’s public schools so the country will come crashing and throw what’s lift of the US back to the Middle Ages at worst and at best return the US to the early 19th century before the 1st Civil War, woman earned the right to vote, and children could be sold into a form of slavery called servitude.
The proof you challenge me to provide has appeared on Diane’s site in hundreds of posts and many of them came with links to the sources.
Has anyone considered that these select poster children for the corporate charter school scam were all fictional characters and they never existed in the real world?
Another very good question.
Well-said, Lloyd!
I suggest that you & Gary co-author a book–“Never Existed:What Happened to Charter School Graduates, Both Real & Fictional.”
&, Gary, brilliant question, deserving of a study & report–perhaps an N.P.E. effort?
Bingo
The childen named in this post appear in several photographs at the Whitehouse, and with Obama. Maybe Obama knows what happened to the students. I am not taking bets.
To answer the question:
Because there are no “saved children”.
I have long believed that schools should keep track of their graduates, because those graduates could provide good feedback!
My university and the department of my major send me a questionnaire every couple of years or so. They ask about the program I went through, which courses proved to be most useful after University, which courses (if any) were not, suggestions for future curriculum, student life, any suggestions for changes to university processes and procedures, and feedback on the university career center. And, of course, yes, they do ask for a contribution to scholarships and alumni funds, but those scholarships helped me get through school; I’d gladly donate if I had the money.
Many private high schools do keep track of their graduates; why not public schools, too?
The sad truth is that most public schools don’t have the funds to follow up and get feedback, as our budgets are so tight, but it would be a great idea if we could.
You are absolutely correct. Our guidance person keeps up with kids better than anyone could imagine, and she has almost no idea about most of them. It would take an alumni association to do that.
Private schools who run a legitimate operation have always existed by asking former grads for donations. My own alma mater, a school that moved to our town in 1886, never tires of sending me mail, both e and snail, asking for support and giving me news of what the kids are doing. Without this support, legitimate private schools die.
That said, even their connections depend on graduates that have and will take the time to return periodically, to check up on their fellow graduates, and report their whereabouts to the Alumni department. This is a difficult job, and employs several people.
There are four types of schools if we don’t count home schooling
real public schools with elected school boards
real private schools that don’t take any public money
religious schools that don’t take any public money
the publicly funded private sector charter school industry, and this group doesn’t want to track the students they graduate because they fear the results would be another nail in their vampire coffin.
Tracking students that graduate from any of these systems is not free. Someone or more than one person has to be hired to work in administration to do the work, and with $$$ cuts to real public school funding, that would be a luxury most if not all public schools can’t afford.
“Tracking students that graduate from any of these systems Is not free”
Behold. The truth. Try to get our county court to sign on to that tax increase. Hah!
The success of graduates does not really say much about a school. As I mentioned above, I was priveleged to attend a traditional private school where I was given (literally, in my case) an excellent education. Friends who graduated from the school where I now teach, the public school, also got a good start.
The good thing about a good education is that it transcends time. Students from years and years showed up for a book signing in Nashville yesterday for my wife’s favorite influence in poetry. They all shared the love of literature they gleaned from his teaching in various Nashville public schools. They all shared the love of poetic image and great literature. I have no idea whether they were economically successful.
This shows the problem of evaluating schools at all. Some feel that the economic success of the students legitimizes the approach of the school. Others want to see students who study and learn their whole lives and contribute to the community. Neither of these desires nor any other intentions of a community for its schools, have anything to do with present school evaluations.
I recall a comment several months ago by Steve Nelson, who recently retired as headmaster from an elite private schools in NYC. He insisted that no one should give his school credit for the success of its graduates. They were brought up in affluence, had tutors when they needed them, had every advantage in life, and got great test scores. He reminded us that this was due to the school but due to their life circumstances, which were splendid. It also helped that they had small classes and all that a great private school confers, a school where tuition is about 5-7 times the size of public school costs per pupil.
If it is true that student outcomes are largely independent of the classroom, it suggests that the qualifications and the experience of the teachers in those classrooms are relatively unimportant.
Teaching economist, following your logic, schools are not necessary. Education is not necessary. We can all live in the wild, and let things fall where they may. The rich get rich, and the poor get poorer. That’s your world. You are an apt demonstration of the emptiness of economists’ thought. Bet you never had a good teacher who cared about you.
Actually I take the other horn of this dilemma. I think teachers matter and that we can show that good teaching matters.
The evidence is clear that good teaching is not, cannot be measured by test scores.
If all you have is an economist, then everything looks like a score.
teachingeconomist,
Do you agree with me that if you drop the scores of the very lowest scoring students on any test, the “average” of the students taking the test will be higher?
That is a basic rule of mathematics that even 4th graders know. Which will give you the highest “average” test score for a class of students?
Choice #1: 90, 90, 100, 100, 80, 60, 60, 50.
Choice #2: 90, 90, 100, 100, 80
I’ll give you a hint: Choice #2 is the highest “average” because there is absolutely no penalty for dropping the 3 lowest scores when figuring out an “average”, since the scores of students dropped are simply not included.
Anyone who understands the basic rules of economics would understand what the incentives are when a school or teacher is judged on their students’ performance. It is to get rid of low performing students as fast as you can make them suffer enough to get their parents to pull them.
It boggles my mind why anyone with a heart would think that setting up a system with those incentives to terrorize and humiliate students into leaving is desirable.
Of course, the one way to check whether this is the case is to look very closely at attrition rates. Thus looking closely at attrition rates is the last thing that any education reformer will do and in fact, they jump through hoops to hide them.
When the obvious is hidden, it is clear what is going on. A corrupt system.
Dr. Ravitch,
How would you measure good teaching and be able to distinguish between good teaching and bad? That would be the first step in trying to show that good teaching matters.
Peer review.
Peer review is not easy since most teachers are teaching, correcting student work or planning lessons during the day often starting before the school day and long after it ends.
There are better ways to identify teachers that could use some support and improvement.
Peer review might be part of that process but not the process and using high stages rank ans punish tests does not work and does not fit.
I taught for thirty years (1975-2005) and to stick it out that long, the teacher must have a passion for teaching. Teaching K-12 is incredibly challenging and the more children a teacher works with that live in poverty the more challenging it is. That is why a few studies have discovered that many teachers burn out from the stress and end up with PTSD. To keep those teachers, there must be a support system to help them recover from the burn out just like the VA has for combat vets that come back from war with PTSD.
Since I am a former US Marine and combat vet with PTSD and also was a public school teacher working with high ratios of children living in poverty, I know that the classroom can contribute to PTSD. In fact, if I was forced now to choose between teaching and combat, I’d go back to the Marines first because the classroom was a lot tougher than combat and the Marines. I also have first hand experience what poverty does to a child because I was born into a family that lived in poverty and my parents were not able to climb out of poverty until I was almost ten.
Even the two alleged expert witnesses from Harvard for the prosecution in the Los Angeles Vergara trial guessed from years of observations (without knowning how much time they actually observed public school teachers teaching) that only 1 to 3 percent of public school teachers were allegedly incompetent.
Imagine the stupidity of punishing 100 percent of the teachers because of 1 to 3 percent that might be incompetent. Instead of incompleteness, what if most of those teachers were burned out from the stress of teaching and really had PTSD?
Teaching Econ: you have twisted Diane’s comment and ignored my point. It is not that there is no relationship between instruction and learning. Nor is it that there are not good schools and bad. My point was that evaluation of schools by objective criteria is difficult due to the simple fact that what takes place after a student graduates is more important than what the school does.
That said, the advantage offered private school students in small, intimate classes where good relationships are the result of interaction is impossible if there are big classes like you find in underfunded schools. Often students find that personal association with band, chorous, FFA (I am from the country), sports, or drama. Sometimes it is in class, but it is harder with a big class. It is these personal relationships that find a student writing a letter to the teacher to tell them of a good book they picked up or an experience that led them to appreciate the relationship they developed.
What formula discerns this process? Would you look for a formula that produces a Degas or a Da Vinci? What made Marc Bloch a great historian or TH White a good journalist? Evaluation is difficult at best, perhaps impossible.
I can’t agree Roy, that “Evaluation is difficult at best, perhaps impossible” unless one qualifies evaluation with “objective” or “standards based” or any other descriptive designation that hints at the evaluation not being subjective. Evaluations can be a dime a dozen. We all evaluate many things all the time-just as you did by designating the folks mentioned as “good” or “great”.
It seems to me that it is the concept of some supposed objective evaluation that cannot be done is what you are referring to, eh?
Roy,
I think that teachers have a significant impact on students and that leads me to the goal of having schools filled with good teachers and have bad teachers find a different, less important, profession.
My preferred teacher evaluation system, as I have stated many times, is a peer evaluation system. The teachers in the building know more about what goes on in the building than anyone else. I have been told repeatedly, however, that criticizing another teacher is unethical and that teachers are not trained to be able to identify good teaching.
Also there was the claim that charters were going to show public schools what to do and how to do it. Putting aside harsh rules and accepting a selected group of students, what is their secret sauce ? I have not heard it.
The secret to Success
The secret to Success
Is keeping highest score
You only keep the best
And show the rest the door
These 4 short lines are the guiding philosophy of “successful” charters.
Hence NYCpsp, the capital S in success, eh!