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The College Admissions Scandal: Why Am I Not Surprised?

By dianeravitch
March 13, 2019 //
102

 

When I first heard about a federal investigation of cheating and rigging of the college admissions process on behalf of wealthy people willing to pay, I completely misjudged the ramifications. I was not surprised.

Why was I not surprised? I was not surprised because admission to elite colleges and universities has long been rigged, though not as blatantly as the latest scheme. In the present story, ringers were paid to take the tests, and test answers were changed by proctors on behalf of students whose parents paid the price. That’s awfully blatant.

The old-time rigging was more subtle. Start with legacy admissions. If the college had eight applicants for every place, a student whose parent or sibling went to the same institution was likely to be admitted despite his or her grades or scores. That’s unfair.

Then there is the rigging that occurs when the college puts too much weight on the SAT or ACT, which favors students from wealthy homes, who have gone to the best schools and had advantageous life experiences. Numerous studies, including some released by the testing companies, acknowledge that the GPA (grade point average) is a better predictor of college success than the college admission test taken on a single day. That is why more than 1,000 colleges and universities have become “test-optional.” Go to the Fairtest website to see the list of test-optional institutions of higher education.

The scores on the SAT/ACT are also affected by tutoring, which is a function of parental income. So, not only do wealthy families begin with a big advantage, they can multiply their advantage by paying for tutors who are skilled in training students to raise their scores. Tutors can be very expensive. They may costs hundreds of dollars an hour. This skews the admissions process yet again towards those with money.

It would have been far simpler for the families involved in the present scam to pay a tutor $5,000-10,000, and they would have not been investigated by the FBI.

But there is one more way to get preferential treatment. Give a large gift to the college or university shortly before your child applies for admission. Daniel Golden, a journalist then at the Wall Street Journal, now at ProPublica, wrote a book in 2006 called The Price of Admission, about how wealthy people gave money to get their children into elite colleges. He referred to a little-known family named Kushner in New Jersey. A real-estate developer named Charles Kushner, who had graduated from New York University, made a gift of $2.5 million to Harvard in 1998. Not long after, his son Jared was admitted to Harvard.

Golden wrote:

I also quoted administrators at Jared’s high school, who described him as a less than stellar student and expressed dismay at Harvard’s decision.

Categories Accountability, Cheating, Higher Education, Inequity

Oklahoma: Virtual Charter School is an EPIC Failure

By dianeravitch
March 13, 2019 //
7
John Thompson, historian and recently retired teacher, wonders how much longer Oklahoma’s low-performing Epic virtual charter school can survive scrutiny and continue raking in the big bucks. Even Republicans are beginning to wonder why they are pouring good money into this sinkhole. How long can a failing school avoid accountability?

Even many of the staunchest pro-charter corporate reformers are criticizing virtual charters for their poor outcomes and draining resources from public schools. For instance, Todd Ziebarth of the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools, criticizes the high rates of “churn” they contribute to, their low graduation rates, and low levels of student proficiency growth. Online charters don’t need to accept the costs that brick and mortar schools must fund, but fair is fair, and virtual schools like Oklahoma’s Epic charters also need to find money for expenses that neighborhood schools aren’t burdened with. 

Ziebarth notes that their poor performance means that virtual charters must find other ways to grow. They must pay for their “aggressive marketing” campaigns. For instance, Tulsa Public Radio reports, “Epic uses giveaways of big-ticket items like concert tickets to reward referrals, and it recently opened a heavily branded children’s play area at (Oklahoma City’s) Penn Square Mall.”

https://www.publicradiotulsa.org/post/oklahoma-lawmakers-interim-study-virtual-charter-performance-inconclusive

https://nondoc.com/2018/09/21/okleg-should-conduct-cost-benefit-analysis-of-virtual-charters/

https://oklahomawatch.org/2018/11/30/virtual-charter-schools-founders-ramp-up-political-contributions/

And recently, Epic supporters were forced to spend $180,000 for the 2018 political campaign season. Co-founder Ben Harris said that the reason why Epic ramped up donations was “we kinda felt like it was us against the entire traditional education establishment.”

https://www.tulsaworld.com/news/local/government-and-politics/us-vs-them-mentality-leads-epic-charter-school-founders-to/article_04398428-d88b-5f8b-8e48-817c88108de7.html#tncms-source=infinity-scroll-summary-siderail-latest

https://www.tulsaworld.com/news/state-and-regional/oklahoma-watch-epic-virtual-charter-school-leaders-ramp-up-political/article_364f2619-3a77-5484-bd75-c5d9c8af8139.html

I kid the private charter “juggernaut” leader. But, seriously, he may be facing more unanticipated operating costs. Until recently Epic has successfully evaded efforts to hold the virtual charters accountable. Republican Senator Ron Sharp became so frustrated at trying to obtain meaningful data on Epic’s performance that he used a wonky state-of-the-art research term to characterize the quality of their numbers; he said, “This is crap.”

After Epic Superintendent David Chaney was criticized for “skewing” the data, Chaney replied that they just did things “differently.”

https://www.publicradiotulsa.org/post/oklahoma-lawmakers-interim-study-virtual-charter-performance-inconclusive

https://nondoc.com/2018/09/21/okleg-should-conduct-cost-benefit-analysis-of-virtual-charters/

But more costs may be coming to the virtual charter. A previous investigation into 2013 allegations of fraud by the Oklahoma State Bureau of Investigation was turned over to the Attorney General’s Office, but no charges were filed and no official conclusions were announced. But the Tulsa World’s Andrea Eger reports that the OSBI is “once again” investigating Epic, so it is “now the target of scrutiny by state and federal law enforcement in addition to state lawmakers.”

Apparently Epic is being investigated for dually enrolling students who attend private schools. Eger reports that charter authorizers are provided a contract template which “specifically prohibits the funding or offering of any instruction to home-schooled students or private school students.” It also explains that “charter schools ‘shall implement and enforce policies and procedures prohibiting enrollment of students on a part time basis,’ with one or two limited exceptions allowed under state law.”

Epic’s Harris responded to questions on whether it is illegal to be paid for educating students attending other private schools by saying, “Not to our knowledge. And I would also say that we’re not aware of the specific situations that you’re talking about. It’s hard to imagine how they could fulfill our requirements while going to another school full time.”

Harris also told the World, “We don’t think that our private company should have to make any disclosures that any other private company shouldn’t have just because who our customers are.”  Eger explained however, that Epic’s co-founders are “both owners of Epic Youth Services LLC, a separate company with which the school contracts for its operation. That contract indicates an annual cost of $125,000 for ‘development services’” plus a 10 percent share of the school’s collected revenues as an ‘indirect cost allocation.’”

Eger “put that 10 percent into context,” explaining that “Epic Charter Schools has been allocated $112.9 million in state aid funding alone for fiscal year 2019.

https://www.tulsaworld.com/news/local/education/epic-charter-schools-under-investigation-by-state-federal-law-enforcement/article_22ffe5cc-b6e5-54f8-9612-4f08ae6ae3d2.html

Ironically, one of the institutions where potential misdeeds are being exposed is Facebook! The World reported:

Shelly Hickman, the school’s assistant superintendent for external affairs, then acknowledged that she had participated in an Epic parent Facebook group discussion just last week in which multiple Epic parents openly discussed how their children were enrolled in private schools and home school cooperatives and even receive credit from their Epic teachers for time spent and work done in those outside entities.

Despite its generous donations to 78 candidates for the legislature and state offices, pressure has increased since an interim legislative committee was unable to pry meaningful information from Epic this fall. Then Epic received $38.7 million in annual, midyear adjustments, as the Oklahoma City (OKCPS) and Tulsa (TPS) districts each faced $2.1 million in cuts. Tulsa Superintendent Deborah Gist, a longtime school choice advocate, complained that her district lost 496 students to Epic in the fall semester, as 196 Epic students returned to the TPS.

https://www.tulsaworld.com/news/local/education/skyrocketing-student-enrollment-nets-epic-charter-schools-nearly-million-more/article_ffe29bc2-25b6-58e2-8172-cdac83915f08.html

https://www.tulsaworld.com/news/local/education/tulsa-public-schools-students-left-for-epic-virtual-school-since/article_03d32126-b3f6-5e9b-9a19-f0605014ef48.html

It won’t be easy to find understandable accountability information in the new Oklahoma Report Cards, but now that the press that is doing a great job in investigating Epic’s finance, they might also find readers interested in the virtual schools accountability data. In 2018, two Epic districts, Epic One on One Charter and Epic Blended Learning Charter, had nine schools. According to the Report Card, they enrolled 13,532. They reported test scores for 4,164 students or about 30 percent of their enrollees.

Despite their huge attrition rate, the Report Card said that both systems had attendance rates exceeding 99 percent.

Epic One on One reported 8,059 enrollees. It isn’t easy to find a meaningful presentation of the test score progress on its 2,433 test takers, but the seemingly hidden outcomes of the minority who persist until the spring testing is shocking. About 23 percent progressed to higher achievement levels.  About 36 percent of students remained on the same levels, while over 41 dropped into lower performance levels.

In theory, Epic’s Blended Learning charter would produce better outcomes. But, just over 25 percent progressed to higher achievement level.  Around 36 percent of students remained on the same levels, while a little over 38 percent dropped into lower performance levels.

https://oklaschools.com/district/growth/1115/

https://oklaschools.com/district/growth/548/

Although the recent headlines have been dominated by Eger’s excellent reporting, for several years Oklahoma Watch’s Jennifer Palmer has done great investigative reporting on Epic. Until she documented Epic’s complex story, I just assumed that the virtual charter was just a case of socialism for the rich, a drag on public education funding which helped some kids who were uncomfortable in public schools but which damaged many more by increasing transiency. I no longer see it as an un-slayable dragon that must be endured. And wouldn’t it be great to see Epic held accountable by today’s federal government, as well as Facebook posts?

 https://oklahomawatch.org/2018/11/30/virtual-charter-schools-founders-ramp-up-political-contributions/

 

Categories Accountability, Education Reform, Oklahoma, Virtual Charter Schools

NEPC: Reviewing The Myths About Vouchers

By dianeravitch
March 13, 2019 //
3

The National Education Policy Center published a review of a pro-voucher brief by the Institute for Justice, which publishes advocacy pieces on behalf of school choice. The author of the review, Christopher Lubienski of the University of Indiana, is a national authority on the subject.

There is one fact about vouchers that discredits all the debates: In Florida, which has an expansive voucher program, voucher schools may hire teachers who have not graduated college and are not certified. Voucher schools do not take state tests. Vouchers seems to be a code word for deschooling, not exactly what Ivan Illich had in mind.

 

BOULDER, CO (March 7, 2019) – Researchers have built a substantial body of evidence about policies that use vouchers to fund private schooling, so an honest attempt to bring together that research could have real value. But readers will be disappointed if they look to the Institute for Justice (IJ) for that report.

Christopher Lubienski of Indiana University reviewed the IJ’s report, 12 Myths and Realities about Private Educational Choice Programs. He considers the merits of each of the 12 claims, and finds that the report fails to take advantage of this body of research, instead offering little more than a simplistic and one-sided treatment of the empirical record.

Setting out 12, often cartoonishly caricatured, “myths” about vouchers, the report proceeds to systematically dismiss each myth. The evidence presented in the report is based largely on previous work from other advocacy groups that curated evidence—much of it highly questionable—on the advantages of vouchers. Accordingly, the IJ report repeats earlier advocacy claims, even when flaws in those works have already been publicly explained. In doing so, the report makes claims that are not supported, and in fact sometimes contradicted, by evidence in the sources it cites.

The report provides a textbook case of echo-chamber advocacy. Professor Lubienski concludes that it offers nothing useful in furthering our understanding of school vouchers.

Find the review, by Christopher Lubienski, at:

https://nepc.colorado.edu/thinktank/voucher-myths

Find 12 Myths and Realities about Private Educational Choice Programs, edited by Tim Keller and published by the Institute for Justice, at:

https://ij.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/12/school-choice-myths-and-realities-2nd-PRINTING-FINAL.pdf
Categories Vouchers

Texas: More Than 100,000 Students Affected by Computer Glitches on State Tests

By dianeravitch
March 13, 2019 //
22

 

The Texas Commissioner of Education Mike Morath (non-educator) revealed that more than 100,000 students were affected by computer glitches on state tests.

“More than 100,000 Texas students were affected by computer glitches on standardized tests this year, tens of thousands more than previously estimated, Education Commissioner Mike Morath told the State Board of Education during a briefing on Wednesday morning.

“In May, Morath threw out 71,000 students’ results for the State of Texas Assessment of Academic Readiness and fined Educational Testing Service, the New Jersey company that administered and graded the test, $100,000 for the computer glitches. Morath also has waived promotion requirements tied to STAAR scores for fifth and eighth graders affected by the glitches.

“At the Wednesday meeting, Morath said 41,702 students were affected by slow connectivity during testing in April, while another 58,743 experienced slowdowns or had trouble logging into computerized tests in May. The total of 100,445 affected students marks a roughly 30,000-student increase from Morath’s previous estimate of the number who encountered computer problems.”

Morath has taken no action to investigate studies that show the tests are invalid. 

Categories Accountability, Education Industry, Education Reform, Testing

Florida: Why Are There More than 2,000 Teaching Vacancies?

By dianeravitch
March 13, 2019 //
32

 

Writing in Valerie Strauss’s “Answer Sheet” blog in the Washington Post, Fed Ingram explains why Florida has a massive teacher shortage. Ingram was Miami-Dade County’s Teacher of the Year in 2006 and he is now president of the Florida Education Association.

He writes that conditions for teachers are so bad that the state is experiencing a “silent strike” as teachers leave.

Halfway through this school year, more than 2,200 vacancies hobble Florida’s public schools. In 2018, the Florida Board of Education identified critical teacher shortages in English, mathematics, reading, general science, physical science and other subjects.

Recent graduates of schools of education ignore Florida recruiters at job fairs. Many educators who began teaching careers here are leaving our classrooms with no plans to return. We’re experiencing a “silent strike.”

Children living in districts that are not fully staffed are likely to wind up in with an overworked substitute in an overcrowded classroom or with a teacher untrained in the subject she or he has been hired to teach…

The Sunshine State ranks 45th in the nation in teacher pay with salaries $10,000 less than the national average. Meanwhile the cost of living here is 10 percent higher than in the rest of the United States.

Facing high costs and low pay, Florida’s teachers often work second jobs. Many teachers with advanced degrees wait tables or drive for Uber — and some teachers sell their own plasma to make ends meet.

It’s no secret that shortsighted policies have starved Florida schools of much-needed funds for years on end. Bogus schemes to use short-term bonuses to make up for long-term deficits in salaries for Florida teachers haven’t worked either.

Money isn’t the only problem. Too many politicians treat public schools and the people who work in them as punching bags. When the profession is attacked daily; when the contribution teachers make to students and communities goes unrecognized; when bureaucrats who’ve never spent a day in a classroom tell teachers how to do their job — then it becomes difficult to attract and retain dedicated and qualified education professionals.

The state’s leaders seem dimly aware of these problems but their priority right now is expanding voucher programs and increasing charter schools. In voucher schools–most of them religious–teachers do not need a college degree or certification. The current omnibus bill, SB7070, relies on bonuses not salary increases and seeks to lower standards for teachers to boost the supply of teachers. These are all incredibly bad ideas, but Florida is run by people who really don’t care about education or teachers or the future of the state. This, after all, is the state that Betsy DeVos considers a model for the nation because of its vouchers, its charter schools, its high stakes testing, its school report cards, and….its low salaries for teachers. Education on the cheap.

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Education Industry, Education Reform, Florida, Privatization, Teacher Pay, Teacher Shortage, Vouchers

Trump Seeks to Slash Medicare and Medicaid Funding, Which He Promised Not to Do

By dianeravitch
March 12, 2019 //
73

 

 

John Cassidy of The New Yorker describes the most important broken promise in the Trump budget proposal. We should all fall to our knees and thank whatever deity we choose that the Democrats won control of the House of Representatives last fall. It is doubtful that even his own party would want to own these budget proposals, which slash the social safety net that so many millions of Americans depend upon. This budget enhances the Trump administration’s well-established reverse Robin Hood approach, robbing from the middle class and the poor while giving to the rich and corporations.

 

He writes:

I’ve noted before that Donald Trump lives by a famous dictum from Joseph Goebbels, the Nazi propagandist: “When one lies, one should lie big, and stick to it.” (Goebbels attributed this tactic to the English.) And the President has outdone himself with his Administration’s new budget proposal for the 2020 fiscal year, which is entitled “A Budget for a Better America: Promises Kept. Taxpayers First.”

“Promises kept” has a particularly nice ring to it. Almost as nice as what Trump said on that fateful day, June 16, 2015, when he descended the escalator at Trump Tower. “Save Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security without cuts,” he declared. “Have to do it.” Throughout the Republican primary campaign, Trump repeated this pledge many times and also accused his G.O.P. opponents of wanting to slash the three big entitlement programs. In the general-election campaign, he stuck to the same mantra. A few days before Election Day, he suggested that Hillary Clinton wanted to “destroy” Medicare, the public health-care system for the elderly, which she had vowed to expand, and claimed that he alone would “protect” it.

So how does the “Budget for a Better America” treat Medicare and the other programs that Trump vowed to safeguard at all costs? By calling for even larger cuts to them than the White House proposed this time last year, when it formally abandoned Trump’s campaign pledges. The budget for the 2019 fiscal year called for five hundred and fifty billion dollars in cuts to Medicare over ten years. With the budget deficit skyrocketing as a consequence of the Trump-G.O.P. tax bill, the 2020 budget would reduce spending on Medicare by eight hundred and forty-five billion dollars over the next decade. Even in Washington, that’s a lot of money.

The cuts to Medicare would be imposed as the budget allots billions of dollars a year in extra spending to the Pentagon and another $8.6 billion for Trump’s wall along the southern border. The economies would be achieved largely by reducing payments to doctors, hospitals, and other health-care providers, which could affect benefits and drive some providers to leave the program. Rather than spelling this out, the document adopts the language of Newspeak: “The Budget proposes to reduce wasteful spending and incentivize efficiency and quality of healthcare in Medicare, extending the solvency of the program for America’s seniors consistent with the President’s promise to protect Medicare.”

The budget treats Medicaid, the federal health program for poor people and children, in even more draconian fashion. Reflecting a long-standing priority of the Republican Party, the budget would convert Medicaid into a decentralized system administered by the states and financed by federal block grants. By indexing these grants to the consumer price inflation, which rises more slowly than inflation in the health-care sector, the budget would substantially reduce the federal-spending commitment going forward. In addition, it would eliminate funding that the Affordable Care Act provided for individual states to expand Medicaid to more recipients—funding that more than thirty states have taken advantage of in recent years.

Even for an ardently conservative administration like this one, you might think that would be enough cuts to health-care spending. No. The budget also proposes to eliminate some federal subsidies that the A.C.A. provided for the purchase of private insurance plans by people who aren’t quite poor enough to qualify for Medicaid. “The budget overall would cut funding for Medicaid and ACA subsidies by $777 billion over ten years, compared to current law,” Hannah Katch, an analyst at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, a liberal think tank, noted.

Categories Budget Cuts, Health

Trump Budget Would Cut Education Programs by 10%, While Expanding $$ for Vouchers, Charters

By dianeravitch
March 12, 2019 //
19

Education Week describes Trump’s proposed cuts for programs in the U.S. Department of Education. Trump proposes eliminating 29 federal education programs while maintaining level funding for Title 1 and Special Education. The key quote in this article is the one from Secretary DeVos, who says the budget is about “education freedom,” by which she means, “So long, you are on your own, don’t expect the feds to help you.” The administration proposes $5 billion for vouchers and an increase in the federal charter school program to $500 million. It is not clear why the federal government needs to spend any money to start charter schools, since this project is now well covered by the Waltons, the Koch brothers, the DeVos family foundations, Michael Bloomberg, the Broad Foundation, the Dell Foundation, the Arnold Foundation, the Fisher Family Foundation, the Gates Foundation, the NewSchools Venture, the Charter School Growth Fund, and others too numerous to mention.

 

President Donald Trump is seeking a 10 percent cut to the U.S. Department of Education’s budget in his fiscal 2020 budget proposal, which would cut the department’s spending by $7.1 billion down to $64 billion starting in October.

Funding for teacher development under Title II, totaling $2.1 billion, would be eliminated, as would $1.2 billion in Title IV funding for academic supports and enrichment and $1.1 billion for 21st Century Community Learning Centers that support after-school programs. In total, funding for 29 programs would be eliminated in the federal budget. 

On the other side of the ledger, Trump’s budget blueprint calls for $500 million for federal charter school grants, a $60 million increase from current funding levels. The president also wants $200 million for the School Safety National Activities program, which would more than double the program’s $95 million in current funding—of that amount, $100 million would be used to fund a new School Safety State Formula Grant program. There are no requirements for the grant program related to firearms, according to the Education Department. And the office for civil rights would get $125 million, the same as current funding.

On the school choice front, the department says its main proposal has already been introduced: a federal tax-credit scholarship program from Republicans. The Treasury Department’s budget proposal includes $5 billion for the cost of such a program. 

Meanwhile, the Education Innovation and Research fund would be funded at $300 million, a $170 million increase from fiscal 2019. Of that amount, $200 million would “test the impact of teacher professional development vouchers,” according to a presentation from the Education Department, while $100 million would go toward innovative STEM grants. In addition, the Trump budget would provide $50 million for a pilot program under Title I to help districts create and use weighted student-funding formulas—this pilot program was created under the Every Student Succeeds Actin order to help schools focus money directly on disadvantaged students and those with special needs. Funding for the District of Columbia Opportunity Scholarships Program, which provides vouchers to students in the nation’s capital, would increase to $30 million. 

Title I funding for disadvantaged students, the single-largest federal funding program for public schools, remains flat at $15.9 billion in Trump’s budget pitch. Special education grants to states would also be level-funded at $13.2 billion. Also flat-funded are the English Language Acquisition formula grants at $737.4 million. 

“This budget at its core is about education freedom—freedom for America’s students to pursue their life-long learning journeys in the ways and places that work best for them, freedom for teachers to develop their talents and pursue their passions, and freedom from the top-down ‘Washington knows best’ approach that has proven ineffective and even harmful to students,” said U.S. Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos in a statement about the budget proposal.

On a Monday conference call with reporters, Jim Blew, the assistant secretary for planning, evaluation, and policy development, acknowledged that Congress and the Trump administration have not been synced up in terms of education spending priorities. 

“The administration believes that we need to reduce the amount of discretionary funding for the education,” Blew said. “That is based on the desire to have some fiscal discipline and address some higher-priority needs.”

Blew indicated that the priorities should be the disadvantaged children and students with disabilities. 

For more details on Trump’s fiscal 2020 proposal for the Education Department, click here. And check out our chart below to see the effects Trump’s budget request would have on different programs.

Categories Accountability, Betsy DeVos, Budget Cuts, Charter Schools, Education Industry, Funding, Privatization, U.S. Department of Education, Vouchers

California: Tony Thurmond Called Me

By dianeravitch
March 12, 2019 //
167

Many of the readers of this blog were disappointed, as was I, to see that the new Superintendent of Public Instruction in California, Tony Thurmond, appointed a task force to review charter law in which six of the 11 members are or were connected to the charter industry. We know how hard that industry has opposed any regulation or accountability. We know how many billionaires have used their influence to support the charter industry, both financially and politically. We know that they spent millions to defeat Tony Thurmond, and they lost. Many of us were disappointed in the task force’s composition, because we had supported his candidacy, believing that he would fight charter abuses.

The task force is expected to analyze the fiscal impact of charters on public schools. I wrote several critical posts, because I didn’t like the optics of having this review conducted by a committee in which a majority of the members were associated with the charter sector.

If I had had Tony Thurmond’s phone number, I would have spoken to him first to understand how this happened. I didn’t have his number.

This morning, Tony called me. He had my number.

He assured me that the task force will present recommendations for reform of the charter law. He assured me that he is personally in charge of the task force and its work product. He asked that I (we) (all of us) judge the task force and him by results.

I told him that I thought that was a reasonable request and that I would suspend judgment until I see what the task force produces.

I reminded him, though he needed no reminder, that California has one of the worst charter laws in the nation. It is a law that the charter industry has fought to keep weak and to allow bad actors to proliferate. I pointed out that it is wrong to allow a district to authorize a charter in someone else’s district, without its consent, especially when the authorizing district is hundreds of miles away.

California has more charter schools (more than 1300) than any other state, in part because it has such a large population. It has also seen more charter closures (more than 300) than any other state, including charters that opened and closed on the same day or within a few months. Under current law, a charter begins by applying to a district. If the district says no, the charter operator appeals to the county board of education. If the county says no, the charter operator appeals to the State Board of Education. Under Governor Schwarzenegger and then Governor Brown, the State Board of Education has rubber-stamped charters, no matter how awful their record or their application.

California charter law is in desperate need of reform. Tony knows that.

The charter sector is not going away; but it should play by the same academic, ethical, professional, and financial rules as public schools, and it should not drain resources away from the public schools. Charters should be audited and monitored to the same extent as public schools. Certification requirements for charter teachers and principals and superintendents should be no less than for public schools. Only educators, not entrepreneurs, should be allowed to operate charters. Charters should open only in districts that approve them and need them, and when they close, their students and property should revert to the public schools. Charters should enroll the same demographic as the district in which they are located. If I had my druthers, charter chains would be banned, as would charters managed by foreign entities. That’s my view.

I pledged to Tony that I would withhold judgment and see what his task force produces.

I think that is fair.

He promised that there would be charter reform.

I normally do not report on private communications, but Tony encouraged me to report our conversation.

Let’s watch and wait and hope that the task force produces the reforms that are needed.

 

 

Categories Accountability, California, Charter Schools, Education Industry, Privatization

Nancy Bailey: Why Don’t Bill and Melinda Gates Talk About Their Failed Efforts to Take Over America’s Public Schools

By dianeravitch
March 12, 2019 //
35

 

Nancy Bailey read Bill and Melinda Gates’ annual letter, recounting their work of the past year and she noticed a curious omission: They forgot to mention their failed efforts to take control of America’s public schools and privatize them!

Their education philanthropy has been a disaster for public schools and teachers. Do they ever listen to critics or only to fawning sycophants?

She writes:

Bill and Melinda Gates’s 2019 letter “We Didn’t See This Coming,” is filled with their concerns and optimism about everything from commodes to climate change. Always eager to discuss their global initiatives to help the poor, and a variety of other endeavors, they say little about the aggressive ways they are remaking public education to their liking.

Almost every nonprofit created to disparage public schools or the teaching profession has the Gates Foundation as a major donor.

Maybe they don’t notice, or didn’t see coming, how they promoted charters at the expense of public schools. Perhaps they didn’t mean to criticize the teaching profession by meddling with their teacher effectiveness initiative, and supporting Teach for America types. Didn’t they realize the hubbub they’d create wanting to collect massive amounts of data on children?

They don’t seem to understand that public ownership of public schools is critical to a democracy. That’s what is at stake here.

Many educators and parents, however, insist that Bill and Melinda Gates are about privatizing public schools, making the workers they want for the future economy, and replacing teachers with technology.

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Education Industry, Gates Foundation, Bill Gates, Privatization

RAND vs. Leonie Haimson on “Teach to One” Evaluation

By dianeravitch
March 12, 2019 //
10

I recently posted Leonie Haimson’s critique of the program called “Teach to One.”

John Pane, one of the authors of the RAND evaluation, wrote to say that he did not agree with Leonie’s characterization. I told him that I would publish his letter and Leonie’s response.

He wrote this letter:

On March 4, 2018 you published this blog entry, “Leonie Haimson: Reality Vs. Hype in “Teach to One” Program,” excerpting from Leonie Haimson’s blog. Your excerpt included this paragraph about my own research (with colleagues) and my public statements:

“The most recent RAND analysis of schools that used personalized learning programs that received funding through the Next Generation Learning initiative, which have included both Summit and Teach to One, concluded there were small and mostly insignificant gains in achievement at these schools, and their students were more likely to feel alienated and unsafe compared to matched students at similar schools. The overall results caused John Pane, the lead RAND researcher, to say to Ed Week that ‘the evidence base [for these schools] is very weak at this point.’“

This paragraph by Haimson has numerous false and misleading statements. Here I summarize my critique, excerpting the original paragraph:

“The most recent RAND analysis of schools that used personalized learning programs that received funding through the Next Generation Learning initiative, which have included both Summit and Teach to One, …”

None of the schools in our sample reported using Teach to One (TtO) among the 194 education technology products they mentioned. Our sample includes schools in the Next Generation Learning Challenges (NGLC) wave IIIa and wave IV programs, a subset of all the NGLC initiatives. Haimson points to blog posts by NGLC about Summit and TtO, but that does not mean our study included them.

“…included both Summit and Teach to One, concluded there were small and mostly insignificant gains in achievement at these schools, …”

Our conclusions were about the whole sample of schools, and did not single out any particular schools as is implied by juxtaposing “Summit and Teach to One” with “these schools.” Our concluding remarks related to achievement did not say “small and mostly insignificant.” What we actually said was, “Students in NGLC schools experienced positive achievement effects in mathematics and reading, although the effects were only statistically significant in mathematics. On average, students overcame gaps relative to national norms after two years in NGLC schools. Students at all levels of achievement relative to grade-level norms appeared to benefit. Results varied widely across schools and appeared strongest in the middle grades.” 

“… and their students were more likely to feel alienated and unsafe compared to matched students at similar schools”

This was not a conclusion of our report. In a supplemental appendix we did compare results from our sample (again, the whole sample of schools in the study, none of which reported using TtO) to a national sample. Our method did not use “matched students at similar schools.” Given data limitations, we were able to make the student samples similar (through weighting) only on grade level, gender, and broad classifications of geographic locale (e.g., urban vs. suburban). Even after weighting, we suspect the high-minority, high-poverty schools in the NGLC sample may be located in more distressed communities than the national survey counterparts, and that this could be related to feelings of safety. Indeed, fewer NGLC students (78 vs. 82 percent) agreed that “I feel safe in this school,” but this small difference cannot be attributed to personalized learning and has no direct relevance to TtO. None of our survey items or reports used the word “alienated.” Possibly related, 77 percent of NGLC students agreed that “at least one adult in this school knows me well” and “I feel good about being in this school,” 76 percent agreed that “I care about this school” and 72 percent agreed “I am an important part of my school community.”

The overall results caused John Pane, the lead RAND researcher, to say to Ed Week that ‘the evidence base [for these schools] is very weak at this point.’“

This EdWeek article clearly states that it is about “what K-12 educators and policymakers need to know about the research on personalized learning” broadly. Quoting accurately, “RAND has found some positive results, including modest achievement gains in some of the Gates-funded personalized-learning schools. But overall, ‘the evidence base is very weak at this point, Pane said.” There is no justification for Haimson to insert “[for these schools]” into my quoted remark. It appears as though Haimson is attempting to give a misleading impression that I was specifically talking about Summit and TtO rather than the entire body of personalized learning research.

I find it very unfortunate that you accepted Haimson’s claims without fact checking, and increased their visibility and attention through your own platform.

I am requesting that you please issue a correction in a way that previous readers of your March 4 post will likely notice. You may include this letter if you wish.

With regards,

John Pane

RAND Corporation

I forwarded John Pane’s letter to Leonie Haimson. She responded as follows:

Hi John – the Rand report was only a small part of my post on TTO which is here – I counted one short paragraph out of nearly one hundred.

Nevertheless, Diane: Please go ahead and print John’s letter in full and I will link to the letter in my blog. It is unfortunate that the specific online program names were left out of the RAND evaluation.  I had wrongly assumed that  TTO was included since it is one of the most heavily funded and promoted of the Next Generation Learning Challenge “personalized learning” programs, by Gates and others.   

I would also like to point out that the following survey stats John includes from the NGLC schools omit the results from the comparison schools, as cited in the appendix of the Rand  report:

Possibly related, 77 percent of NGLC students agreed that “at least one adult in this school knows me well” [compared to 86% of the national sample] and “I feel good about being in this school,” [vs. 89% of the national sample] 76 percent agreed that “I care about this school” [vs. 87% of the national sample] and 72 percent agreed “I am an important part of my school community.” [compared to 79% of the national sample.]

bargraph

In addition, the  students at the personalized learning schools were more likely to say that that “their classes do not keep their attention, and they get bored” compared to the national sample (30% to 23%). Only 35% of students at the NGLC schools said that “learning is enjoyable” compared to 45% of the national sample. With results like this it is very difficult to see support for the claim that students at personalized learning schools are more engaged in their coursework, feel more connected and have more agency, as is often claimed.

Now we know that TTO students aren’t included in these surveys but there is no reason to assume that the responses would be significantly different until and unless New Classrooms releases their own survey results.  And we do have the results from Mountain View school, which showed a 413% increase in the number of students who said they hated math as a result.

Nor does John’s response relate to the larger question of how difficult it is to use MAP scores to evaluate these programs, especially ones that aren’t disaggregated by race or economic status, which also calls into question the conclusions of the MarGready report.  One might expect that with all the data that NWEA has by now they would have done that by now; any thoughts on that, John?

Finally, it is extremely unfortunate that Gates, Zuckerberg etc. haven’t bothered to commission any truly randomized  small-scale evaluation of Summit, TTO or any of the other PL programs they have so heavily funded and promoted before expanding their reach and subjecting hundreds of thousands of students to them.   Summit has rejected  any independent evaluation of its results.  One can only speculate why.

 

Thanks,

Leonie Haimson

 

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