Shawgi Tell, a Professor in upstate New York, thinks the public needs that charter school failure is widespread, commonplace, and underreported. Even now, mainstream publications like the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal treat charter schools reverentially, as if they know how to perform education miracles.
Professor Tell assembles research showing the frequent failure of charters.
Open the link to see a great cartoon.
He writes:
It is worth noting that both public schools and privately-operated nonprofit and for-profit charter schools are victims of expensive, curriculum-narrowing, time-consuming, high-stakes standardized tests produced by large for-profit corporations that have no idea what a human-centered education looks like. Such corporations are retrogressive and harmful in many ways; they are not concerned with the growth and well-being of children, or the future of society.
The research on how damaging and unsound these expensive corporate tests are is robust, unassailable, and constantly-growing.
High-stakes standardized testing has nothing to do with learning, growth, joy, or serving a modern society and economy. Unsound assessments do not prepare young people for life. High-stakes standardized testing does not even rest on a scientific conception of measurement; it is discredited psychometric pseudo-science through and through.
Still, with these important caveats in mind, thousands of charter schools, even when they cherry-pick students with impunity, dodge tests and ratings, and massage or misreport test scores, perform worse on these flawed, top-down, widely-rejected corporate tests than public schools.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
A damning summary. Meanwhile, the quacks persist.
Maybe this era we’re in now will be best remembered for its very dangerous quackery: school “reform” flimflam artists, climate science deniers, the anti-vaccine crowd, the racist enablers…. etc…etc….
We were sitting by a beautiful campfire Sunday evening… And, we got to talking about how the mood of the country does change. (The person I was sitting beside is an architect and teacher.)
Just like architectural styles can make these huge shifts, I look forward to the next era when hopefully our nation turns more towards authenticity, wisdom and ethical values.
Meanwhile, I have a chance to catch my breath for a moment amidst a busier-than-usual end to the school year. (Today is an unused snow day tacked onto the long Memorial Day weekend. Thank God, for that. Life just seems more hectic than ever….)
The “quacks” are waddling very fast and quickly quacking all the way to the bank.
In Florida DeSantis and his flim flam education commissioner Corcoran are concerned that forty per cent of students from VPK (voluntary pre-K) are not prepared for kindergarten. The VPK is paid for by the state and offered by an assortment of private contractors. Corcoran and DeSantis plan to build “accountability” into the program. At the same time DeSantis plans to greatly expand vouchers in order to send students off to private contractors where there is zero accountability. It makes no sense, but sense is not one of the strengths of Florida. Again, no mention of poverty is in their proposal. https://www.tampabay.com/blogs/gradebook/2019/05/16/gov-ron-desantis-too-many-florida-kids-not-ready-for-kindergarten/
This just in: Governor DeSantis announces that Florida will begin piloting the new Gates/Pearson high-stakes standardized tests of fetuses. Do they have the reading and math skills necessary for a highly competitive living environment? Urgent questions, just like the “are they ready for kindergarten” one.
This is satire. Satire.
The poet Randall Jarrell once wrote that in the near future, parody will become impossible because our public figures too effectively parody themselves. DeSantis’s “readiness for kindergarten” is a great example of this. Trump’s recent statement that “We’ve kept more promises than we made” is another. Trump the logician. DeSantis the educator.
gosh, imagine kindergarten being a place you didn’t have to b PREPARED for…
I think there are basic, logical problems with the charter school narrative.
If public school employees are “self-interested” because they work in public schools and therefore lobby for or on behalf of public schools, aren’t charter school employees also “self-interested” when they lobby for or on behalf of charter schools?
If we’re going to adopt the cynical belief that everyone acts out of narrow self interest all the time, shouldn’t this belief apply across the board? It really has to, unless they’re arguing that charter school employees are actually better PEOPLE than public school employees.
Let’s add private school employees. They lobby for vouchers. Self interest? Or just better people than public school employees?
Andre Agassi’s charter school funding operation was paid about 700k for one Detroit charter school. Andre Agassi lobbies to open more charters. Self interested or NOT self interested? If not, why not?
Charters in Ohio are lobbying for more funding. Is this “throwing money at the problem” as it is depicted by ed reformers when public schools request additional funding?
If not, why not? One set of schools is intrinsically more pure and less “self interested” than the other? Why would that be true? The ed reform belief is that the ONLY reason to advocate on behalf of public schools is self interest. That must also apply to charter lobbyists, correct?
I’m just trying to figure out how we define “self interest” and wondering why this definition only applies to the public schools ed reformers disfavor.
At least two of the Fordham-sponsored contractor schools are ignoring the Ohio Supreme Court’s ruling that declared they are not “public”.
Truth in advertising is a concept that means nothing in the Ohio oligarch controlled colony.
If advocating on behalf of students in public schools is defined in ed reform as “advocating on behalf of teachers unions” doesn’t this necessarily exclude any advocacy for public school students?
How do they propose we advocate on behalf of students in our schools?
Under their rules, the minute I take up for a public school student I am advocating on behalf of a labor union.
Is this how we ended up with no one in government advocating on behalf of public school students? Ed reformers defined our schools and students as a labor union?
That hardly seems fair. Or accurate. They’ve set this up as the only principled advocacy applies to charter and private school students. I reject that. Obviously. Because it’s nonsense.
“High-stakes standardized testing . . . is discredited psychometric pseudo-science through and through.”
Yes, it is. Unfortunately, the level of ignorance of this among a) politicians, b) state department officials, c) administrators, and d) language arts coordinators is quite high. Recently, on this blog, I posted much the same comment. I said that there is a terrible irony in the fact that the proponents of “data-driven accountability” have based their approach on numerology, on pseudoscience. Immediately, I was attacked by someone who claimed to be a math and former English teacher who was shocked that I would use such terms to describe the current K-12 testing system. This person claimed to be able to predict “within 10 points” what scores her students would get on the state ELA tests. When I asked whether she was talking about raw or scaled scores, she said, “scaled.” That’s amusing because states set their scales AFTER the test results are in, and these tend to vary enormously from year to year. That’s because states dramatically manipulate the raw-to-scaled score conversions to get the results they want to have this carnival season. (I once plotted the scaled score cutoffs for the New York ELA and math tests over several decades. These jumped around like a gerbil on methamphetamines. In many years, the scaled score cutoff for proficiency was barely above what one would get by GUESSING RANDOMLY.) So, in order to predict scaled scores with that degree of precision, this person would have to have psychic powers.
But the terms I used, “numerology” and “pseudoscience,” are accurate.
One of the most fundamental issues in testing is validity. Is this test an accurate measure of what it purports to measure? In ELA, given the so-called “higher standards” that the tests are supposed to be measuring, the tests CANNOT BE VALID because of the nature of the items on the puerile Gates/Coleman/Pimentel bullet list. Let’s look, for a moment, at validity.
The high-stakes ELA tests are supposed to be measuring reading and writing ability. However, if you look at the Common [sic] Core [sic] bullet list for ELA, you will find that it is an extremely vague, abstract list of “skills.” Now, knowledge of reading and writing, like all knowledge, comes in two types. There is descriptive knowledge–knowledge of what–and procedural knowledge–knowledge of how. The former–the descriptive knowledge part of ELA–is entirely missing from the high-stakes tests because it is missing from the Gates/Coleman/Pimentel bullet list, which is almost entirely content free. The latter–the procedural knowledge part of ELA–is not properly being measured on those tests because the “standards” on which they are based are so vague as not to be testable, for in order to test something accurately, you have to be able to turn it into a concrete operation that can be carried out and observed as having been done or not having been done. When the ELA “standard” describes something as vague as making inferences based on evidence, this is akin to saying, “knows and understands the cultures of the world.” There are many kinds of inference, and there are whole sciences related to making those different kinds of inference rationally. It’s a simple matter to write a test question that requires a student to make an inference from evidence that is so easy that a head of lettuce could answer it correctly, and it’s simple, as well, to write another that is so difficult that very few English professors could. So, what the test publishers do is write a bunch of questions and test these to find ones that some percentage of the kids answer correctly. But that’s circular reasoning. It’s deciding beforehand what outcome you’re going to get. It’s a scam, and the testing companies know this. And, even if that were acceptable, and it’s not, there would still be the issue that the range of types of inference from evidence in texts has not been covered. A typical ELA high-stakes test will have one or two questions that purportedly “measure” each standard, but clearly, when the standards are this vague, that’s insufficient to do the job accurately, validly.
Clearly, the current tests fail with regard to prima facie validity–with regard to whether a given test, as a whole, “covers the subject being tested.” What goes into being able to read well? Well, there are many, many factors. These include being able, unconsciously and fluidly, to interpret graphemes (the phonics component of decoding), being able to parse automatically the syntax of sentences (the grammar component of decoding), being able to interpret the meanings of words and phrases (which is dependent on specific world knowledge in the domain that the text treats) and having the background knowledge that the writer has assumed that the reader has, and being able to apply to the text critical information related to its total context–its genre, the concerns of its author, its literary and rhetorical conventions. Have a look at a typical ELA standardized test and see whether it does all of those things. It doesn’t.
But those are not the only validity issues here. Typically, when people speak of “validity” in testing, they are talking about concurrent validity. The way you test for this is by correlating the measure on the test with some independent measure that is widely accepted. But the publishers of the high-stakes tests have never done this. There is no study of the correlation of the questions related to ELA standard x or y to independent, widely accepted, external measures of those “skills.” So, the tests DO NOT MEET THIS BASIC REQUIREMENT OF STANDARDIZED TESTS.
Another approach is predictive validity. One might correlate, for example, the overall score on the test with grades in English (or math) classes in the following year. To my knowledge, no such correlation has been done for any of these high-stakes ELA standardized tests.
So, the tests simply aren’t measures of what they purport to measure.
And even if we had better “standards” and could create high-stakes ELA tests that are valid, should we? As almost any English teacher can tell you, we shouldn’t because standardized test-based accountability tends to narrow and distort curricula and pedagogy–to invite teaching to the test instead of teaching.
This whole thing is a scam. And it’s a terribly, terribly costly one, both in terms of the dollars lost and in the opportunity cost of time wasted and resources diverted.
And, of course, the standards-and-testing regime HAS FAILED UTTERLY BY ITS OWN PREFERRED MEASURE, test scores. The claim was that this high-stakes testing would lead to higher test scores over time and would close achievement gaps. IT HAS DONE NEITHER.
We’ve wasted BILLIONS on this flim-flam, and as a result of it, an entire generation of students have had stolen from them any possibility of a decent, humane education in the English language arts.
Put a stake in it.
In addition to rigged cut scores, the tests based on the CCSS are often poorly written and misleading. Recently, a writer whose poem was part of the Texas STAAR test was unable to answer one the questions on the test.https://www.forbes.com/sites/petergreene/2019/04/28/the-writer-who-couldnt-answer-standardized-test-questions-about-her-own-work-again/#509685084e8c
An extremely important point! One of the MAJOR issues with the ELA tests is that their makers have attempted to use multiple-choice questions to test so-called “higher skills.” To do this, they have introduced using distractors that are “plausible” but not the “best answer.” Well, if an answer is plausible, that means that it is reasonably correct. But on these tests, it will be incorrect!!! And, commonly, the questions are so badly written that there is no correct answer given to the question as written or more than one answer is arguably correct, given the question. But teachers and administrators must sign a statement saying that they will not look at or discuss the test questions, so we basically buy something without being able to evaluate it!!! We accept on faith that the grifters who make these tests have done their job. But look at the sample questions that they do release. They doubtless try to put their best foot forward by releasing exemplary questions. But the sample release questions are RIDDLED with errors. So, the best of them are awful. After every one of these tests, my students would (despite having been warned of the dire consequences of doing this) be discussing with one another, in anger and frustration, the totally ludicrous questions on the test. EVERY TIME.
cxs:
There is no study of the correlation of the questions related to ELA standards x, y, and z to independent, widely accepted, external measures of those “skills.”
an entire generation of students has had stolen from it
Oh, for a correction feature in WordPress!
The cartoon is great. Miracle elixir requires no oversight.
Deformy magic.
REVERENTIALLY. Such a useful word to describe how the big news outlets keep treating the subject of school reform. The word holds that surreal connotation of discussing something much like a blindly followed and blindly protected religion.