The reason that parents and teachers are giving Nick Melvoin a rating on YELP is in response to his plan to rate teachers, mainly by the test scores of their students.
Jeb Bush invented the template for grading schools from A-F, based mainly on their test scores. It became a convenient way to close public schools and turn them over to charter operators. It is an dumb idea for many reasons, because schools are complex institutions with many staff and many functions. Students are not randomly assigned.
In state after state, school grades reflect the proportion of needy kids enrolled. The lowest scores go to schools with high proportions of students who are poor, don’t speak English, and have special needs. Schools with the greatest challenges are wrongly labeled an stigmatized as “failing schools.”
So now Los Angeles is considering a school grading scheme in which most of the grades will depend on standardized test scores.
https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2019-08-13/lausd-schools-ranked
Even the Los Angeles Times ridiculed this bad idea.
https://www.latimes.com/opinion/story/2019-08-16/grading-los-angeles-schools
According to documents obtained by Times reporters, the proposed measurement system, which hasn’t come before the board yet, would include a rating for each school on a scale of 1 to 5, based mostly on test scores. In the case of elementary and middle schools, the scores themselves and students’ improvement on them would make up 80% of the ranking. In high schools, it would be 65%, and since the state’s annual standardized test is given in only one grade in high school, it would show nothing about whether any particular cohort of students is improving on the tests as they move from 9th to 12th grade….
But what’s wrong might not be the quality of the teaching or the running of the school. The reality is that students in some neighborhoods face considerably more challenges of poverty, family disruption and the like, and those issues often affect their academic performance and test results.
Charter schools and magnet schools draw their enrollment from parents who go out of their way to find out about different schools and who have the time and ability to sign up their children for possible acceptance. Even if those students are poor and enter school not yet knowing English, they tend to have a leg up on students whose parents are less involved, perhaps because they’re ill or working too many jobs. Neighborhood schools shouldn’t be made to look comparatively bad over factors they can’t control.
Why is Los Angeles copying Jeb Bush’s bad ideas?
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Even the Los Angeles Times editorial board see through this rightwing privatization scam. That really says something. Any board member who votes for this doesn’t care about his or her constituents at all. Not one iota.
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“Charter schools and magnet schools draw their enrollment from parents who go out of their way to find out about different schools and who have the time and ability to sign up their children for possible acceptance. Even if those students are poor and enter school not yet knowing English, they tend to have a leg up on students whose parents are less involved, perhaps because they’re ill or working too many jobs. Neighborhood schools shouldn’t be made to look comparatively bad over factors they can’t control.”
Even the LA Times understands what every single parent in charter schools also knows is true. Any comparison is apples to oranges.
And yet we have some of the most co-opted education researchers who value getting money from funders far more than telling the truth, who pretend that they have come up with a scientifically-valid method to account for this even as they know that if they did not their funding would stop flowing.
Can you imagine if drug companies ran tests on a new childhood cancer treatment and claimed 99% success rates and billionaires paid a bunch of scholars to “prove” that it was absolutely irrelevant that the drug companies kicked out of the study every child who failed to get healthy? “But we are so brilliant that we figured out how to compare the kids who did well on this new drug and were allowed to remain in the study with the kids in the control group which treated every single kid without dumping them and then accepted all the kids that the drug company dumped from their study because they weren’t doing well on their drug. And with our brilliance, we can assure you that the cancer drug is a miracle that works on every child because our new research says that all the children that the drug company dumped from their study don’t matter so we feel confident in recommending this drug which has a 99% success rate!” Who would believe such nonsense?
Would they believe it if the drug company argued “but all the kids are poor so they are equal and that’s all that matters, not the fact that we pick and choose among the poor kids and dump all the poor kids who don’t thrive and keep the ones who do.” But that is exactly what charters claim. All poor kids are equal and all who leave are irrelevant and should be ignored.
What kind of researcher would even be part of such a study in which they pretended it was perfectly fine that a control group just eliminated the kids who didn’t do well and it didn’t matter?
Thankfully, it seems as the people at the LA Times are not as willing to sacrifice and harm children with dishonesty as the people in ed reform think tanks who are perfectly willing to promote a lie if they get paid enough.
The notion that you can compensate for the fact that one group dumps all the students who don’t do well and the other group does not AND also must take in all the students the first group dumps, speaks volumes. Even the LA Times knows it is ridiculous but the co-opted researchers insist that it is easy to do.
And hopefully the outrageously gullible reporters will start doing their job instead of embarrassing themselves by parroting such studies instead of questioning them. Amy science reporter who was as gullible as the typical education reporter would have long been drummed out of journalism.
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The amazing thing about the LA Times editorial is that over the years they have written editorials applauding the very things that this editorial condemns.
It just goes to show that the arguments all of us have been making are influencing the public discourse. Even the LA Times editorial board sees the light about the fraudulence of school grades, A-F.
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Isn’t the new LA Times owner a doctor (albeit quite a conservative one)?
Maybe he decided that a newspaper he owned should not lower itself to embrace the kind of fake studies funded by pro-reform billionaires that supposedly “proved” that it was absolutely, positively scientifically accurate to compare the results of one group that had total power to dump kids who didn’t thrive and keep only the kids who thrived with the results of another group that not only did not have that power, but had to accept every kid the other group wanted to dump because it wanted its results to look better.
Those kinds of studies that are embraced without question by scientifically ignorant NY Times education reporters and their editors would have any medical researcher or scientist drummed out of the field and presumably the new owner of the LA Times has too much pride to embrace them the way ignorant journalists and their editors do. Presumably he knows that those kinds of studies would be laughed out of science and he doesn’t want to have egg on his face when finally enough credible people start pointing out that the emperor has no clothes but the ignorant education reporters were told that he did so they dutifully reported it as fact.
The problem with conservatives these days is that they have abandoned the truth. But perhaps not all conservatives, if the new owner of the LA Times is actually more interested in the facts than in twisting reality to promote lies and mistruths that might help the conservative cause. I certainly hope so as it would be a very good thing for public education.
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The new owner of the Los Angeles Times is a multibillionaire doctor. He has saved the newspaper, which was owned by a Chicago corporation. He bought other newspapers as well, including the San Diego Union Tribune, which has recently published dazzling exposes of charter fraud. Reporters I know at the LA Times tell me there is no party line, and they are free to write their stories.
https://www.npr.org/2018/06/18/620925039/new-la-times-owner-says-he-wants-to-compete-for-a-national-audience
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The new owner of the ‘Los Angeles Times’ is Patrick Soon-Shiong and he is worth $7 billion according to Forbes. Probably more than Donald Trump will ever be “really” worth.
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Good analogy, nycpsp. I think bought ed-deform researchers get by w/their ludicrous results because the public feels as pubsch grads they have expertise (tho they never step in a classroom & imagine nothing has changed). They buy into negative conclusions either because they had personal negative experiences, or because they have no offspring in pubschs, or because results fit w/their late-in-life conclusion that everything is going to h in a handbasket [Faux News watchers]. Such folk approach med research differently. They don’t pretend to know medicine. And they examine research results w/more care because they have a current, personal stake.
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Agree, Diane, & kudos to you for helping to make this happen!!
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Apparently, Nick Melvoin is pushing for the 1-5 system to be up and running by Halloween at the latest.
From today’s L.A. School Report, (currently an affiliate of Campbell Brown’s The74, a couple years after it was absorbed by The74)
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L.A. SCHOOL REPORT:
“Board District 4’s Nick Melvoin told the Times that the system could be in effect by October.”
x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x
This is at:
http://laschoolreport.com/back-to-school-rundown-5-things-lausd-parents-should-know-as-school-starts/
_
You notice that there’s no mention of the Kohlhaas emails that show the true and long-term purpose of this same 1-5 ratings system — the system which Nick Melvoin is so hell-bent and in such a hurry to implement — as discussed in secret meetings with Melvoin and certain charter school industry operatives?
Oh no. None of THAT.
Don’t you see?
The proposed 1-5 system is only about helping parents by providing them more *”transparency.” * Whatever could be wrong with THAT?
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L.A. SCHOOL REPORT:
“Transparency is a priority this year, Beutner told LA School Report — especially as parents in recent months have blasted the district for being opaque about its spending and how its investments are translating to a better education for kids.”
x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x
This irony or contradiction, or just plain hypocrisy just boggles the mind.
The very same billionaires and privatizers who conduct secret meetings where they conspire to plot the future of lLAUSD by enacting a plan to create a ratings system that will bring about the closures of public schools, and enable the charter schools to then move in and occupy the newly-vacant campuses …. make a truly bogus claim.
(btw, these are meetings that none of us in the public — you know, those folks currently denied LAUSD’s “transparency” because there’s not 1-5 school grading system yet in place — would ever know about, but for gadfly and blogger Michael Kohlhaas determined efforts to unearth documents that bring these secret meetings to light.)
Those same billionaires and privatizers and the dubious organizations which they fund have one of their propaganda orgs (L.A. School Report) quoting their puppet Superintendent bemoaning LAUSD’s lack of “transparency” claiming that he’s now making this his “number one priority” and also tells how parents are “blasting (LAUSD) for being opaque.”
Really?
Could there being anything MORE “opaque” than these closed-door, no-public-allowed-or-informed, backroom charter school industry meetings, attended by unelected charter industry operatives and their bought-and-paid-for puppet Nick Melvoin, where they deceptively plot installing a 1-5 school ratings system, with the goal of that system being the privatization of huge chunks of LAUSD schools?
Hey, Austin! (& the rest of the LAUSD School Board):
You wanna know an even better way to provide more “transparency” to those same parents and the public?
You could pass an LAUSD Board Motion that compels Board Member Nick Melvoin to publicly disclose — before and after the fact — all the secret meetings that he has with CCSA and/or other charter industry operatives, and provide in detail all that was discussed at those meetings, with a threatened penalty (i.e. expulsion) if Nick fails to do so.
Doesn’t the public have a right to know about this kind of stuff?
But for Kohlhaas, none of us would have been any the wiser.
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Tennessee uses such a rating system. Schools bounce from 5 (the best rating) to 1 without even a year passing or a trend forming, a sure sign of statistical unreliability, but no one questions the nudity of the emperor. Other schools bounce dramatically from 1to 5, their principlals celebrated in the paper and granted trips to the White House.
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Add Ohio to the list of A-F school grades. Ohio also has a version of the Tennessee “value added growth measure” (VAM), not yet dead but totally condemned by statisticians .
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VAM is dead in many states, but not Ohio.
The governor of New Mexico, newly elected, repealed it as one of her first official acts in January 2019.
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After all, it’s Ohio. Sean Parker’s Economic Innovation Group ranks the state 50th in dynamism.
At the state’s helm, conservatives like Fordham and libertarians like ALEC.
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You don’t have to have an advanced degree to see the holes in this system. What is wrong with these people? Obviously, their stated agenda of school improvement is hogwash.
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When Bloomberg and Klein imposed the A-F grading system in NYC, chaos ensued. Schools bounced from A to F in a year, with no explanation. At one point, the grades were so inflated that the local conservative media began asking why so many A schools. DeBlasio ended the farce.
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So that DUMP is a FAILURE. Why doesn’t Congress GRADE HIM?
Politicians like to GRADE other people and organizations not themselves.
This is called “Switch and BAIT.” https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Bait%20and%20Switch
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Dr. Ravitch,
The secret meetings that charter industry held with their bought-and-paid-for puppet Nick Melvoin explain what’s REALLY behind this new proposed 1-5 rating system.
As yet, no one in the L.A. media has yet connected the dots.
(C’mon Howard Blume! C’mon Kyle Stokes! Get it together!!!)
These meetings were uncovered and exposed by blogger Michael Kohlhaas in Kohlhaas’ release of emails documenting and summarizing these meetings and the plans that came out of them.
Again, what NONE of the media is talking about is that, in the Kohlhaas emails, it CLEARLY shows how the charter-izers and privatizers who bought Melvoin his LAUSD Board seat* will use this proposed 1-5 school ratings plan as just the first step towards instituting a Hunger Games-ish competition for the right a school must earn as to* …
1) whether or not that school (i.e. traditional public school) will continue to occupy a campus,
AND
2) whether or not another school (i.e. privately-managed charter school … whose backers kicked in $10 million to Melvoin’s campaign and write his board resolutions for him Oy vey!) can invade that campus.
It’s Prop. 39-on-steroids!
(Prop. 39 is a California law that put into effect the disastrous practice of co-locating charter schools on public school campuses… or allowing them to invade and pillage those campuses, even in the face of extreme opposition from parents and community).
Here’s that document — an attachment to one of the emails uncovered and published by Kohlhaas — about how “an accountability framework” (the proposed 1-5 school grading system) will lead to “a new pathway (for charter companies) to access to facilities.”
Yeah, I bet it will!
Click to access BD4%20Facilities%20Proposal%20Meeting%20Notes%20%282-20-18%29.pdf
Again, Nick’s billionaire backers are planning — and eventually hope to be executing — a slow-motion strategy for putting this “Hunger-Games-fight-for-facilities” in place.
They would first introduce this system with “accountability that is not (yet) tied to facilities” or with no strings or connection to a school — charter or public — being allowed to continue to occupy that school.
(btw, hundreds of those schools have celebrated their 100th anniversary within the last 20 years … but they can go the way of the dinosaur, if the charterzing, privatizing industry gets its way).
The next phase would be to use this bullsh#& to kick “low-performing” public schools off campuses in favor of “high-performing” charter schools. The document says that “one year” would be too short a “fix-your-school-or-else-lose-your-campus” time frame, so instead they propose “3-5” years, as “five years is more than enough.”
Here’s an excerpt from the email, with its plan for slow-motion demolition of existing public schools:
Click to access BD4%20Facilities%20Proposal%20Meeting%20Notes%20%282-20-18%29.pdf
x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x
MINUTES OF SECRET MEETING:
“Resolve objective: create another pathway for access to facilities. Pathway should not be to the exclusion of Prop 39. Supplement not supplant Prop 39.
BD4: This pathway is a long-time in the making. Many condition precedents before this can happen.
BD4: Preliminary questions — are any other districts using an accountability framework related to facilities allocation? What are other districts doing?
If accountability becomes criteria, note that schools (charter and traditional) don’t fail/succeed in one year. 3-5 year outlook probably appropriate. 5 years more than enough time.
Pathway should include softer consequence – e.g., if accountability not met, closure of school/facilities should not be sole draconian consequence. What are other alternative options and uses?
Idea: creating cluster based feeder programs; not based on geography, but rather program based. McKenna might latch on given that many schools are failing in his district.
BD4: advocate of choice – open to public school closure; something looking like PSC 2.0; and/or school consolidation.
BD4: school accountability with teeth is important with Kelly Gonez. Not sure about others. Charter and district accountability.Outstanding question: who is 3rd and 4th board member ally?
Where do district and charter accountability currently align, if at all?
Resolve 2:
The development of a complete inventory of all LAUSD school facilities, which includes but is not limited to current enrollment, site capacity, site plans, and verifiable classroom utilization information. The inventory should be designed to be made available to the public online, and updated every year by October 1, and should either be created by an independent, professional facilities management organization, or subject to yearly independent audits to verify the accuracy of the information included in the inventory.
Comments:
BD4: This resolve should be an easy one. Groundwork already present – e.g., open data transparency resolution.
Next Steps on Resolve 1:
Work on developing an accountability framework for rating schools that is not (yet) tied to facilities.
x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x
(NOTE from Jack, that parenthetical (yet) just above is not mine, but is in the document itself, which puts a lie to Melvoin’s claims that this proposed system is just a way to “help parents”, and not part of any larger strategy, when this document clearly shows that it’s actually it’s a midway step in the plan to enable the private sector charter school industry to steal public school campuses… as JUST BELOW, it says that there will be “later iterations” where they’ll add and “work in the facilities tie-in” — i.e. the “Hunger Games” competition and the means for closing traditional public schools, and replacing them with charters. For the time being, however, the document wants to keep all this under wraps, and put forth that the 1-5 ratings system is only about “academic accountability and renewal work”. So keep the end game goal under wraps for the time being.)
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MORE FROM THE SECRET MEETING’S MINUTES
Perhaps later iterations can work in facilities tie-in, but for now consider academic accountability and renewal work as path forward.
Identify whether any other districts or states are doing something
x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x
Once the 1-5 ratings system had been in place for a while, a pro-charter LAUSD Board could then easily add to this and and impose a system of a performance-based right to a school continuing to occupy a campus / another school’s right to supplant that school form occupying that same campus.
A low-performing public school could be supplanted by a high-performing charter school — solving the charter school industry ‘s real estate problems, and putting the privatization of LAUSD schools into hyperdrive.
Perhaps most ominous in this document is their claim this whole plan “was a long time in the making,” and of course, created by unelected people who are using Melvoin as their puppet to push this garbage.
This was the same thing that was tried with teachers when former Superintendent John Deasy tried to do the same thing with teachers’ rating system, putting teachers into 4 categories (based heavily on test scores, of course.)
The union rightly saw right through that as a first step toward merit pay. Once the 4-category system was put in place, the next step would be to pay teachers based on which category they fell, and UTLA rightfully spotted this, and said “No dice!”
They need to do the same thing with this proposed 1-5 ratings system, by fighting it tooth and nail, and education then public about what’s really going on (which we now know, thanks to Kohlhaas’ work in uncovering these secret meetings).
btw, Ben Austin argued for this idiotic teacher merit pay system to be part of any contract settlement during the recent strike — no raise without this system. Thankfully that didn’t happen as that’s is what lead to the merit pay fiascos that occurred in cities such as D.C. and most tragically, Atlanta.
Here’s the original Kohlhaas article that included a link to the above document:
http://michaelkohlhaas.org/wp/2019/07/15/in-january-2018-just-mere-months-after-millions-of-dollars-in-charter-school-money-bought-icky-sticky-nicky-melvoins-election-to-the-lausd-school-board-he-asked-the-california-charte/
And here’s Kohlhaas’ snarky cartoon accompanying that article:
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Kohlhaas cites some other excerpts that further expose this sham.
Reading this, you can see what this proposed 1-5 rating system is REALLY about, and why it needs to be stopped, and these emails exposed to the widest audience possible.
http://michaelkohlhaas.org/wp/2019/07/15/in-january-2018-just-mere-months-after-millions-of-dollars-in-charter-school-money-bought-icky-sticky-nicky-melvoins-election-to-the-lausd-school-board-he-asked-the-california-charte/
x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x
MICHAEL KOHLHAAS:
“And here’s a copy of the confidential draft attached to that email, both in the original MS Word format and also a PDF I made for easier reading.
Click to access CONFIDENTIAL%20DRAFT%20FOR%20REVIEW_School%20Facilities%20Resolution%201.11.18RS.pdf
“This document, according to the metadata created by CCSA flack Nicholas Watson and subsequently edited by Cassy Horton, is fairly complex in terms of deciphering its intentions. But fortunately the indefatigable Horton has provided detailed marginal comments explaining exactly what the privatizers are trying to accomplish, and it’s not pretty.
“The overarching problem they claim to be solving is found in the preamble 4 …securing access to high-quality, affordable, long-term school facilities arrangements is the most commonly cited challenge faced by charter public schools operating within the District The proposed solutions, though, suggest an entirely different goal, which includes the transfer of public property over into private hands:
★ Principle: Access to facilities based on performance and student demand. —
x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x
MICHAEL KOHLHAAS:
“This is Horton’s summary of a proposal to allocate space in LAUSD facilities based on “whether high levels of student learning are occurring and whether high levels of demand for services from parents are present.”
“In other words, they want to turn the annual contest for physical space into some kind of blood tournament, with student test scores the weapons.
“In other words, say the privatizers, For those schools that are not excelling with students and do not have sufficient demand from parents, facilities allocations will be reduced to allow for the development and establishment of other programs better able to excel with students are receive high levels of demand from parents.”
“It’s not hard to see where this kind of thing would lead, and not to a good place.
x x x x x x x x x x x x x x
★ Principle: Access to district facilities information. — It’s well-understood by privatizers, imperialists, and pirates everywhere that you can’t run a highly efficient campaign of plunder without an accurate list of plunderables.
x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x
MICHAEL KOHLHAAS:
“In other words, they’re seeking “The development of a complete inventory of all LAUSD school facilities, which includes current site enrollment, site plans, and verifiable classroom utilization information.” Or, as humans would call it, a shopping list.
★ Principle: Improved Prop. 39 oversight. —
x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x
MICHAEL KOHLHAAS:
“It’s my impression after reading hundreds of megabytes of these people’s emails that they are obsessively paranoid about the prospect of LAUSD secretly opposing their interests by cheating them on Prop 39 colocation offers. And maybe they’re right, I don’t know. Here they’re pushing for putatively neutral third party review of disputed offers.”
x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x
★ Principle: Transparent RFP process that prioritizes public school student access to public school facilities. —
x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x
MICHAEL KOHLHAAS:
This is a big one. Here they’re planning to call on LAUSD to basically sell or give public school facilities and real property to charter schools.
It’s worth quoting in full, it’s that bad:
x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x
“The development of a program, consistent with those California Education Code provisions which govern the joint use, joint occupancy, and sale or lease of school district owned property, whereby the District could:
• “Identify, after seeking input from the district, charter school community and other city stakeholders, District school facilities and other real property which could provide long-term or permanent school sites to charter schools or other non-profit groups interested in providing tuition free K-12 public school instruction; and
• “Consider different collaborative models that would allow proposals that envision the renovation of existing District facilities, and/or the development of new public school facilities on District owned real property where appropriate; and
• “Analyze, and incorporate where feasible, project models that would be eligible for existing public school facilities funding and finance programs, to make facilities arrangements more affordable for interested charter schools, and to increase potential revenues for the District; and
• “Develop a request for proposals for the use of identified sites and criteria for the review and consideration of proposals.”
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As part of the school privatization industry’s carefully coordinated disinformation campaign, well-paid privatization shill Ben Austin weighed in on Twitter: (Don’t buy it! It’s a trick!)
Notice how Ben couches the latest scheme as being just a harmless “parent empowerment” plan — and hey, what’s wrong with giving parents “knowledge?” — just as Melvoin has been doing and dishonestly saying, and Ben’s attempt to divert people from catching on to the “red flags” that bring to light the charter industry’s nefarious endgame.
However, the real goals are laid bare in the Kohlhaas email release of the secret charter industry’s meetings with their puppet Melvoin. It’s ACTUALLY a charter industry empowerment plan, as in empowering the billionaire privatizers to seize campuses multi-million-dollar annual school budgets, and throw existing public schools — hundreds of the over a century old — off those campuses.
Again, it’s Prop 39 on steroids.
What’s it going to take for the reporters in the Los Angeles media to connect the dots, and make the connections between this proposed 1-5 school ratings plan, and the same plan’s / charter industry’s actual goals and their nefarious endgame, as described in the secret charter industry’s meeting contained in the email released by Kohlhaas?
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Jeb’s A-F plan is demoralizing to children.
A few years ago a friend of mine in Tampa chaperoned a field trip for her child’s class. They were seeing a program at the performing arts center and multiple schools attended. She said they were chatting with children from another school before the show started and one of the boys said, “We go to the bad school. We are a D.”
How can anyone be so stupid and/or greedy to think this is a good idea?
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It sounds as though LA is proposing exactly what DC is doing to rate schools, again with no growth measure at all for high schools. DC claims to have a growth measure in the lower grades based on comparable cohorts citywide, but none for individual children. And as expected, ratings reflect demographics.
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Politicians can legally lie. Some states have codified the right into law. So, I doubt political speech on Yelp from his opponents gives someone like Melvoin an opportunity to sue.
Bill and Melinda Gates have a scorched earth policy for the common good. Journalists allow them to cavalierly dismiss their failures as risks that the rich bear in their villainthropy. The wealthy bear no risk, the nation, communities and students bear all of the risk. The rich even have PR teams that protect their reputations from risk. If I had a dollar for every word in the puff pieces written about Saint Melinda and Bill, I’d be rich
Thanks Jack, for posting to this blog.
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It is clear that Jeb Bush wants to control California like he controls Florida.
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Minor adjustment, Bush money controls… Trump told us Jeb lacks energy. And, on the campaign trail, Jeb appeared the dimmer of the two brothers.
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Since Jeb lost out on becoming president, he has been working behind the curtain like the Wizard of Oz but succeeding where the wizard failed.
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Because the LA Times have created an impossible situation for making public comments on their website, I have to resort to finding the article on their facebook page to make comments. With the rating story, suggested that if a school has a bad rating, it reflects on the board member who failed to provide proper support and funding so that school could succeed. If anything, the system would give the public reason to remove board members, not change schools to charters.
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I Nan’s Zack hxyuznmtz
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Yes, that’s exactly how much sense school ratings make. You nailed it!
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yep vzcccxxoxznzi
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Thank You MICHAEL KOHLHAAS.
The LAUSD will be a coup for privatizers even though there is a decline in enrollments not entirely related to expansions of charter schools. The district is also in deep debt. That is attributed to teacher pensions.
The damage done by teaching the test is aided and abetted by ESSA.
A missing piece is who makes money on California Tests of the Common Core and the state version of tests in the “Next Generation Science Standards.” Who makes money on test prep for this huge market?
I could not find a contract, but ETS (Education Testing Service) seems to be in line as the manager of test administration of the required “Smarter Balanced Assessment Consortium ” tests. https://achieve.lausd.net/oda
Those tests are all on line. Beginning in Grade 3 SBAC tests take a minimum of 8 hours of screen time. In California, ETS lost more than $3 million for not providing the correct testing materials and not delivering scores in the set timeframe. With AP and SAT exams ETS offered through the College Board, it had “minor to moderate failures” in administering the tests in the schools where it had contracts.
Test-based school-wide grades A-F would be a coup for Jeb Bush, The Broads, ALEC, and contributors to this national effort to damage public schools and create a market for charter schools, vouchers and variants and profiteering from real estate and “education services.”
See who loves Jeb Bush’s Foundation
https://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/Foundation_for_Excellence_in_Education
https://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/Foundation_for_Excellence_in_Education
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You should directly contact Howard Blume (howard.blume@latimes.com) with this information. He’s very receptive to background and data, mentioning that the LATimes reporters generally don’t have the time to do deep background research.
So, just email him with the background origin of this proposed plan.
Hannah MacLaren
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I have enormous respect for Howard Blume. I’m sure he knows all this.
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Then why hasn’t he written about it? The same goes for Kyle Stokes at NPR, and all the rest who cover the L.A. education beat.
I mean, seriously.
When it comes to damning. irrefutable evidence of backroom, smoking gun corruption, the Kohlhaas emails — about the charter industry’s plans to seize public school property and multi-million-dollar annual school budgets — represent the journalistic equivalent of a multi-course gourmet meal served up on a silver platter.
For Christ’s sake, this should be the subject of a front page, above-the-fold expose. but … as yet … nothing.
What gives?
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“In state after state, school grades reflect the proportion of needy kids enrolled. The lowest scores go to schools with high proportions of students who are poor, don’t speak English, and have special needs. Schools with the greatest challenges are wrongly labeled an stigmatized as “failing schools.”
Truer words never spoken. & w/all due respect, Ed Policy for Dummies. Anyone w/half a brain would look at US policy from NCLB & beyond and see it for what it is: a cruel & cynical plan to de-fund poor schools, kicking their most-expensive-to-teach students to the curb, so as to lower the govt “overhead” adder on US labor, so as compete w/3rd world labor.
Privatization [charter] plans to take over/ colocate etc are part & parcel: cost of ed is 70% teachers’ salaries, so replace pubschs by schs staffed w/ non-union > uncertified> TFA – & kick back some profit to the Broad/ Walton etc underwriters, so as to net the lowest possible ed cost.
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Here’s a take by Peter Greene.
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Oops! Here’s the link: https://curmudgucation.blogspot.com/2019/08/the-problem-with-comparisons-in.html?m=1
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These rating systems waste time and money. …and are demoralizing. How is giving a school a bad grade going to help that school ? Wil the staff somehow be inspired to do better ? They are probably doing the best they can. Wasted time and paperwork and data mining…let’s put our time and money directly into the classroom.
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