Archives for the month of: February, 2020
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New Jersey: Is Chris Christie Still Governor?

By dianeravitch
February 11, 2020 //
4

The Education Law Center is suing to block former Governor Chris Christie’s 2016 decision to expand charters in Newark:

 
February 11, 2020
NJ SUPREME COURT TO REVIEW STATE COMMISSIONER’S DECISION TO DRAMATICALLY EXPAND CHARTER SCHOOLS IN NEWARK
The New Jersey Supreme Court has granted a petition filed by Education Law Center (ELC) to review the State Commissioner of Education’s 2016 decision approving an enrollment increase of 8500 students in KIPP, Uncommon and other charter operators’ schools in the Newark Public School (NPS) district.
In accepting In Re Team Academy Charter School, the Supreme Court will now decide several consequential issues raised by the State’s push to rapidly grow charter school enrollments in NPS over the last decade. Under former Governor Chris Christie, Newark charter enrollments grew 320% from 4,559 in 2009, to 19,152 in 2020. NPS payments to charter schools increased from $63 million in 2009, or 7% of the NPS operating budget, to $265 million in 2020, or 26% of the budget.
The legal issues before the NJ Supreme Court in Team Academy implicate the Commissioner’s failure to comply with the Court’s 2000 Palisades Charter ruling imposing an affirmative obligation under the New Jersey Constitution to carefully evaluate the impact of charter school applications in two interrelated areas:
  • The education resources available to NPS students from the loss of funding that will occur from increasing charter school enrollments;
  • The segregation of NPS students by disability, English language proficiency and race.
The Team Academy appeal addresses the obligation of charter authorizers to protect the constitutional rights of public school students when faced with overwhelming and unrefuted evidence that expanding charters will deprive district students of essential education resources and intensify persistent patterns of student segregation in the resident district.
In 2016, ELC, on behalf of NPS students, submitted detailed evidence to the Commissioner opposing the charter school expansion. ELC’s evidence showed that, if the expansion was approved, NPS would continue to lose funding from its budget, causing further cuts to essential teachers, support staff and programs, including for English language learners (ELL) and students with disabilities. ELC also documented that the expansion would increase the concentration of more costly to educate students with disabilities and ELLs in Newark district schools and worsen the entrenched isolation of Black and Latino students in the already intensely segregated district.
After the Commissioner ignored this evidence and approved the applications, ELC appealed. The Appellate Division upheld the decision, relying on the failure of the NPS superintendent, hired by the State, to object to the expansion. At the time the charter applications were decided by the State, NPS was under State control.
Because NPS students are in the class of plaintiff school children in the landmark Abbott v. Burke school funding litigation, the Supreme Court will also decide whether the Commissioner bears a heightened burden when reviewing charter applications in those districts. Abbott district students remain the subject of continuing Abbott orders to remedy the State’s longstanding violation of their right to a constitutional thorough and efficient education.
Michael Stein of the Pashman Stein Walder Hayden law firm is serving as pro bono co-counsel on this appeal, along with ELC Executive Director David Sciarra, lead counsel for the Abbott v. Burke school children.
Argument before the NJ Supreme Court is expected in the fall.
Press Contact:
Sharon Krengel
Policy and Outreach Director
Education Law Center
Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Education Industry, Education Reform, New Jersey, Newark, Privatization

Bloomberg Blocks Release of His Comments at Aspen About Minorities and Guns

By dianeravitch
February 11, 2020 //
53

Four years ago, Michael Bloomberg spoke candidly in Aspen about his stop-and-frisk policies that targeted young black  and Hispanic men, but he immediately requested that it not be released to the public. Although he was proud of his policy, he knew there was something that wasn’t right about targeting young minority males.

Charles Blow of the New York Times wrote about the racist, disastrous policy of stop and frisk.

Let me plant the stake now: No black person — or Hispanic person or ally of people of color — should ever even consider voting for Michael Bloomberg in the primary. His expansion of the notoriously racist stop-and-frisk program in New York, which swept up millions of innocent New Yorkers, primarily young black and Hispanic men, is a complete and nonnegotiable deal killer.

Stop-and-frisk, pushed as a way to get guns and other contraband off the streets, became nothing short of a massive, enduring, city-sanctioned system of racial terror…

In 2002, the first year Bloomberg was mayor, 97,296 of these stops were recorded. They surged during Bloomberg’s tenure to a peak of 685,724 stops in 2011, near the end of his third term. Nearly 90 percent of the people who were stopped and frisked were innocent of any wrongdoing.

A New York Times analysis of stops on “eight odd blocks” in the overwhelmingly black neighborhood of Brownsville in Brooklyn found close to 52,000 stops over four years, which averaged out to “nearly one stop a year for every one of the 14,000 residents of these blocks.”

In 2009, there were more than 580,000 stop-and-frisks, a record at the time. Of those stopped, 55 percent were black, 32 percent Hispanic and only 10 percent white. Most were young, and almost all were male. Eighty-eight percent were innocent. For reference, according to the Census Bureau, there were about 300,000 black men between the ages of 13 and 34 living in the city that year.

Not only that, but those who were stopped had their names entered into a comprehensive police database, even if they were never accused of committing a crime. As Donna Lieberman, then the executive director of the New York Civil Liberties Union, said in 2010, the database became a place “where millions of completely innocent, predominantly black and Latinos have been turned into permanent police suspects.”

The state outlawed the keeping of these electronic records on the innocent, over the strong objections of Bloomberg and his police chief…

Bloomberg’s crime argument was dubious. The Columbia Law School professor Jeffrey Fagan produced a report that became part of a class-action lawsuit against the city in 2010. It found that: “[s]eizures of weapons or contraband are extremely rare. Overall, guns are seized in less than 1 percent of all stops: 0.15 percent … Contraband, which may include weapons but also includes drugs or stolen property, is seized in 1.75 percent of all stops.”

Categories Billionaires, Bloomberg, Michael, Education Reform, New York City, Racism

Tim Slekar and I Discuss My Book on “Busted Pencils”

By dianeravitch
February 11, 2020 //
6

Tim Slekar, one of the pioneers of the Resistance invited me to talk with him on his podcast Busted Pencils. 

We talked about SLAYING GOLIATH.

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Education Industry, Education Reform, For-Profit, Privatization, Testing, Vouchers

SomeDAM Poet: College Ready in Kindergarten

By dianeravitch
February 11, 2020 //
17

When Arne Duncan was Secretary of Education, he touted the idea that every student should be college ready. There has been considerable debate about which was Arne’s most memorable utterance. Some say it was his claim that Hurricane Katrina “was the best thing that ever happened to the schools of New Orleans,” despite the deaths of over 1,000 people. Others think it was his crack that the reason suburban moms hated Common Core was because it showed that their child was “not as brilliant” as they thought. The Common Core, he believed, was the key to “College and Career” readiness, and it was never to soon to start.

My favorite line is his statement when he visited a New York City public elementary school and said, “I want to be able to look into the eyes of a second-grader and know that he was on track to go to college.” It seemed to me that the typical second grader would have more immediate concerns and dreams (a cowboy? A fireman? An astronaut? A doctor?  A prince or princess?).

Our blog poet, SomeDAM Poet, wrote here:

College Ready in Kindergarten

College Ready in Kindergarten
Bachelor’s in First
PhD in Second grade
A life that’s well rehearsed

Categories Childhood, Pre-K, K, Duncan, Arne, Education Reform, Humor

Laura Chapman: EdReports is NOT Independent!

By dianeravitch
February 11, 2020 //
5

Laura Chapman writes:

“EdReports, an independent curriculum review nonprofit, rates curriculum on three gateways: Text Quality, Building Knowledge, and Usability. Amplify CKLA earned a green rating in all three.”

This should not be regarded as a trustworthy endorsement. Here is Why. Recall that the Common Core State (sic) Standards were first marketed as if they were not intended to be about curriculum (but they were), because the owners of the CCSS soon offered up “publisher’s criteria” for curriculum materials (2011). Those criteria morphed into a system for reviewing curricula, based on absolute compliance with the CCSS, including grade-by grade alignments. In 2013, the initial criteria for reviewing curriculum materials for compliance with the CCSS were called “drop dead” (meaning comply with these criteria or do not waste the time of reviewers). A year later, the language was softened to the idea that materials had to meet “gateway” criteria (2014), but with the same meaning,—comply or else the reviewers will not bother to look at anything else.

By 2015, the promoters of the CCSS had set up a non-profit called EdReports.org to function in the capacity of a consumer-reports of newly published math and ELA materials. The purpose was to rate publications that claimed to be in compliance with the CCSS.

EdReports is said to be the result of a meeting at the Annenberg estate of “the nation’s leading minds in math, science, K-12 and higher education.” I have not been able to find a list of participants in that meeting or the sponsors, but in 2014 professionals in branding and communications were hired to promote EdReports. You can see the strategy and their pride in getting coverage in national news, http://www.widmeyer.com/work/edreports-org.htmlincluding from Peter Greene at http://curmudgucation.blogspot.com/search?q=EdReports

In August 2015 the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation gave $1,499,988 to EdReports for operating support followed in 2016 with $6,674,956 for operating support. The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation gave EdReports.org $1.5 million in 2015 and $2 million in 2016.

Ed Reports.org is also funded by Broadcom Corporation (Board member from Broadcom is with EdReports), the Charles and Lynn Schusterman Foundation, the Helmsley Charitable Trust, the Overdeck Family Foundation, the Samuel Foundation, the Charles and Helen Schwab Foundation, and the Stuart Foundation.

You can find more about the quest for absolute continuity from the writing of the CCSS, largely funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, to current efforts to impose “approved curriculum materials” for any state that has adopted the CCSS… https://www.edreports.org/about/index.html

EdReports is a Gates funded review process initially marketed to ensure that “approved” curriculum materials were in compliance with the common core. Any curriculum materials that did not pass muster with three gateway “drop dead criteria” would not be subjected to further review.

Amplify does not want you to know the history of this phony system of rating materials. Bob Shepard has offered another excellent history of this absurdly wrong effort to standardize ELA curriculum.

I see that Margaret Spellings, former Secretary of Education, has found a position at Amplify. She also serves on the board of Gates’ relatively new lobby shop. She is not competent to make judgments about education, but that seems to qualify her to be a crony of the disrupters who will do almost anything to please a billionaire.

Categories Common Core, Curriculum, Fake, Funding, Gates Foundation, Bill Gates, Hoax

Trump’s Budget for Education Eliminates the Scandal-Ridden Federal Charter School Program

By dianeravitch
February 11, 2020 //
12

To the shock and consternation of charter school advocates, the Trump budget proposal abandons the controversial federal Charter Schools Program, turning it into a state bloc program that turns the money over to the states. 

The National Alliance for Public Charter Schools issued a scathing denunciation of the axing of the federal charter school programs, which has enriched the big corporate charter chains.

The Network for Public Education issued two reports on waste, fraud, and abuse in this program, showing that nearly 40% of the federal money was spent on charters that either never opened or closed soon after opening, with waste of nearly $1 billion. See the reports here and here.

Trump and DeVos are backing their chief priority: vouchers, which they prefer to call “education freedom scholarships,” at a proposed cost of $5 billion. They want America’s children to be “rescued” from public schools that hat have been burdened by harmful federal policies like high-stakes testing, and punishments attached to testing. They want them to attend religious schools that are low-cost and have no standards or accountability, and are free to discriminate against students, families, and staff they don’t like.

The erstwhile Center for American Progress lamented the proposal to cut federal spending on charter schools, even though Democratic support for them has substantially declined. Apparently, CAP is the last to know that school choice is a Republican Policy.

Chalkbeat reports:

The Trump administration wants to create a new stream of funding for disadvantaged students that would consolidate current spending on Title I — which gives money to schools serving low-income students — and 28 other programs.

This school year, the department spent $16.3 billion on Title I grants to states and districts and $7.8 billion on the other programs. Under the proposed budget, it would all become a $19.4 billion pot that would be distributed through the Title I formulas — a $4.7 billion cut, if the budget were enacted.

The individual programs on the chopping block include:

  • 21st Century Learning Centers, which supports after-school programs in places like Detroit and New York City ($1.25 billion)
  • Arts in Education ($30 million)
  • English Language Acquisition ($787 million)
  • Homeless Education ($102 million)
  • Neglected and Delinquent, which offers grants to states to educate incarcerated students ($48 million)
  • Magnet Schools, which offers grants some districts use for desegregation ($107 million)
  • Migrant Education ($375 million)
  • Rural Education ($186 million)
  • Supporting Effective Instruction State Grants, which is also known as Title II, Part A, which districts can use for teacher training and to reduce class sizes ($2.1 billion)

This move, the budget documents say, would reduce the federal government’s role in education and pave the way for less spending on department staff.

But the proposed elimination of these streams of funding raised alarms among civil rights advocates, who said this would enable states to spend less money on vulnerable groups like students who are English learners, homeless students, students involved in the juvenile justice system, or migrant students.

“History has shown us that … unless the federal government says you must serve migrant children, and here are funds to help you do that, migrant children are lost and forgotten,” said Liz King, the education equity program director at The Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights. “The purpose of the dedicated pots of money … is to make sure that the most powerless people in our country are not lost.”

Advocates for other programs expressed concern, too. During a question and answer session with education department officials, a member of the National Association for Gifted Children asked why the administration had proposed eliminating a $13 million program that supports gifted education.

Jim Blew, one of DeVos’s assistant secretaries, and a former official at the Walton Family Foundation, said that advocates for these programs should lobby the states to fund their favorite programs.

Categories Accountability, Arts Education, Betsy DeVos, Bias, Bigotry, Budget Cuts, Charter Schools, Education Industry, Funding, Privatization, Vouchers

Trump Proposes Deep Cuts to Social Programs, Including Education

By dianeravitch
February 11, 2020 //
27

Congresswoman Rosa DeLauro (D-Conn.) is in charge of the appropriations for most social programs. She released this list of the programs that the Trump administration wants to slash or gut. She stands in his way, which illustrates the importance of re-electing a Democrat-controlled House of Representatives and electing a Denocratic Senate to stop the attacks on needed, successful federal programs.

 

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

February 10, 2020

CONTACT:

Will Serio: 202-225-3661

 

DeLauro Statement on President Trump’s 2021 Budget

 

WASHINGTON, DC — Congresswoman Rosa DeLauro (CT-03), Chair of the Labor, Health and Human Services, and Education Appropriations Subcommittee, today released the following statement on President Trump’s Fiscal Year 2021 budget.

 

“For the fourth year in a row, President Trump has released a budget decimating programs that help working people and the middle class. With $19 billion in cuts to programs at the Departments of Labor, Health and Human Services, and Education, President Trump has once again shown his disdain for those who are struggling to make ends meet. Among the programs President Trump wants to cut or eliminate are Social Security, Medicaid, Affordable Care Act subsidies, home energy assistance for seniors and people with disabilities, groundbreaking medical research, tools that help local communities fight poverty, job training programs, programs to combat climate change, funding to enforce our trade agreements, pre-school grants, teen pregnancy prevention programs, anti-hunger programs like SNAP, afterschool programs, federal work study programs, and much more.”

 

“As with his previous budgets, this one is going nowhere. Instead, House Democrats will continue working for the people on an agenda that recognizes our biggest economic challenge: that people are working in jobs with wages that do not keep up with the rising cost of healthcare, child care, housing, and education. As Chair of the House Appropriations Subcommittee on Labor, Health and Human Services, and Education, we are going to continue investing in working people, the middle class, and the most vulnerable—not millionaires, billionaires, corporations, and special interests.”

 

President Trump’s budget proposes significant cuts to the Departments of Labor, Health and Human Services, and Education, including:

 

Department of Labor – $1.3 billion cut

  • Cuts Job Corps by $728 million
  • Cuts the Bureau of International Labor Affairs by $77 million
  • Cuts Women’s Bureau by $11 million
  • Cuts National Dislocated Worker Grants by $110 million
  • Cuts YouthBuild by $10 million
  • Eliminates job training for Native Americans (-$55 million)
  • Eliminates job training for Migrant and Seasonal Farmworkers (-$92 million)
  • Eliminates Senior Community Service Employment Program (-$405 million)
  • Eliminates Susan Harwood Training Grants (-$12 million)

 

Department of Health and Human Services – $10.1 billion cut

  • Cuts the National Institutes of Health (NIH) by $3.3 billion
  • Cuts the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) by $678 million
  • Cuts the Health Resources and Services Administration by $742 million
  • Eliminates the Low Income Home Energy Assistance Program (LIHEAP) (-$3.7 billion)
  • Eliminates the Social Services Block Grant (SSBG) (-$1.7 billion per year)
  • Eliminates the Community Service Block Grant (CSBG) (-$740 million per year)
  • Eliminates Preschool Development Grants (-$275 million per year)
  • Eliminates the Teen Pregnancy Prevention Program (-$108 million per year)

 

Department of Education – $6.2 billion cut

  • Cuts K-12 education programs by $4.7 billion, eliminating 30 altogether, including:
    • Supporting Effective Instruction State Grants (-$2.1 billion)
    • Afterschool programs (-$1.2 billion)
    • Student Support and Academic Enrichment Grants (-$1.2 billion)
    • Arts in Education (-$30 million)
  • Cuts higher education and student financial assistance programs by $2.3 billion.  The President’s budget:
    • Eliminates Supplemental Educational Opportunity Grants (-$840 million)
    • Eliminates Gaining Early Awareness and Readiness for Undergraduate Programs (GEAR UP) (-$365 million)
    • Cuts Federal Work Study by $680 million
    • Cuts Federal TRIO Programs by $140 million
    • Cuts Childcare Access Means Parents in Schools by $38 million
    • Level funds the maximum Pell Grant at $6,345

 

In addition, the President’s Budget:

  • Cuts Social Security, Medicaid, and Affordable Care Act subsidies by over $1 trillion
  • Contains a woefully inadequate paid leave proposal that falls short of what the nation needs
  • Cuts the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) by more than $18 billion per year, on average
  • Reduces Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) by more than $2 billion per year
  • Cuts the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) by $2.8 billion
  • Eliminates the Community Development Block Grant (-$3.4 billion)
  • Eliminates the Institute of Museum and Library Services (-$229 million)
  • Eliminates the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (-$455 million)
  • Eliminates the Corporation for National and Community Service (-$797 million)
  • Eliminates National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) Grants and Education programs (-287 million)

 

###

delauro.house.gov

 

Categories Budget Cuts, Education Reform, Funding

ProPublica: The Navy Installed Touch-Screen Technology: 10 Sailors Died

By dianeravitch
February 10, 2020 //
61

ProPublica has another important expose, this one about the Navy’s dependence on flawed technology. 

I donate to ProPublica. This investigative journalism has never been more important.

The Navy installed touch-screen steering systems to save money.

Ten sailors paid with their lives.

COLLISION COURSE

When the USS John S. McCain crashed in the Pacific, the Navy blamed the destroyer’s crew for the loss of 10 sailors. The truth is the Navy’s flawed technology set the McCain up for disaster.

By T. Christian Miller, Megan Rose, Robert Faturechi and Agnes Chang

ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up to receive our biggest stories as soon as they’re published.

DAKOTA BORDEAUX HAD RARELY traveled outside his home state of Oklahoma before he joined the Navy in February 2017. He’d certainly never seen the ocean.

But only four months later, Bordeaux was standing at the helm of the USS John S. McCain, steering the 8,300-ton destroyer through the western Pacific. Part of the Navy’s famed 7th Fleet, the McCain was responsible for patrolling global hot spots, shadowing Chinese warships in the South China Sea and tracking North Korean missile launches.

It filled the high school graduate with pride.

“Not many people of my age can say, ‘Hey, I just drove a giant-ass battleship,’” said Bordeaux, 23.

To guide the McCain, Bordeaux relied upon a navigation system the Navy considered a triumph of technology and thrift. It featured slick black touch screens to operate the ship’s wheel and propellers. It knit together information from radars and digital maps. It would save money by requiring fewer sailors to safely steer the ship.

Bordeaux felt confident using the system to control the speed and heading of the ship. But there were many things he did not understand about the array of dials, arrows and data that filled the touch screen.

“There was actually a lot of functions on there that I had no clue what on earth they did,” Bordeaux said of the system.

Bordeaux, one of the newest sailors on the ship, was joined in uncertainty by one of the most seasoned, Cmdr. Alfredo Sanchez, captain of the McCain.

A 19-year Navy veteran, Sanchez had watched as technicians replaced the ship’s traditional steering controls a year earlier with the new navigation system. Almost from the start, it caused him headaches. The system constantly indicated problems with steering. They were mostly false alarms, quickly fixed, but by March 2017, Sanchez’s engineers were calling the system “unstable,” with “multiple and cascading failures regularly.”

Sanchez grew to distrust the navigation system, especially for use in delicate operations. He often ordered it to run in backup manual mode, which eliminated some of the automated functions but also created new risks.

In August 2017, Sanchez and his crew steered the ship toward a naval base in Singapore, where technicians were waiting. The navigation system had indicated more than 60 “major steering faults” during the month.

“We were going to have the programmers,” Sanchez said, “give the system a full, a full check, a full clean bill of health.”

The McCain never reached its destination.

 

Categories Technology

Dispelling the Myths of the College Admissions Tests

By dianeravitch
February 10, 2020 //
45

This post was submitted as a comment by a reader who self-identifies as “Democracy”:

There’s little question that the SAT and ACT are marginally “good” at predicting success in college. I’ve made this point here numerous times.

The best predictor of success in college is high school grade point average (including an SAT score doesn’t add much). Moreover, research shows that “the best predictor of both first- and second-year college grades” is unweighted high school grade point average. A high school grade point average “weighted with a full bonus point for AP…is invariably the worst predictor of college performance.”

The College Board, which produces the PSAT, SAT, and Advanced Placement courses and tests, now recommends that schools “implement grade-weighting policies…starting as early as the sixth grade.” Yes, the SIXTH grade! There’s nothing quite like hyping nonsense.

College enrollment specialists say that their research finds the SAT predicts between 3 and 14 percent of freshman-year college grades, and after that nothing. As one commented, “I might as well measure their shoe size.” Matthew Quirk reported this in “The Best Class Money Can Buy:”

“The ACT and the College Board don’t just sell hundreds of thousands of student profiles to schools; they also offer software and consulting services that can be used to set crude wealth and test-score cutoffs, to target or eliminate students before they apply…That students are rejected on the basis of income is one of the most closely held secrets in admissions; enrollment managers say the practice is far more prevalent than most schools let on.”

http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2005/11/the-best-class-money-can-buy/4307/2/

The authors of a study in Ohio found the ACT has minimal predictive power. For example, the ACT composite score predicts about 5 percent of the variance in freshman-year Grade Point Average at Akron University, 10 percent at Bowling Green, 13 percent at Cincinnati, 8 percent at Kent State, 12 percent at Miami of Ohio, 9 percent at Ohio University, 15 percent at Ohio State, 13 percent at Toledo, and 17 percent for all others. Hardly anything to get all excited about.

Here is what the authors say about the ACT in their concluding remarks:

“…why, in the competitive college admissions market, admission officers have not already discovered the shortcomings of the ACT composite score and reduced the weight they put on the Reading and Science components. The answer is not clear. Personal conversations suggest that most admission officers are simply unaware of the difference in predictive validity across the tests. They have trusted ACT Inc. to design a valid exam and never took the time (or had the resources) to analyze the predictive power of its various components. An alternative explanation is that schools have a strong incentive – perhaps due to highly publicized external rankings such as those compiled by U.S. News & World Report, which incorporate students’ entrance exam scores – to admit students with a high ACT composite score, even if this score turns out to be unhelpful.”

The study cited on this thread is from a small (a couple of thousand students) study at the University of Alaska. While some its findings confirm what’s already known about the SAT and ACT, some of its findings suggest that another College Board product — ACCUPLACER — might actually be as good as the College Board says it is.

But it isn’t.

The Community College Research Center at Teachers College, Columbia University has done extensive research on ACCUPLACER (tens of thousands of students), and their research finds that ACCUPLACER has “only a weak relationship with educational performance.” Follow-up research found that the vast majority (71 percent) of students who disregarded low placement test scores to take credit classes rather than remedial ones passed the classes.

Author Nicholas Lemann, the Joseph Pulitzer II and Edith Pulitzer Moore Professor of Journalism and Dean Emeritus at Columbia’s School of Journalism, and whose book The Big Test is all about the SAT, said this about it:

“The test has been, you know, fetishized. This whole culture and frenzy and mythology has been built around SATs. Tests, in general, SATs, in particular…”

Princeton Review founder John Katzman was a bit more blunt:

“The SAT is a scam…It has never measured anything. And it continues to measure nothing. And the whole game is that everybody who does well on it, is so delighted by their good fortune that they don’t want to attack it. And they are the people in charge. Because of course, the way you get to be in charge is by having high test scores. So it’s this terrific kind of rolling scam that every so often, somebody sort of looks and says–well, you know, does it measure intelligence? No. Does it predict college grades? No. Does it tell you how much you learned in high school? No. Does it predict life happiness or life success in any measure? No. It’s measuring nothing.”

The amazing thing – as amazing as the fact that some people still believe Trump – is that some people, including lots of teachers and administrators, not to mention students and parents, still buy into the goofiness.

Categories Education Reform, Testing

New York City Parent: How “Reformers” Rig the Game So They Always Win

By dianeravitch
February 10, 2020 //
30

One of the regular commenters on the blog signs in as NYC Public School Parent.

She wrote the following:

The ed reformers have set up a game with rules in which they always win.

If 100% of students in public schools are meeting standards, then the standards are too low.

If 50% of students in public schools are meeting standards, then the schools are terrible.

If a charter comes in and cherry picks from the 50% of students who meet standards, then the charter is performing miracles because 100% of their students meet standards.

If a public magnet comes in and cherry picks from the 50% of students who meet standards, then the public school is wrongly cherry picking students and look, the 50% who are left are still not meeting standards.

If a charter has 100 students in 9th grade and 4 years later only 60 of them make it to 12th grade, the charter has a 100% graduation rate because all 60 seniors graduate.

If a public school has 100 students in 9th grade and 4 years later has 90 students and “only” 70 of them graduate, the public school is a failure.

The ed reformers could not get away with this if the education reporters at major newspapers did not demonstrate their incompetence every single day when they accept every press release and study put out by ed reformers as the gospel truth. Too many overprivileged education reporters are so terrified of numbers that they cannot even envision that a charter that starts with 100 students in 9th grade and graduates 60 is not performing the miracles in which 100% of their students are high performing scholars. It is beyond their very limited ability to take a deep dive into numbers. These reporters write as if they were simply acting as stenographers for the PR groups. Their stories are as ridiculous as if a medical/science reporter kept reporting: “This brand name cough medicine cures 100% of the children with serious coughs, as proven by this never peer reviewed study which started with 100 children taking this brand name cough medicine in which 50 children disappeared from the study. We know that the number of kids who disappeared from this brand name cough medicine study is irrelevant because the people at the brand name cough medicine company explained to us that all those children who disappeared had parents who – once they saw that their child would be miracle-cured – decided that they would rather see their children suffer.”

Would science reporters simply report that the cough medicine had 100% cure rates because they accepted as gospel that there were large numbers of parents who had enrolled their kids in that study and then decided they’d prefer their child suffer and stop taking this miracle medicine? Would science reporters say “it doesn’t matter if 25% of the kids disappeared, if 50% of the kids disappeared, or if 80% of the kids disappeared from this study because the people running it told me these missing kids’ parents wanted them to suffer with coughs once their kid started experience the miracle of our cure.”

Would science reporters ignore all the parents publicly explaining how their kids were pushed out of these studies? Would science reporters say “we already know from the cough medicine maker that you just wanted your child to suffer from the cough so we are still going to report that this medicine miraculous cures 100% of the kids who take it.” Or would they listen to parents and say “hey, it’s clear something very fishy and corrupt is going on”.

Would a science reporter make that judgement based on the race and class of the children who leave the study, and if their parents are white and middle class, then reporters are skeptical of the cough medicine company’s claims that they want their children to suffer more instead of being cured. But if those parents are African-American, do those science reporters simply accept as gospel what the cough medicine company tells them is true, that those parents prefer to see their children suffer than be cured and that’s the only reason their kids disappeared from the study?

It seems like education reporters don’t feel the need to ask any questions when the kids who disappear are African-American and Latinx with few other resources. They accept as gospel that their parents prefer to see them suffer, and it never occurs to those white education reporters that perhaps their parents are pulling them BECAUSE the charters are making their kids suffer. I have no doubt that those white education reporters would ask a whole lot more questions if all the missing students were white.

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Corporate Reformers, Data, Disruption, Education Industry, Education Reform, Privatization
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