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Julian Vasquez Heilig Schools Jonathan Chait about Charters

By dianeravitch
January 26, 2021 //
21

This post was originally published on January 6. The day turned into a full-scale riot as Trump urged his devoted followers to march on the Capitol. They did, they invaded it, they vandalized it, they went looking for legislators and the Vice-President with murderous intent. We narrowly averted a coup that day, and thank God, none of our legislators were killed, though several of them feared for their lives, and five people (including a Capitol Police officer) died.

Thus, due to the national Insurrection, many people did not get to read this outstanding critique by Heilig.

Julian Vasquez Heilig directly refuted journalist Jonathan Chait on the subject of charters, citing research that is unknown to Chait.

Here is an excerpt from Heilig’s brilliant article:

In this blog I respond to Jonathan Chait’s grossly unfounded opinions in the New York Magazine article entitled Unlearning an Answer with data, peer reviewed research and by highlighting the work of scholars who have conducted extensive research about charter schools. I will also recognize when the predominance of the research supports his opinions.

Political support for Charters is waning among Democrats Chait writes that “political support among Democrats has collapsed.” Chait is right on this point, it’s true political support amongst Democrats has dropped. In a recent meeting I was shown internal polling from the November 2020 election that indicates this fact. I also saw in the same data that Republicans are bigger fans of vouchers than they are of charters. The memory of Betsy DeVos and Donald Trump’s unwavering support for charters will probably have a longstanding and poisonous political legacy for Democratic party support of charter schools. Also, this past year, I met with legislative staffs on the Hill and they relayed that previously increased federal funding for charters was a requirement for Republicans in previous budgets but in recent years they have had other priorities besides charters— such as vouchers.

Charter Schools do not deliver extraordinary results— in fact on average their results are quite limited.Contrary to Chait’s argument, as an academic, I can assuredly tell you that “education researchers” HAVE NOT been shocked by charter schools gains— I think unimpressed is probably a better word. Check out this extensive list of more than 30 National Education Policy Center “top experts” whose peer reviewed research findings are largely contrary to Chait’s grandiose claims about school choice. Also, Chait cited studies produced by The Center for Research on Education Outcomes (CREDO) located at the conservative Hoover Institution. CREDO studies are not blind peer reviewed. But Chait and charter school supporters point to CREDO’s 2015 urban charter study to say that African American and Latino students have more success in charter schools. Leaving aside the methodological integrity of the study for a moment, what Chait and charter proponents don’t mention is that the performance impact is .008 and .05 for Latinos and African Americans in charter schools, respectively. These impact numbers are larger than zero, but you need a magnifying glass or telescope to see them. Contrast that outcome with policies such as pre-K and class size reduction with far more unequivocal measures of success than charter schools— often more than double and triple the impact of charter schools. Also, CREDO doesn’t usually compare schools in their studies. Instead, researchers use statistics to compare a real charter school student to a virtual (imaginary) student based on many students attending a limited subset sample of neighborhood public schools. Considering the limited impact, criticism of CREDO’s methods, and lack of blind peer review— Chait problematically leans on the CREDO as important evidence demonstrating charter school success.

New Orleans is not a charter success story. Chait mentioned New Orleans as a charter success story. Notably, New Orleans charters and Louisiana have been last and nearly in most educational data (NAEP, ACT scores, and Advanced Placement scores, dropout, and graduation). Further, a near majority of charters schools in New Orleans are rated D or F. Does that sound like a success story to you? Where education reformers actually succeeded in New Orleans was in realizing their goal to close NEARLY ALL the neighborhood public schools and replace them with (primarily poorly performing) charters.

Virtual and for-profit charters are performing poorly. Chait is correct when he says, “One variant of the charter-school model — schools operated by for-profit organizations, which account for about 12 percent of the category — tend to do badly. Another kind, “virtual” charters that conduct classes online, are regarded by experts almost uniformly as a scam.” Research using federal data by the Network for Public Education (NPE) will soon show that the national percentage of for-profit charters is actually underestimated nationally by charter school lobbying groups— it is a larger proportion than reported by Chait (stay tuned). For research on the problematic performance of for-profit schools and virtual schools, I recommend you take a look at research by Kevin Welner (University of Colorado) and Gary Miron (Western Michigan University).

Charter school admissions and student retention is not as simple as “lotteries” and “voting with your feet.” Thus, due to widespread access and inclusion issues. Charters are NOT a perfect laboratory for research or— on average— bastions of student success. While students may enter charters via lottery, student attrition is an extensive problem for charter schools. For example, we conducted an analysis of state data and published the work as a peer reviewed study in the Berkeley Review of Education. We found that approximately 40% of Black students left KIPP before graduation and identified a similar problem in other independent and network charters. This is not an unusual finding in peer reviewed research. I asked several nationally known scholars of school choice research to share articles that the public could consider in the debate surrounding charter access and inclusion. You can read that crowd sourced list of research here. The research they cited indicates that charter schools have extensive issues with access and inclusion. 

The Chait talking point that charter schools provide an ideal laboratory for elite studies because of lotteries is not grounded in fact. First, from my experience, charter schools don’t particularly like to be studied by academic researchers. One of my former doctoral students at the University of Texas at Austin sought to study access of special education students to charter schools in Texas. She contacted hundreds of charter schools in Texas and less than ten agreed to participate in her dissertation research. Also, years ago I had agreed to conducted a study to explain extensive African American student attrition at KIPP Austin. KIPP Austin changed their mind once they discovered we planned to publish the study in a peer reviewed journal. Second, Chait points out a policy brief about charters and the achievement gap. It is notable that the review he cited stated at the outset that, “a number of which share a no excuses philosophy, tend to produce the largest gains.” It is well known in the peer reviewed research literature that “no excuses” charters school serially crop and suspend students of color which creates a creamed population of students. Scholars of colors such as Laura Hernández (Learning Policy Institute), Janelle Scott (University of Pennsylvania), Terrenda White (University of Colorado), Kevin Lawrence Henry (University of Wisconsin), Chris Torres (Michigan State University), Joanne Golann (Vanderbilt University), and Chezare Warren (Vanderbilt University) have extensively studied the “carceral” practices, pedagogies & experiences of parents/students of color in no excuses charters (The words of Professor Janelle Scott in this thread on Twitter). A quick Google search of any of these scholars will reveal their important and critical work about charter access and inclusion the incorrect framing of the issue by Chait.

In summary, due to extensive access and inclusion issues, the predominance of the peer reviewed research has demonstrated that charter schools have been problematic for students of color and less importantly are NOT a perfect laboratory for studying student success due to student attrition and exclusion. Furthermore, the proposition that charters can produce dramatic learning gains on average and without expunging students is STILL in serious question in the field of education policy analysis considering the extensively documented access and inclusion issues in the peer reviewed research. Thus, Chait’s arguments on access and equity largely deal in charter school talking points rather than research and data deep dives.

Was school choice created to empower students and families of color or instead derived from other ideological goals? Writing in the 1960s, the libertarian economist Milton Friedman, followed by John Chubb and Terry Moe in the 1990s, argued for a profit-based education system where resources are controlled by private entities rather than by democratically elected governments. They recommended a system of public education built around parent-student choice, school competition, and school autonomy as a solution to what they saw as the problem of direct democratic control of public schools.

According to Chait concern about charter schools is primarily from “white liberals.” Actually, there is a long-term history of opposition from communities of color to private-management of public resources and charters schools. NAACP co-founder W.E.B. Du Bois, in his essay Negroes and the Crisis of Capitalism in the U.S., extolled the virtues of collaborative social and government action. He railed against the role of businesses and corporate control that “usurp government” and made the “throttling of democracy and distortion of education and failure of justice widespread.” Martin Luther King Jr. argued that we often have socialism in public policy for the rich and rugged free market capitalism for the poor. Du Bois and King would have recognized the current pattern we see— charters (on average more segregated than nearby neighborhood schools) located primarily in urban and poor areas rather than wealthy suburban enclaves. Conservative think tanks and other neoliberal proponents pressing for market-based school choice in the name of “civil rights” ignore this history of African American civil rights leaders advocating for collaborative, democratic systems of social support and distrusting “free market” policies. Furthermore, the NAACP has for years been consistent in its critique of charters schools. At the 2010 convention, the NAACP national board and members supported a national anti-charter resolution saying that state charter schools create “separate and unequal conditions.” More recently, in 2014, the NAACP connected school choice with the private control of public education in a national resolution. A 2016 national resolution, voted on by more than 2,000 NAACP delegates from across the nation, called for a charter school moratorium based on a variety of civil rights-based critiques such as a lack of accountability, increased segregation, and disparate punitive and exclusionary discipline for African Americans.

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Education Industry, Hoax

Why the District of Columbia Should Gain Statehood

By dianeravitch
January 26, 2021 //
19

Chris Myers Asch grew up in D.C. His mother still lives there. He now lives in Maine and he urges his senators in Maine to support statehood for D.C. In this column, published in the Maine Press Herald, he explains why the District should gain statehood and why the residents of the District should have the right to vote. Asch teaches at Colby College and is the author of Chocolate City: A History of Race and Democracy in the Nation’s Capitol.

He writes:

My mom is an amazing American. The only child of a Census Bureau statistician and a Jewish social scientist (who fled her native Germany because of the Nazis), she was born and raised in the nation’s capital. She had two children while attending medical school and another (me!) in Laos, where she practiced medicine as my father served in Vietnam. She worked in pediatrics and later in a drug clinic, then spent the last 15 years of her career caring for veterans at Walter Reed Army Medical Center. She has lived an extraordinary life of service.

But she can’t vote.

My mom and over 700,000 American citizens – 32,000 of whom are veterans – have no voting representatives or senators in Congress because they happen to live in Washington, D.C. That’s right. The people who reside in the capital of the world’s foremost democracy do not actually get to participate fully in that democracy. They can vote for president, but in Congress all they have are a “Non-Voting Delegate” and a “Shadow Senator,” neither of whom has full voting rights...

The power to create new states rests entirely with Congress. Last summer, with support from Reps. Chellie Pingree and Jared Golden, the House of Representatives voted 232-180 to turn D.C. into a state, the first D.C. statehood bill ever to pass a house of Congress. The bill is scheduled to be introduced in the Senate on Friday, and we need both Sens. Angus King and Susan Collins to get on board as well.

Some critics say D.C. is too small too have statehood, but it has a larger population than Maine or Wyoming. Furthermore, the people of D.C. pay more taxes than the people of 22 states.

It is time. The District of Columbia should become a state, with representation in Congress.

Categories Democracy, District of Columbia

Study: Weakening Unions Increases Gender Gap in Wages

By dianeravitch
January 26, 2021 //
16

Barbara Biasi, assistant professor of economics at the Yale School of Management, recently published a study that concluded that eliminating unions increases the gender gap in wages.

She looked at data from Wisconsin, before and after Scott Walker eliminated collective bargaining rights in 2011, in his Koch-funded effort to destroy unions.

For every dollar earned by men in the U.S., women earn about 82 cents, according to 2018 census data; this pay gap is even larger for Black and Hispanic women.  Some public schools have avoided the gender wage gap because they follow a strict salary schedule, in which each teacher’s pay is determined based on objective factors such as seniority and academic degrees. But what happens when schools switch to a more flexible pay system?

Barbara Biasi, an assistant professor of economics at Yale SOM, had an opportunity to examine this question when Wisconsin passed Act 10, legislation that essentially weakened the power of teachers’ unions. Afterward, schools had much more latitude in deciding how much to pay teachers.

Five years after union agreements expired, male teachers earned about 1% more per year than female colleagues with similar experience and skills, reported Biasi and her co-author, Heather Sarsons at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business. The gender gap was even higher among younger teachers.

While 1% might not seem like much, such a gap can substantially affect income in the long run, Biasi says. It “can add up pretty quickly over the course of a person’s career,” she says.

The results suggest that women may start earning less than men when they have to bargain on their own, rather than being supported by a union that negotiates for them. This effect could be seen in many industries as union membership shrinks. “The decline of union power might have an increase in the gender gap in pay as one of the unintended consequences,” Biasi says.

Categories Teachers, Unions, Walker, Scott, Wisconsin

Breaking News! New York State Asks Feds for Testing Waiver for This Spring!

By dianeravitch
January 25, 2021 //
6

New York State education officials have agreed to request a waiver from the Secretary of Education from federally mandated testing this spring, due to the pandemic. State officials recognize that the pandemic has caused gross inequities in opportunity to learn and would serve no useful purpose. (Under normal circumstances the federally required tests serve no useful purpose, but they are a terrible burden this year, in addition to being worthless.)

The federal response may be delayed since the Senate is moving slowly to confirm President Biden’s Cabinet appointments.

Every state should seek a waiver. Students have been subject to trauma and daily disruption. Now is not the time to focus on test scores. It’s time to give students the social, emotional, and academic support they need. The most avid proponents of resuming standardized testing have never been teachers.

Categories Accountability, Education Reform, Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA), Federal Waiver, Hoax, NCLB (No Child Left Behind), New York, Race to the Top, Standardized Testing

Emiliana Dore: Charter Schools Are Not the Answer!

By dianeravitch
January 25, 2021 //
15

Emiliana Dore wrote a powerful article at Medium about the importance of public schools and why charter schools do not promote racial or social justice. Her article was posted by Carl J. Petersen, a valiant fighter for public schools in Los Angeles.

Dore, a public school parent and advocate, wrote in response to an article at The 74 contending that charter schools were models for teaching kindness and anti-racism. Dore strongly disagreed.

In response, she wrote:

I agree with Ms. Nurick that kindness, caring and an awareness of diversity are very important qualities to teach in our schools. I also believe that we should be doing more to integrate our schools and communities. But demonizing our public schools and creating carefully curated charter schools that cater to a few select students is not the way to nurture future social justice leaders. We have a long way to go before we reach an equitable education system in this country, but charter schools are not the answer.

Dore cited the ample evidence of embezzlement and self-dealing in the charter industry and the instability of charter schools, which open and close at a dizzying rate.

Yet, despite these clear bad faith players in the charter industry, charter advocates fought tooth and nail against all of the charter accountability bills. If you really want to create schools that foster greater equity, why fight against transparency and accountability? In memos uncovered via a recent public records request, two charter advocacy groups, Los Angeles Advocacy Council (LAAC) and California Charter School Association (CCSA), gleefully celebrated their role working with pro-charter school board members to remove the Office of the LAUSD Inspector General’s (OIG) oversight of charter schools. The memo claims that this “should be seen as a major win by and for the charter community.” It may be a win for the “charter community”, but it is not a win for the BIPOC [black, indigenous, and people of color] and low-income communities that are so often targeted by questionable charters.

Both the NAACP and Black Lives Matter conducted studies about the impact of charter schools on BIPOC communities. The hope was that charter schools might be the silver bullet that they promise to be. Instead, the studies concluded that while some BIPOC families do benefit from charter schools, on the whole, charter schools do not outperform public schools, and they are causing a great deal of harm to minority and low-income neighborhoods. The NAACP study also found that charter schools were causing our schools to be more segregated. The Students Deserve group here in Los Angeles has also called for our leaders to invest in public schools and stop charter expansion. When will our local leaders start to listen?..

The problems with charters extend beyond politics. Due to the ill-conceived Prop 39, charter schools like Citizens of the World can co-locate on public school campuses. In theory, two small schools sharing space on one campus might not sound so bad, but when all of the advantages are on the charter side, it becomes a much more questionable practice. Prop 39 requires the district to provide charter schools with a list of schools that have available space. By law, that means any part of a school that isn’t actively used as a classroom is up for grabs — computer labs, gardens built by the community, after school enrichment programs — can all be taken away from local public school kids to make way for a charter. Public school families have zero say in this process. Even worse, co-location requests are based on prospective charter school enrollment. Many charters have been caught posting on local parent boards asking parents to sign up for their school, even if they do not intend to enroll. This practice of inflating enrollment means that imaginary charter school kids can take away space from actual public school kids. Charter schools are supposed to pay an over-allocation penalty for space they take from public schools but do not use. Within the LAUSD many charters are woefully behind on payments with one charter school openly scoffing at the idea of paying funds that it legally owes to the LAUSD...

My big hope is that we can start working together to make education better for all of the kids in our neighborhoods — not just the lucky few who are selected by lottery. To my fellow white parents, especially, please consider sending your child to a local public school. Ignore Great Schools, which was founded with charter money specifically to seed doubt in our local neighborhood schools. Join the Integrated Schools community and listen to podcasts like Nice White Parents or Season 2 of The Promise. Instead of creating our own schools, imagine if we pooled all of our resources and worked hard together to support and strengthen our neighborhood schools. Imagine providing exceptional learning opportunities for every single child.

Charter proponents have long pushed a narrative about our public schools failing, but maybe we need to reframe that discussion and realize that we are the ones who are failing our public schools. We have been shamefully underfunding them for years — especially here in California where we spend close to $8,500 less annually per student than New York City. I am encouraged that President-elect Biden has committed to reigning in charter failure and fraud, and has appointed public school educator Miguel Cardona as Secretary of Education. If we truly want to build an education system that works for everyone, the answer is not privately run charter schools. The only true solution is fully-funded, equitable public education.

Categories Charter Schools, Education Industry, Los Angeles, Supporting public schools

Arthur Camins: Time for Democrats to Divorce the “Bipartisan” Education Policy Agenda

By dianeravitch
January 25, 2021 //
33

Arthur Camins calls on the Democratic Party to divorce the “bipartisan” education policy agenda that has been in place for the past four decades. This is the agenda of competition, testing, accountability, and choice. It actually was the Republican policy agenda first, and the Democrats decided to embrace it. What did the Democrats give up when they endorsed the Republican education agenda? Democrats in Congress used to oppose testing and accountability; they used to advocate for equity, funding, and teacher professionalism. But, as I have written over my past three books, Democrats slowly gave up a winning and relevant hand and slipped into the Republicans’ tough stance towards students, teachers, and public schools. How has that worked out? Not so well. The trend lines on the National Assessment of Educational Progress have been completely flat for the past ten years. The scores of the bottom 10 percent have actually declined. Test prep can lift scores just so much, then they go flat.

Camins writes:

It is time for Democrats to file for a divorce from a four-decade bipartisan education policy marriage.  The case is clearer now than ever. There are irreconcilable differences. A marriage with one partner committed to competition as an improvement driver and the other to equity and democracy is an inevitable failure. A partnership in which one party prioritizes tax cuts and deregulation for the wealthy and the other quality education for everyone results in abuse of the least powerful partner. A record of persistent child abuse makes a complete separation a necessity.  

Democrats: If not for your own moral integrity, do it for the kids.

To see evidence of that unfortunate marriage of Democrats and Republicans, read the articles co-authored by Arne Duncan (Obama’s Secretary of Education) and Margaret Spellings (George W. Bush’s Secretary of Education). Here is one of the best examples:

We have long benefited from a broad coalition that has advanced bold action to improve America’s education system.

That coalition has waned. It’s time to rebuild it.

Today, education is blessed with bipartisan agreement on what works, and cursed with bipartisan complacency at every level on taking action.

As Arthur Camins knows, that “bipartisan agreement on what works” has been a disaster: testing, charter schools, evaluation of teachers by test scores, closing schools with low scores, competition, threats.

Categories Education Reform

John Thompson: A Hilarious Novel about Life in the Classroom Today

By dianeravitch
January 25, 2021 //
8

Who knew that “adequate yearly progress” and “accountability” could be the subject of a comic novel? John Thompson just read that novel and he reviews it here.

Roxanna Elden’s Adequate Yearly Progress is a hilarious, satirical novel that nails the very serious truths about the real world effects of corporate school reform. Although Elden’s humor spectacularly illuminates the reformers’ often-absurd mindsets, she also reveals the good, bad, and the ugly of a diverse range of human beings.

Adequate Yearly Progress begins with Lena, a young, black, literature teacher returning to school at Brae Hill Valley High School in a high-challenge Texas neighborhood. The way she is greeted starts to reveal some of the flaws of the complex people who teach there. A colleague asked, “Don’t you read the news? Miss Phil-a-delphia?” She thus assumed that Lena comes from a city where everyone is in a hurry and no one attends church.

The news is that Nick Wallabee, a political celebrity without real-world experience in classrooms, but who had written a book on “easy fixes” to schools, has been hired as the district’s superintendent. Any discussion about Wallabee was likely to become a “morale-draining gripe session.”

The Wallabee administration starts by introducing a new accountability metric, the “Believer Score.” Stressing the positive, the administrator said the measure will “let you gain points by proving you believe all children can learn.” Teachers need to “just be ready to show that you fully embrace any new initiatives.”

The announcements caused “collective grumbling,” but hope was raised by the school’s principal, Dr. Barrios. He was known as “the superintendent whisperer,” who had always been able to buffer teachers from the ill-conceived quick fixes that are routinely dumped on schools.

Wallabee was a new type of micromanager, and even Barrios was unable to temper his new boss’ hubris. Wallabee asserted, “I know there are adults (spitting out the word adults) … who take issue with being held accountable.” He proclaimed the willingness to break eggs to make an omelette, and it became clear that Brae Hill Valley HS and Barrios were targeted.

The school was turned into a “Believers Make Achievers Zone.” A series of “three-ring binders, the highest level of the organizational hierarchy” would guide the process. Brae Hill Valley became a “Curriculum Standard of the Day Achievement Zone.” Teachers were given the first of a series of orders, and each Curriculum Standard of the Day must be written in its entirety on the board each day.

The next interventions were the “fearsome Office for Oversight of Binders and Evidence of Implementation,” the “Pre-Holiday Cross-Departmental Midyear Assessment Data Chart” (PHCDMADC), and the “Cross-Disciplinary Compare-And-Contrast Holiday Review Packet,” as well as worksheets to identify what students don’t know in order to fortify instruction. A non-educator, Daren Grant of “Transformational Change Advocacy ConsultingPartners,” then distributed the folder, “Research-Based Best Practices That Work,” and made surprise visits to classrooms, as well as the football team’s locker room during halftime.

Two of those visits foreshadow climactic outcomes.  Hernan Hernandez was perhaps the school’s best teacher, even though he refused to join the teachers union. A student who was exited from the “Demographics Don’t Determine Destiny” or Destiny Charter School arrived unexpectedly, and disrupted Hernan’s class. This happened as Daren, the consultant, dropped in.

Second, in perhaps the only type of activity in the novel which I had never witnessed in schools, he spoke to Coach Ray and his players, using the same data-driven vocabulary and reality-free exhortations in the middle of a game, as Coach Ray was exhorting the team to put on their “inner game face.”  (I would have loved to witness such a scene.) It foreshadowed a positive outcome that offset the sad result of the consultant’s dropping-in to Hernan’s class.

Coach Ray, brought much of the negative baggage of his family in Huntsville, the infamous prison’s town, to coaching, but he had another side that made him the story’s silent hero.

Also foreshadowing a crucial realization at the end of the novel, Lena seemed to have mixed but mostly negative feelings about a scene with white people clapping off-key and rapping a poem with the line “I got ninety-nine problems , but a b____ ain’t one of them”

A young Teacher Corp history teacher, Kaytee, was understandably outraged by her mentor who offered the “QUIT” or “Quit Taking It Personally” advice. Even though I don’t think I’ve ever worked with a veteran teacher who didn’t oppose the data-driven accountability systems that were imposed by non-educators, Kayte would be right to resent the response of some of her colleagues to those metrics. They called for the “neck-tattoo statistic.” Students who wear those tattoos can’t be expected to meet outcome metrics as well as poor children of color who don’t wear them.

Then, Wallabee sought to ramp up the types of teaching methods that Kaytee was taught in her Teacher Corp classroom management principle professional development class. The consultant said, “I’d like to start by having everyone in here physically unpack their preconceptions and assumptions and put them in the assumption box.” Her call to “raise the roof!” was followed by pressed palms reaching up to imaginary roof beams.

Kaytee seemed destined to rise in the reformers’ world after her blog post went viral when it was endorsed by the filmmaker of Show Me You Care and I’ll Show You My Homework. That anti-teacher film was followed by How the Status Quo Stole Christmas, which, of course meant How Teachers Stole Christmas.  That foreshadowed the possibility of a different education film genre, The Mystery History Teacher.

Reality started to set in, for instance, after Kaytee’s effort to teach a culturally relevant lesson was undermined by the technology which was supposed to drive “transformational” change. Her video of Cesar Chavez “Fighting for Improved Hand Job Conditions” was blocked by the online autocorrect censor. Much worse, after being assaulted by a student and no disciplinary consequences were contemplated, she started having second thoughts about whether simplistic memes could really help students. 

Eventually, Kaytee found herself drafting a letter to a law school admissions office. She knew the best pitch would be something like how she had learned to “lead from the classroom and scale up her macro impact for low-income students.” But she wanted to write, “Dear Admissions Committee, I want to go to law school because I will do anything in this world to get out of being a teacher.”

As the “Crunch Time” which always proceeds high-stakes testing approached, even more test prep was mandated. During a faculty meeting, angry teachers asked whether the principal was “trying to tell us to teach nothing but test-taking skills?” Principal Barrios replied with the standard answer, “I don’t think that’s exactly what I said.” He thus stirred an “amiable laugh,” while exemplifying the culture of compliance that traditional teachers resent, and corporate reformers tried to exorcise. (To complicate things, those on all sides of the teacher wars complained that the principal hadn’t fired an obvious incompetent.  However, nobody else knew that Barrios was reluctant to fire the teacher in his late 6os because he  had cancer.)

As the year ended, reformers focused on the need to terminate teachers based on their “Believer Scores.” Because of their relationship with Global Schoolhouse’s test creation division, an administrator seeking to replace Barrios felt free to let favored teachers with high “Believer Scores” preview sample test questions, so that the two accountability metrics would line up with each other.

A scandal then leads reformers to shift gears and invest in a new virtual school charter network startup.

Another result was a great teacher was “selected out of the classroom.” On the other hand, these experiences help inform Lena’s growing enlightenment, inspiring the line in her poem, “Tapping their feet, shifting and creaking the seats, struggling students with ninety nine problems apiece.”

In a brilliant ending, that I don’t want to reveal too much about but which spoofs another test question meme, Elden asks, “What would an additional scene at the end of this story most likely be?”

Will an anxious principal be looking at the test scores, or will the new Global Schoolhouse School Choice Solutions be started? Will filmmakers shift from themes that demonize teachers, or will there be a happy ending for an excellent, unfairly fired teacher?

Or will the answer be, “All of the above.”

Categories Accountability, Corporate Reform, Corporate Reformers, Data, Education Reform, Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA), NCLB (No Child Left Behind), Race to the Top, Standardized Testing

Dr. Bandy X. Lee and the “Goldwater Rule”

By dianeravitch
January 25, 2021 //
32

In the past four years, we have often been warned that we must not try to decipher Trump’s mental state because it would violate the American Psychiatric Association’s “Goldwater Rule.” This is a rule that was adopted in 1973, as an ethical warning to its members that they should not attempt to define the psychiatric state of a patient that they have not personally evaluated. This rule came about because a magazine called FACT polled psychiatrists in 1964 about whether Barry Goldwater was fit to be president. He lost the election but sued the magazine and won. This article explains the genesis of the rule, written by a psychiatrist who was on the panel that adopted it (although he opposed the rule because it infringed on freedom of speech).

Not all psychiatrists agreed with the Goldwater rule, especially when Donald Trump emerged as a candidate for president. One psychiatrist, Dr. Bandy Lee at the Yale School of Medicine, spoke out against it and organized a collection of essays called The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump.

The Yale Daily News published a profile of Dr. Lee here, written in May 2020.

Although she considers herself apolitical, she became increasingly alarmed by the behavior and statements of Donald Trump as a candidate. Dr. Lee is a specialist in the area of violent behavior, and she saw in his actions the dangers ahead.

Since the 2016 election, Lee has spearheaded a movement to shed light on what she believes is the dangerous mental condition of the president. She has organized a coalition of mental health experts similarly concerned with the president’s mental state, and in October 2017, she published “The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump,” a book of essays by numerous mental health professionals assessing the president’s mental aptitude. Last December, as the presidential impeachment proceedings came to a head, Congress received a petition led by Lee and two other mental health professionals. The statement accompanying the petition claimed that the president’s mental fitness was rapidly declining. In the petition signed by 350 other health professionals, the trio wrote that the president had the “real potential to become ever more dangerous, a threat to the safety of our nation.”

After the publication of her book, Dr. Lee received numerous death threats.

We now know that Dr. Bandy Lee was prescient. From afar, she diagnosed Trump as a “threat to the safety of our nation.” We now know that he incited an insurrection and encouraged his supporters to march on the U.S. Capitol to try to stop the certification of Joe Biden’s electoral victory. He imagined, somehow, that if they stormed the building and took hostages, Congress would meekly reverse the election results. This is delusional thinking.

Fortunately he has returned to private life, and we can only hope that officials in New York City and New York State act promptly to hold him accountable for his crimes, as we hope that the U.S. Senate will hold him accountable for his reckless and unprecedented effort to violently overthrow the certification of the Electoral College votes.

He is a traitor.

Dr. Bandy Lee saw it first. She is a hero. She is courageous. She is a truth-teller.

Categories Character, Democracy, Trump

Donald Trump: America’s Liar-in-Chief

By dianeravitch
January 24, 2021 //
52

The Washington Post fact-checkers have kept a meticulous record of Donald Trump’s lies, and there were so many of them that it became a nearly full-time job. Every time he spoke at a rally, the lies came tumbling out. Trump made more than 30,000 false or misleading statements, nearly half of them in his last year in office. The biggest lie, of course, was his claim that he won the election, which was denied to him because of massive voter fraud. His lawyers never produced evidence of voter fraud in any court, and they lost 60 court cases, appearing before judges appointed by both Republicans and Democrats. The U.S. Supreme Court twice refused to accept the Trump campaign’s claims of voter fraud; not even the three Justices appointed by Trump–Gorsuch, Kavanaugh, and Barrett– supported his claims. It is easy to claim “fraud” on television, but actual courts expect evidence, and Trump’s lawyers never had any evidence.

Glenn Kessler, the lead fact-checker, wrote about Trump’s lies:

He overstated the “carnage” he was inheriting, then later exaggerated his “massive” crowd and claimed, despite clear evidence to the contrary, that it had not rained during his address. He repeated the rain claim the next day, along with the fabricated notion that he held the “all-time record” for appearing on the cover of Time magazine.

And so it went, day after day, week after week, claim after claim, from the most mundane of topics to the most pressing issues.

Over time, Trump unleashed his falsehoods with increasing frequency and ferocity, often by the scores in a single campaign speech or tweetstorm. What began as a relative trickle of misrepresentations, including 10 on his first day and five on the second, built into a torrent through Trump’s final days as he frenetically spread wild theories that the coronavirus pandemic would disappear “like a miracle” and that the presidential election had been stolen — the claim that inspired Trump supporters to attack Congress on Jan. 6 and prompted his second impeachment.

The final tally of Trump’s presidency: 30,573 false or misleading claims — with nearly half coming in his final year.

Read and search the full database of Trump’s false or misleading claims

For more than 10 years, The Fact Checker has assessed the accuracy of claims made by politicians in both parties, and that practice will continue. But Trump, with his unusually flagrant disregard for facts, posed a new challenge, as so many of his claims did not merit full-fledged fact checks. What started as a weekly feature — “What Trump got wrong on Twitter this week” — turned into a project for Trump’s first 100 days.  Then, in response to reader requests, the Trump database was maintained for four years, despite the increasing burden of keeping it up.

The database became an untruth tracker for the ages, widely cited around the world as a measuring stick of Trump’s presidency — and as of noon Wednesday it was officially retired…

An assessment of the Fact Checker database shows the dramatic escalation in the rate of Trump’s dishonesty over time. Trump averaged about six claims a day in his first year as president, 16 claims day in his second year, 22 claims day in his third year — and 39 claims a day in his final year. Put another way, it took him 27 months to reach 10,000 claims and another 14 months to reach 20,000. He then exceeded the 30,000 mark less than five months later.

Scroll a visual timeline of the false claims Trump made during his time in office

Trump made false claims about just about everything, big and small, so the Fact Checker database provides a window into his obsessions (and the news cycle) at the time. When he felt under siege or in trouble, he responded by trying to craft an alternative reality for his supporters — and to viciously attack his foes. Nearly half of the false claims were communicated at his campaign rallies or via his now-suspended Twitter account...

After his election defeat, Trump spoke or tweeted about little except to offer lies about a stolen election, even as he or his supporters lost more than 60 court cases as judges repeatedly rejected his claims as bogus. After Nov. 3, he made more than 800 false or misleading claims about election fraud, including 76 times offering some variation of “rigged election.”

At his Jan. 6 speech at the Ellipse, in which he incited the attack on the Capitol, Trump made 107 false or misleading claims, almost all about the election.

The aftermath of what Biden and other Democrats now call the “big lie” hovers over Washington as both parties figure out whether there can be a return to a shared set of facts undergirding national debate, or whether one of the major political parties will remain captive to the sorts of conspiracy theories that marked so many of Trump’s final year of claims.

Our democracy is in deep trouble when we can’t agree on basic facts about the world around us.

Categories Education Reform

Ann Cronin: Miguel Cardona, What Is Your Vision for American Education?

By dianeravitch
January 24, 2021 //
15

Ann P. Cronin is a former Connecticut Distinguished English Teacher of the Year, a school district administrator, and creator of award-winning programs for the teaching of English in middle schools and high schools. At her blog, she asks about Miguel Cardona’s vision for the future.

She writes:

When I ask Connecticut teachers about Miguel Cardona, those who know him or have worked with him say that he is really nice guy who knows what the challenges in our classrooms are, knows how to help teachers to improve their teaching, and respects public schools. All good.

The majority of Connecticut teachers who don’t know him personally say that he has been largely quiet as Commissioner and are critical that he seems more interested in keeping schools open than in caring about public health, including the welfare of teachers, students and students’ families during the pandemic. 

But what is his vision for teaching and learning that he will bring to the U.S. Department of Education? When appointed Commissioner of Education in Connecticut 19 months ago, he stated that his goals would be to:

  1. Make a positive impact on graduation rates.
  2. Close the achievement gap.
  3. Ensure that all students have increased access to opportunities and advantages that they need to succeed in life.

It is reasonable to assume that the goals he had for Connecticut 19 months ago will be goals that he will now bring to the country. Those goals, however, are “old hat” and don’t have a record of being successfully accomplished.

The goals themselves are worthy ones, but they need a new interpretation which would give rise to a dramatically new vision and radical new actions. The questions are: What would that new vision and new actions look like? And is Dr. Cardona open to that vision and those actions?

Cronin points out that it easy to “raise the graduation rate,” as many districts now do, by offering “credit retrieval” or “credit recovery” courses, a quick computer course that involves minimal learning but provides credits. The goal ought to be, she says, not raising the graduation rate but something like the graduating of well-educated high school students. Currently, graduation rates make good headlines but can mean very little in terms of student learning.

Charter schools have mastered the trick of raising graduation rates by pushing out students who are unlikely to graduate on time.

She asks for something more: a genuine vision that involves improving the quality of education, not improving the data.

How refreshing!

Categories Cardona, Miguel, Connecticut, Data, Education Reform, Graduation rates, Real Education
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