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The Philadelphia Story

By dianeravitch
May 26, 2012 //
2

These days, U.S. education is beginning to look like a slow-motion train wreck. In some places, it is fast motion, not slow motion.

One of the places where the train seems to be speeding rapidly towards a wreck is Philadelphia. The wreck will

There, the schools have been under state control for a decade, and the state legislature has underfunded the public schools to the extent possible, even though (or because) the school system has a large proportion of poor black and Hispanic students.

The city leaders, in their wisdom (or lack thereof), brought in one of those ubiquitous management consulting firms, Boston Consulting Group, to devise a “turnaround” plan for the public schools. Of course, this is treating public schools as if they were just any old business, selling auto parts or paper products, which they are not. Public education is not a product; it is not even a service. It is an essential part of our social fabric, a democratic institution that must be preserved and strengthened.

Business consultants don’t understand this. They look at public schools, and they don’t see teachers and children. They see an investment opportunity. They see a cash flow. They make calculations about return on investment. They see a deficit, and they think bankruptcy, reorganization, sell off the healthy parts, and kill the weak ones.

When you bring in business consultants, you can count on them to recommend that the “business” should be downsized and right-sized. It should be privatized. That’s the way they think. When you have a superintendent who was trained by the Broad Superintendents’ Academy, you can expect to get the same perspective.

The irony in Philadelphia is that the district tried privatization on a large scale a decade ago and it failed. The district has a sizable number of charters, a number of which are under investigation for corruption and financial malfeasance.

I guess the moral of the story is: If at first you fail, do the same thing over and over and over until public education has been completely eliminated.

I just came across this excellent summary of privatization in Philadelphia, which contains excellent links to sources: http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/2012/05/2012521114853681761.html

The article says: “As in other cities, public money was extensively abused in real estate profiteering schemes, as charter school operators used schools as tenants, paying money to themselves to rent their own property. In one particularly classy instance, the charter operator was running a private parking lot on school property. Exorbitant salaries were common for the charter school operators, and some implausibly held fully salaried jobs in multiple schools, billing the city for more than 365 days in a year.”

This is what Philadelphia’s leaders want more of.

And for anyone wanting another story about the dismantling of public education in Philadelphia:

http://www.citypaper.net/cover_story/2012-05-03-whos-killing-philly-public-schools.html?viewAll=y

I cited this story before. It deserves to be cited whenever the Philadelphia situation is up for discussion.

Diane

Categories Boston Consulting Group, Broad Foundation, Philadelphia

What is NCTQ?

By dianeravitch
May 23, 2012 //
16

Several  months ago, U.S. News & World Report announced that it planned to rank the nation’s schools of education and that it would do so with the assistance of the National Council on Teacher Quality (NCTQ).

Since then, many institutions announced that they would not collaborate. Some felt that they had already been evaluated by other accrediting institutions like NCATE or TEAC; others objected to NCTQ’s methodology. As the debate raged, NCTQ told the dissenters that they would be rated whether they agreed or not, and if they didn’t cooperate, they would get a zero. The latest information that I have seen is that the ratings will appear this fall.

To its credit, NCTQ posted on its website the letters of the college presidents and deans who refused to be rated by NCTQ. They make for interesting reading, as it is always surprising (at least to me) to see the leaders of big institutions take a stand on issues.

U.S. News defended the project, saying that it had been endorsed by leading educators. The specific endorsement to which it referred came from Chiefs for Change, the conservative state superintendents associated with former Governor Jeb Bush. This article, by the way, has good links to NCTQ’s website, describing the project and its methods. Two of the conservative Chiefs for Change are on NCTQ’s technical advisory panel.

Just this week, NCTQ released a new report about how teachers’ colleges prepare students for assessment responsibilities. The theme of this report is that “data-driven instruction” is the key to success in education. The best districts are those that are “obsessive about using data to drive instruction.” The Broad Prize is taken as the acme of academic excellence in urban education because it focuses on data, data, data. The report acknowledges that the data it prizes in this report is “data derived from student assessments–ranging from classwork practice to state tests–to improve instruction.”

Data-driven decision making is now a national priority, it says, thanks to U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, who required states “to improve their data systems and create high-quality assessments” if they wanted a crack at his $5 billion Race to the Top.

Unfortunately despite a massive investment in data collection by states and the federal government, the report says, teachers don’t value data enough. Reference is made to the report sponsored by Gates and Scholastic, which found that most teachers do not value the state tests. I wrote about that report here. How in the world can our nation drive instruction with data if the teachers hold data in such low regard?

The balance of the report reviews teacher training institutions by reviewing their course syllabi. The goal is to judge whether the institutions are preparing future teachers to be obsessed with data.

Now, to be candid, I am fed up with our nation’s obsession with data-driven instruction, so I don’t share the premises of the report. The authors of this report have more respect for standardized tests than I do. I fear that they are pushing data-worship and data-mania of a sort that will cause teaching to the test, narrowing of the curriculum, and other negative behaviors (like cheating). I don’t think any of this will lead to the improvement of education. It might promote higher test scores, but it will undermine genuine education. By genuine education, I refer to a love of learning, a readiness to immerse oneself in study of a subject, an engagement with ideas, a willingness to ask questions and to take risks. I don’t know how to assess the qualities I value, but I feel certain that there is no standardized, data-driven instruction that will produce what I respect.

And then there is the question that is the title of this blog: What is NCTQ?

NCTQ was created by the Thomas B. Fordham Foundation in 2000. I was on the board of TBF at the time. Conservatives, and I was one, did not like teacher training institutions. We thought they were too touchy-feely, too concerned about self-esteem and social justice and not concerned enough with basic skills and academics. In 1997, we had commissioned a Public Agenda study called “Different Drummers”; this study chided professors of education because they didn’t care much about discipline and safety and were more concerned with how children learn rather than what they learned. TBF established NCTQ as a new entity to promote alternative certification and to break the power of the hated ed schools.

For a time, it was not clear how this fledgling organization would make waves or if it would survive. But in late 2001, Secretary of Education Rod Paige gave NCTQ a grant of $5 million to start a national teacher certification program called the American Board for Certification of Teacher Excellence (see p. 16 of the link). ABCTE has since become an online teacher preparation program, where someone can become a teacher for $1995.00.

Today, NCTQ is the partner of U.S. News & World Report and will rank the nation’s schools of education. It received funding from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation to review teacher quality in Los Angeles. It is now often cited as the nation’s leading authority on teacher quality issues. Its report has a star-studded technical advisory committee of corporate reform leaders like Joel Klein and Michelle Rhee.

And I was there at the creation.

An hour after this blog was published, a reader told me that NCTQ was cited as one of the organizations that received funding from the Bush administration to get positive media attention for NCLB. I checked his sources, which took me to a 2005 report of the Inspector General of the U.S. Department of Education (a link in this article leads to the Inspector General report), and he was right. This practice was suspended because the U.S. Department of Education is not allowed to expend funds for propaganda, and the grantees are required to make full disclosure of their funding. At the time, the media focused on payments to commentator Armstrong Williams. According to the investigation, NCTQ and another organization received a grant of $677,318 to promote NCLB. The product of this grant was three op-eds written by Kate Walsh, the head of NCTQ; the funding of these articles by the Department of Education was not disclosed.

Diane

Categories Broad Foundation, Chiefs for Change, Duncan, Arne, Gates Foundation, Bill Gates, Klein, Joel, National Council on Teacher Quality (NCTQ), Rhee, Michelle

Corporate Reformers Love Lofty Goals

By dianeravitch
May 21, 2012 //
12

One of the favorite tactics of corporate reformers is to set lofty goals.

We have learned over the past twenty years that you can’t have reform without goals.

I remember back when No Child Left Behind was passed, and it included the goal (mandate, actually) that all students in grades 3-8 would be proficient by the year 2014. (By the way, if anyone wonders, I was not an architect of NCLB. I wasn’t involved at any point in writing it. That distinction goes to Sandy Kress, Margaret Spellings, Education Trust, and maybe even Rod Paige, who was Secretary of Education.)

I remember the six  national goals set in 1990 by the nation’s governors and the George W. Bush administration. Goal one was, “By the year 2000, all children in America will start school ready to learn.” There was also, “By the year 2000, United States students will be first in the world in mathematics and science achievement.” The Clinton administration added two more national goals I don’t think any of the national goals were met, but there were no punishments attached to them so they quietly disappeared.

With NCLB, everything changed. Suddenly, there were real consequences attached to not meeting a goal (100% proficiency) that no nation in the world had ever reached.

Schools that persistently failed to make “adequate yearly progress” would eventually be closed or turned over to a private management company or turned into a charter (same difference) or taken over by the state or staff would be fired. At the time, none of these sanctions had any evidence behind them. They still don’t. No state had ever taken over a school and made it a better school. Charters had almost no record at all. And private management companies had failed to demonstrate that they knew how to “fix” schools with low scores.

So now we have moved on to higher levels of goal-setting, since that is what business strategists like to do. Reformers must have goals! And goals must have accountability!

When I was in Detroit, the local business-civic groups that wanted to take over the schools said that if they were given a free hand, the graduation rate would rise to 90% in ten years. Well, why not 100%, as long as they were making promises? Why only 90%?

In Indianapolis, a local group of corporate reformers has proposed the usual remedy of privatization and promised remarkable achievements, come the by-and-by.

In Philadelphia, the former gas company executive who is currently in charge promised that if the plan he purchased from the Boston Consulting Group were adopted…well, you know, a dramatic increase in test scores, graduation rates, etc.

As I wrote just yesterday, Mike Miles—the Broad-trained military man who holds his troops in low regard—pledged grand goals for 2020.

But my current favorite goal is the one pledged by John White, the Broad-trained Commissioner of Education in Louisiana. White has promised that by 2014, all students in Louisiana would be proficient. (http://louisianaeducator.blogspot.com/2012_05_06_archive.html). Now, the reason I especially like this goal is that the timeline is so short. That means that we can hold Commissioner White accountable for results in only two years! If 100% of Louisiana’s students are not proficient in 2014, he has failed.

Now there is a man willing to stake his career and reputation on his goals. That’s impressive.

I wouldn’t exactly take that pledge to the bank, but I think we should treat his promise seriously and hold him to it in 2014.

Diane

Categories Broad Foundation, Indiana, Louisiana, Michigan, Philadelphia

Enter the New Dallas Superintendent

By dianeravitch
May 20, 2012 //
13

The new superintendent of the Dallas public schools, Mike Miles, is off to a rousing start. He is a military man, and he thinks in terms of organizational goals, the mission, the beliefs.

The story about Miles’ plan appears in the Dallas Morning News behind a paywall, so I can’t link to it.
But here are the essentials:
Like his predecessors, Miles has a long list of impressive goals.
He wants the district to embrace “a vision and a mission of raising academic achievement, improving instruction and not accepting excuses.” (What were they doing before Miles arrived?)

He said at a meeting of the school board:

“We cannot just post it and market it and put it in little brochures. We have to practice this,” said Miles, adding that he wants 80 percent of DISD employees to be “proficient” on those beliefs in a year. It is not clear how he plans to test the proficiency of all DISD employees, whether the test will be multiple-choice, and whether the test will be created by Pearson.

By 2020, he says, the graduation rate will be up to 90% from the 2010 rate of 75%.
By 2020, SAT scores will jump by 30%, and 60% of students will achieve at least a 21 on the ACT.
80% of students will be workplace ready, as determined by assessments created by the business and nonprofit communities.
He will create a new leadership academy to train principals in one year, based on what sounds like NYC’s unsuccessful one.
Teachers will be observed up to ten times a year, and these observations will factor into a pay-for-performance plan.
All classroom doors must be open all the times. so that teachers may be observed at any time, without warning.
Principals will have one year “to demonstrate that they have the capacity and what it takes to lead change and to improve the quality of instruction.” 
Miles did not say how he intends to measure whether principals have this capacity.

By August 2015: 

“At least 75 percent of the staff and 70 percent of community members agree or strongly agree with the direction of the district.

At least 80 percent of all classroom teachers and 100 percent of principals are placed on a pay-for-performance evaluation system.At least 60 percent of teachers on the pay-for-performance evaluation system and 75 percent of principals agree that the system is “fair, accurate and rigorous.”

Create a rubric to assess the professional behavior and effectiveness of each major central office department.
Miles is one heckuva corporate reformer. Nothing in his plan refers to the quality of curriculum, instruction or teaching. Nothing about meeting the needs of children. It’s all about the carrots and sticks, all about the shape of the container.
He not only has big goals, but he demands that DISD employees and the community agree with him. Wonder if Pearson has a test for that?
Diane
PS: I neglected to mention, when I put up this post, that Mike Miles is a 2011 graduate of the Broad Superintendents Academy. Perhaps that explains why he is focused solely on organizational and management goals and overlooks anything having to do with raising the morale of teachers or addressing the needs of children. Thanks to commenter Jack Stansbury, for reminding me of the BS background.
Categories Broad Foundation, Dallas

Chicago Supt Brizard Admits Failure

By dianeravitch
May 17, 2012 //
17

Chicago Superintendent of Schools J.C. Brizard has admitted that he does not know how to improve Chicago’s public schools. He did so by asking the Gates Foundation to supply millions of dollars to open another 100 charter schools. http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/local/ct-met-cps-charter-growth-20120517,0,7306759.story

Handing public schools over to private management is a frank admission of failure on the part of school leadership. It amounts to saying, “I don’t know how to improve them. Let’s turn the kids over to the private sector and see if they can do it.”

Of course, Brizard arrived with an uneven record after having served briefly as superintendent of schools in Rochester. While he was there, the low graduation rate fell even lower. And, even though he claimed test scores gains, the proficiency rate in English and math was less than 30% when he left for Chicago. Brizard claimed that the state had raised standards in 2010, but in fact the state education department admitted that it had dropped the passing mark on state tests year after year, creating a false image of progress. http://www.chicagonewscoop.org/jean-claude-brizard-report-card-uneven-performance-in-short-rochester-tenure/

It is a shame that Mayor Rahm Emanuel was unable to find a superintendent for the city’s public schools that was able to develop a plan to improve them. Not having a plan, Brizard is ready to throw in the towel and privatize them. But, then, as a graduate of the Broad Superintendents’ Academy, he probably thinks that this is a good strategy, rather than an admission of defeat and failure.

Diane

Categories Broad Foundation, Chicago, Testing

Tenure Issue Doesn’t Belong in Courts

By dianeravitch
May 17, 2012 //
0

The usual group of corporate reformers, bankrolled by a Silicon Valley entrepreneur and the Broad Foundation, filed a lawsuit to invalidate teacher tenure and seniority in California. They claim that such protections impair the provision of quality education. Their claim is laughable on its face, since high-performing districts as well as low-performing districts have the same contractual requirements. http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-0516-lausd-teachers-20120516,0,6292585.story

This is part of an unending assault on any job protections or due process at all for public school teachers, as well as an effort to negate collective bargaining.

Quite remarkably, the Los Angeles Times–no softie for teachers’ unions–blasted the idea of taking the issue to court, as the corporate reformers have done. In its editorial, it says that job protections are too strong, that it should take longer to get tenure, and that there have to be safeguards to permit the dismissal of incompetent teachers. But the editorial smartly argues that these issues should be resolved through collective bargaining, not by a challenge in the courts. If this challenge is sustained, the editorial warns, then every policy issue affecting education will end up in the courts, which is not the appropriate place to reach agreement.

This is a smart editorial: http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/editorials/la-ed-tenure-teacher-california-lawsuit-20120516,0,5459914.story

Categories Broad Foundation, California, Teachers and Teaching

Cerf Rolls Out Reform Plans for Camden, NJ

By dianeravitch
May 5, 2012 //
1

You have heard this from me before, and you’ll hear it again. People who are in charge of public schools are placed there to lead them. They are there to help them get better. They are appointed or elected to solve problems, not to abandon public schools.

When they take charge, they are supposed to be (in Phillip Schlecty’s term), moral and intellectual leaders of the public schools.

They are not appointed or elected to hand off their responsibility to the private sector. That is not leadership. That is an abandonment of responsibility. That is a clear indicator of leaders who lack the knowledge to improve schools and who lack the moral sense required of those in public office.

Yet this is the plan for Camden, New Jersey. Ten schools will close now, undoubtedly more later. The New Jersey Department of Education has a plan prepared by one of its Broad-trained administrators (as the article cited below mentions, the Broad people have colonized the NJ DOE). Since the Broad Foundation is known for training people to privatize public schools and put school systems into bankruptcy, the plan should not surprise. Yet it does. It rings with the business-type phrases that are supposed to assure the public that the writer knows what he is talking about. In fact, what the document shows is a Department of Education that does not know how to help public schools, that doesn’t believe in helping public schools. It shows leaders who are clueless about education. The plan begins by saying that asking how to improve the schools is the wrong question. That’s old-style thinking. The new way of thinking is to hand the public schools over to private management; surely, they must know how to get those test scores up. If they don’t, the schools can always be closed again and turned over to someone else.

This is what is known today as school reform.

http://www.courierpostonline.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=2012305010023

http://www.courierpostonline.com/assets/pdf/BZ18861851.PDF

http://www.courierpostonline.com/article/20120430/NEWS01/304300034/campprivatization?odyssey=tab|topnews|text|FRONTPAGE

Diane

Categories Broad Foundation, Cerf, Chris

How Far Will Some Authors Go to Get a Good Review?

By dianeravitch
May 4, 2012 //
3

I just read online that Eli Broad, the Los Angeles billionaire, might buy the Los Angeles Times. Broad’s book was published this week. My first thought, speaking just as an author, was: “Some people will do anything to get a good review in their hometown paper.” http://articles.latimes.com/2012/may/02/local/la-me-broad-20120503

My second thought, after a slight period of reflection (five minutes), was that it would be unfortunate if this comes to pass. Eli Broad is not shy about using his billions to advance his political agenda. I don’t know where he stands on most issues, but in education, he has been a force for distorted priorities that are harming American education. He has used his fortune to train a generation of school leaders devoted to imposing the business model onto education. Business values belong in the business office of the schools, but they don’t belong on the instructional side. Broad once told me quite frankly that he knows nothing about education, but he knows the importance of good management. I am not so sure that the graduates of his Superintendents Academy are good managers. Many have been run out of town after alienating the public. Of course, he prefers mayoral control, where the public can be ignored.

His acolytes are known for the closing and demolition of public schools in district after district. He has had a large hand in Detroit, which is now on the verge of total collapse and/or privatization. In Louisiana, a Broad-trained superintendent is leading the charge for privatization via a vast expansion of vouchers and charters. It seems that wherever a Broad graduate goes, the district or state starts closing public schools and expanding opportunities for privatization and for-profit operators. Along with their emphasis on privatization comes a devotion to high-stakes testing. The combination is not only toxic to public education but results in an approach that betrays a naive faith in the value of standardized testing. These policies are ultimately anti-intellectual, anti-education, and anti-child.

I hope he decides not to buy the Los Angeles Times. It is one of the few remaining independent dailies. I hope it stays that way.

Diane

Categories Broad Foundation, California, Corporate Reformers
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