Archives for category: Chiefs for Change
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For-Profit Online Charter Scandal

By dianeravitch
September 2, 2012 //
18

Maine’s State Commissioner of Education Stephen Bowen went to San Francisco to hear Jeb Bush tout the glories of for-profit online charter schools. Jeb Bush’s foundation paid for the trip. The commissioner met with Jeb’s chief education aide, Patricia Levesque, whose company lobbies for the online corporations. She promised help.

This is what the Maine Sunday Telegram found after getting access to public records of the correspondence:

Bowen was preparing an aggressive reform drive on initiatives intended to dramatically expand and deregulate online education in Maine, but he felt overwhelmed.

“I have no ‘political’ staff who I can work with to move this stuff through the process,” he emailed her from his office.

Levesque replied not to worry; her staff in Florida would be happy to suggest policies, write laws and gubernatorial decrees, and develop strategies to ensure they were implemented.

“When you suggested there might be a way for us to get some policy help, it was all I could do not to jump for joy,” Bowen wrote Levesque from his office.

“Let us help,” she responded.

So was a partnership formed between Maine’s top education official and a foundation entangled with the very companies that stand to make millions of dollars from the policies it advocates.

In the months that followed, according to more than 1,000 pages of emails obtained by a public records request, the commissioner would rely on the foundation to provide him with key portions of his education agenda. These included draft laws, the content of the administration’s digital education strategy and the text ofGov. Paul LePage’s Feb. 1 executive order on digital education.

A Maine Sunday Telegram investigation found large portions of Maine’s digital education agenda are being guided behind the scenes by out-of-state companies that stand to capitalize on the changes, especially the nation’s two largest online education providers.

K12 Inc. of Herndon, Va., and Connections Education, the Baltimore-based subsidiary of education publishing giant Pearson, are both seeking to expand online offerings and to open full-time virtual charter schools in Maine, with taxpayers paying the tuition for the students who use the services.

Categories ALEC, Bush, Jeb, Chiefs for Change, Education Industry, Education Reform, Florida, For-Profit, On-Line Education, Privatization

A Nomination for Florida’s Commissioner

By dianeravitch
August 6, 2012 //
3

A reader has a suggestion for the next Comissioner of Education in Florida. I am mentioning this because he made me laugh out loud. More than once.

I actually think that Bill Gates might like this job. He could try his bracelets on the kids, and use Florida as a kind of laboratory for reform. Florida always scores near the bottom with testing anyway, so what the hell. It is all the fault of the unions…oh I forgot, they don’t have unions, sorry. It may be something to do with the heat and optimal temperature for brain function. The kids could wear special helmets that would reduce the temperature of their heads to 72 degrees. He could lower the teaching requirements and start pulling people off the street to come in and try to raise test scores. “Hey you with the surfboard!” “Have you ever thought about being a teacher for two years?” “Put down that board and come with me.” Something like that. The rich people (the people who count/the job creators) already send their kids to private schools, so he wouldn’t get any pesky lawsuits. It sounds like a plan. Maybe he could bring Rhee in with him to fire them after two years. He could bring them in off the street, and Rhee could shout “no excuses for poverty” and fire them. I have some e-mails to write.

Categories Chiefs for Change, Florida, Gates Foundation, Bill Gates

Creationists in Louisiana Win State Funding

By dianeravitch
July 25, 2012 //
49

The voucher legislation in Louisiana will send millions of dollars to Christian academies that repudiate evolution and teach creationism. Their students will never learn about evolution other than to hear it ridiculed.

At least 20 of the religious schools that receive voucher students teach creationism, and as this researcher shows, that may be only the tip of the iceberg.

This is a descent into ignorance.

But in the eyes of a group of state superintendents called Chiefs for Change (the state superintendents of Florida, Oklahoma, New Jersey, New Mexico, Maine, Louisiana, Rhode Island, and Tennessee), this is called bold and visionary “reform.”

We are in deep trouble if we continue in this direction.

The Louisiana reforms should be recognized for what they are: An embarrassment to our nation.

Louisiana has made itself an international joke.

But for the children, it’s not funny.

Categories Chiefs for Change, Curriculum, Education Reform, Jindal, Bobby, Louisiana, Vouchers

Remember “Separation of Church and State”?

By dianeravitch
July 10, 2012 //
6

A blogger in Louisiana calls out State Rep. Valerie Hodges for expressing shock about the possibility that voucher funds might go to Islamic schools.

I have already done that in an earlier post and won’t do it again here.

I repost this commentary because it lists many of the Christian academies that will be getting vouchers from the state of Louisiana in September. It is a reminder that the state is sending children from schools with a low grade (a grade established by the state of Louisiana) to religious schools that have NO grade. Are they better schools than the schools the children are leaving? These are schools that teach a specific religious doctrine; many will not teach modern science or history.

These schools are free to teach whatever they want, but let’s be clear. The state of Louisiana is sending students to religious schools of unknown quality and taking the funding out of the minimum foundation budget for public schools. The state constitution says that public funds must be used to support public education. Education in religious schools is not public education.

Lest we forget, Governor Jindal’s regressive legislation was hailed by the conservative group called Chiefs for Change, which includes the state education commissioners of Rhode Island and Indiana.

We will learn in the months to come whether Louisiana has an independent judiciary.

Whenever vouchers have been put to a state referendum, they have lost. The American public does not want to cross the line that separates church and state. They want to protect both public schools and religious freedom.

Governor Jindal doesn’t understand that basic tenet of American education. He may end up destroying both in Louisiana.

Categories Accountability, Chiefs for Change, Education Reform, Jindal, Bobby, Louisiana, Vouchers

Louisiana Breaks New Ground

By dianeravitch
June 22, 2012 //
31

With all the education reforms taking place in Louisiana, it’s clear that Governor Bobby Jindal wants to be a national leader in what is now called the “education reform” movement. Louisiana is leading the nation in the race to the bottom, having adopted every bad idea in ALEC’s catalogue of ways to tear up your public school system.

The Louisiana law was saluted by Indiana’s state superintendent Tony Bennett, head of a group of ultra-conservative state superintendents called Chiefs for Change, who share Jindal’s desire to get rid of public education if at all possible. Bennett said, “These student-centered reforms will completely transform Louisiana and its students,” by introducing a “marketplace of choices.” Part of that “marketplace of choices,” we now know, is letting students take tax dollars away from their public school and pay it to universities, private businesses, individual teachers, tutoring businesses, online companies, or anyone who sets himself up and says he is selling education.

Now we knew about the voucher program and we knew about the vast expansion of charters and for-profit online corporations. And we knew that teachers will be fired if the scores don’t go up in their classes every year.

But here is a new way to “reform” the schools. The state board of education, in its infinite wisdom, decided that teachers in charter schools don’t need to be certified. Understand that certification in Louisiana is not a real high bar to clear. A teacher need have only a college degree, a grade point average of 2.5 out of 4, and pass a national teachers’ exam.

But not for charter teachers! They don’t need certification. State board member Charles Roemer, a graduate of Harvard College and Harvard Business School, insists that charter schools need to be free to “try new approaches.” One new approach is to have uncertified teachers.

But wait, Roemer has an even better idea! According to an article in the local press:

Roemer said the issue of teacher credentials should be left to individual charter schools.

Some who even lack an undergraduate degree could do a good job in the classroom, he said.

Roemer said charter schools should be given flexibility, then be held accountable for how students fare in the classroom.

Roemer knows a good bit about charter schools. His sister Caroline Roemer Shirley is executive director of the Louisiana Association of Public Charter Schools.

Teachers in charter schools, if Mr. Roemer has his way, won’t even need to be college graduates. Now there is an innovation. Just hire anyone who wants to teach, without regard to qualifications, and see if they can raise test scores. Do they need a high school diploma? Why? Why not go for broke and wipe out all credentialism?

This is indeed new ground in the “education reform” movement.

Diane


Categories Charter Schools, Chiefs for Change, Education Reform, Louisiana

Is Rhode Island the Worst State?

By dianeravitch
June 19, 2012 //
9

Teachers in Rhode Island frequently write me to tell me that the state is rapidly deteriorating in its commitment to public education, especially after winning $75 million from the Race to the Top. Commissioner Deborah Gist is enamored of evaluating teachers by the test scores of their students, and she fought hard to increase the number of charter schools in the state, over the determined opposition of parents. The parents in Cranston actually defeated the state’s efforts to bring in the charter chain Achievement First, which now is bound for Providence. Commissioner Gist is a member of  the rightwing group called Chiefs for Change, which is affiliated somehow with former Florida Governor Jeb Bush and is religiously devoted to data, testing, accountability, grading, ranking, rating, and other means of turning children and teachers into data points. Chiefs for Change sent out a press release congratulating Louisiana on the passage of Jindal’s legislation to dismantle public education and replace it with vouchers and charters, while reducing the status of teachers to at-will employees who can be easily fired.

I personally don’t think Rhode Island is the worst state, as compared to states like Louisiana, Ohio, Michigan, Florida, and Indiana. But it deserves credit for moving in the same direction and seeking to earn its spurs in the competition for worst.

In Rhode Island, all the teachers in Central Falls were fired, and a year later all the teachers in Providence were fired. Commish Gist’s PhD dissertation (defended about a month ago) was on this horrendous new evaluation plan. Principals from around the State were begging her to slow the process down because it was impossible for them, and for teachers, to get it done. In many cases, one principal was responsible for evaluating 123 teachers, complete with scripts, multiple classroom visits, and tons of paperwork on both sides. Many teachers and admins have retired because of this madness.
Categories Charter Schools, Chiefs for Change, Education Reform, Race to the Top

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
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