Tim Slekar is a fearless warrior for public schools, teachers, and students. I will be talking to him about Slaying Goliath and the struggle to protect public schools from the depredations of billionaires and zealots.
This Thursday on Civic Media: Dive Back into “Slaying Goliath” with Diane Ravitch
Grab your pencils—BustEDpencils is gearing up for a no-holds-barred revival of Diane Ravitch’s game-changing book, *Slaying Goliath*, live this Thursday on Civic Media.
Launched into a world on the brink of a pandemic, *Slaying Goliath* hit the shelves with a mission: to arm the defenders of public education against the Goliaths of privatization. But then, COVID-19 overshadowed everything. Despite that, the battles Diane described haven’t paused—they’ve intensified. And this Thursday, we’re bringing these crucial discussions back to the forefront with Diane herself.
This Thursday at 7pm EST on BustEDpencils, we’re not just revisiting a book; we’re reigniting a movement. Diane will dissect the current threats to public education and highlight how *Slaying Goliath* still maps the path to victory for our schools. This isn’t just about reflection—it’s about action.
**It’s time to get real. It’s time to get loud. It’s time to tune in this Thursday at 7 PM EST on Civic Media.**
If you believe that without a robust public education system our democracy is in jeopardy, then join us. Listen in, call in (855-752-4842), and let’s get fired up. We’ve got a fight to win, and Diane Ravitch is leading the charge.
Mark your calendars and fire up Civic Media this Thursday at 7pm Central.
Governor Ron DeSantis signed a bill limiting the ability of non-parents to initiate book bans. That’s a step forward since any crank was free to challenge any book under previous law. But, the same law made it easier to close public schools and hand them over to the charter industry.
TALLAHASSEE — After more than 1,200 objections were filed to library books and other materials last school year, Gov. Ron DeSantis on Tuesday signed a bill to limit challenges by nonparents or guardians.
The wide-ranging bill (HB 1285) also includes changes designed to ease the process of charter schools taking over operations at traditional public schools that are failing.
The part of the measure dealing with book challenges came after the Republican-controlled Legislature and DeSantis approved measures that ramped up scrutiny of library books and classroom materials, leading to highly publicized disputes.
More than half of the 1,218 book objections during the 2022-2023 school year occurred in two counties, Clay and Escambia, according to a Senate staff analysis. The objections resulted in the removal of 186 books in the two counties.
The bill will require that any “resident of the county who is not the parent or guardian of a student with access to school district materials may not object to more than one material per month.”
During an event Monday, DeSantis said that some people who filed mass objections to books made a “mockery” of the process.
“The idea that someone can use the parents’ rights and the curriculum transparency to start objecting to every single book, to try to make a mockery of this, is wrong. And you had examples where books were put under review that are just normal books that have been in education for many, many years,” DeSantis said.
Meanwhile, parts of the bill related to underperforming public schools would “add some oomph” to the state’s process of allowing charter schools to take over operations, DeSantis said.
Under state law, if a school receives consecutive D or F grades based on various performance criteria, the school is given two years to improve to a C under what’s known as a “turnaround plan.” If the school’s grade doesn’t make such an improvement, one option is for the school to close and reopen as a charter school.
The bill signed Tuesday will speed up converting traditional public schools to charter schools under such circumstances, by giving districts a deadline to execute charter contracts. For schools reopening as charters, districts would have to execute contracts by Oct. 1 of the following school year, and charter organizations would assume “full operational control” by July.
Jan Resseger reports on dramatic changes in Chicago, which has been a Petri dish for corporate school reform for at least two decades. The last mayoral election pitted Paul Vallas, an Uber reformer against Brandon Johnson, a teacher and member of the Chicago Teachers Union. Johnson is now beginning to unravel the damage done by Arne Duncan, Rahm Emanuel, and the business leadership.
Chicago’s Board of Education has voted to implement an important first step in Mayor Brandon Johnson’s proposed school district overhaul: the elimination of student based budgeting.
Mayor Johnson seeks to restore equal opportunity across a school district that has become marked by magnet schools, charter schools, elite and selective public schools, struggling neighborhood schools, and neighborhoods without a a public high school or even a traditional public elementary school.
Johnson has prioritized major changes in the Chicago Public Schools, whose problems became especially obvious in June of 2013, when Mayor Rahm Emanuel closed 50 neighborhood public schools because, as he claimed, they were under-enrolled. Eve Ewing, a University of Chicago sociologist explains that, “80 percent of the students who would be affected were African American… and 87 percent of the schools to be closed were majority black.” (Ghosts in the Schoolyard, p. 54)
Chicago was an early experimenter with school reform. Brandon Johnson, the city’s elected mayor, leads Chicago’s schools as part of the 1994 mayoral governance plan imposed on the public schools by Mayor Richard M. Daley and the Illinois legislature. The Chicago Public Schools adopted universal, districtwide school choice, and the launch in 2004 of Renaissance 2010 (led by Arne Duncan) that involved the authorization of a mass of new charter schools and the subsequent closure of so-called failing neighborhood public chools. Chicago adopted a strategy called “portfolio school reform,” described in a National Education Policy Center brief: “The operational theory behind portfolio districts is based on a stock market metaphor—the stock portfolio under the control of a portfolio manager. If a stock is low-performing, the manager sells it. As a practical matter, this means either closing the school or turning it over to an charter school….”
Then in 2014, Mayor Emanuel added a districtwide funding plan called student based budgeting. In a 2019 report, Roosevelt University professor Stephanie Farmer explained: “Student Based Budgeting fundamentally remade the approach to funding public schools. Student Based Budgeting is akin to a business model of financing public schools because funds are based on student-consumer demand and travel with the student-consumer to the school of their choice. (The plan contrasts with)… the old public good approach to financing public schools that ensured a baseline of education professionals in each school.”
Because it is known that aggregate school test scores correlate primarily with poverty and wealth, it was predicable that student based budgeting would put schools in Chicago’s poorest neighborhoods on a race to the bottom, leading to schools with tragically limited programming for the city’s most vulnerable students and more school closures. Farmer concludes: “Our findings show that Chicago Public Schools’ putatively color-blind Student Based Budgeting reproduces racial inequality by concentrating low budget public schools almost exclusively in Chicago’s Black neighborhoods. The clustering of low budget schools in low-income Black neighborhoods adds another layer of hardship in neighborhoods experiencing distress from depopulation, low incomes, and unaffordable housing.”
In late March of this year, WBEZ’s Sarah Karp reported that the Board of Education voted to launch a new plan to determine how much each school has to spend on teachers and programming: “Chicago Public Schools is officially moving away from a school funding formula that pitted schools against each other as they competed for students… District officials… announced (on March 21, 2024) they are implementing a formula that targets resources for individual schools based on the needs of students, such as socioeconomic status and health. They will abandon student based budgeting—a formula unveiled a decade ago under former Mayor Rahm Emanuel that provided a foundational amount of money based on how many students were enrolled…. Under the needs-based formula, every school will get at least four foundation positions, including an assistant principal, plus core and ‘holistic teachers.’… Schools will then get additional funding based on the opportunity index, which looks at barriers to opportunity including race, socioeconomic status, education, health and community factors.”
While undoing a market-based scheme for school funding and operations is clearly a moral imperative, the challenges appear daunting. Karp continues: “This change was expected as Mayor Brandon Johnson and others have sharply criticized student based budgeting. However, it was unclear how it would play out, especially as the district faces a $391 million deficit for the next school year. The shortfall is the result of federal COVID relief funds running out… District officials offered no information at a Board of Education meeting… on how the district will fill the budget hole.”
In addition to the threat of a serious financial shortfall, another challenge is the outcry from parents who have over the past two decades become a constituency for charter schools, magnet schools and selective high schools. Mayor Johnson has tried to reassure parents: “(L)et me assure people that—whether its a selective enrollment school or magnet school—we will continue to invest in those goals… (A)ll I’m simply saying is that where education is working in particular at our selective enrollment schools and our magnet schools, my position is like any other parents in Chicago: that type of programming should work in all of our schools. And that has not been the case. Neighborhood schools have been attacked, they have been demonized, and they’ve been disinvested in, and Black and brown parents overwhelmingly send their children to those schools. So it’s not just demonizing and disinvesting in Black and brown schools, it’s demonizing and disinvesting in Black and brown people—and not under my administration.”
Although school choice plans like Chicago’s were originally premised on the idea of providing more choices for those who have few, in her profound book, Ghosts in the Schoolyard, Eve Ewing explains that families in Chicago do not have equal access in today’s school system based on school choice: “While choosing the best option from a menu of possibilities is appealing in theory, researchers have documented that in practice the ‘choice’ model often leaves black families at a disadvantage. Black parents’ ability to truly choose may be hindered by limited access to transportation, information, and time, leaving them on the losing end of a supposedly fair marketplace.” (Ghosts in the Schoolyard, p. 23) Families dealing with poverty and its challenges are more likely to select a neighborhood school within walking distance of their home.
Mayor Johnson and his school board are facing a fraught political battle in the midst of severe budget challenges. Chicago school reform has exacerbated inequality. The families whose children remain in traditional neighborhood schools that have been undermined by school choice and student based budgeting have watched their their schools lose staff and programs their children need. At the same time, families who have benefited from charter schools, magnet schools and selective-enrollment high schools have now become strong supporters of the programs they have come to take for granted.
Mayor Johnson has been very clear, however, about what the past two decades of portfolio school reform, school choice and student based budgeting have meant for Chicago: “What has happened in the city of Chicago is selective enrollment schools go after students who perform academically on paper. It’s a very narrow view of education. Let’s also ensure that other areas of need are also highlighted and lifted up. That’s arts, our humanities, technology, trades… It’s not like we’re asking for anything radical. We’re talking about social workers, counselors, class sizes that are manageable. We’re talking about full wraparound services for treatment for families who are experiencing the degree of trauma that exists in this city.”
John Thompson, historian and retired teacher in Oklahoma, explains what happened when “reformers,” led by Secretary of Educatuon Arne Duncan, advocated for school closures.
He writes:
When non-educators watch Abbott Elementary, the television comedy, they are likely to find it hilarious, but I suspect it takes a teacher to fully understand the accuracy of its portrayal of the weird corporate reforms imposed on Philadelphia schools. But, recent research helps explain why many of even the most fervent advocates for test-driven, competition-driven school turnarounds now acknowledge their failures (even though they don’t apologize for them.).
The third-year premiere of Abbott gave a shout out to the respected journal, Chalkbeat. And, Chalkbeat is again reporting on failed turnarounds in Philadelphia, Tennessee, and elsewhere, as well as why former supporters of school takeovers are repudiating the reward-and-punish method for rapid, transformative change.
Chalkbeat analyzed the Philadelphia mandate, the 2010 Renaissance Initiative. It “strove to turn around about 10% of Philadelphia’s low-performing district schools by ceding them to charter organizations that promised to do better.” By 2023, however, “the Renaissance charter schools as a group mostly performed worse in standardized tests for elementary and middle schoolers than the district averages.”
Donna Cooper, executive director of Children First explained, “The goal was to prove that charters would work with any kid, not just about parents who were highly motivated to enter a lottery, and to show that a neighborhood school turned over to a charter organization would do better than if run by the school district.” But, “As far as I can tell, the data didn’t result in that.”
Similarly, “Chris McGinley, who served on both the School Reform Commission that oversaw the district while it was under state control and the Board of Education,” said “‘It was a bad idea poorly implemented.’”
Chalkbeat quoted a second-grade teacher who said, “All the disruption was even more unsettling for her students, … many of whom have already had to deal with trauma in their lives. The staff turnover, she feared, reinforced feelings that adults weren’t there for them.” And a Renaissance principal now says, “He is not a fan of charter conversion as a school reform strategy.” “‘I think it’s offensive … ‘A lot of these measures were experimenting with communities of color.”’
According to the Chalkbeat analysis, “these schools started out well below district and state averages in English Language Arts and math performance,” but “none of the schools are performing particularly well today. For instance, one charter school’s “achievement scores have remained persistently low;” its “math proficiency is at 1%.”
It explained “Other takeaways include the importance of giving families an early seat at the table when making changes and seeking more collaboration among state and local officials throughout the process.” And, because of “its heavy-handed takeover of neighborhood schools and broken promises on performance, the ASD also hasn’t endeared itself to a city with a highly charged racial history.”
The quotes from Tennessee’s Achievement School District (ASD) superintendent Chris Barbic were especially important. I’ve long been frustrated by the refusal of true-believers like Barbic who ignored the research which explained why those turnarounds were likely to fail. But Barbic says that “18 months in as he sat in a classroom and [he] saw the ASD’s systems weren’t working.”
Barbic told Chalkbeat, “’The way the ASD was set up, it had a lot more sticks than carrots.’” Moreover, “while the state-run district was positioned to act quickly, Barbic acknowledged ‘we were probably too aggressive on the sticks and not thinking about what other options there were besides doing nothing, using charters, or running the schools ourselves.’” He then “acknowledged that, ‘building grassroots support and collaborating with partners over time is ultimately more effective,’” and “’We’re in a world today where top-down just doesn’t work.’”
These massively funded bets on rapid turnarounds were based on the corporate reform hypothesis that creative destruction would lead to transformational improvements that could be scaled up. It earned the ridicule of Abbott Elementary, students, educators, and researchers. It’s good that more corporate reform advocates are admitting that their experiment failed. But that doesn’t undo the chaos which resulted in serious harm to the students it sought to help.
Today, however, the MAGA crowd is sowing discord and mistrust for political reasons. Extremists like Oklahoma’s State Superintendent Ryan Walters are using the worst of their punitive tactics to spread hatred. They are disrupting schools and other institutions in order to reelect Donald Trump. The rightwing seeks to burn down the barn without having any interest in rebuilding it. Their assault on public education is just one of their weapons for undermining democracy.
So, the history documented by Chalkbeat and satirized by Abbott Elementary is especially important today. It’s time to clearly spread the word about the inherent dangers of massive school closures and other punitive measures regardless of whether its goal is creative disruption, or disruption as a tool for destruction.
John Thompson, a historian and retired teacher in Oklahoma, reviews the stalemate in education in the Sooner State. The cause: a state superintendent who will not abandon failed reforms.
He writes:
As School Superintendent Ryan Walters ramps up his attacks on public education, resisting his false, rightwing agenda has become Oklahoma educators’ top priority. While we need to unite and put the school reform wars of the last two decades behind us, the lessons of corporate reforms must be remembered. As Walters puts the doomed-to-fail, test-to-punish No Child Left Behind Act of 2002 (NCLB) “accountability” mandates on steroids, I’ve tried to be as diplomatic as possible in reminding educators how and why data-driven, competition-driven “reforms” did so much damage. Reading the Tulsa World editorial, “Current Public Accountability Systems Always Leaving Kids Behind” by Bixby Superintendent Rob Miller, brought me back to a time when I was one of many educators trying to reason with corporate school reformers. Then I read Peter Greene’s “VAM: Why Is This Zombie Policy Still Around?, and I was reminded of the history of so many Oklahoma administrators failing to push back against the Billionaires Boys Club.
My favorite memories of Rob Miller was when he pulled no punches in telling legislators the hard truths about NCLB. Miller is still candid about it, illustrating education’s “gap between those who make policy and those who suffer the consequences.” Research made it clear that “standardized tests are unreliable indicators of school quality,” and “nothing more than an elaborate sorting and labeling system.” Non-educators dismissed the experience of teachers, concluding they were “just falling back on excuses about student poverty, adverse childhood experiences, teacher shortages and unstable families.”
Miller recounts the loss of “recess, music and arts, field trips, class discussions and reading books for pleasure when we need to get these kids proficient at bubbling correct answers on multiple-choice tests.” He then writes:
Who cares if a 10-year-old learns to hate school because he’s been retained in third grade and his days are now filled with worksheets, practice tests and repetitive drill-and-kill curriculum in place of projects, puzzles and hands-on activities which nurture his natural curiosity and develop thinking skills? Suck it up, kid!
In my experience, the overwhelming majority of education leaders knew that test-driven accountability would inevitably lead to “tedious, time-wasting, high-pressure, spirit-killing, highly scripted instructional programs.” But few would go on the record about the harm done by focusing on test scores, as opposed to improving learning. And few of them were as eloquent as Miller when standing up for students.
Then, I read Peter Greene’s summary of what I believe was the worst of the worst corporate reform mandate, Value Added Models (VAMS). When the Billionaires Boys Club” saw the way that NCLB wasn’t working, they blamed Baby Boomers for accepting “Excuses!” and targeted individual educators, using invalid and unreliable algorithms to punish and replace veteran teachers with 23-year-olds they could train. I will always love President Obama, but his Race to the Top was even more destructive than NCLB. Virtually every educator and student above 2ndgrade were held accountable for increased “outputs.”
Greene first explained the inherent flaws in VAMS, doing an intensive analysis of the model’s flaws for teacher evaluation, and surveys documenting teachers rejecting them. He also wrote:
We used to talk about this a lot. A. Lot. But VAM … has departed the general education discussion even though it has not departed the actual world of education. Administrators still brag about, or bemoan, their VAM scores. VAM scores still affect teacher evaluation. And VAM scores are still bunk.
And that leads to what may be the most disturbing aspect of Greene’s piece for states like Oklahoma. He reviewed a range of studies around 2014 and 2015 that made the overwhelming case for abandoning the use of VAMs for accountability purposes. Since Ryan Walters has said he’s been consulting with the architects of the Houston IDS regarding a plan for taking over the Tulsa Public Schools, the most relevant and frightening research Greene cites for Oklahoma document the destructive role that VAMs played in Houston.
Reading Superintendent Miller’s and Greene’s work makes me, once again, rethink my efforts to persuade administrators and politicians to reject test-driven accountability. I worry that education leaders will revert back to the “culture of compliance,” and obey Walters’ demands. I keep remembering the time when one of the nation’s top experts, John Q. Easton of the Chicago Consortium on School Research, came to Oklahoma City and explained why it is impossible to improve schools without first building trusting relationships, and warning about untrustworthy accountability metrics. Afterwards, in the parking lot where administrators were more likely to feel free to speak their minds, the OKCPS’s top researchers agreed, but warned that the new types of tests resulting from NCLB (with Criterion Based Tests replacing Norm Referenced Tests) would completely corrupt our data.
Then, we had an agreement with MAPS for Kids volunteers that the OKCPS would be clear in telling teachers that their job was teaching to state standards, not standardized tests. When NCLB was implemented, however, I was in the meeting where top administrators recalled years of ridiculous mandates and then jolted us all by saying the district had no choice but to expand high-stakes testing. I was the only one who pushed back. A smart, sincere, veteran administrator replied, “John, I always say you don’t make a hog bigger by weighing it. But this is politics. We have no choice.”
On the state level, I joined an informal committee with superintendents trying to draft NCLB policies that would be less destructive. I was tasked with studying the Ohio standards. Because it was then a swing state, Ohio was granted the most freedom to get around the most destructive accountability mandates. The thought was that NCLB’s worst aspects would not survive the 2004 elections, so we sought to kick the ball down the field until evidence-based policies returned!?!?
So, I kept trying to be diplomatic, bridging differences with both – corporate reformers who would not reconsider their ideology-driven mandates and educators who felt they had to comply with those mandates. On one hand, unity is more important when our democracy – not just public education – faces existential threats. On the other hand, discussing these historic facts could be a unifying force. After all, so many of today’s teachers and parents have experienced the damage done by test-driven, competition-driven schooling. I suspect that many of them would appreciate a discussion of the history of those failures.
The 21st century is full of hard truths about the way that the holistic instruction students need for a better future was undermined. And then came Covid, and then came the Moms for Liberty. Reading Rob Miller and Peter Greene, and the science they present, is convincing me that I also must learn from failures to openly oppose corporate school reforms, in addition to fighting back against fanatics like Ryan Walters.
The Cooperative Council for Oklahoma School Administration responded, “Last year, over 5,400 educators attended CCOSA’s professional development events to serve those members, focusing on topics such as school finance, special education law and teacher evaluations.” The OPSRC did not reply, but apparently, Walters broke ties with them because they hired a former district superintendent, April Grace, who was his Republican opponent for state superintendent. Before education leaders try to cooperate with Walters in order to avoid his full fury, they should remember that the OPSRC is funded by the Walton Family Foundation and other philanthropies that support corporate school reforms! That’s one more reminder that revenge, not school improvement, is his focus.
No wonder Jeb Bush wrote an opinion article defending his so-called reforms, especially high-stakes standardized testing.
The Republican-controlled Legislature is moving to dismantle the structure that Bush created when he was governor. Some legislators wanted to cancel recess but the outcry from parents made them drop that idea.
The Florida Senate backed away Tuesday from plans to end the state’s recess requirement after objections from “recess moms” but moved ahead with proposals to scrap key, and controversial, parts of the Republican education agenda.
The Senate’s fiscal policy committee agreed by an 18-0 vote to end policies ushered in by former Gov. Jeb Bush more than 20 years ago. Those include requirements that high school students pass two exams to graduate and that third graders pass a reading test to move on to fourth grade.
Under the bill approved by the GOP-dominated committee, students would no longer have to pass an Algebra 1 and a language arts exam to earn high school diplomas. But the 10th-grade language arts exam would count as 30% of a student’s final grade in 10th-grade English classes, just as the algebra exam already counts as 30% of the final grade in Algebra 1 classes.
The bill also would allow third graders who failed the state reading test to be promoted to fourth grade, if that is what their parents thought was best.
Jeb Bush’s allies objected to the changes and said they would water down standards. It’s not yet clear whether DeSantis will go along. Moms for Liberty also objected.
But Republicans in the Senate have pushed and supported the measures, and two committees have now approved them.
Senate President Senate President Kathleen Passidomo introduced the proposals in a memo she sent to senators last month that was titled “Learn Local – Cutting Red Tape, Supporting Neighborhood Public Schools.”
The idea, she said, was that after the Legislature expanded school choice (HB 1) earlier this year, making many more children eligible for private school scholarships, it should look in its 2024 session to remove regulations on public schools, which serve the bulk of the state’s students.
In the memo, she called the ideas “bold,” “controversial” and, she conceded, ones that might “not make it across the finish line.”
Many of the Senate’s suggestions have broad support from school superintendents, administrators, teachers and parents.
Representatives from the Broward, Orange and Seminole county school districts all showed their support Tuesday, for example.
Simon noted that Florida’s new standardized test, FAST, is a “progress-monitoring” exam given several times a year starting in pre-Kindergarten. “We’re able to find those students much earlier on in the process,” he said, making the current third-grade rule unnecessary.
Indiana blogger Steve Hinnefeld reviews the damage left behind when charter schools close, often mid-year. The possibility of a sudden closing is an unadvertised disadvantage of charters. If they don’t have enough students, if there’s a financial scandal, if lots of other things, the school abruptly closes, leaving students and parents to find another school. Charter school advocates think it’s commendable when the schools close, as that is the market at work. Not so good for the students.
He writes:
Regardless of what you think about charter schools, it’s bad news when one closes unexpectedly. It’s bad for the staff. It’s bad for the people who were committed to the project. It’s especially bad for the students, who will have to find a new school, learn their way around and make new friends.
And it’s not a rare occurrence here in Indiana. A list provided by the Indiana Department of Education includes 50 charter schools that have closed or merged since Indiana began allowing charters in 2002. An analysis by Chalkbeat Indiana found at least 29 charter schools in Marion County have closed.
The latest to fold was Vanguard Collegiate, an Indianapolis middle school that opened with big plans in 2018 but struggled to enroll students. It had only 71 students in grades 5-8 last year, according to Indiana Department of Education data, and was down to about 40 this fall.
Vanguard announced two weeks ago in a letter to parents that it would close Oct. 1. “Please know that we fought hard for you, our beloved school community,” executive director Robert Marshall wrote.
In January, another Indianapolis charter school, HIM by HER, closed abruptly, sending its 200 students scrambling with three months left in the school year. The school, which launched during the COVID-19 pandemic, was authorized by Ball State University and operated for 2½ years.
One charter-school supporter commented online that Vanguard Collegiate shouldn’t have been allowed to open in the first place, Ball State shouldn’t have extended its charter last year, and it shouldn’t have been allowed to close mid-semester. Certainly, the situation could have been handled better.
The fact that the school, over five years, never managed to enroll 100 students should have been a red flag. It reported good attendance rates for a high-poverty school, but its academic performance wasn’t stellar: Only two of 61 test-takers scored proficient on both the math and English/language arts ILEARN assessments in 2023. It’s not clear what the school’s board was doing about this; board minutes haven’t been posted to the school’s website since June 2022.
Then there was the school’s most recent posted audit, covering the 2020-21 school year and submitted to the State Board of Accounts in March 2022. The audit concluded that “substantial doubt continues to exist about the ability of the school to continue as a going concern.”
Nevertheless, the school’s authorizer, the Indiana Charter School Board, approved a 5-year extension of its charter late last year. If the board had rejected the renewal request, the school could have shut down in May in an orderly fashion and its students would have had the summer to find a new school. On the other hand, it might have gone shopping for a different authorizer. That’s what happened with HIM by HER: the Indiana Charter School Board rejected its initial application, but Ball State approved it.
What happens to students when their schools close unexpectedly? Research is mixed, but there’s strong evidence that switching schools has negative academic and behavioral impacts, especially on students of color and students from low-income families – like those at Vanguard and HIM by HER.
Mike Petrilli, head honcho of the right-tilted Fordham Institute thinky tank, made it into the New York Times today to do some chicken littling about Learning Loss and suggest a bold solution. Don’t have a NYT subscription? That’s okay– let me walk you through the highlights of this festival of Things We Can Stop Saying About Education Right Now, Please.
Let’s start by invoking general Learning Loss panic. Petrilli points out that students “lost significant ground” during covid, and now NWEA says that students continue “backsliding” and “falling further behind.” People, in Petrilli’s view, are not panicking enough about “America’s massive learning loss.”
First, let’s use some more precise language, please. In all discussions of learning loss, we are actually talking about scores on a Big Standardized Test of reading and math going down. We will never, ever know how much of the slippage in tests scores is the result of students going a year or two without practicing for the BS Test. But in the meantime, it would be great if we stopped talking about test scores as if they were infallible equivalents of learning and achievement.
Second, “learning loss” is a misnomer. I’m willing to bet that verrrrrrry tiny number of students in this country actually lost learning. I’m equally certain that the vast majority of students did not learn as much as they would have in a non-pandemic year, but that’s not the same.
Think of it this way. It’s budget time, and the Mugwumps’ proposed budget increases spending on widgets from $500 to $600. The Wombats say, “Let’s only increase widget spending to $550.” That gets us to the part where the Mugwump talking point is “The Wombats want to cut spending on widgets.” When in fact everybody wants widget spending to go up.
That’s where we are. During the pandemic, learning occurred–just not as much as might have been expected in a normal-ish year. And this looks most like a crisis if you think of test scores like stock prices and focus on data rather than individual human students. (Petrilli does not invoke the baloney about impact on future earnings, so we’ll not go there right now.)
And, it should also be pointed out, it is where we were for a decade before covid even hit.
Having sounded the alarm, Petrilli bemoans the surfeit of leaders willing to make alarmy noises.The country is in desperate need of leaders who will speak the truth about what’s happening in our K-12 schools, and are willing to make the hard choices to fix it. Simply put, we need to bring some tough love back to American education.
Tough love? Back? Petrilli doesn’t really explain how the pandemic led to a loss of tough love in education. But that’s the dog we’re going to try to hunt with.
He cites Michael Bloomberg, who is ceaselessly alarmed about anything going on in public schools. Bloomberg wants a plan from Washington, a joint session of Congress, a Presidential address.
Ah, says Petrilli–you know when politicians were on the same page about education, presumably flinging tough love around with wild abandon.
We’re talking, of course, about the golden days of No Child Left Behind.
Petrilli remembers it fondly, citing how we saw “significant progress” which of course means “test scores went up,” which they did, at first, for a few years. Anyone who was in a classroom, especially a math or reading classroom, can tell you why. Within a couple of years, schools figured out what test prep would be most effective. Then they targeted students who were teetering on the line between High Enough Scores and Not High Enough Scores, especially the ones in special subgroups, and test prepped the hell out of those kids. At which point scores started stagnating because schools had done all they could do.
The Average Yearly Progress requirements were set up as a bomb that would go off during the next administration. Again, if you were working in a school at the time, you remember that chart, showing a gentle upward glide for a bit before jutting upward to 2014, the magical year in which 100% of students were to score above average on the BS Test. Oh, Congress will fix that before it happens, we were told. They did not. By the early 20-teens, there were two types of school districts–those that were failing, and those that were cheating.
Petrilli claims maybe success probably, saying NCLB “likely contributed” to graduation rates (no, schools just learned how to game those), college attainment rates (eh, maybe, but correlation is not causation) and “possibly” future real-life outcomes (absolutely not a shred of evidence–even reformster Jay Greene said as much).”It’s true that No Child Left Behind was imperfect,” says Petrilli. No. It stunk. But Petrilli has quite the tale here.There were fierce debates over “teaching to the test” and “drill and kill” instruction; about closing low-performing schools versus trying to fix them; and about the link between student achievement and family poverty. But once the law’s shortcomings became apparent, policymakers responded by adopting common standards and improving standardized tests, so as to encourage higher-level teaching. They poured billions into school turnarounds, invested in stronger instructional materials and started grading schools on how much progress their kids made from year to year, rather than focusing on one snapshot in time — an approach that is markedly fairer to high-poverty campuses. Still, the bipartisan effort that was No Child Left Behind ultimately fell apart as our politics fractured.
That’s quite the load. There was no debate about teaching to the test or drill and kill, because nobody was in favor of it except shrugging administrators who were staring at 2014. Petrilli also forgets that “teach to the test” ended up meaning “cut out any other classes–or recess–that does not appear on the test.” Arts slashed. History and science cut (at least for those teetering students). Closing low-performing schools was, in fact, the quickest way for a district to free itself of the low scores; who knows how many districts were restructured to put predictably low 8th grade scores under the same roof as better scores from lower or higher grades. And yes, poverty affects scores, despite all the No Excusing in the world.
What came next did not address any of these issues, The Common Core was an amateur hour fiasco. Were standardized tests improved? Not really (as witnessed by the fact that states dumped the SBA and PARCC as quickly as they could)–but it made a lucrative contract for some test manufacturers. Including progress in scores is great–unless you’re teaching kids who are already scoring at the top. School turnarounds have consistently failed (e.g. Tennessee’s failed Achievement School District).
But he’s right that Trump’s election and appointment of Betsy DeVos hurt the reformster alliance (despite the fact that DeVos had long been part of the club). But then, so was the increasing split between the social justice wing of reform and the free marketeer AEI-Fordham wing.
But look– NCLB and the sequel, Race to the Top, were just bad. They started from bad premises: 1) US education is failing because 2) teachers either don’t care or don’t know what they’re doing. They rest on a foundation of using a mediocre BS Test as an unquestioned proxy for student learning and teacher effectiveness, creating a perfect stage on which to conduct a national field test of Campbell’s Law (when you make a measure a proxy for the real thing, you encourage people to mess with the measure instead of the real thing, and it gets worse if the measure isn’t very good). And none of the “policymakers” who championed this mess ever came up with a single solitary idea of how to Fix Things that actually worked on either a local or macro scale.
The pandemic did not help anything in education. But it did lead to some flaming prose, like Petrilli’s assertion that “here we are, with decades of academic progress washed away and achievement trends still moving in the wrong direction.” This kind of overheated rhetoric is nothing new from the folks who gave us The Pandemic Erased Two Decades of Progress in Math and Reading as a headline. But what does it even mean? Washed away to where? Did knowledge dribble out of students’ heads? Did the learning of the past several years retroactively vanish with former students waking up across America feeling a little bit dumber somehow? Did teachers forget everything they knew about how to teach students, so they have to start over? Or do we just mean “test scores are down”?
Petrilli breaks this down to some other issues. His first point starts out fine– there’s an attendance problem right now. But he tries to set that beside an alleged nationwide move to lower standards. I’m not sure what basis there is for that assertion. He points to the “no zeros” rule used in some schools, but that rule existed in many places (like my old district) for ages. Maybe it’s letting slackers slide through in other places, but my own experience with no zeros policy is that it merely kept students working who would otherwise have given up–kind of the opposite of encouraging slacking.
But then he’s slicing NCLB-style baloney again:Virtually all schools and districts have enjoyed a vacation from accountability. Almost nobody is worried about state officials shutting their campuses because of low performance, or forcing district schools to replace their principals or teachers.
You say that like it’s a bad thing, Mike.
Embedded here are many of the same bad assumptions that have driven ed reform for decades. Teachers and schools have no motivation to do their jobs unless they have some kind of threat of punishment hanging over their heads. This isn’t just bad education policy–it’s bad management. As management which W. Edwards Deming pointed out often, fear should be driven out of the workplace. But NCLB and RttT were always all stick, no carrot, always starting out with the worst possible assumptions about the people who had chosen education as their life’s work (assumptions made largely by people who had never actually worked in a school).
And even if you don’t dig Deming, there’s another thing to consider–none of the stuff Petrilli misses actually worked (which was Deming’s point). He points out that the kind of thing being done in Houston right now has become rare, to which I say “Good,” because Houston is a nightmare and it will end just like all the other similar attempts–no actual success, but lots of disruption and dismay and upheaval of children’s education.
Petrilli will now argue for NCLB 3.0. We need “action at scale,” but we can’t ignore “the support and assistance schools require.” Holding schools accountable wasn’t enough because– wait for it– if NCLB failed it was because schools lacked the expertise and know-how to do it right. And now Petrilli almost–but not quite–gets it.“Teaching to the test” and other problems with No Child Left Behind stemmed from schools resorting to misguided practices to meet requirements. Under pressure to boost scores, but without the training to know what to do, some educators engaged in endless practice testing, and stopped instruction in any subject that was unlikely to be on the state assessment. In a few places, educators even resorted to outright cheating. They likely felt they had no choice, because they hadn’t been given the tools to succeed.
Nope. Close but no cigar. No, the reason all those things happened was because, as NCLB 1.0 and 2.0 were designed, those things were the tools to “succeed.” Because “success” was defined as “get maximum number of kids to score well on a poorly-designed multiple-choice math and reading test.” Granted, when most of us think about “success” in education, we have a whole list of other things in mind–but none of those things were valued by NCLB or RttT.
But we’re rolling up to the finish now. But after a decade of building capacity, offering helping hands and adding funds, it’s time once again to couple skill-building with will-building.
That is a great line. But what capacity-building? More seats in unregulated charters and voucher-accepting schools? Which helping hands? And exactly whose will needs to be built? Parents? Children? Teachers? Policymakers? I’m seriously asking, because I think a hell of a lot of will was involved in slogging through the last couple of years.
Petrilli calls on schools to spend their “federal largesse” to “catch their kids up”–and I think the call to accelerate education is one of the most infuriating calls of the last few years. Sure– because all along teachers have known how to educate children faster but they just haven’t bothered to do it, but hey, now that we have certified lower test scores, teachers will all bust the super-secret Faster Learning plans out of their file cabinets.
Petrillii says we don’t actually need to bring back NCLB, though he seems to have been talking about nothing else– just let’s get out those big sticks and get back to (threats of) “tough interventions for persistent underperformance,” because that has totally worked in the past. No, wait. It hasn’t actually worked ever. Kids, too, should know that it’s time to hit the books again. We need to rethink our lax grading policies, make clear to parents that their children need to be at school and bring back high school graduation exams and the like to ensure that students buckle down.
Also, get those kids off our lawns. And while you’re making sure parents know their kids should be in school, maybe talk to all the reform crowd that has been working hard to build distrust of public schools and deepen disrespect of educators.
And the big finish:Education matters. Achievement matters. We need leaders who are willing to say so, and educators who are willing to act like these simple propositions are true.
This seems straightforward enough, though if you replace “achievement matters” with “standardized test scores matter,” which is what he really means, it doesn’t sound quite as compelling. And it’s insulting as hell to suggest that the ranks of educators are filled with people who are unwilling to act as if education matters.
Well, the piece is completely on brand for the New York Times, and it certainly echoes the refrain of that certain brand of reformster whose response to their own policy failures has been, “Well, get in there and fail harder.” No Child Left Behind failed, and it not only failed but left some of its worst policy ideas embedded in the new status quo, continuing to do damage to public education right through today.
The pandemic did many things, and one thing it did was panic the testing industry, which faced an existential threat that everyone might realize that school without the BS Test, or NWEA’s lovely test-prep tests, might actually be okay. It’s no wonder that they feel a special nostalgia for the days when the entire weight of the government reinforced their importance. So here we are, painting low reading and math tests scores as an educational crisis whose only solution is to get more fear, more threats, and especially more testing back into schools.
I’m sorry if this assessment of some reformsters, their policies, and their motives seems harsh, but, you know– tough love.
Mike Petrilli, president of the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, published an article in the New York Times yesterday in which he lamented the “learning loss” caused by the pandemic and called for a new national effort, like No Child Left Behind, to instill rigor and accountability, which he says will raise test scores. Time to bring back tough love, he wrote.
I have a hard time criticizing Mike Petrilli because I like him. When I was on the board of the Thomas B. Fordham Foundation/Institute, I got to know Mike, and he’s a genuinely good guy. But when I left the board of the TBF Institute in 2009, it was because I no longer shared its beliefs and values. I concluded as early as 2007 that No Child Left Behind was a failure. I wrote an article in the conservative journal EdNext in 2008 about NCLB, saying “End It,” paired with an article by the late John Chubb saying, “Mend It.”TBF sponsored charter schools in Ohio—a move I opposed because think tanks should be evaluating policy, not implementing it; also, during the time I was on the board, the charters sponsored by TBF failed.
By the time I left, I had concluded that the NCLB emphasis on high-stakes standardized testing was a disaster. It caused narrowing the curriculum, gaming the system, cheating, excessive test prep, and squeezed the joy of teaching and learning out of classrooms.
Furthermore, the very idea that Congress and the U.S. Department of Education were stigmatizing schools as failures and closing them was outrageous. I worked in the US ED. There are many very fine career civil servants there, but very few educators. In Congress, the number of experienced educators is tiny. Schools can’t be reformed or fixed by the President, Congress, and the Department of Education.
NCLB and Race to the Top were cut from the same cloth: Contempt for professional educators, indifference to the well-established fact that test scores are highly correlated with family income, and a deep but misguided belief that punishing educators and closing schools were cures for low test scores. Both the law (NCLB) and the program (RTTT) were based on the assumption that rewards and punishments directed at teachers and principals would bring about an educational renaissance. They were wrong. On the day that the Obama administration left office, the U.S. Department of Education quietly released a study acknowledging that Race to the Top, having spent billions on “test-and-punish” strategies, had no significant impact on test scores.
And as icing on the cake, Mike Petrilli wrote an article in 2017 about the latest disappointing NAEP scores, lamenting “a lost decade.” That “lost decade” was 2007-2017, which included a large chunk of NCLB and RTTT. In addition, the Common Core standards, released in 2010, were a huge flop. TBF was paid millions by the Gates Foundation both to evaluate them and to promote them. The NAEP scores remained flat after their introduction. Please, no more Common Core.
I wrote two books about the failure of NCLB and RTTT: The Death and Life of the Great American School System: How Testing and Choice Are Undermining Education (2010) and Reign of Error: The Hoax of the Privatization Movement and the Danger to America’s Public Schools.
Mercedes Schneider and I both wrote posts commending Mike Petrilli in 2019 when he wrote about the “dramatic achievement gains” of the 1990s and early 2000s before NCLB kicked in. He attributed those gains to improving economic conditions for families and declining child poverty rates. I wanted to give him a big kiss for recognizing that students do better in school when they are healthy and well-nourished.
So, what did No Child Left Behind and Race to the Top produce? A series of disasters, such as the Tennessee Achievement School District and Michigan’s Educational Achievement Authority, both gone. A landscape of corporate charter chains, for-profit charters, for-profit online charters, and now vouchers, in which red states commit to pay the tuition of students in religious schools and fly-by-night private schools. A national teacher shortage; a sharp decline in people entering the teaching profession.
Please, no more tough love. No more punishment for students, teachers, principals, and schools. Let bad ideas die.
John Thompson, historian and retired teacher, believes that Ryan Walters, the state superintendent, may take control of Tulsa Public Schools, despite the fact that he has no idea how to improve them and that state takeovers have seldom (if ever) improved any schools. It’s ironic that Walters is eager to fire Tulsa superintendent Deborah Gist, since Gist received national plaudits for threatening to seize control of the impoverished Central Falls school district in 2010 when she was state superintendent in Rhode Island.
Thompson writes:
We’ve known that State Superintendent Ryan Walters was rapidly ramping up his attacks on public education, especially the Tulsa Public Schools (TPS), but the intensity of his assaults keeps growing at a frightening rate. Even though I’ve been worrying that Walters would combine the destructive rightwing extremists’ venom with the worst of the discredited neo-liberal corporate privatization reforms, it sounds like on August 24, he may do it in the worse possible way. Rather than remove the TPS’s accreditation and/or its superintendent, Walters may order a rushed takeover of the district patterned after the recent takeover of Houston’s schools.
As Nondoc reported on Tuesday, on Saturday Walters said at a Moms for Liberty event, “Tulsa Public Schools is getting money from the Chinese communist government,” He said, “They funneled it through a nonprofit — I mean, money-laundered it through a nonprofit in Texas.” On Monday, “Walters appeared at the Tulsa County Republican Party headquarters to discuss the district,” saying that it must “Reorient finances to serve students, increase reading proficiency scores to the state average, and lift its schools off of the state F-list.” “Now,” Nondoc reports, “state board members could choose to place TPS on full probation.” Moreover, Walters has “also declined to rule out a non-accreditation vote on TPS, though it is unclear how that action would play out for a district of 33,000 students after the school year has already started.”
Clearly, the removal of Superintendent Deborah Gist is a major priority. Ironically, Walters is challenging the honesty of TPS administrators as his “administration of federal GEER funds is being investigated by FBI agents and the Oklahoma Attorney General’s Office, according to people with direct knowledge of the inquiry.”
Even worse, Walters says he is regularly consulting with the Texas education commissioner, Mike Morath, about “strategies Texas used in its takeover of HISD.” The new Houston superintendent, Mike Miles, has long relied on mass exiting of teachers, and he’s already ordered educators at 28 schools to reapply for their jobs, and ordered the closures of many “reformed” schools’ libraries. So, it is no surprise that the President of the Tulsa Classroom Teachers Association, Shawna Mott-Wright, says that “the uncertainty over the district’s future already has some teachers stepping away from their jobs.”
In response, TPS board member, Jennettie Marshall, “said during the board’s 90-minute discussion of the district’s accreditation status. ‘We are under attack. If you’re not keeping up with Houston, … if we continue the course we’re on, that’s where we’re headed. That shouldn’t be.’” She warned, “We can’t afford to lose our educators, support groups and people who provide wraparound services. We can’t afford for this district to lose its accreditation.”
To understand why Walters’ new attack could be an existential threat to public education in Tulsa, one should listen to Nancy Bailey’s analysis of such takeovers:
State takeovers aren’t new. Nor are they known for innovation, but for creating school voids, cutting services, and firing key staff, promising to close learning gaps. Takeovers usually only weaken schools, breaking them up and leaving communities with fewer and poorer schools.
Moreover, the Hechinger Report cited a study by Brown University and the University of Virginia which “looked at all 35 state takeovers between 2011 and 2016. ‘On average, we find no evidence that takeover generates academic benefits.’” But the Hechinger Report added, “Race, meanwhile, plays a role in the likelihood of a district being taken over.”
The HIDC takeover campaign sped up in 2018 when “four of Houston’s 274 schools, all of them in the city’s economically distressed north and east sides, hadn’t met the standards for four years running.” By the time the takeover was ordered, “all but one of the district’s four failing schools was meeting state standards” but a rule change caused Phillis Wheatley High School to “narrowly” miss the mark. By 2021-22, Phyllis Wheatley had already improved from an F to a high C grade. Persisting in the takeover thus added support to researchers who concluded, “Now red-state governors increasingly use the takeovers to undermine the political power of cities, particularly those governed by Black and Hispanic leaders.”
We must also remember the history of the disastrous reigns of non-educator Mike Miles, a Broad Foundation corporate reform trainee, who Texas commissioner Morath placed in charge of Houston. When Miles was selected, apparently nobody asked about “the 26% drop in high school enrollment during the 6 years he was superintendent over Harrison School District Two in Colorado.” In Dallas, Miles set a target of “at least 75 percent of the schools are ‘partially proficient’ in four areas that focus on classroom instruction.” One of many reasons why that goal was impossible was “the loss of 6000 teachers in just three years.” His dictatorial mindset was illustrated by Miles ordering the removal by the police of a board member visiting a middle school where he had “replaced the principal, two assistant principals and 10 teachers.”
Dallas student outcomes had been increasing before Miles took over but student performance largely stagnated during his administration. As the Dallas Morning News reported, his tenure was marked by “disruptions, scandals, clashes.”
Now, Houston is facing the same situation where “sweeping changes include longer instructional days, lessons scripted by planners, not teachers, and new evaluations for educators that tie pay to academic performance.” The focus will be on math and reading. Cameras will be placed in each classroom to monitor behavior. Not surprisingly, Nancy Bailey notes that as the “HISD is losing qualified teachers, school libraries, and librarians,” it is “advertising for 350 long-term substitutes who don’t require a college degree.” She presciently concludes, “Watch as these kinds of reforms become prevalent in other school districts if they haven’t already.”
I have long had serious problems with Superintendent Gist, but I would have never called her “Woke Barbie” as her opponents have. To me, this is similar to the situation when Democrats joined with former Rep. Liz Cheney in defending our democracy. And, if we unite, the damage that Walters is promising to inflict on the TPS, and the Tulsa metropolitan area as a whole, could undermine his extremist campaigns. On the other hand, if we don’t recognize the extent of the threats of a HISD-style takeover, he might unite the worst of the corporate reform privatizers, with his Moms for Liberty extremism, and impose irreparable damage on the TPS and other school systems.
Diane Ravitch's blog 