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Jeannie Kaplan: “Education Reform” Was a Hoax from the Start

By dianeravitch
May 15, 2019 //
38

 

Jeannie Kaplan was twice elected to the school board in Denver. She has long been active in civil rights and education issues. She has been a persistent and vocal critic of school closings, choice, and boasting about paltry gains in test scores. She was ignored by the “Reformers” like Michael Bennett and Tom Boasberg. As “Reform” money poured into Denver elections, the grassroots candidates she favored were defeated time and again, and Denver’s school board became unanimous for disruption.

When she recently read a blunt admission by her fellow Coloradan Van Schoales that “reform as we know it, is over,” she was astonished, outraged, and not amused.

Here is her response.

She summarized it in the title of her post: “OMG, ICYMI, SMDH.”

For a translation, open the link.

She begins:

Soooooo…it appears   “The education reform movement as we have known it is over.”  This from none other than “education reformer” extraordinaire, Van Schoales,  writing in the May 6, 2019 Education Week: Education Reform as We Know It Is Over.  What Have We Learned? Along his way to becoming the president of Colorado’s own reform-oriented “oversight” committee, A+ Colorado , Van has worked at Denver’s Piton Foundation and Education Reform Now (ERN), the advocacy arm of Democrats for Education Reform (DFER).  He has also been integrally involved with starting and supporting local charter schools and drafting statewide education reform-oriented legislation. When Denver media has needed a quote to support “education reform” outcomes, whom have they called?  Not Ghost Busters!  No, their go-to guy has been Van Schoales. So his partial about face in his recent post in Education Week is quite surprising.  In his words:

 “There are three primary reasons that education reforms failed to live up to our expectations: too few teacher-led reforms, a lack of real community support from those most impacted, and a lack of focus on policy change for public schools across the board, not just the lowest of low-performing schools.” 

Gee.  Who knew?

If I weren’t so darn mad, I’d be shedding tears of laughter.  If we hadn’t fought and fought and fought against “education reform” for the last 15 years, foretelling the recent conclusions of ed reformers,” the whole education reform movement could be viewed as a bad joke.  If we the taxpayers hadn’t spent hundreds of millions of dollars and if we the people hadn’t lost at least a generation of students and teachers to the chaos and churn and complete lack of common sense of “education reform,” we could all be lifting a glass of whatever to toasting “we told you so.”  If only the past 15 years could have been a bad dream, and we could all be like Dorothy and wake up in our safe places, wiping out the nightmare. But alas, that is not the case. And even with these mea culpas coming from unexpected places, most reformers are still unwilling to fully accept the disasters they have wrought upon community after community, most of which just happen to be populated primarily by people of color.

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Common Core, Denver, Education Industry, Education Reform, Fraud, Hoax, Teacher Evaluations

Steven Singer Has a Very Innovative Idea for Schools: More People

By dianeravitch
May 7, 2019 //
19

 

Steven Singer goes through the long list of failed innovations that “Reformers” have foisted on the schools.

Think how many billions have been wasted on standardized tests, interim assessments, data coaches, test-based evaluations, Common Core, etc.

He has an idea for an innovation that he is certain will make a difference: more people. 

Have you walked into a public school lately? Peak your head into the faculty room. It’s like snatching a glance of the flying Dutchman. There are plenty of students, but at the front of the overcrowded classrooms, you’ll find a skeleton crew.

Today’s public schools employ 250,000 fewer people than they did before the recession of 2008–09. Meanwhile enrollment has increased by 800,000 students. So if we want today’s children to have not better but just the same quality of services kids received in this country only a decade ago, we’d need to hire almost 400,000 more teachers!

Instead, our children are packed into classes of 25, 30 even 40 students!

And the solution is really pretty simple – people not apps. Human beings willing and able to get the job done.

If we were fighting a war, we’d find ways to increase the number of soldiers in our military. Well, this is a war on ignorance – so we need real folks to get in the trenches and win the battle.

We need teachers, counselors, aides and administrators promoted from within and not functionaries from some think tank’s management program.

We need more people with masters or even more advanced teaching degrees – not business students with a three-week crash course in education under their belts who are willing to teach for a few years before becoming a self-professed expert and then writing education policy in the halls of government.

We need people from the community taking a leadership role deciding how our schools should be run, not simply appointing corporate lackeys to these positions at charter or voucher schools and narrowing down the only choices parents have to “Take It” or “Leave It.”

We need people. Real live people who can come into our schools and do the actual work with students.

What an idea! Real people to do the work, instead of machines!

Thats innovation!

 

Categories Class size, Common Core, Innovation

Was the Common Core Successful?

By dianeravitch
May 2, 2019 //
107

 

It is probably far too soon to know whether the Common Core succeeded or failed, but the studies are beginning to appear.

The adoption of the Common Core standards was a central requirement of the Obama-Duncan Race to the Top program. States had to agree to adopt the Common Core if they wanted to be eligible to compete for $5 billion in federal funds. The Gates Foundation paid for the Common Core, from its writing to its implementation, at a cost estimated between hundreds of millions to $2 billion. (If anyone can determine how much money Bill Gates plowed into the CCSS, I will salute them on this blog). Arne Duncan could not pay for them because federal law bars any federal official from influencing curriculum or instruction. But Duncan did pay $360 million to pay for two testing consortia to develop new tests for the CCSS. PARCC and Smarter Balanced Assessment Consortium.  Almost every state signed up for Race to the Top. Almost all adopted the Common Core. Almost all signed up to use one or both of the new tests.

The whole venture cost the states many billions of dollars. New standards. New tests. New materials. New software and hardware. New professional development.

The Common Core came with dramatic promises about improving test s ores and closing achievement gaps.

Were these promises kept?

No.Since 2007, NAEP scores have gone flat. The lowest achieving students lost ground.

Matt Barnum reports here on a study that found that the Common Core made no difference.

“A new study, released in April through a federally funded research center, shows that states that changed their standards most dramatically by adopting the Common Core didn’t outpace other states on federal NAEP exams. By 2017 — seven years after most states had adopted them — the standards appear to have led to modest declines in fourth-grade reading and eighth-grade math scores.”

Most states have dropped out of the two federally-funded testing consortia, which arbitrarily set their passing marks so high that most students were certain to “fail.”

 

Categories Accountability, Common Core, Duncan, Arne, Education Industry, Education Reform, Gates Foundation, Bill Gates, Race to the Top, Testing

Steven Singer Recommends a Fun Book for You

By dianeravitch
April 19, 2019 //
3

I begin by saying I don’t like selling anything except ideas. That’s why this blog accepts no advertisements.

Nonetheless, I recommend this post by Steven Singer, which describes his reaction to the collection of many of my essays in a book called “The Wisdom and Wit of Diane Ravitch.”

Any royalties earned by the book will be donated to the Network for Public Education.

Steven begins:

“Imagine you could talk with Diane Ravitch for 10 to 15 minutes everyday.

“That’s kind of what reading her new book, “The Wisdom and the Witt of Diane Ravitch”, is like.

“You’ve probably heard of Ravitch before.

 

“She’s the kindly grandmother you see on the news who used to think standardized tests and school privatization were the way to go but actually had the courage to pull an about face.

 

“She’s that rare thing in public policy – a person with the honesty to admit when she was wrong — and even lead the resistance to everything she used to believe in!

 

“Now she champions teacher autonomy, fair and equitable school funding and authentic public schools with duly-elected school boards.

 

“Her new book is full of shorter pieces by the education historian from all over the mass media – The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, Huffington Post and even her own blog.

“You’ll find an article explaining why she changed her mind about school reform nestled next to a reflection on what it’s like to grow up Jewish in Texas. Here’s a succinct take down of President Obama’s Race to the Top next to an article extolling the virtues of student activism in Providence. Ever wonder what Ravitch would say to her mentor Lamar Alexander about our current Education Secretary Betsy DeVos? It’s in there. Ever wonder what books on education she would recommend? It’s in there.”

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Common Core, Corporate Reformers, Education Industry, Education Reform, Privatization, Teachers and Teaching, Testing

New York City: Struggle Over Whether to Lift the Charter Cap

By dianeravitch
April 17, 2019 //
15

The battle has begun about whether to lift the cap on charter schools in New York City.

New York City has 235 charter schools serving 123,000 students (about 10% of those enrolled in public schools) and there are no empty slots for additional charters unless the legislature raises the cap.  Governor Cuomo, flush with hedge fund cash from his last campaign, wants to raise the charter cap.

Now billionaire Merryl Tisch, who previously was Chancellor of the New York Board of Regents and is now on the board of the State University  of New York, proposed that the city be allowed to use some of the 99 open charter slots from the rest of the state. 

Under Tisch’s leadership at the Regents, New York won a Race to the Top grant of $700 million, hired John King as State Commissioner, committed to evaluate teachers by the test scores of their students, and adopted the Common Core and PARCC Testing. Tisch set off the Opt Out Movement, and she also hired MaryEllen Elia from Hillsborough County in Florida, which was part of the Gates Foundation’s failed experiment with VAM (value-added measurement) of teachers.

We are told that the waiting list for admission to charters in NYC is very, very long.

So think about this:

If there is a long waiting list, as Merryl Tisch says, why do charters hire a marketing firm to send recruiting letters to children in public schools? Why are they moaning about not having access to the public school names and addresses? Why don’t they just accept kids from the waiting list? Is there a waiting list? Maybe there are actually vacancies, as in Los Angeles, where 80% of the charters have empty seats. Even Eva Moskowitz needs access to public school names for recruitment purposes.

Would someone please audit that alleged waiting list?

 

 

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Common Core, Education Industry, New York City, Privatization, VAM (value-added modeling)

The New York Times Magazine Interviews Melinda Gates

By dianeravitch
April 16, 2019 //
104

I wish that the New York Times were not behind a paywall. I wish you could read this article in full. It is an interview with Melinda Gates.

You would get a sense of a very rich and very privileged woman who doesn’t realize how out of touch she is with the lives of ordinary people.

The interviewer wants to know how she feels about her privilege, given the rise of tide of anger against elites and the super-rich.

Here are a few snippets:

One of the recurring criticisms of large-scale philanthropists is that they aren’t interested in any redress of the economic systems that create inequality. But in order to rectify inequalities, doesn’t a radical rethinking need to happen? Bill and I are both on the record saying that we believe in more progressive taxes. We believe in an estate tax. We don’t believe in enormous inherited wealth.  

There are certain places where Bill and I sit where that is not a popular idea. Bill will be the first person to tell you, and Warren Buffett will be the second, that they could not have done what they did without having grown up in the United States, benefiting from the United States education system, benefiting from the infrastructure that exists here to build a business. If they had grown up in — pick your favorite place — Senegal, they couldn’t have started their businesses. There’s no way. So they have benefited. But we do need to think about how we right some of these inequities. How do we open our networks of power for women and people of color? We have to think about our privilege. I have to think about my privilege every day.

Yet, they choose to live in the lowest-taxed state in the nation, where there is no income tax and no corporate tax. With all of Gates’ power and influence, he has not lobbied the Washington State legislature to pass a progressive income tax. The schools of Washington State have been underfunded for years, and it took a long-running court case to get the legislature to allocate more money to them. Meanwhile, Bill used his influence to fight for a charter school law, enabling about 3,500 students to attend charter schools in a state with a student enrollment of one million.  Warren Buffett and Bill Gates had very different experiences in “the United States education system.” Bill went to private school in Seattle, with small classes, lavish facilities, and experienced teachers; his own children attended the same elite private school. Warren Buffett went to public school in Omaha, sent his own children to public school in Omaha, and they sent their children to public school.

What’s a recent epiphany you’ve had about your privilege? That it’s not enough to read about it. You have to be in the community with people who don’t look like you. When I read about a shooting, maybe in the south side of Seattle, I’m not living the experience. Whereas if I have a friend who’s a person of color, they most likely are living that experience or know somebody who was part of that community. And so my youngest daughter and I — she has a lot of friends whom I’m meeting, and they’re of very mixed races, I love that — have this motto that we go by: Every single person who walks through our door should feel comfortable in our house, despite how large it is and that it has nice art. And, believe me, there are people who show up at my front door who are not that comfortable. So sometimes that means sitting down inside the front door with our dog — and I’m in my yoga pants, no makeup on — and petting the dog until they’re comfortable being there. And only if we’ve made them comfortable can we be in real community. I have to do more to break down those barriers. It is very hard for almost anybody to show up at my front door….

To get back to philanthropy: What about the notion that the foundation’s work on an issue like public education is inherently antidemocratic? You’ve spent money in that area in a way that maybe seems like it’s crowding out people’s actual wants in that area. What’s your counter to that criticism? Bill and I always go back to “What is philanthropy’s role?” It is to be catalytic. It’s to try and put new ideas forward and test them and see if they work. If you can convince government to scale up, that is how you have success. But philanthropic dollars are a tiny slice of the United States education budget. Even if we put a billion dollars in the State of California, that’s not going to do that much. So we experiment with things. (Including funding small-population schools, bonuses for high-performing teachers and supporting the development and implementation of the Common Core educational standards.)

 If we had been successful, David, you’d see a lot more charter schools. I’d love to see 20 percent charter schools in every state. But we haven’t been successful. I’d love to say we had outsize influence. We don’t.

Certainly you have more influence than, say, a group of parents. Not necessarily. I went and met with a group of three dozen parents in Memphis. We thought we had a good idea for them. They were having none of it. So we didn’t move forward. A group of parents, a group of teachers, they can have a very large influence.

Well, Melinda is wrong about the influence of the foundation and the Gates’. After all, they singlehandedly (or four-handedly) funded the Common Core standards and paid out millions to every organization they could think of advocate for them. More than anyone else, the Gates Foundation imposed the Common Core standards on the nation, and they flopped by any measure one could think of. All of their “experiments” on the American educational system have failed. But she is right that the charter movement has stalled. In some states where the Gates’ have been most active, only 3-5% of the students are in charter schools. Now that scandals appear daily in the charter industry, this investment is blowing up too. And as she said, “a group of parents, a group of teachers, they can have a very large influence.” Yup. Parents and teachers can beat big money. They can beat the Gates’ money and protect their public schools from being one of Bill & Melinda’s “experiments.”

 

 

Categories Accountability, Billionaires, Charter Schools, Common Core, Gates Foundation, Bill Gates

New Mexico: New Democratic Governor Eliminates A-F School Grades

By dianeravitch
April 6, 2019 //
56

One of Jeb Bush’s signature initiatives–and possibly the stupidest–was giving schools letter grades of A-F.

Schools are complex institutions with many individuals engaged in their work, some doing better jobs than others, some essential, some not. No complex institution should be graded A-F. No individual child should be graded with a single letter, A-F. Imagine if your child came home with a report card that held only one letter, A-F. As a parent, you would be outraged. You would know that she was good at this, not so good at that, that there were many ways of describing her efforts and abilities and skills and work. How dumb it is to grade an entire school with a single letter.

Yet the Florida model of testing, accountability, choice, punishments, and rewards goes wherever there are rightwing zealots who want to destroy public education.

New Mexico had the misfortune of electing a Republican governor who wanted to be just like Jeb. She hired a non-educator, Hannah Skandera, as the state’s commissioner of education (Skandera had worked for Jeb), and she tried to import the Florida model. After seven years, Skandera left, and New Mexico saw zero improvement in education by any metric.

Fortunately Susana Martinez was replaced by a Democratic governor, former Congresswoman Michelle Lujan Grisham, who has been removing every trace of the Florida model. In January she eliminated the state’s disastrous teacher-evaluation system and the hated PARCC tests, which had been imposed by Martinez’s executive orders.

Yesterday, with the stroke of a pen, she repealed the state’s A-F grading system. The state’s Public Education Department must now devise a new accountability system to comply with the federal Every Student Succeeds Act. The bill now under consideration in the legislature calls for a “dashboard showing how each of the state’s public schools are faring in terms of graduation rates, student proficiency outcomes, reliance on federal Title I funds and the progress of English-language learners.”

Of course, this too appeals to the idea that parents are consumers, not citizens bound to work together for better public schools.

New Mexico has extremely high levels of child poverty, the second worst in the nation after Mississippi. Standards, accountability, and choice doesn’t cure that. It also ranks at the very bottom of NAEP, close to the other poor states. The Florida Model pretends that poverty doesn’t matter. Skandera’s failure proved that it does.

Here is the system that is being dropped:

The state currently grades schools on a complex range of measures, including graduation rates, student performance on standardized tests, student attendance and parental involvement in schools. Advocates believe these grades provide a clear picture of how schools are performing and encourage communities to help struggling schools. Critics say the formula is so confusing that the grades are of little use. They also complain that the system relies too much on standardized test scores.

Several years ago, a group of Los Alamos National Laboratory scientists said even they struggled to make sense of the complicated grading system.

Categories Accountability, Bush, Jeb, Common Core, Education Industry, Florida, New Mexico, Teacher Evaluations

Denisha Jones: First, Protect Childhood and Children from Harm

By dianeravitch
April 5, 2019 //
11

 

Denisha Jones was recently invited to give a lecture at Sarah Lawrence College, and she turned it into this article.

She describes the corporate threat to education and children, which was named GERM (the Global Education Reform Movement) by Pasi Sahlberg.

Jones calls on teachers to become advocates and activists on behalf of children, protecting them from GERM.

You will enjoy reading the article, from which this brief excerpt is drawn:

We can see how GERM has infected U.S. education policy and reforms. The Common Core drives standardization and aligns with a narrow focus on math and literacy. The use of scripted learning programs, behavior training programs, and online learning is evidence of the search for low-risk ways to reach learning goals. While charter schools claim to be nonprofit, most are managed by companies with CEOs and CFOs who apply corporate models to education.

Teach for America and other fast-track teacher preparation programs also use a corporate model,  developing education leaders who get their feet wet teaching before moving on to become policymakers or head up charter schools.

Pearson’s PARCC and the Smarter Balanced Assessment Consortium are drowning  public education  in test-based accountability.  Systems that punish and reward schools and teachers based on student achievement on standardized tests are the norm today.

While the new Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA) includes language that protects the right of parents to opt out—a movement that has been growing in recent years—it also maintains the requirement that 95 percent of students participate. Test-based accountability is here to stay and rapidly evolving into competency-based and personalized learning, in which assessments occur all day every day as students are glued to computer screens.

We have failed to stop the expansion of choice, which threatens the existence of public schools through the proliferation of charters and vouchers. In the U.S., most school-age children are educated in traditional public schools, but we can expect to see this trend reversed under the administration of Betsy DeVos.  We have failed to stop the assault on public education through school closures in communities of color.

And then there’s the inexorable  push down of developmentally inappropriate standards onto young children. The Common Core, adopted by most states, imposes expectations on young children that are out of step with their development, not to mention the research. Empirical data confirm that kindergarten is the new first grade, and preschool the new kindergarten.

On top of this, we have failed to stop racist school discipline practices that suspended 42% of black boys from preschool in the 2011-2012 academic year. This failure stems from our inability to address the systemic and institutional racism that is prominent in public education but often masked by teachers with good intentions who lack an understanding of culture, bias, and systems of oppression.

 

 

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Childhood, Common Core, Education Industry, Global Education Reform Movement (GERM), Privatization, Testing

Garn Press Publishes a Collection of My Most Important Essays

By dianeravitch
April 2, 2019 //
16

 

Garn Press, one of the nation’s valuable independent publishers, has compiled a collection of my most important essays. I am grateful for their hard work and dedication in bringing the book to fruition.

The book is titled “The Wisdom and Wit of Diane Ravitch.”

It contains selected essays published on this blog, the New York Review of Books, Huffington Post, and elsewhere.

I am grateful for the prodigious research that went into this effort by publisher and literary scholar Denny Taylor and her team, as well as the elegant design.

Yohuru Williams, the great scholar of African-American history and my colleague on the board of the Network for Public Education, wrote the introduction.

Should there be any royalties, I have asked that they be given to the Network for Public Education.

To learn more about the book, open any of these links:

Visual Press Release – Enhanced
Best Retail Link Amazon
Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Common Core, Corporate Reformers, Privatization, Testing

Tom Ultican: IReady: Is This the Worst Education Program Ever Marketed? Maybe, Maybe Not.

By dianeravitch
March 18, 2019 //
12

 Tom Ultican discovered a program called iReady that has magnificent marketing, but he says it is awful. If he spoke Yiddish, he would say it is “schlock” or “dreck.” Worse than the program is that stuff like this is pushed by the federal government. They like to waste your money. Ultican posted this entry a year ago but it has taken on a life of its own. One mother who reviewed it called it not iReady but “iSCAM.”

 

iReady is an economically successful software product used in public schools, by homeschoolers and in private schools. It utilizes the blended learning practices endorsed by the recently updated federal education law known as the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA). iReady employs competency-based education (CBE) theory which is also advocated by ESSA. The outcome is iReady drains money from classrooms, applies federally supported failed learning theories and undermines good teaching. Children hate it.

Public education in America contends with four dissimilar but not separate attacks. The school choice movement is motivated by people who want government supported religious schools, others who want segregated schools and still others who want to profit from school management and the related real estate deals. The forth big threat is from the technology industry which uses their wealth and lobbying power to not only force their products into the classroom, but to mandate “best practices” for teaching. These four streams of attack are synergistic.

Profiting from Education Law

A group of billionaires with varying motives are using their vast wealth to shape America’s education agenda to their own liking. The last rewrite of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965 called ESSA was larded up with provisions like the big money for technology which is listed in Title’s I and IV. It also specifies generous grants to promote both “blended learning” and “personalized learning.” (See page 1969 of the official law.) Charter schools, vouchers and social impact bonds are promoted in ESSA. All these initiatives drain money from the classroom and none have been credibly shown to improve education outcomes.

Read his post to learn the history of iReady, which started innocently enough as a workbook series in 1969. Then an equities investor took over, and all of a sudden the whole spectrum of money-grabbing hedge funders and know-it-all billionaires get into the picture. Even Jeb Bush.

A cautionary tale that begins with money and ends with money.

Categories Common Core, Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA), For-Profit, NCLB (No Child Left Behind)
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