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Tom Cahill: The 5 Famous Billionaires Who Are Dismantling Public Education

By dianeravitch
January 16, 2016 //
41

Tom Cahill describes the five famous billionaires who are intent on dismantling public education, especially public education for African American children.

 

He writes that “The charter school movement is particularly insidious, as it’s essentially a form of institutionalized racism veiled in altruism.”

 

They call themselves “reformers,” but in fact they are destroying a vital democratic institution.

 

The process, he says, begins with Common Core standards that disregard all individual or local differences. That is followed by high-stakes testing that fails most students.

 

Finally, schools are labeled as “failing” due to the lopsided evaluation process, and privately-run charters are forced onto inner-city populations, paving the way for the privatization of public education in predominantly black and latino communities. (Actually, the “failing schools” narrative was launched prior to Common Core. Arne Duncan started closing public schools in Chicago when he was Superintendent. NCLB prescribed school-closings as an antidote to low scores. Low test scores, wherever they came from, were used as weapons to replace public schools with charter schools. Common Core just speeded up the demolition strategy.)

 

The five white billionaires he points to are: Mark Zuckerberg; the Walton family; Carl Icahn; Bill Gates; and Rupert Murdoch.

 

The list of billionaires who want to privatize the public schools should include Eli Broad, John Arnold, Michael Dell, the Koch brothers, and Michael Bloomberg. I may have missed a few billionaires, but you get the picture. The free market worked for them; why should schools operate in a free market? Why pay attention to the mounds of research showing that charter schools do not get higher test scores when they enroll the same children? Why care that minority children are enrolled in charter schools with harsh and punitive discipline policies that would not be allowed in public schools? Why care if there is no evidence that charter schools and Teach for America do not “close the achievement gap” and have no discernible impact on reducing poverty?

 

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Common Core, Corporate Reformers, Privatization, Testing

On “Close Reading” and What NOT to Do to a Poem

By dianeravitch
January 5, 2016 //
6

This post was erroneously posted on December 20, 2015, because I scheduled it in advance for January 5, 2016, but forgot to change the year. So, instead of coming out when I planned, it came out the same day I posted it. If you tried to post a comment, you discovered that the comments were closed. That’s because the computer thought it had been posted 11 months earlier (January 5, 2015). If that sounds confusing, forget it. I made an error. Not unusual!

 

In a heated discussion of the Common Core’s recommendation of “close reading,” i.e., reading and analyzing what is on the page without reference to context or background knowledge, a reader who signs as Danielle sent this comment:

 

U.S. Poet Laureate, Billy Collins, writes about the over analysis of poetry in the poem below. Clearly David Coleman knows not what he is doing. He wants American students to beat literature, books and poetry with a hose to find out what it really means, which is exactly what the writers do not want.

 

 

 

Introduction to Poetry
By Billy Collins

 
I ask them to take a poem
and hold it up to the light
like a color slide

 

 

or press an ear against its hive.

 

 

I say drop a mouse into a poem
and watch him probe his way out,

 

 

or walk inside the poem’s room
and feel the walls for a light switch.

 

 

I want them to waterski
across the surface of a poem
waving at the author’s name on the shore.

 

 

But all they want to do
is tie the poem to a chair with rope
and torture a confession out of it.

 

 

They begin beating it with a hose
to find out what it really means.

Categories Common Core

With Chicago in Turmoil, Rahm’s School Board Wants To Expand Charters

By dianeravitch
January 4, 2016 //
9

Despite declining enrollments, despite the closing of 50 public schools, the Chicago Public Schools board (hand-picked by Mayor Rahm Emanuel) is seeking to expand the number of charter schools. The great advantage of charters, from the Mayor’s point of view, is that they are mostly non-union. So think of it as payback to the Chicago Teachers Union for its insistence on adequate resources for the public schools.

 

Despite declining student enrollment and dozens of dramatically under-enrolled schools, Chicago is seeking potential new charter schools for the city.

 

 

In a Request for Proposals issued Wednesday, CPS says it’s looking for dual language schools, “Next Generation” schools that would blend technology and traditional teaching, and—in a first—it wants a “trauma-informed school,” where staff would get training to support students with Post Traumatic Stress Disorder or exposure to trauma.

 

 

The district is prepared to give charters that already run schools approval for up to four additional campuses. And it’s poised to grant approvals now for campuses that wouldn’t open for several years, to allow more time for planning a school’s opening, the district says in a press release.

 

 

In recent years, the district had named Neighborhood Advisory Councils where community members could give input into charter proposals. Those are now scrapped, saving roughly $170,000, CPS says. Instead, charter schools themselves will “directly engage residents in obtaining the support of their desired school community,” according to the release.

 
“It looks like they’re making it even less democratic,” said Wendy Katten, director of the parent group Raise Your Hand, which has had members serve on the advisory councils.

 

 

Katten says many considered the NACs “flawed” because CPS seemed frequently to ignore the advice of the councils, but “at least it was an opportunity to look at the proposal, to really scrutinize it as a community. To take (that) away—and to have the charter operators do the community engagement—that’s even more of a sham than what currently has existed. The real question is, our city needs a massive debate about opening any kind of new schools in a city that has just hemorrhaged students,” said Katten.

 

 

Categories Charter Schools, Chicago, Common Core, Corporate Reformers, Education Reform, Privatization, Unions

Peter Greene on Our Clueless Business Leaders

By dianeravitch
January 4, 2016 //
19

Peter Greene read the Fortune article about how business leaders are fighting valiantly to save Common Core, and he realized that they don’t have a clue about dealing with individual consumers or social media. They pour millions into creating astroturf groups and blogs without readers, but they don’t understand anything about education or the public.

 

The writer of the infamous article, Peter Elkind, tries to portray the business leaders sympathetically, but it could not have been easy.

 

Greene writes:

 

Elkind recounts the story of how Rex Tillerson, head of Exxon, threatened to pull the company out of Pennsylvania if the state did not embrace Common Core (and quotes without citing Kris Nielson’s blog response– in Elkind’s world, the businessmen and politicians all have names and faces, but only a few bloggers and activists get the same consideration). Business interests tried founding groups like the Collaborative for Student Success to gin up some CCSS love among the citizenry, says Elkind, but he neglects to mention just how many similar groups have been created– all fruitlessly, right up to recent entries like Education Post and the74, both well-funded with the hope that CCSS fans can fight internet fire with internet fire. And yet all of these have fizzled, almost as if corporate chieftains don’t understand why there is opposition or how it spreads.

 

One thing that jumps out at me is that Elkind mostly talks about corporations like Exxon and Intel and SAS– companies where corporate executives are unlikely to ever face the business problem of “How do we sell our product to individual consumers.” And so when they discover that Common Core is a product that individual consumers don’t actually want, they are stumped. Their “marketing” usually consists of gathering the political and corporate connections to make themselves inescapable. If Intel convinces the major computer companies to use their chips, it doesn’t matter so much how individual consumers feel about it.

 

In short, big business is neither nimble, quick, or smart enough to fight this fight.

 

And then there is Rex Tillerson, who comes across as an inhumane person who never met a child or a teacher, except maybe at Groton or Deerfield Academy:

 

Tillerson is a central figure in Elkind’s article, and it’s Tillerson who gets to demonstrated just how completely, clueless, stupidly wrong these guys are. Elkind takes us to a 2014 panel discussion in DC.

 

But Tillerson articulates his view in a fashion unlikely to resonate with the average parent. “I’m not sure public schools understand that we’re their customer—that we, the business community, are your customer,” said Tillerson during the panel discussion. “What they don’t understand is they are producing a product at the end of that high school graduation.”

 

The Exxon CEO didn’t hesitate to extend his analogy. “Now is that product in a form that we, the customer, can use it? Or is it defective, and we’re not interested?” American schools, Tillerson declared, “have got to step up the performance level—or they’re basically turning out defective products that have no future. Unfortunately, the defective products are human beings. So it’s really serious. It’s tragic. But that’s where we find ourselves today.”

 

Man. The fact that anybody can shamelessly express such an opinion out loud, without recognizing that it is ethically dense and morally bankrupt, a view of both human beings and an entire country that is about as odious and indefensible as anything spit out by a Ted Bundy or an Eric Harris.

 

This article seems to have set off a twitter storm to #boycottExxon. Poor, poor Tillerson! So rich, so powerful, so out of touch with reality.

 

Greene writes:

 

 

Students are not a product. Corporations are not “customers,” and the public institutions of our nation do not exist to serve the needs of those corporations. The measure of public education is not how well it produces drones that serve the needs of corporations, not how “interested” corporations are in the meat widgets that pop out of a public education assembly line.

 

 

Tillerson’s viewpoint is anti-education, anti-American, anti-human. It’s a reminder that the education debates are not about Left versus Right or GOP versus Dems. The education debates are about the interests of the human beings who are citizens of a nation and stakeholders in its public institutions versus the interests of a those who believe their power and money entitle them to stripmine an entire nation in order to gather more power and money for themselves. The education debates are about democracy versus oligarchy. The education debates are about valuing the voices of all citizens versus giving voice only to the special few Who Really Matter.

 

 

 

 

 

Categories Common Core, Corporate Reformers, Education Reform

Carol Burris to CEO of ExxonMobil: “Leave Our Children Alone”

By dianeravitch
January 4, 2016 //
29

Carol Burris, experienced educator and Executive Director of the Network for Public Education, reacted to the article in Fortune about corporate support for the Common Core. Her message to CEO Rex Tillerson: “Leave our children alone.”

 

Burris wrote a personal letter to Rex Tillerson, the CEO of ExxonMobil. Tillerson was quoted in the Fortune article, complaining that American schools turn out “defective products.” For unknown reasons, he is convinced that the Common Core will fix those “defective products” (i.e., students) and make them “college and career ready.” Why does he think so? Well, important people say so, and that’s proof enough for Rex.

 

Burris’ message to Rex: leave our children alone. They are children, not products.

 

She writes:

 

Your Dickensian thinking has been “outed” and this holiday season, you are as welcome as the ghost of Christmas past. The common-folk for whom the Core you adore was designed, do not like it—only 24 percent of public school parents want it used in their school. And they certainly do not like to hear their children referred to as “defective products.” Mr. Tillerson, you have made the mommies and daddies mad.

 

I understand their reaction must confound you. In a world in which your corporation has been declared a person, one might mistake human children for products to consume. When we humanize the inanimate, it is easy for the humanity of the animate to slip away.

 

Take that, Rex. Very bad PR for Exxon. What is “good will” worth to your corporation? When you make the parents and teachers mad, you make a big mistake. A gaffe. A PR disaster.

 

Categories Common Core, Corporate Reform, Education Reform

Fortune: Proof That Business Leaders Know Nothing about Public Education

By dianeravitch
January 4, 2016 //
47

While I was supposedly taking a break from blogging, the biggest story of the Christmas break appeared in Fortune and reverberated in blogs and on Twitter. It demonstrates how little business leaders know about public education and why they should spend their time creating jobs in this country and sticking to what they know.

 

The Fortune article is a fascinating account that begins with a dinner in 2014 between Bill Gates and Charles Koch of the infamous Koch brothers. Gates thought he could persuade Koch to drop his opposition to the Common Core standards. Koch was not interested. He told Bill to call someone in his office. Fail! Only a billionaire could tell off another billionaire like that.

 

The article shows something that it doesn’t mean to show. Businessmen know nothing about education. Neither does the writer. The article repeats every well-worn cliché about our “failing” schools and about how the Common Core standards will raise our test scores to the top of the world.

 

Let’s state a simple fact: there is NO EVIDENCE that Common Core will improve education or test scores. It was launched in 2010. It has been tested in many states, and test scores have collapsed. Why the stubborn insistence that it will raise American test scores compared to the rest of the world or prepare all students for college and career? There is no evidence for this stubborn belief. If businessmen acted this way in their own corporations, every one of their products would be untested. Their gasoline would cause engines to explode, their buildings would collapse, their software would be fraught with bugs, and their hardware would melt. And they wouldn’t understand why. They would keep insisting that we have to keep doing the same things over and over. At least their customers would have a choice, unlike American parents and children, who are forced to endure Common Core despite their protests.

 

First, our schools are NOT failing. Test scores on the NAEP are at their highest point ever, for all groups of students, including whites, blacks, Hispanics, and Asians. Scores on NAEP rose steadily since the 1970s until NCLB went into effect; then the rate of gains slowed. But in 2015, the NAEP scores went flat or declined, when the full force of NCLB , Race to the Top, and Common Core converged. Repeat, our schools are NOT failing, but our policymakers have rained chaos and disruption on them since 2001.

 

Second, we have heard this claim about “our failing schools” since 1983, when the Reagan-era report “A Nation at Risk” was published to moaning and groaning. We have been warned again and again that the schools were harming our economy. Yet our economy has grown since 1983. The biggest harm to our economy has come not from our schools but from major corporations outsourcing jobs to other countries where labor is cheaper, not better.

 

Third, the article repeats the same tired litany about our terrible international scores, but those scores prove nothing, zero, zilch. Our nation has had low international scores since 1964, when the first international test was given, and those scores had no effect upon the economy. In fact, our economy has surpassed those nations with higher scores on TIMSS and PISA. The scores of 15-year-olds on standardized tests do not predict the future.

 

Fourth, there is no evidence whatever that the Common Core standards will improve education. None. It has been tried nowhere before it was imposed. Which of these businessmen would adopt a product without finding out how it works?

 

Fifth, it is absolutely false that there is no way to compare state academic performance without the Common Core tests. Remember NAEP? It compares states by test scores and disaggregates the scores by race, gender, disability status, free-lunch status, and other dimensions. It reports regularly on achievement gaps.

 

The best thing in the article is this quote from Bill Gates:

 

The Gates Foundation would help bankroll virtually every aspect of Common Core’s development, promotion, and implementation. “This is like having a common electrical system,” Gates told the Wall Street Journal in 2011. “It just makes sense to me.”

 

Yes, if children were toasters, they could be plugged into a common electrical outlet. If every teacher was a robot or was replaced by a computer, every child would get exactly the same lessons. Gates said the same thing to the National Board for Professional Standards. Why not have a common script for every teacher and every classroom in the nation? Children are not electrical appliances. Each is a unique person. Teachers think; they have minds and ideas independent of the script.

 

This article demonstrates why American business leaders are in the dark when it comes to education. Why don’t they demand that all American children get the same education they want for their own children? That would be real reform.

 

 

Categories Common Core, Education Reform

Here Comes the New Boss, Same as the Old Boss

By dianeravitch
January 3, 2016 //
21

Valerie Strauss has a good column introducing you to the new Acting Secretary of Education John King. Why will he be “acting”? Apparently there is some concern that, in light of his controversial tenure as state commissioner in New York, he might not be confirmed. Maybe busloads of angry parents will arrive from New York to testify against him. Whatever.

 

As you will see, John King as an impressive resumé. He earned both a law degree from Harvard and a doctorate from Teachers College at the same time! The resumé doesn’t mention that King was one of the leaders of the Uncommon Schools network, which is an unusually harsh “no-excuses” charter chain. Not long ago, his school had the highest suspension rate in the state of Massachusetts.

 

You will also read that he managed to alienate many parents in New York and was probably the spark plug for the Opt Out movement. He and the Chancellor of the Board of Regents Merryl Tisch set up a series of public hearings around the state. Parents showed up in large numbers, and King lectured them almost to the point of hectoring. After one of the stormiest hearings, he stormed out and called parents a “special interest group.”

 

Like Duncan, he is a fervent believer in high-stakes testing and the Common Core standards. His own children attended a Montessori school when he lived in New York, where there is neither high-stakes testing or the CCSS.

 

He is a quintessential reformer.

Categories Charter Schools, Common Core, Testing

Mercedes Schneider on Arne Duncan’s “Legacy”

By dianeravitch
January 3, 2016 //
13

Mercedes Schneider reflects on Arne Duncan’s legacy. He was described by President Obama as a man who “has dedicated his life to the cause of education.” Now he is gone. He left behind, said the President, “a good product.” We will somehow have to persist without him.

 

But his “legacy” of bullying states and school districts lives on.

 

Mercedes notes that one of his aides, Ann Whalen, sent out a threatening letter to several states, warning that there would be serious consequences if they permitted or experienced high number of opt outs. They might even see the loss of federal funding for their poorest kids. Imagine that: the U.S. Department threatening to hurt poor kids as a punishment to states where many children opt out of testing.

 

This letter violates the spirit of the new federal law, Every Student Succeeds Act, but the new law has not yet taken effect. So, the Duncan crew must bully and intimidate as much as possible until the new law kicks in.

 

Ann Whalen, by the way, wrote a blistering attack on experienced educator Carol Burris last year for doubting the transformative power of high standards and daring to question the Common Core standards. Whalen has a BA in political science from Stanford; that makes her assertive and confident. She has apparently never been a teacher or principal, unlike Burris. Whalen worked for Duncan in Chicago before he became Secretary. She has been a bureaucrat now for many years, but she has some nerve lecturing Carol Burris. I suppose we should forgive her messianic belief in high standards and the Common Core because her attack was penned before the release of the 2015 NAEP scores, which showed that after 15 years of relying on standards and testing, after five years of Common Core, NAEP scores were flat or declining in almost every state.

 

What I can’t forgive, however, is the very idea that a federal official would attack a private citizen. When I served in the U.S. Department of Education under Lamar Alexander in 1991-92, that impropriety would not have been permitted. Something about working in Arne Duncan’s space seems to give his aides the belief that they are relieved of the rules of civility and propriety. I still recall that he accused me of “insulting” teachers, principals, and students “all across the country” when I wrote an article in the New York Times debunking his absurd claim that his favorite schools were achieving miraculous results merely by having high expectations and firing experienced teachers or closing the school and restaffing it. I used data to demonstrate that there were no miracles. No, I wasn’t insulting teachers, principals, or students; I was calling out the hype and spin that is now customary from the U.S. Department of Education. The only thing they haven’t been able to spin is the NAEP scores. And the NAEP scores raise serious questions about the Bush-Obama reliance on standards, testing, firing teachers and principals, and closing schools as a strategy for reform.

 

 

 

 

Categories Accountability, Common Core, Education Reform, ESSA, NCLB, Opt Out, Testing

Peter Greene Eviscerates the New York Times’ Editorial on Education

By dianeravitch
December 31, 2015 //
27

I wrote the last entry before I saw Peter Greene’s razor-sharp evisceration of the New York Times’ editorial praise for high-stakes testing and the Common Core. The editorial cited a number of spurious sources, all of them from cheerleaders for the Common Core.

 

I took on the general point that the Times makes: that high-stakes testing produces higher achievement. Surely after 15 years of NLB and Race to the Top, and five years of Common Core, no one believes that unless they are paid to do so or are hoodwinked by the former.

 

Peter looks at the underlying sources for the Times’ editorial and identifies each of them as fraudulent. For example, the editorial cites Education Trust for its claim that one of every five high school graduates were rejected by the military, but Greene finds this response from the Department of Defense:

 

For the military, the largest single disqualifying factor is health, including such problems as obesity. The estimate for those who are disqualified only because of aptitude is about 2 percent, said Lt. Cmdr. Nate Christensen, a Pentagon spokesman. That includes not just people who failed the test but also those with other academic deficiencies, such as failure to get a GED.

 

The editorial claims that high school graduates in South Carolina won’t be prepared for the jobs available at automakers in the state.

 

But, writes Peter, this is not true.

 

Five minutes of googling indicates that they can be less worried. BMW appears ready to add more jobs in South Carolina, and these jobs include Forklift Operator and Production Associate. Production associates must have a year of steady job experience and be able to pass a drug test; they must also be willing to work any day they’re called, for a 10-12 hour shift. Forklift operators must have experience operating a forklift. Clearly more AP math courses would help graduates be better-prepared for these jobs.

 

How could the New York Times get everything so wrong? Peter says it is because they relied for their “data” on organizations funded by the Gates Foundation to promote the Common Core standards. Are these trustworthy sources?

 

He writes:

 

I suppose they are “bi-partisan” in the same way that The Tobacco Institute and most lobbying groups are “bi-partisan.” In that sense, the NYT board just stopped short of flat out lying by saying that these two groups are impartial or unbiased. But the Education Trust is a Gates-funded advocacy group from the earliest days of the Core. And Achieve is the organization that “helped” the CCSSO and NGA write the Common Core to begin with– no organization is more highly invested in the continued support and push of the Core Standards and the tests that are welded to them. And they earlier this month released a report that says– well, it says pretty much exactly what this editorial says.

 

In short, the NYT board has done the opposite of journalism here. This belongs with such classics as “Cigarettes Are Totally Good For You” or “US Must Solve Critical New Car Gap.” This is endorsing one political candidate without ever actually talking to any of the others.

 

The problems that face public education are complicated. In fact, right now they’re more complicated than ever because we have a muddy mix of actual problems (e.g. poverty, refusal to fully fund), created problems (e.g. charters stripping public schools of resources), and made-up problems (e.g. Oh Nos! Our students aren’t taking enough standardized tests!). All of these problems exist at the intersection of larger national issues such as income inequality, systemic racism, and the proper relationship between corporate and citizen interests.

 

What would help? Information. Correct, well-researched, thoughtful information. If you want to find one of the problems getting in the way of finding a remedy for everything that ails education, a good first step would be for journalists to stop uncritically running the PR of the people who want to dismantle public education and sell off the parts. The NYT did not solve any problems today, and they didn’t identify any, either. But they surely provided an example of one of them. Come on, New York Times– do journalism better.

 

 

 

Categories Common Core, Education Reform, Testing

New York Times’ Editorial Defends High-Stakes Testing and Common Core

By dianeravitch
December 31, 2015 //
33

The New York Times published an editorial (“The Counterfeit High School Diploma”) today lamenting the poor preparation of high school graduates. The Times enthusiastically supported No Child Left Behind and applauds the continued federal mandate for annual testing. The editorial is a caricature of the criticism of high-stakes standardized testing. The editorialist believes that opposition to high-stakes testing was cooked up by teachers’ unions to protect their members, ignoring the parent-led opt out movement and the solid research base for opposing such testing (including statements by the American Statistical Association, the National Research Council of the National Academy of Sciences, and the American Educational Research Association).

 

 

The Times’ editorial says:

 

 

Teachers unions and other critics of federally required standardized tests have behaved in recent years as though killing the testing mandate would magically remedy everything that ails education in the United States. In reality, getting rid of the testing requirement in the early grades would make it impossible for the country to know what if anything children were learning from year to year.

 

 

The statement above is sheer nonsense. The loudest criticism of “federally required standardized tests” has come from parent groups, not teachers unions. No one has ever said that “killing the testing mandate would magically remedy everything that ails education in the United States.” And it is beyond ridiculous to state that without the testing requirement it would “impossible for the country to know what if anything children were learning from year to year.”

 

 

Note to New York Times editorial writer from Planet Reality: There is a federal testing program called the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) that reports on what U.S. students are learning every other year. NAEP has been testing students since the 1970s and reporting on states and individual districts since 1992. The scores on NAEP have steadily increased until the adoption of NCLB in 2002, when progress slowed. Test score gains came to a crashing halt in 2015, as NCLB, Race to the Top and Common Core converged in a frenzy of exactly what the New York Times wants.

 

 

If students are graduating with empty high school diplomas, it cannot be because there wasn’t enough testing. We have had a federal policy of high-stakes testing, and students are graduating unprepared for college and careers. So the New York Times’ solution: keep on doing what hasn’t worked for 15 years. Keep high-stakes testing and add Common Core so that standards are higher.

 

 

The New York Times blames states and teachers unions for the failure of high-stakes testing. It bemoans the loss of enthusiasm for the Common Core standards. Maybe the editorialist should do some research and learn that high-stakes testing creates perverse incentives to game the system, teach to the test, and cheat. Maybe he could start by reading Tom Loveless’s prediction in 2012 that the Common Core would make little or no difference in test scores, because the test-score differences within states (with exactly the same standards and curricula) are as great as differences between states. Test scores reflect demographics, not curricula, standards, or teacher quality. Anyone who believes that the Common Core standards will magically improve achievement and close achievement gaps has not been paying attention to research, evidence, NAEP, or reality.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Categories Common Core, Testing
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