This article by Tom Ultican tells the sordid story of rich elites who have cynically decided to destroy public education in San Antonio.
They have cumulatively raised at least $200 million to attract charter operators to San Antonio, a figure which includes funding by the U.S. Department of Education and local plutocrats. The lead figure is a very wealthy woman named Victoria Rico, who sits on the boards of multiple charter chains. Rico and her friends have decided to re-engineer and privatize public education in San Antonio. Rico is working closely with Dan Patrick, the State’s lieutenant governor, who loves vouchers, hates public schools, and was the Rush Limbaugh of Texas before winning election to the State Senate.
Was there a vote taken in San Antonio? No. Was the public asked whether they wanted to abandon public education? Of course not. The titans don’t believe in democracy. They know what’s best for other people’s children.
They have hired a superintendent, Pedro Martinez, who was “trained” by the unaccredited Broad Superintendents Academy, which encourages school closures, privatization, and top-down management. Martinez has worked in school districts but was never a teacher or a principal and apparently knows nothing about pedagogy. Martinez is a member of Jeb Bush’s Chiefs for Change, which promotes privatization and technology in the classroom. He is also a big fan of the faux Relay “Graduate School of Education,” which specializes in charter teachers training new teachers for charter schools and has no professors or research programs.
As a native Texan, this whole deal made me physically ill. It stinks to high heaven. Everyone facilitating this private takeover of public schools should be ashamed of themselves.
They are not “doing it for the children.” They are doing it for their own egos. There are more failing charter schools than failing public schools. What right do they have to destroy the public schools of San Antonio? Who elected them? They have won plaudits from Betsy DeVos, the Koch brothers, and ALEC. They should be held accountable for their assault on democracy. I noticed that the Texas philanthropist Charles Butt refused to participate in this unholy cabal; he prefers to invest his fortune in supporting public schools.
I take this opportunity to name Victoria Rico, Pedro Martinez, and all their rightwing enablers to the Wall of Shame.
John Thompson, historian and teacher, lives in Oklahoma.
The Oklahoma press is focusing on the state’s low level of college readiness as measured by the ACT test, 16 percent, in comparison to the national rate of 27 percent. The state known for dramatic cuts in education funding is ranked 19th in the nation with an average composite score of 19.3. But it is missing the big picture.
The average ACT composite for my old school, Centennial, is 14.8, which is above average for the high-poverty neighborhood schools in Oklahoma City and Tulsa. Even when we were ranked last in the state, our ACT scores were significantly higher. Since I retired, Centennial received a $5 million School Improvement Grant. I believe that its ACT decline is just one example of evidence explaining how and why tens of billions of dollars of corporate school reform drove meaningful learning out of many inner city schools.
The important question is what caused the national decline. Retired PBS education reporter John Merrow argues these ACT-takers “have had 12 or 13 years of test-centric education, and the kids coming up behind them have also endured what the ‘school reformers’ designed.” He also asks, “How much more evidence do we need of the folly of ‘No Child Left Behind’ and Education Secretary Arne Duncan’s ‘Race to the Top’ before we take back our schools?”
Since reformers sought to improve low-performing schools, it is significant that Merrow cites the ACT report on recent outcomes:
A higher percentage of students this year than in recent years fell to the bottom of the preparedness scale, showing little or no readiness for college coursework. Thirty-five percent of 2018 graduates met none of the ACT College Readiness Benchmarks, up from 31% in 2014 and from 33% last year.
All types of researchers are contributing to the autopsies being performed on data-driven, competition-driven reform. And many of us are especially intrigued by the analyses of corporate school reformers on why test-driven accountability, the expansion of charter schools, and the quest to “build a better teacher” failed. The latest, by the Gates Foundation’s Tom Kane, is very illustrative. Kane acknowledges that media coverage has declared his “teacher quality” effort a failure, but he mostly blamed educators.
Kane is typical of many reformers who say the big mistake was rapidly scaling up their teacher evaluation and test-driven accountability models. Kane forgets, however, that he, Bill Gates, other venture philanthropists, and Arne Duncan were the ones who imposed the rapid scaling up of their untested hypotheses.
This leads to my hypothesis about the Tulsa Public Schools, which is led by corporate reformer Deborah Gist and a team of Broad Academy-trained administrators. It may offer a case study in the causes of the reform debacle. The TPS has the nation’s 7th lowest rate of student performance growth from 3rd to 8th grade.
Tulsa has a lot of advantages due to the Kaiser Foundation’s science-based early education efforts, and it used to have better student outcomes than the OKCPS. Tulsa has received millions of dollars in funding for it value-added teacher evaluations, “personalized” learning, and other corporate reforms. The cornerstone of their approach was the termination and “counseling out” of experienced educators, and demanding compliance to their new model.
Of course, no single piece of data can prove that Tulsa’s experiments failed for any single reason, but a new database created by ProPublica and Chalkbeat provides valuable new information. Their research shows that many of the biggest experiments, costing hundreds of millions and even billions of dollars and that were once proclaimed as successes, actually increased the achievement gap. Despite false claims to the contrary, many districts that committed to corporate reforms, and often claimed that they improved student performance, actually practiced mass suspensions of poor, black students. And there seems to be an unmistakable correlation between their commitment to teacher quality experiments and the increase of inexperienced teachers.
So, how much of the decline in Oklahoma ACT scores is attributable to the top-down reforms funded by the federal government, Bill Gates, and other edu-philanthropists?
It doesn’t rise to the level of “proof,” but it is noteworthy that black TPS students are 2.2 years behind their white peers. That is .5 a year worse than the OKCPS gap. (And only 18 percent of TPS students took those college readiness tests, in contrast to the OKCPS where 29 percent took the ACT or SAT.)
Nearly a quarter of OKCPS teachers are categorized as inexperienced. The same percentage applies to Centennial, and whenever I visit my old school I hear more concerns about the ways that teacher turnover undermines school improvement.
Nearly 1/3rd of Tulsa teachers are inexperienced.
As more data arrives, we will be able to evaluate whether the multi-million Tulsa/Gates Foundation teacher quality initiative drove down the quality of teaching and learning. But this much is obvious. It is easier for competition-driven reformers to suspend poor students than it is for them to increase student learning.
And the “exiting” of large numbers of veteran educators was seen as a feature, as opposed to a flaw in their model. Now we know it is much easier to drive teachers out of the profession than it is to social-engineer better teachers.
He writes:
No teacher should ever be data-driven. Every teacher should be student-driven.
You should base your instruction around what’s best for your students – what motivates them, inspires them, gets them ready and interested in learning.
To be sure, you should be data-informed – you should know what their test scores are and that should factor into your lessons in one way or another – but test scores should not be the driving force behind your instruction, especially since standardized test scores are incredibly poor indicators of student knowledge.
No one really believes that the Be All and End All of student knowledge is children’s ability to choose the “correct” answer on a multiple-choice test. No one sits back in awe at Albert Einstein’s test scores – it’s what he was able to do with the knowledge he had. Indeed, his understanding of the universe could not be adequately captured in a simple choice between four possible answers.
As I see it, there are at least six major problems with this dependence on student data at the heart of the data-driven movement.
So without further ado, here is a sextet of major flaws in the theory of data-driven instruction:
The Data is Unscientific
When we talk about student data, we’re talking about statistics. We’re talking about a quantity computed from a sample or a random variable.
As such, it needs to be a measure of something specific, something clearly defined and agreed upon.
For instance, you could measure the brightness of a star or its position in space.
However, when dealing with student knowledge, we leave the hard sciences and enter the realm of psychology. The focus of study is not and cannot be as clearly defined. What, after all, are we measuring when we give a standardized test? What are the units we’re using to measure it?
We find ourselves in the same sticky situation as those trying to measure intelligence. What is this thing we’re trying to quantify and how exactly do we go about quantifying it?
The result is intensely subjective. Sure we throw numbers up there to represent our assumptions, but – make no mistake – these are not the same numbers that measure distances on the globe or the density of an atomic nucleus.
These are approximations made up by human beings to justify deeply subjective assumptions about human nature.
It looks like statistics. It looks like math. But it is neither of these things.
We just get tricked by the numbers. We see them and mistake what we’re seeing for the hard sciences. We fall victim to the cult of numerology. That’s what data-driven instruction really is – the deepest type of mysticism passed off as science.
The idea that high stakes test scores are the best way to assess learning and that instruction should center around them is essentially a faith based initiative.
Before we can go any further, we must understand that.
This is an unusually good opinion piece that appeared in the New York Times a few days ago.
Think Gates, Zuckerberg, Walton, Hastings, Koch, and many more who use their wealth to impose their ideas on what they consider lesser lives.
The author is Anand Giridharadas.
Please note the mention of charter schools, a bone used by the elites to distract us from wealth inequality and the necessity of providing a better education for all.
It begins:
“Change the world” has long been the cry of the oppressed. But in recent years world-changing has been co-opted by the rich and the powerful.
“Change the world. Improve lives. Invent something new,” McKinsey & Company’s recruiting materials say. “Sit back, relax, and change the world,” tweets the World Economic Forum, host of the Davos conference. “Let’s raise the capital that builds the things that change the world,” a Morgan Stanley ad says. Walmart, recruiting a software engineer, seeks an “eagerness to change the world.” Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook says, “The best thing to do now, if you want to change the world, is to start a company.”
“At first, you think: Rich people making a difference — so generous! Until you consider that America might not be in the fix it’s in had we not fallen for the kind of change these winners have been selling: fake change.
“Fake change isn’t evil; it’s milquetoast. It is change the powerful can tolerate. It’s the shoes or socks or tote bag you bought which promised to change the world. It’s that one awesome charter school — not equally funded public schools for all. It is Lean In Circles to empower women — not universal preschool. It is impact investing — not the closing of the carried-interest loophole.
“Of course, world-changing initiatives funded by the winners of market capitalism do heal the sick, enrich the poor and save lives. But even as they give back, American elites generally seek to maintain the system that causes many of the problems they try to fix — and their helpfulness is part of how they pull it off. Thus their do-gooding is an accomplice to greater, if more invisible, harm.
“What their “change” leaves undisturbed is our winners-take-all economy, which siphons the gains from progress upward. The average pretax income of America’s top 1 percent has more than tripled since 1980, and that of the top 0.001 percent has risen more than sevenfold, even as the average income of the bottom half of Americans stagnated around $16,000, adjusted for inflation, according to a paper by the economists Thomas Piketty, Emmanuel Saez and Gabriel Zucman.
“American elites are monopolizing progress, and monopolies can be broken. Aggressive policies to protect workers, redistribute income, and make education and health affordable would bring real change. But such measures could also prove expensive for the winners. Which gives them a strong interest in convincing the public that they can help out within the system that so benefits the winners.”
Jeb Bush has been promoting school choice and disparaging public s hoops for years. Betsy DeVos was a member of the board of his Foundation for Excellence in Education until Trump chose her as Secretary of Education.
Jeb Bush invented the nutty notion of giving a letter grade to schools.
Jeb Bush zealously believes in high-stakes standardized testing and VAM. In Jeb’s Odel, Testing and letter grades are mechanisms to promote privatization.
She really gets it. She speaks to the hearts and minds of all who have suffered the insufferable Walker, who has walked all over teachers, students, and public schools. He has bulldozed the Wisconsin Idea.
Wisconsin needs Kelda Roys.
She writes:
This is a message of hope. A promise to you of what kind of governor I will be, and a heartfelt statement to demonstrate that I hear what you’ve been saying and empathize with what you’ve been experiencing.
Throughout the past eight years, you, your pocketbook, and your profession have been under attack.
You are constantly asked to “do more with less” as a result of the historic budget cuts to your classrooms. Without proper funding, the schools you work in, especially in rural communities, continue to close. You are often forced to “‘teach for the test” as opposed to engaging young minds in the joy of learning and helping develop students’ whole selves. Your class sizes are going up, but your professional autonomy is being ratcheted down.
As a result of Act 10, your collective bargaining rights were eliminated, compensation reduced, and work devalued. Your median salaries have continued to fall: as of the 2015-26 school year, your average pay was more than $10,000 lower than it was before the passage of Act 10. The policies of the Walker administration have done serious harm to Wisconsin’s once-great public education system. A record number of your colleagues have left the profession altogether.
In the numbers-driven, high-stakes testing approach that many school districts are taking, your autonomy is lost. This is bad for you and even worse for students. In the ever-expanding push for “accountability,” teachers are too often punished — never administrators, or politicians who fail to remedy the social and economic injustice that follows students into the classroom. Rather than addressing the teacher retention and pipeline problem by increasing pay and restoring joy to the profession, Walker and the DPI are undermining teacher qualifications by enabling fast-track “alternative” licensing for people without teaching degrees. And the expansion of privatization, from the voucher programs to so-called “independent” charters, steals resources away from our public schools and the kids you serve. It’s no wonder so many teachers feel demoralized and are leaving — your ability to practice the profession you love and teach your students is constantly questioned, challenged, and denied by the very people who should be supporting you.
Despite all this, I am asking you to not to leave.
As a small-business owner, as a mother, and as a proud graduate of Wisconsin’s public schools, I know how critical you are to our state and our future. To attract and retain the best teachers, Wisconsin must become a better state in which to be a teacher — we must invest in public schools and educators.
As governor, I pledge I will do everything in my power to restore the funding our schools deserve, the rights, wages, and benefits you lost, and the autonomy and respect you deserve.
The Guardian reports here on the collapse of a privatization program in England supported by both the Labor and Conservative parties. The idea sounds very much like our corporate charter chains. If a school was scoring poorly, hand it over to a private “trust” that renames it an academy and takes control of the school.
“Multi-academy trusts” are government-funded, run by private entities, and the schools are no longer locally controlled.
Lots of potential for graft and scandal.
“Wakefield City Academies Trust was in 2015 named a “top-performing” academy sponsor by Nicky Morgan, then education secretary, and handed a £500,000 slice of a £5m fund to improve schools in the north of England. Since then, things have gone awry. The trust has sunk to the bottom of the league tables to become one of the lowest-performing academy chains in the country. And it has been plagued by question marks over its finances.
“In July 2016, the Education Funding Agency investigated the trust. Its draft report, leaked to the TES, found that its interim chief executive, the businessman Mike Ramsay, had paid himself £82,000 over a three-month period. It concluded that the trust was in an “extremely vulnerable position as a result of inadequate governance, leadership and overall financial management”. Later that year, it was reported that the trust had paid almost £440,000 to IT and admin companies owned by Ramsay and his daughter.
“The trust was nevertheless allowed to carry on. Then, in September last year, it suddenly announced it would be looking for new sponsors for all 21 of its schools – but not before it had transferred more than £1.5m of reserves from its schools to its central coffers, entirely permissible in the current system. Some of this was funds raised by parents. It’s not clear whether any of this money will be left when the trust winds up, or whether those schools will see it again.
“The collapse of Wakefield City Academies Trust has sent shockwaves through our area,” says the local Labour MP Jon Trickett, who has for months been seeking answers from the government. “For many parents, it has been disturbing to find that their children’s futures could be threatened by the recklessness of people with very limited educational experience.”
“Wakefield City is one in a series of high-profile failures of trusts forced to give up all their schools. The magazine Schools Week reported just last week that Bright Tribe, the trust with the lowest-performing secondary schools in the country, would also be closing and handing back its 10 schools.
“Are these failures the inevitable consequence of a quasi-market system, predicated on the idea of takeovers? Or a sign of something deeply rotten at the heart of the government’s flagship education policy?
“Academies have been a jewel in the education policy crown for both Labour and Conservative governments in the past 25 years. According to Professor Becky Francis, director of the Institute of Education at University College London, Labour’s academies programme was “focused on the revitalisation of schooling as an engine of social mobility in deprived areas”. She says the idea of bringing in business and philanthropic sponsors – including big names such as the London-based French financier Arpad Busson – “not just for money but for expertise” was controversial from the start.”
We and the Brits have this in common. Both nations have eagerly abandoned responsibility for the quality of education and thrown the schools to the vagaries of the marketplace.
Mike Feinberg, co-founder of the KIPP megacorporation national chain, was dismissed because of allegations of inappropriate sexual contacts with students, which he denied. Not to worry. Mike has a new gig, teaching people how to start charters.To be clear, I don’t approve of the behavior (unspecified) of which he was accused and led to his ouster or resignation.
I wish Mike would take a job helping public schools. Or he could be a fundraiser for the Network for Public Education.
You may not want to hear this, but I like Mike, even though I disagree with the whole charter school hustle. He invited me to Houston in 2010, and he was a very congenial host. I had a great Tex-Mex lunch with his staff, toured the flagship school, then lectured at Rice University. TFA co-sponsored the event. As he expected, I lambasted Charter schools and TFA. The room was packed with teachers who belonged to the Houston Federation of Teachers. I admired Mike for listening to a dissident like me.
C’mon, Mike, come on over to the good guys. The pay stinks, but you will definitely feel right with your conscience.
“The power of collective resistance is being mounted in full force against a neoliberal logic that unabashedly insists that the rule of the market is more important than the needs of teachers, students, young people, the poor and those deemed disposable by those with power in our society. Teachers are tired of being relentless victims of a casino capitalism in which they and their students are treated with little respect, dignity and value. They have had enough of corrupt politicians, hedge fund managers and civically illiterate pundits seduced by the power of the corporate and political demagogues who are waging a war on critical teaching, critical pedagogy and the creativity and autonomy of classroom teachers.
“Since the 1980s, an extreme form of capitalism — or what in the current moment I want to call neoliberal fascism — has waged a war against public education and all vestiges of the common good and social contract. In addition, this is a war rooted in class and gender discrimination — one that deskills teachers, exploits their labor and bears down particularly hard on women, who make up a dominant segment of the teaching force. In doing so, it not only undermines schooling as a public good, but also weaponizes and weakens the formative cultures, values and social relations that enable schools to create the conditions for students to become critical and engaged citizens.
“Schools have been underfunded, increasingly privatized and turned into testing factories that deliver poor students of color to the violence of the school-to-prison pipeline. Moreover, they have also been restructured in order to weaken unions, subject teachers to horrendous working conditions and expose students to overcrowded classrooms. In some cases, the dire working environment and dilapidated conditions of schools and classrooms appear incomprehensible in the richest nation in the world…
“Moreover, as state and corporate violence engulfs the entire society, schools have been subject to forms of extreme violence that in the past existed exclusively outside of their doors. Under such circumstances, youth are increasingly viewed as suspects and are targeted both by a gun culture that places profits above student lives and by a neoliberal machinery of cruelty, misery and violence dedicated to widespread educational failure. Instead of imbuing students with a sense of ethical and social responsibility while preparing them for a life of social and economic mobility, public schools have been converted into high-tech security spheres whose defining principles are fear, uncertainty and anxiety. In this view, a corporate vision of the U.S. has reduced the culture of schooling to the culture of business and an armed camp, and in doing so, imposed a real and symbolic threat of violence on schools, teachers and students. As such, thinking has become the enemy of freedom, and profits have become more important than human lives…
“Rejecting the idea that education is a commodity to be bought and sold, teachers and students across the country are reclaiming education as a public good and a human right, a protective space that should be free of violence and open to critical teaching and learning. Not only is it a place to think, engage in critical dialogue, encourage human potential and contribute to the vibrancy of a democratic polity, it is also a place in which the social flourishes, in that students and teachers learn to think and act together.”
Why? Because his biggest campaign funders are hedge fund managers who believe in privatization and want to destroy teachers’ unions.
Now, Cuomo is counting on support from unions and public school teachers in his bid for a third term.
They should ask themselves whether he deserves their support.
This article was written in 2014:
It was a frigid February day in Albany, and leaders of New York City’s charter school movement were anxious. They had gone to the capital to court lawmakers, but despite a boisterous showing by parents, there seemed to be little clarity about the future of their schools.
Then, as they were preparing to head home, an intermediary called with a message: Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo wanted to meet.
To their surprise, Mr. Cuomo offered them 45 minutes of his time, in a private conference room. He told them he shared their concern about Mayor Bill de Blasio’s ambivalence toward charter schools and offered to help, according to a person who attended but did not want to be identified as having compromised the privacy of the meeting.
In the days that followed, the governor’s interest seemed to intensify. He instructed charter advocates to organize a large rally in Albany, the person said. The advocates delivered, bringing thousands of parents and students, many of them black, Hispanic, and from low-income communities, to the capital in early March, and eclipsing a pivotal rally for Mr. de Blasio taking place at virtually the same time.
Mr. Cuomo’s office declined on Wednesday to comment on his role.
As the governor worked to solidify support in Albany, his efforts were amplified by an aggressive public relations and lobbying effort financed by a group of charter school backers from the worlds of hedge funds and Wall Street, some of whom have also poured substantial sums into Mr. Cuomo’s campaign (he is up for re-election this fall). The push included a campaign-style advertising blitz that cost more than $5 million and attacked Mr. de Blasio for denying space to three charter schools.
Charter school leaders had built a formidable political operation over the course of a decade, hiring top-flight lobbyists and consultants. They had an ally in former Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg, but Mr. de Blasio promised a sea change, saying that he would charge rent to charter schools that had large financial backing, and that he would temporarily forbid new schools from using public space.
In public, the mayor largely ignored the outcry. At his prekindergarten rally, before a smaller crowd at the Washington Avenue Armory in Albany, Mr. de Blasio spoke about the value of early education. Not far away, a much larger crowd of charter school supporters was gathered on the steps of the State Capitol. In an act that his aides later said was spontaneous, Mr. Cuomo joined the mass of parents and students.
“You are not alone,” he told the roaring crowd. “We will save charter schools.”
The move to protect charter schools had begun months before, when it became clear that Mr. de Blasio was favored to win the mayoral race. Charter school leaders were in a panic; a memo circulated over the summer by one pro-charter group, Democrats for Education Reform, had identified Mr. de Blasio as the candidate least friendly to their cause.
Charter schools — privately run, but with taxpayers paying the tuition — have become popular nationwide among Democratic and Republican leaders, as well as with tens of thousands of low-income parents who submit to kindergarten lotteries every year. They are also popular among Wall Street leaders who see charter schools, which often do not have unions to bargain with and have relative freedom from regulation, as a successful alternative to traditional public schools. But many Democrats, including the mayor, have sought to slow their spread, contending that they are taking dollars and space from other public schools. Pro-charter advocacy groups, including Families for Excellent Schools, StudentsFirstNY and the New York City Charter School Center, met regularly to plot strategy. Increasingly, they turned to state officials.
A lot was riding on the debate for Mr. Cuomo. A number of his largest financial backers, some of the biggest names on Wall Street, also happened to be staunch supporters of charter schools. According to campaign finance records, Mr. Cuomo’s re-election campaign has received hundreds of thousands of dollars from charter school supporters, including William A. Ackman, Carl C. Icahn, Bruce Kovner and Daniel Nir.
Kenneth G. Langone, a founder of Home Depot who sits on a prominent charter school board, gave $50,000 to Mr. Cuomo’s campaign last year. He said that when the governor asked him to lead a group of Republicans supporting his re-election, he agreed because of Mr. Cuomo’s support for charter schools.
“Every time I am with the governor, I talk to him about charter schools,” Mr. Langone said in an interview. “He gets it.”
It was not until late February, shortly before the rally on the steps of the Capitol, that a full-fledged battle broke out.
Mr. de Blasio, reviewing plans for school space, had decided to deny it to three schools run by Success Academy Charter Schools, a high-performing network founded by Eva S. Moskowitz, a former city councilwoman. While he allowed the vast majority of charter schools to continue using public space, many supporters of Ms. Moskowitz’s schools were outraged.
Daniel S. Loeb, the founder of the hedge fund Third Point and the chairman of Success Academy’s board, began leaning on Wall Street executives for donations. Later this month, he will host a fund-raiser for Success Academy at Cipriani in Midtown Manhattan; tickets run as high as $100,000 a table.
The governor and his staff worked with Republicans in the State Senate and others to come up with a package of protections for charter schools in the city. He was already said to be displeased with Mr. de Blasio for rejecting his compromise offer on prekindergarten funding.
Mr. Cuomo did not mention charter schools in his State of the State address, but now, with Mr. de Blasio under assault and charter advocates behind him, he pushed for a sweeping deal.
The proposed legislation included provisions to reverse Mr. de Blasio’s decisions on school space, and it required the city to provide public classrooms to new and expanding charter schools or contribute to the cost of renting private buildings. It also suggested increasing per-pupil funding for charter schools and allowing them to operate prekindergarten programs.
