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John Merrow Questions Rick Hess’s Contrition about the Failure of Reform in D.C.

By dianeravitch
March 31, 2018 //
20

 

Yesterday I posted Rick Hess’s article chastising his fellow reformers for their celebration of D.C.’s “success” as a model, which led to their embarrassment when the falsification of graduation data was revealed.

John Merrow posted a lengthy comment following Hess’s article, which is worth reading.

He wriites:

Rick Hess has, sadly, been singing the praises of ‘school reform’ from the beginning. That he’s acknowledging error now is laudable, but it’s inaccurate, unfair, and disingenuous to suggest that no one has called attention to the fraud of the ‘test and punish’ approach championed by Rhee and Henderson.

Below are nine citations of my own work (#8 with Mary Levy). If readers of this note have time for only a few, please review #1, “Michelle Rhee’s Reign of Error,” #4, “The Premature Celebration of Henderson’s 5-year Anniversary,” and #8, “A Complete History of the DC Reform Fiasco,” written with Mary Levy.

(I also write about this in my new book, “Addicted to Reform: A 12-Step Program to Rescue Public Education.” If you are wondering who and what public education needs to be rescued FROM, well, let me say that Rick Hess, Checker Finn, Mike Petrilli, the Fordham Foundation, Tom Toch, Education Next, Democrats for Education Reform, and the big testing companies are on the list.)

I believe that Hess and other apologists owe far more than an apology to the THOUSANDS of DC students who were lied to about their progress, and to the teachers who were vilified and driven out of their chosen field.

Right now Hess and others of his tribe ought to be working overtime to persuade Mayor Bowser, who shows no visible signs of having learned from this tragedy, to change course.

Yes, the failure of the Washington Post’s editorial page is regrettable, but I doubt that strong editorials would have been enough to drown out the hymns of praise from Hess, Arne Duncan, the big foundations, and local philanthropists.

That repentant apologists like Rick Hess and unrepentant ones like Tom Toch continue to dine out on and parade their supposed expertise is beyond ironic.

1.https://themerrowreport.com/2013/04/11/michelle-rhees-reign-of-error/
2.https://themerrowreport.com/2013/05/15/michelle-rhee-and-the-washington-post/
3.https://themerrowreport.com/2014/07/24/michelle-rhees-high-priced-pr/
4.https://themerrowreport.com/2015/12/08/a-premature-celebration-in-dc/
5.https://themerrowreport.com/2015/12/16/kaya-hendersons-track-record-redux/
6.https://themerrowreport.com/2015/12/16/kaya-hendersons-track-record-redux/
7.https://themerrowreport.com/2018/02/12/graduation-rates-school-reform-fraud/
8.https://themerrowreport.com/2017/11/11/the-d-c-school-reform-fiasco-a-complete-history/
9.https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/film/education-of-michelle-rhee/

Categories Corporate Reform, District of Columbia, Fraud

Tom Ultican: D.C. Reform is a Mighty Fraud

By dianeravitch
March 7, 2018 //
11

 

Ever since D.C. Mayor Adrian Fenty took control of the D.C.public schools and named Michelle Rhee as its leader, corporate reformers have hailed the long-struggling district as a model of school reform. Rhee was a blazing meteor in the world of reform, appearing on the covers of national magazines and as a frequent guest on national TV. She starred in “Waiting for ‘Superman,’” and prominent reform-loving journalists burbled in print about her miraculous achievements.

She “knew” that “bad teachers” caused low student test scores, so she set about firing teachers and principals and designed an evaluation system tied to test scores to weed out the bad apples.

Her stle was mean. She gloried in her lack of empathy and her contempt for collaboration.

Now, Tom Ultican (like John Merrow before him, whom he cites) dismantles the Rhee legacy as a fraud, an exemplar of the Destroy Public Education Movement, a testament to the failure of the “portfolio model.”

Inflated test scores, inflated graduation rates, doctored data, a regime of deception and boasting. A model of corporate reform. Educators in Atlanta were sentenced to jail for the same things that happened in D.C. yet D.C. was hailed as a model.

Rhee is gone. Her successor Kaya Henderson is gone. Her successor Antwan Wilson is gone. But the hype and spin survives. When will the Mayor and City Council and people of D.C demand accountability?

Categories Accountability, Corporate Reform, Data, District of Columbia, Education Reform, Fraud, Rhee, Michelle, Scandals

Peter Greene: Center for American Progress Calls for Doubling Down on Failed Reforms

By dianeravitch
February 12, 2018 //
44

 

During the Obama years, the Center for American Progress reliably cheered on the administration’s education policies. As one after another failed, CAP never backed down. Charter schools good. Closing schools good. Common Core great. Despite the convergence of evidence that these policies did not work, that they destabilized fragile urban neighborhoods, that they demoralized teachers and created shortages, CAP never wavered.

As Peter Greene shows in this post, the CAP has learned nothing from the past 15 years of failed reforms. They are still pushing policy ideas cribbed from the GOP.

They still are pushing state takeovers and turnarounds.

He writes:

”And what example do folks who support takeovers and turnarounds like to cite? Of course, it’s New Orleans. Do we really have to get into all the ways that the privatization of the New Orleans school system is less than a resounding success? Or let’s discus the Tennessee experiment in a recovery school district, in which the state promised to turn the bottom five percent into the top schools in the state, and they utterly failed. As in, the guy charged with making it happened gave up and admitted that it was way harder than he thought it would be, failed.

“The whole premise of a state takeover is that somebody in the state capital somehow knows more about how to make a school work than the people who work there (or, in most cases, can hire some guy who knows because he graduated from an ivy league school and spent two years in a classroom once). The takeover model still holds onto a premise that many reformsters, to their credit, have moved past: that trained professional educators who have devoted their adult lives to working in schools– those people are the whole problem. It’s insulting, it’s stupid, and it’s a great way to let some folks off the hook, like, say, the policy makers who consistently underfund some schools.

“Most importantly, at this point, there isn’t a lick of evidence that it works.

“We have the results of the School Improvement Grants used by the Obama administration to “fix” schools, and the results were that SIG didn’t accomplish anything (other than, I suppose, keeping a bunch of consultants well-paid). SIG also did damage because it allowed the current administration and their ilk to say, “See? Throwing money at schools doesn’t help.” But the real lesson of SIG, which came with very specific Fix Your School instructions attached, was that when the state or federal government try to tell a local school district exactly how things should be fixed, instead of listening to the people who live and work there, nothing gets better. That same fundamental flaw is part of the DNA of the takeover/turnaround approach.

“But CAP is excited about ESSA because some states have included this model in their plan. So, yay.”

Worst of all, CAP ends it’s paean to ESSA by linking to a paper produced by a Jeb Bush’s Chiefs for Change.

If proof is needed of a mind meld between “centrist” Democrats and free-market, DeVos-style Republicans, This is it.

 

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Closing schools, Common Core, Corporate Reform, Corporate Reformers, Democrats, Education Industry, Privatization, Stupid, Turnaround

Good News! Phony Billionaire Charter Group Collapses: ADDENDUM

By dianeravitch
February 6, 2018 //
22

 

One of the nation’s leading corporate education reform groups— Families for Excellent Schools—has collapsed. It adopted a name to suggest that it spoke for poor black and Hispanic families, but the families it represented were wealthy financiers from Wall Street, Greenwich, Connecticut, the Walton Family, and the Eli Broad family.

This is the group that spent millions to run ads attacking Mayor deBlasio when he had the gall to challenge Eva Moskowitz’s demand for free space in public schools and the right to force the city to pay for any space she was required to rent. Eva had the support of the powerful financiers of FES and Governor Cuomo, and together they beat DeBlasio and taught him not to challenge Queen Eva.

FES expanded to Massachusetts and poured millions of “Dark Money” (undisclosed names) into the referendum battle to lift the cap on charter schools. After the election, the state investigated the millions in outside money that poured into the race, fined FES nearly half a million dollars for failing to identify its donors, and banned them from operating in the state for four years.

Then came the embarrassment this week when FES was compelled to fire its leader, Jeremiah Kittredge, for inappropriate sexual behavior with a non-employee. As Politico reported, Kittredge was one of the most prominent reform leaders in the nation. But he acted like a jerk, making stupid vulgar comments about a woman’s breasts at an education reform conference, the Philos retreat. Kittredge was one of Eva Moskowitz’s closest advisors.

Then today came this announcement:

**FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE** FEBRUARY 5, 2018

New York, NY – Statement from Bryan Lawrence, Board Chair of Families for Excellent Schools:

“This is a sad day for everyone at Families for Excellent Schools. We are very proud of the work we’ve done to help thousands of families stand up for educational opportunity in their communities, and believe our vision of a world where every child has access to an excellent school has never been more important.

“Unfortunately, after a series of challenges over the past year and particularly given recent events, we have determined that the support necessary to keep the organization going is not there. We are beginning the process of winding down our work. I want to thank all those who have given their heart and soul to this organization since its inception; I know they will continue to advocate for the families and communities we serve.”

Mercedes Schneider wrote about the fall of this phony group here:

Families for Excellent Schools (FES) Is Shutting Down. Marvelous.

Politico explained the declining fortunes of FES this way (and hedged on whether FES was closing partially or completely):

The pro-charter group has seen its fortunes decline sharply over the last year. Its influence in New York has waned as de Blasio has largely declined to criticize charters and much of the local press turned its attention away from Families for Excellent Schools’ relentless schedule of rallies and press releases aimed at pressuring the mayor.

By 2016, the expensive rallies the group was best known for were no longer leading to policy wins at the city or state level, and the strategy was eventually abandoned.

And most crucially, the group suffered a disastrous political defeat in late 2016 from which it never fully recovered, sources say. After funnelling $20 million into a pro-charter ballot initiative in Massachusetts known as Question 2, the question was defeated at the polls by 25 points.

Several sources indicated its once-prolific fundraising became significantly more challenging in the aftermath of the Massachusetts loss.

https://www.politico.com/states/new-york/albany/story/2018/02/05/families-for-excellent-schools-planning-to-close-following-ceos-firing-235707

So, the big rallies with the matching T-shirts were no longer impressing politicians. The money was drying up. The executive director was caught in an embarrassing moment of monumental grossness.

Sad. The ed reform movement seems to be cracking up. Students First, gone. FES, gone. Who is next?

ADDENDUM:

Correction by a reader:

“Jeremiah Kittredge’s behavior was not just “an embarrassing moment of monumental grossness.”

“Jeremiah Kittredge guy was a serial creep. Consensual or not, Jeremiah was basically f—ing his way through the Families for Excellent Schools headquarters:

“POLITICO: “Kittredge has been involved in multiple consensual sexual relationships with colleagues throughout his relatively brief career in education reform, including at least one employee who reported directly to him, according to five sources with direct knowledge of the situation.”

“That’s from here:

https://www.politico.com/states/new-york/city-hall/story/2018/02/02/charter-champions-firing-came-after-sexual-harassment-allegations-233549

“Jeremiah picked the wrong year(s) to be engaging in this kind of Don-Draper-in-Mad-Men type carousing. (Mad Men took place in the early to mid 1960’s) Given the current MeToo/Times Up atmosphere, his behavior was / is monumentally anachronistic.”

Categories Billionaires, Corporate Reform, Dark Money, Education Reform, Failure

Gary Rubinstein: A Model of Abject Failure: The Tennessee Achievement School District

By dianeravitch
February 4, 2018 //
5

 

Gary Rubinstein has chronicled the creation, the hype, the premature claims of success, and the utter collapse of the Tennessee Achievement School District.

It was created with Race to the Top funding. It promised to take the schools ranked in the bottom 5% of the state and “catapult” them to the top 25%. This would take only five years. It would be done by turning them into charter schools.

But, five years later, Rubinstein finds, 5 of the six original schools are still in the bottom 5%, and the sixth is in the bottom 9%.

Tennessee ‘Cusp List’ 2017: 5 of 6 Of Original ASD Schools Still In Bottom 5%

This outcome could be fairly characterized as abject failure.

Unfortunately, reformers are never deterred by failure. Several other states, including Nevada, Georgia, and North Carolina have started a similar program, modeled on the Tennessee ASD.

Worse, the ASD concept is embedded in the federal Every Student Succeeds act, which directs states to develop a plan to intervene in the schools in the lowest performing 5%.

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Corporate Reform, Education Industry, Failure, Privatization, Tennessee

Carol Burris: California’s Charter Law Invites Corruption, Fraud, Malfeasance

By dianeravitch
January 14, 2018 //
9

 

 

 

Carol Burris, the amazing and talented executive director of the Network for Public Education, wrote this stunning investigative report on charter fraud in California. It is titled “Charters and Consequences.”

The report details the fraud and financial scams permitted by California’s weak charter law. So weak is that law that it not only tolerates fraud, it encourages it.

As you read the report, you will ask yourself why taxpayers are not outraged. They should be.

Categories Accountability, California, Charter Schools, Corporate Reform, Education Industry, For-Profit, Fraud, Privatization

Tom Ultican: The Billionaires’ Plan to Destroy Public Education

By dianeravitch
December 19, 2017 //
26

Tom Ultican lays out in gruesome detail the billionaires’ plan to destroy public education.

The documentation is solid. The billionaires are jointly funding every anti-public school organization they can find, and they create them when they don’t exist.

Gruesome, yes. But it is a fact that their spending has not accomplished much, other than to ruin the lives of children, teachers, families, and communities. Nowhere has it produced better education. They sow chaos and disruption, then move on to the next big idea.

He begins like this:

“Three researchers from Indiana coined the terminology Destroy Public Education (DPE). They refuse to call it reform which is a positive sounding term that obfuscates the damage being done. America’s public education system is an unmitigated success story, yet, DPE forces say we need to change its governance and monetize it.

“We are discussing the education system that put a man on the moon, developed the greatest economy the world has ever seen and wiped out small pox. It is the system that embraces all comers and resists all forms of discrimination. In the 1980’s, it was laying the foundation for the digital revolution when it came under spurious attack.

“Not only are great resources being squandered on DPE efforts but the teaching profession is being diminished. Organizations like Relay Graduate School and the New Teachers Project are put forward as having more expertise in teacher education than our great public universities. That would be amusing if wealthy elites were not paying to have these posers taken seriously.”

Categories Accountability, Billionaires, Charter Schools, Corporate Reform, Education Industry, Failure, Fraud

Susan Ochshorn: A Battle for the Heart and Soul of American Education: Meier v. Moskowitz

By dianeravitch
December 17, 2017 //
30

[I am reposting since I just discovered that I put the wrong link in the original post. Sorry, Susan!]

Susan Ochshorn of ECE PolicyWorks and a new member of the board of the Network for Public educatio, writes here about two polar opposites: Deborah Meier and Eva Moskowitz.

Ochshorn compares the biographies, the lives, and the education philosophy of these two people.

She begins with Meier, an advovate, like Ochshorn, for children’s right to play:

“More than two decades ago, Deborah Meier warned that the idea of democracy was in peril. “Is it ever otherwise?” she asked in the preface to The Power of Their Ideas, her elegantly argued manifesto for public education. A self-described preacher on its behalf, she has spent half a century nurturing “everyone’s inalienable capacity to be an inventor, dreamer, and theorist—to count in the larger scheme of things.”

“I met Meier in the mid-aughts, when I joined a grassroots campaign she spearheaded in New York City to restore creative play and hands-on learning to preschools and kindergartens. This éminence grise of progressive early childhood education and the small-schools movement (for which she received a MacArthur fellowship in 1987) had begun her career as a kindergarten teacher at the Shoesmith School in Kenwood, a diverse neighborhood wedged between the University of Chicago’s Hyde Park and an impoverished black community.”

When she turns to Moskowitz, she sees a power-hungry woman who uses children for her own purposes.

“The Education of Eva Moskowitz” is a torturous read. After 359 pages of copious detail, an internal structure that defies chronology, zig-zagging across Moskowitz’s life, the evisceration of journalists, politicians and “union flacks,” as she refers to people and organizations fighting for social justice, and anyone else who has crossed her, my mind was numb. Not to mention her hubris, greed, narcissism, humorlessness and lack of self-awareness…

“His hypocrisy would have been comical if the fates of real children weren’t at stake,” Moskowitz writes of Mayor Bill de Blasio, her adversary in building an empire. Ah, yes, the children. “While it can be frustrating to teach them because they don’t know how to behave,” Moskowitz writes in a chapter called “Weevils” (an infestation she attributes to snacks from the Department of Education), “the upside is that they are virtually a blank slate…. if you take advantage of that fact to teach them to become good learners, that investment will pay dividends for years to come.”

“Apparently, Moskowitz isn’t aware that the tabula rasa theory of the English empiricist John Locke has been discredited by decades of neurological and developmental science. As Berkeley psychologist Alison Gopnik writes in The Philosophical Baby, “Their minds seem drastically limited; they know so much less than we do. And yet long before they can read and write, they have extraordinary powers of imagination and creativity, and long before they go to school, they have remarkable learning abilities.”

“Moskowitz and other charter network operators such as KIPP’s David Levin have cast their “No Excuses” schools in the mold of Harvard psychologist B.F. Skinner, whose radical behaviorism ignores internal processes—thoughts, feelings, and neurophysiological processes—emphasizing the relationship between observable stimuli and responses. Through a process called operant conditioning, behavior is modified by positive and negative reinforcement. (See Pavlov and his dogs.)

“With harsh discipline, and incentives offered for good behavior and high scores on practice tests, Moskowitz remains convinced she can close the achievement gap between her students, the vast majority of whom are black or Latino living in poverty, and their more affluent, white peers. Her methods are abusive. Students’ every movement is monitored. Daydreaming is prohibited. Children are shamed, their lackluster performances on weekly spelling and math quizzes posted in a red zone on charts in the hallway.”

As we view these two, we see a struggle for the heart and soul of American education, or for the hearts and souls of our children. Big money is betting on Moskowitz. She is the darling of Wall Street, DFER, and other corporate titans. The survival of our democracy and humane ideals is riding on Meier’s vision.

Categories Charter Schools, Childhood, Citizenship, Corporate Reform, Democracy, Discipline and Suspensions, Education Industry

Jersey Jazzman: What We Discovered About “Reform”in Newark: A Summary

By dianeravitch
December 17, 2017 //
4

Mark Weber, aka Jersey Jazzman, worked with Bruce Baker at Rutgers University to review the progress of the “reforms” (aka privatization and disruption) in Newark. This post is the first in a series that will summarize their findings.


The National Education Policy Center published a lengthy report written by Dr. Bruce Baker and myself that looks closely at school “reform” in Newark. I wrote a short piece about our report at NJ Spotlight that gives summarizes our findings. We’ve also got a deep dive into the data for our report at the NJ Education Policy website.

You might be wondering why anyone outside of New Jersey, let alone Newark, should care about what we found. Let me give you a little background before I try to answer that question…

In 2010, Mark Zuckerberg, the CEO and founder of Facebook, went on the The Oprah Winfrey Show and announced that he was giving $100 million in a challenge grant toward the improvement of Newark’s schools. Within the next couple of years, Newark had a new superintendent, Cami Anderson. Anderson attempted to implement a series of “reforms” that were supposed to improve student achievement within the city’s entire publicly-financed school system.

In the time following the Zuckerberg donation, Newark has often been cited by “reformers” as a proof point. It has a large and growing charter school sector, it implemented a teacher contract with merit pay, it has a universal enrollment system, it “renewed” public district schools by churning school leadership, it implemented Common Core early (allegedly), and so on.

So when research was released this fall that purported to show that students had made “educationally meaningful improvements” in student outcomes, “reformers” both in and out of New Jersey saw it as a vindication. Charter schools are not only good — they don’t harm public schools, because they “do more with less.” Disruption in urban schools is good, because the intractable bureaucracies in these districts needs to be shredded. Teachers unions are impeding student learning because we don’t reward the best teachers and get rid of the worst…

And so on. If Newark’s student outcomes have improved, it has to be because these and other received truths of the “reformers” must be true.

But what if the data — including the research recently cited by Newark’s “reformers” — doesn’t show Newark has improved? What if other factors account for charter school “successes”? What if the test score gains in the district, relative to other, similar districts, isn’t unique, or educationally meaningful? What if all the “reforms” supposedly implemented in Newark weren’t actually put into place? What if the chaos and strife that has dogged Newark’s schools during this “reform” period hasn’t been worth it?

What if Newark, NJ isn’t an example of “reform” leading to success, but is instead a cautionary tale?

These are the questions we set out to tackle. And in the next series of posts here, I am going to lay out, in great detail, exactly what we found, and explain what the Newark “reform” experiment is actually telling us about the future of American education.

Categories Corporate Reform, Education Industry, New Jersey, Newark, Privatization, Research

Mercedes Schneider: Betsy DeVos Discovers “A Nation at Risk” and Claims That Choice is The Answer

By dianeravitch
December 5, 2017 //
14

Mercedes Schneider’s reviews Betsy DeVos’s speech to her friend Jeb Bush’s Foundation for Educational Excellence.

Betsy and Jeb have this in common: They both hate public schools and have devoted their life to demeaning, belittling, and attacking the schools that 85-90% of American children attend. They are in love with consumer choice, and they would like nothing better than to direct public funds to religious schools, for-profit schools, cyber schools, and homeschooling.

As Mercedes notes, Betsy (or more likely, a speechwriter) discovered “A Nation at Risk,” The 1983 jeremiad that blamed public schools for the loss of industries to Germany and Japan. The report was written in the midst of the 1982 recession, and the commissioners decided that the schools were to blame for the downturn. When the economy recovered, no one bothered to thank the schools.

Betsy devoutly believes that choice will fix everything, but “A Nation at Risk” didn’t mention choice.

And she continues to ignore the evidence of the past 25 years of choice. Her home state of Michigan is overrun with charter schools, and its standing on NAEP fell from the middle of the 50 States to the bottom 10 from 2003 to 2013. The news out of the New Orleans all-Charter District throws cold water on the Charter Movement, as New Orleans continues to be a low-performing District in a low-performing State. The evidence on vouchers continues to accumulate, and it is not promising. In the most recent voucher studies, students actually lose ground. After three or four years, those who have not left to return to public schools catch up with their peers who stayed in public schools, but that’s probably because the weakest students left.

Now that Betsy is talking numbers, maybe she will pay attention to the research on charters and vouchers and admit that her favorite panacea is not working.

But I’m not holding my breath.

Categories Accountability, ALEC, Betsy DeVos, Bush, Jeb, Charter Schools, Corporate Reform, Michigan, New Orleans, School Choice, Vouchers
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