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Success Academy is Seeking to Hire a “Chief Scaling Officer”

By dianeravitch
June 15, 2016 //
33

A friend sent me a recruiting notice from Success Academy. It is seeking to hire a “Chief Scaling Officer.” No, this has nothing to do with fish. It is about growing the charter chain and finding a guru who knows how to expedite that growth. My friend also told me that the salary is huge, like $300,000. This is your chance to get in on the hottest business opportunity in town. Warning: staff turnover is extremely high.

Here is the offer (please note the use of “architect” as a verb, something new to me):


Success Academy Charter Schools

Managing Director and Chief Scaling Officer

The mission of Success Academy is to reimagine public education. From the classroom to the halls of government, this means finding profoundly different approaches to how we structure, implement and support schooling. To realize our radical vision, we reconceive every aspect of school design, from writing rigorous new curricula to drawing regularly on the advances in technology, business and social/civic practices that are transforming every sector except education. Over the past decade, Success has grown faster than any charter network in the nation, building a vibrant network of 34 elementary, middle and high schools. Our 11,000 children – mostly poor and minority – are out-performing students at top city and suburban schools across New York State. With our oldest students in 10th grade, we are fast approaching the irrefutable proof point that zip code does not determine destiny.

Our goals for our second decade are even more ambitious. To rectify the state of schooling in America, we urgently need to demonstrate that excellence can be achieved at scale. And with 19,000 families on our waiting lists (most of them with no other options than failing district schools), we are dedicated to opening great schools as quickly as possible. So our plan is to grow to 100 schools, with the goal of educating 50,000 children across New York City in a uniquely holistic pre-k-12 system. This will make Success Academy one of the larger school districts in the country – on a par with Atlanta or Boston – ensuring that the charter sector is large enough in New York that it cannot be turned back. At 100 schools, we will be graduating 3,000 scholars each year who are prepared to enter, persist and graduate from college and eventually to lead in business, government and civic realms.

With this rapid growth and trajectory, Success seeks to hire its first Chief Scaling Officer—a compelling leader who can spearhead the strategic planning and project execution needed to scale up in critical operational and functional areas while maintaining extraordinary quality across all schools.

The Chief Scaling Officer will report to founder and CEO, Eva Moskowitz, and will be responsible for reimagining how Success Academy structures its operations and school support, so that from school launch to school management, Success is achieving greater operational excellence and outcomes for students. The Chief Scaling Officer
will partner with the CEO and other members of senior management to establish a shared vision around scaling for the organization, will identify areas of inefficiency and unwanted redundancy, will define processes that require standardization, and will outline changes in personnel, technology, systems, and/or management that are required to take the organization to 100 schools and develop Success as a national model in public education.

Not a mere architect of such initiatives, this executive will execute on the aforementioned plans and recommendations.

The CSO should be someone who…

● Understands how to build a replicable model that is both defined and elastic and has experience implementing such a model across multiple sites;

● Can architect a clear, actionable strategic scaling plan that maps out a scope and sequence for the proposed operational changes and what is needed to accomplish them;

● Has the communication and leadership skills to drive the change management required to get all parts of the organization to scale according to plan;

● Has experience navigating political, bureaucratic, and operational hurdles to clear pathways to scaling;

● Seeks to work at a fast-paced, collaborative, compassionate, start-up organization, where entrepreneurialism, innovation, and creative disruption are valorized;

● Is an enthusiastic learner; and

● Is committed to education reform.

The winning candidate will have an opportunity to become an Executive Vice President upon demonstrating success in the role over time.

Success Academy has retained Seiden Krieger Associates, a 30 year old New York executive search firm as its exclusive partner to recruit the Chief Scaling Officer. Contact: Steven A. Seiden, President, Seiden Krieger Associates, 445 Park Avenue, New York, NY 10022; 212-688-8383; steven@seidenkrieger.com.

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Corporate Reformers, Education Industry, Privatization

Audrey Amrein-Beardsley: Why Houston Kicked Out EVAAS, Its Teacher Evaluation Vendor

By dianeravitch
June 15, 2016 //
9

Last week, the Houston Independent School Board deadlocked in a 3-3 tie vote on whether to renew its contract with the vendor supplying the teacher evaluation program.

Audrey Amrein-Beardsley explains their decision here.

At least three board members realized that five years of this program had not moved the needle by an inch. If performance matters, then EVAAS was a failure.

Beardsley is one of the nation’s leading researchers in the study of teacher evaluation.

She writes:

Seven teachers in the Houston Independent School District (HISD), with the support of the Houston Federation of Teachers (HFT), are taking HISD to federal court over how their value-added scores, derived via the Education Value-Added Assessment System (EVAAS), are being used, and allegedly abused, while this district that has tied more high-stakes consequences to value-added output than any other district/state in the nation. The case, Houston Federation of Teachers, et al. v. Houston ISD, is ongoing.

But just announced is that the HISD school board, in a 3:3 split vote late last Thursday night, elected to no longer pay an annual $680K to SAS Institute Inc. to calculate the district’s EVAAS value-added estimates. As per an HFT press release (below), HISD “will not be renewing the district’s seriously flawed teacher evaluation system, [which is] good news for students, teachers and the community, [although] the school board and incoming superintendent must work with educators and others to choose a more effective system.”

Open the link, read the full article, and read her links. This is excellent news.

The bad part of her post is the news that the federal government is still giving out grants that require districts to continue using this flawed methodology, despite the fact that it hasn’t worked anywhere.

Apparently, HISD was holding onto the EVAAS, despite the research surrounding the EVAAS in general and in Houston, in that they have received (and are still set to receive) over $4 million in federal grant funds that has required them to have value-added estimates as a component of their evaluation and accountability system(s).

So Houston will have to find a new vendor of a failed methodology.

Categories Accountability, Corporate Reformers, Education Industry, Failure, For-Profit, Houston, Teacher Evaluations, Testing, VAM (value-added modeling)

Idaho Students to Albertson Foundation: “You Don’t Know What You Are Talking About!”

By dianeravitch
June 14, 2016 //
20

High school students in the West Ada school district made a 3-minute video to respond to the Albertson Foundation’s attack on public education. (Read here about the Albertson Foundation’s attacks and its plan to open enough charter schools to enroll 20,000 students.)

The Albertson Foundation is leading a mean-spirited attack on public education in Idaho. They have underwritten television ads saying that the public schools are no good and 80% of the graduates are not prepared for college or careers. Attacks like this are always the prelude to demands for privatization and for replacing public schools with charter schools, vouchers, and virtual charters.

The students got tired of hearing these stale and erroneous complaints from a handful of billionaires who don’t like public education, so they made their own video. Of course, they can’t afford to put it on television, but they can put it on social media.

Let’s hear it for the kids! They are alright in Idaho!

Categories Accountability, Billionaires, Charter Schools, Corporate Reformers, Education Reform, Idaho, Privatization

Valerie Strauss Interviews Me about National Standards, Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, and Donald Trump

By dianeravitch
June 14, 2016 //
20

Valerie Strauss conducted a written Q&A exchange with me over the weekend.

She asked good questions. She wanted to know what I had changed in the revision of The Death and Life of the Great American School System: How Testing and Choice Are Undermining Education.

She asked me what I would say to President Obama if I had the chance to sit down with him.

She asked what I thought Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump would do.

I thought it was a good opportunity to sum up what is happening right now.

As an aside, readers of this blog might be interested to note that our old friend Virginia SGP comments and claims that he was “censored” on my blog. Happily, a reader of this blog pointed out that he was limited to only four comments a day, which is not censorship. If I posted everything he sent in, he would have had 10-12 comments a day. And then there was the problem that he often used his space to slam and slander people he disagreed with. Not me, but others. He has left us, sadly. I no longer have to read a dozen comments of his daily and decide which to post.

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Common Core, Corporate Reformers, Education Industry, NCLB (No Child Left Behind), Obama, Privatization, Race to the Top, Testing

Peter Greene on Jeb Bush’s Stale Vision to Disrupt, Privatize, and Monetize Public Education

By dianeravitch
June 14, 2016 //
21

Jeb is back, writes Peter Greene, with the same old snake oil. Having lost the GOP presidential nomination, he has returned to his favorite song: Public education is failing, and we (the reformers) need to disrupt it, monetize it, privatize it, and sell lots of technology to it.

As Peter shows, there is nothing new in what he has on offer. The same overworked and faulty statistics about massive educational failure (we would now be a fourth world nation if any of this baloney were true). The same claims about the wonders of technology. The same empty claims for privatization and profiteering. Merit pay. No unions. Test scores as the be-all and end-all of education.

Peter writes:

Jeb loves him some vouchers. In his perfect future, the money will follow the child. I always think this is a bold choice for a nominal conservative politician, since it is literally taxation without representation– taxpayers who don’t have kids get to pay for schools, but they have no voice in what kind of schools they get. And if the money follows the kid, why can’t the kid just have a big party?

But I have to take my hat off to somebody who still believes in vouchers. It’s the kind of devotion you usually find only in members of the Flat Earth Society, an adherence to a long-debunked belief that doesn’t have a speck of evidence to support it.

Float Free as a Bird

But why have a school at all, says Bush. Why not just get your AP Calculus from this on-line provider, and get your English from some other provider. Watch for the Amazon.com of homeschooling. Let students move through coursework at their own personal speed. Assess student mastery of skills through the year, and never social promote. Yes, we’ll have Competency Based Education, but we’ll call it something else.

Jeb’s answer to everything: get rid of public education.

Jeb Bush is the Ivan Illich of the right.

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Common Core, Corporate Reformers, Education Industry, Online Learning, Privatization, Virtual Charter Schools, Vouchers

Tom Loveless: Why Campbell Brown, StudentsFirst, and Achieve Are Wrong about NAEP Proficient

By dianeravitch
June 14, 2016 //
10

Tom Loveless of the Brookings Institution has studied student achievement for many years. He has written several reports on the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP). Before earning his doctorate, he taught sixth grade in California.

In this post, he explains why “reformers” who confuse NAEP’s “proficient level” with “grade level” are wrong.

This claim has been asserted by pundits like Campbell Brown of The 74, Michelle Rhee, and organizations such as Achieve. They want the public to believe that our public schools are failing miserably, and our kids are woefully dumb. But Loveless shows why they are wrong.

He writes:

Equating NAEP proficiency with grade level is bogus. Indeed, the validity of the achievement levels themselves is questionable. They immediately came under fire in reviews by the U.S. Government Accountability Office, the National Academy of Sciences, and the National Academy of Education.[1] The National Academy of Sciences report was particularly scathing, labeling NAEP’s achievement levels as “fundamentally flawed.”

Despite warnings of NAEP authorities and critical reviews from scholars, some commentators, typically from advocacy groups, continue to confound NAEP proficient with grade level. Organizations that support school reform, such as Achieve Inc. and Students First, prominently misuse the term on their websites. Achieve presses states to adopt cut points aligned with NAEP proficient as part of new Common Core-based accountability systems. Achieve argues that this will inform parents whether children “can do grade level work.” No, it will not. That claim is misleading.

The expectation that all students might one day reach 100% proficiency on the NAEP is completely unrealistic. It has not happened in any other country, including the highest performing. Not even our very top students taught by our very best teachers haven’t reached 100% proficiency. This is a myth that should be discarded.

Loveless goes even farther and insists that NAEP achievement levels should not be the benchmark for student progress.

He warns:

Confounding NAEP proficient with grade-level is uninformed. Designating NAEP proficient as the achievement benchmark for accountability systems is certainly not cautious use. If high school students are required to meet NAEP proficient to graduate from high school, large numbers will fail. If middle and elementary school students are forced to repeat grades because they fall short of a standard anchored to NAEP proficient, vast numbers will repeat grades.

Anyone who claims that NAEP proficient is the same as grade level should not be taken seriously. Loveless doesn’t point out that the designers of the Common Core tests decided to align their “passing mark” with NAEP proficient, which explains why 70% of students typically fails the PARCC and the SBAC tests. Bear in mind that the passing mark (the cut score) can be arbitrarily set anywhere–so that all the students “pass,” no students pass, or some set percentage will pass. That’s because the questions have been pre-tested, and test developers know their level of difficulty. And that is why U.S. Secretary of Education John King, when he was New York Commissioner of Education, predicted that only 30% of the students who took the state tests would “pass.” He was uncannily accurate because he already knew that the test was designed to “fail” 70%.

He concludes:

NAEP proficient is not synonymous with grade level. NAEP officials urge that proficient not be interpreted as reflecting grade level work. It is a standard set much higher than that. Scholarly panels have reviewed the NAEP achievement standards and found them flawed. The highest scoring nations of the world would appear to be mediocre or poor performers if judged by the NAEP proficient standard. Even large numbers of U.S. calculus students fall short.

As states consider building benchmarks for student performance into accountability systems, they should not use NAEP proficient—or any standard aligned with NAEP proficient—as a benchmark. It is an unreasonable expectation, one that ill serves America’s students, parents, and teachers–and the effort to improve America’s schools.

Categories Corporate Reformers, Hoax, NAEP, Testing

Paul Thomas: Closing Schools, Opening Schools: Why Not Look at the Evidence?

By dianeravitch
June 13, 2016 //
6

Paul Thomas reacts to an editorial in the Charleston (S.C.) “Post and Courier,” which recommended closing a high-poverty school with low test scores and turning it over to private operators.

Thomas asks a few questions:

So there are actually some very important questions that the editors at the P&C are failing to ask:

Why have some students been allowed ever to languish in school conditions that are subpar when compared to vibrant schools and opportunities for other students in the same city? Burns Elementary with a poverty index of 96 is but one school that represents a long history in SC of how negligent we have been as a state in terms of providing anything close to equity in the opportunities poor and racial minority children are afforded.

Why does any public school board need a private partnership to do what is needed to offer these students the sort of school all children deserve? If what is needed is so obvious, and so easy to do (which is a subtext of the editorial), the truth is that the school board simply does not have the political will to do what is right for some children.

And this is very important: What third party, not invested in the Meeting Street Academy, has examined the claims of academic success in the so-called “successful” schools that are being promised as fixes for Burns? I cannot find any data on test scores (setting aside that test scores aren’t even that good for making these claims), but I have analyzed claims of “miracle” charter schools in SC—finding that these claims are always false. Always. I do not trust that Meeting Street is going to prove to be the first actual miracle school in a long line of those that have been unmasked before.

He notes that politicians are easily bamboozled and follow the crowd, without asking where they are going.

SC political leaders have pushed for school choice, charter schools, VAM evaluations of teachers, ever-new standards and high-stakes testing, exit exams, third-grade retention, and now takeover policies for so-called “failing schools”—yet all of these have no basis for policy in the body of research refuting the effectiveness of each one.

For the editors of the P&C, as well as our political leaders and the public, the real questions are why do we persist in ignoring the stark realities of our inequitable society, why do we then continue to play politics with our schools that are just as inequitable as our society, and then why do we refuse to consider the evidence about addressing social and educational inequity directly in our policies?

Why do politicians continue to push for policies that have failed elsewhere, again and again? Because they don’t care. Because they are happy to maintain the status quo. Their eager embrace of “school choice” and other failed policies is a smokescreen. They know such policies will change nothing.

Closing schools, renaming schools, shuffling students—these are the practices of those who are invested in the status quo regardless of the consequences for “other people’s children.”

Categories Charter Schools, Closing schools, Corporate Reformers, Education Industry, Education Reform, Privatization, South Carolina, Testing

Angie Sullivan: Read-By-Third Grade Begins the Destruction of Young Children in Nevada

By dianeravitch
June 13, 2016 //
20

Angie Sullivan teaches elementary school in Clark County, Nevada (Las Vegas). Most of her children are poor and ELL. She writes often about the disastrous policies imposed on the schools by the legislature.

Angie writes:


Read-by-Three is upon us. Ready to damage disenfranchised kids because as Assemblyman Elliot Anderson stated: They need “tough love”.

I will note here poor children need a lot of things – “tough love” isn’t one of the things.

Basically read-by-three requires students to read on grade level by third grade or they are not promoted to the next grade.

Do you see the fatal flaws?

1. Not research based or proven effective – academically or politically

2. Money diverted so it does not reach the kids who need it the most.

3. Money spent on people who are not directly teaching kids.

4. Language learners and IEP students in double jeopardy without access or support

Let me explain:

A century of education research proving retention does NOT work should be enough.

Simply: Whole group learning did not work the first time so the remedy should not be another year of whole group learning. Repetition of a grade level, without a significant change in the method of instruction does not work. Real remedies would include smaller class-size, differentiated instruction, language learning scaffolding if necessary, or individualized support like tutoring in small groups. The worst possible remedy is blanket retention for large masses of at-risk studennts.

States like Florida which have used this destructive program – are now regretting it. Data shows it failed badly. Academically and politically.

Florida may promote 3rd graders who fail standardized tests

http://www.brookings.edu/research/papers/2012/08/16-student-retention-west

Besides the complete failure of this education policy – Nevada presses forward intent on replication of bad policies of other states.

To add insult to injury, the program is grant based. The Northern school districts applied and received most of the funding. Now Clark County which has 80% of the at-risk primary students will only receive 47% of the money to support kids so they are not retained. While 20% of the children in rural Nevada will receive the bulk of the money and possibly avoid the punitive result.

With the inequitable funding Clark County receives, CCSD is hiring many “read-by-three” strategists. Again – this does not change the method of instructional delivery. Another teacher who is not working with directly with students? This has been very ineffective and tried many times by the district. Teachers who are not assigned students often are assigned lunchroom tasks, playground duty, and paperwork by adminstrators. Very few specialists are effective because they do not work with kids.

Supposedly language learners and students with IEPs will be “exempt”.

Which shows a further flaw, since parents who often do not have an e-mail address must navigate the enrollment system in Infinite Campus accurately identifying their child as LEP. Parents who do not speak English or regularly use the Internet get limited support to go through this process. Accuracy of data in the system is questionable and I have seen many young children enrolling themselves in school because they are the person in the family who uses a computer regularly. Identification is complex and inaccurate.

Also if certain students are “exempt” will they be ignored? Is it better to not mark accurately so a child may receive instruction? Even if this means jeopardy? This is an unintentional result of placing pressure on students and kids. Schools will focus on kids to avoid retention while not focusing on others. Especially when working in a system which is not appropriately funded. Limited resources and too many at-risk kids means tough choices which are unfortunate need to be made.

This is a big civil rights and access problem. Along with being seriously flawed legislation.

It will cost millions of tax payer dollars.

Listening to teachers could have prevented this destruction.

Now teachers will have to make do – while “tough love” lawmakers brag about putting needed information in spam. I hope the campaign donation from reformers was worth it for the assembly democrats.

Reformers enjoy disruption. Disruption is teaching zero kids. It is just destructive.

Categories Accountability, Childhood, Civil Rights, Corporate Reformers, Nevada, Testing

Harold Meyerson: The Challenge for Progressives in California to Clean Up Our Politics

By dianeravitch
June 12, 2016 //
11

Harold Meyerson, editor of The American Prospect, writes in the Los Angeles Times that progressives in California should stay involved in state politics and join to defeat the power of big money.

As he shows, the big money interests have combined to elect conservative Democrats and defeat progressive Democrats. Because of the state’s “top-two” primaries, regardless of party, the big-money guys are picking malleable conservative Democrats and pouring millions into their campaigns to pick off progressive campaigns.

Bernie Sanders’ keystone issue was to limit the role of money in politics. In California, the moneyed interests are saturating legislative races with donations that their opponents can’t match.

Over the past two years, oil companies and “education reform” billionaires have been funding campaigns for obliging Democratic candidates running against their more progressive co-partisans under the state’s “top-two” election process. In this week’s primary, independent committees spent at least $24 million, with most of that money flowing to Democrats who opposed Gov. Jerry Brown’s effort to halve motorists’ use of fossil fuels by 2030, and a substantial sum going to Democrats who support expanding charter schools.

Six years ago, according to the Associated Press, just one legislative primary race had more than $1 million in outside spending, and four had more than $500,000. This year, eight races saw more than $1 million in such spending, and 15 more than $500,000.

In a heavily Democratic district outside Sacramento, a November state Senate runoff will pit Democratic Assemblyman Bill Dodd, who opposed Brown’s legislation, against former Democratic Assemblywoman Mariko Yamada. Dodd has already benefited from one independent campaign funded by Chevron and other energy companies to the tune of more than $270,000, and from an education reform campaign funded by charter school proponents such as billionaire Eli Broad in the amount of $1.68 million.

Since progressives can’t match their millions, they should do their best to expose them and their surrogates as the puppets they are.

Public education in California is a plum for the billionaires. They want to privatize it. Who are the biggest spenders in the self-named “education reform movement”? Eli Broad, Michael Bloomberg, Reed Hastings, and Alice Walton. None is a parent in public schools. None has children in public schools. Two do not even live in California.

This is NOT what democracy looks like.

Categories Accountability, Billionaires, Bloomberg, Michael, Broad Foundation, Charter Schools, Corporate Reformers, Democracy, Education Industry, Privatization, Walton Foundation

Peter Greene on the SAT Whistle Blower

By dianeravitch
June 10, 2016 //
3

Peter Greene contacted the SAT whistle blower, Manuel Alfaro, and learned that he was a college classmate of Jason Zimba, who wrote the Common Core math standards.

Peter writes:

The short form of Alfaro’s story– the College Board has knowingly lied about using best practices in developing the “revamped” SAT, and in the process of selling the SAT as a state-wide and/or graduation exam, will be lying some more. And it would appear that even this stripped down, cut corners approach isn’t letting the College Board get tests written fast enough, for as Schneider found poking around Reddit, the same form of the SAT was given in March and in June.

Alfaro is still out there and still writing. He says that the story has “more plot twists than the Da Vinci Code.” It seems certain that those plot twists are not good news for the College Board. Go read some more about the full extent of Coleman’s fraud. Stay tuned, and pass the word.

Categories Common Core, Corporate Reformers, Education Reform, Testing
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