Archives for category: Corporate Reformers

The Latest News from the Privatization Sector

May 18, 2016 //

Politico reports on the latest news from school choice advocates:

STUDIES OF SCHOOL CHOICE: Two advocacy groups are out with papers today expounding on the benefits of school choice. The Friedman Foundation for Educational Choice says in its effort that more than a dozen empirical studies have found that school choice improves student outcomes. And nine out of 10 studies say school choice can improve racial segregation, moving students from more segregated schools into less segregated ones. The report: http://bit.ly/1TiRZzn. The conservative American Legislative Exchange Council is introducing three tools – peer reviews, branding and consumer reports – that parents can use to optimize education savings accounts. The paper: http://bit.ly/1TeOVcP.

Don’t expect to learn from either the Friedman Foundation (so-named for libertarian economist Milton Friedman, a voucher advocate) or ALEC (the far-right corporate-funded group that promotes deregulation of every government function) to say anything about Milwaukee. Milwaukee has had vouchers and charters for 25 years. There is no evidence that the children of Milwaukee have benefited by their choices. Despite the failure of choice to improve education, Governor Scott Walker wants to expand school choice and eliminate public schools altogether. The irony is that the students in public schools repeatedly have outperformed the students in choice schools, even though the public schools have a disproportionate share of students with disabilities and others that are not chosen by the choice schools. Chances are that Walker and the legislature will keep some public schools to use as a dumping ground for the students unwanted by the charters and voucher schools.

– On a related note: The National Alliance for Public Charter Schools and The Eli and Edythe Broad Foundation named the finalists for the 2016 Broad Prize for Public Charter Schools today: Success Academy in New York and IDEA Public Schools and YES Prep Public Schools in Texas. The $250,000 award will be given to the best-performing charter management organization on June 27 at the National Charter Schools Conference in Nashville, Tenn.

Isn’t that great news? I am rooting for Eva and Success Academy charters. If she wins, she can use the money to buy a four-year supply of beanies or T-shirts for future political rallies. The $250,000 won’t be enough to pay for both. Or she can hire a private investigator to track down the high-level official inside her organization who leaked important documents to the media, including the internal report that alleged cheating, teacher churn, and central staff turnover.

The spending included $71,900 for the beanies and $62,795 for the T-shirts, according to receipts submitted to Success’s board of directors.

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Corporate Reformers, Harlem Success Academy, Milwaukee, Privatization, School Choice, Vouchers, Walker, Scott

Education Expert Campbell Brown Offers Advice to the Next President

By dianeravitch

May 18, 2016 //

The rheeform leadership has changed. Michelle Rhee was once the cover girl for test-and-punish reform, and now it is Campbell Brown. The telegenic Brown used to read the news on television but now she has taken Rhee’s place in the reformy firmament. Since she launched her career as an education expert with an op-ed attacking the teachers’ union in New York City for protecting sexual predators, Brown has become increasingly active in the world of education punditry. She received $4 million from various billionaires to launch a news site called “The 74,” which was supposed to refer to the number of school-age children in the United States. However, there are 50 million school-age children, but then why quibble? Brown organized candidate debates for both parties last fall. Three Republicans showed up, and no Democrats. Yesterday, she moderated a panel at the Harvard Graduate School of Education at a symposium on poverty and schooling.

Now Brown, having established her bona fides as an expert on education, has prepared a memo for the next president.

Unfortunately her memo begins with a false statement. She starts by saying that 2/3 of American students in eighth grade are “below grade level” in reading and math. Apparently she refers to the National Assessment of Education Progress, the only national assessment of student skills. She confuses NAEP proficiency, a specific achievement level, with grade level.

To begin with, “grade level” is a median. Fifty percent are always above grade level, and fifty percent are always below.

But the NAEP achievement levels do not measure “grade level.” They are defined in the NAEP reports thus: “basic” represents partial mastery of skills; “proficiency” represents mastery; “advanced” represents extraordinary performance. “Below basic” is very poor performance.

Here are the definitions on the NAEP website:

Achievement Level Policy Definitions
Basic

Partial mastery of prerequisite knowledge and skills that are fundamental for proficient work at each grade.
Proficient

Solid academic performance for each grade assessed. Students reaching this level have demonstrated competency over challenging subject matter, including subject-matter knowledge, application of such knowledge to real-world situations, and analytical skills appropriate to the subject matter.
Advanced

Superior performance.

Here is a statement on the U.S. Department of Education (National Center for Education Statistics) website:

https://nces.ed.gov/nationsreportcard/studies/statemapping/faq.aspx

The statement, “Proficient is not synonymous with grade-level performance.”

The NAEP website says that the Governing Board thinks that the goal should be “proficient,” not “basic,” but the reality is that these achievement levels have been in place since 1992, and in no state or district has 100% of students ever achieved NAEP proficiency. In only one state, Massachusetts, has as much as 50% of students reached proficiency. If you believe, as Campbell Brown and the NAGB board does, that 100% of students should reach proficiency, then you believe that somewhere there is a baseball team that never loses a game, or an entire school district in which all children get grades of all As. It has never happened, not even in the wealthiest, most successful schools and districts. When elephants can fly, that is when “all” students will reach NAEP proficiency. Be it noted that the standard (the passing mark or cut score) for the Common Core tests is aligned with NAEP proficient, which is why 65-70% of students consistently “fail.”

I was a member of the National Assessment Governing Board for seven years. I read questions before they were administered to samples of students across the nation and in every state. The greatest number of students are scored as “basic,” which I consider to be the equivalent of a B or C. Those who register as “proficient” are the equivalent of an A performance. Advanced is for superstars. Typically, only 5-10% of students are “advanced.” About a third are proficient or advanced. The remaining 65% are basic or below basic. (These are my definitions, not the government’s or the NAGB board.)

To expect that most students will score the equivalent of an A is nonsensical.

Ms. Brown has been engaged in a Twitter debate with Tom Loveless of the Brookings Institution. Loveless, a real expert with years of teaching experience (elementary school) and a doctorate, has been studying and writing about NAEP and student performance for many years. He chastised Brown on Twitter for saying that 2/3 of students are “below grade level.” He encouraged her to check her facts, because he assumed that her journalistic background had taught her to do so. Carol Burris, director of the Network for Public Education, and veteran educator, jumped into the exchange.

Just yesterday, Brown responded with this comment:

Campbell Brown ‏@campbell_brown
@carolburris @tomloveless99 this is why parents dont listen to u. U play semantics while 2/3 kids arent where they should be. I call BS

Since Brown thinks that NAEP proficiency is the same as “grade level,” she would profit by reading this report on the meaning of NAEP achievement levels. It gives a good overview of them and points out that they do not refer to grade levels. The report also usefully reviews the numerous critiques of the achievement levels, by experts who consider them “fundamentally flawed” and an inaccurate measure of student achievement.

I can only hope that Ms. Brown, education expert, gets a quick tutorial about what NAEP achievement levels are.

And I invite her to take the NAEP eighth-grade test, composed of released questions in reading and math, and release her scores. In a supervised setting, of course. I think she will be surprised. I will be interested to see if she is “proficient,” since she believes that anyone who is not proficient is a failure.

Categories Accountability, Corporate Reformers, Education Reform, NAEP, Testing

Arthur Goldstein: How Can I Get Away from Michael Bloomberg?

By dianeravitch

May 17, 2016 //

Arthur Goldstein has taught in the New York City public schools for more than 30 years. His blog is NYC Educator. He has been a frequent critic of the disruption and turmoil of the past fifteen years in the schools.

Michael Bloomberg is everywhere I look. A few weeks ago I went to see NYS Regents Chancellor Betty Rosa at George Washington Campus, nee George Washington High School. “Campus” means it’s been broken up into four smaller schools. If your test scores weren’t high enough for Mayor Mike, you got broken up. If they were good, like in my school, you got filled to 300% capacity.

Two miles south of my school is the Jamaica Campus, a building that looks exactly like the George Washington Campus. It used to be Jamaica High School, and it had, for my money, the smartest and best UFT chapter leader in New York City, James Eterno. It had a long history, and photos in the halls of the doughboys who’d attended, of the bowtie clad principal on the David Susskind Show, and a million things in between. Michael Bloomberg closed it based on false stats. James sent the corrected stats to then-Chancellor Joel Klein, and as far as I know, they’ve never even been disputed.

Michael Bloomberg renamed the Board of Education the Panel for Educational Policy (PEP). He controlled the majority of votes on the PEP, and when a couple of his appointees disagreed with him, he simply replaced them. Despite Patrick Sullivan’s persistent voice of sanity, they approved every school closing, every new school, every charter that Michael Bloomberg wanted. Mayoral Control is very much favored by prominent reformies like Bill Gates because it sidesteps all that messy, time-consuming democracy stuff.

Bill de Blasio wants mayoral control too, though I have no idea why. At first I was glad to see mayoral control in the hands of someone who appeared not to be insane, but I was quickly disappointed. Once de Blasio decided not to approve a few Moskowitz Academies, Andrew Cuomo moved to change the law. Now de Blasio had to pay Eva’s rent even if he doesn’t want her school. It was like the spirit of Michael Bloomberg had taken over Andrew Cuomo, who took to calling himself a “student lobbyist.” (Curiously, he hasn’t bothered lobbying for the billions of dollars the state owes NYC from the CFE lawsuit.)

Every time I look at the car I bought in May 2014 I think about Michael Bloomberg. By 2009, just about every union but teachers got an 8% raise. After a few years it adds up. In fact, by that time that raise would have more than paid for that car. But Mayor Mike passed it off to Bill de Blasio, who isn’t paying until 2020. The Mazda dealer was a nice guy, but would not agree to wait that long.

Many of Michael Bloomberg’s friends and cronies still sit at Tweed. Even Chancellor Carmen Fariña once worked for him. In fact, her predecessor, Dennis Walcott, was an alumni of my school. Our principal named our college office for him and now I feel like I have to wash my whole body with Brillo pad every time I set foot in there.

Mayor Bloomberg, with what was in effect mayoral dictatorship, used our city as a laboratory for reforminess, and used our children as guinea pigs. He gave no-bid contracts to all his pals, and if they left young children outside waiting hours for buses freezing days, well, too bad for them. He spent 95 million dollars on a computer system no one used. He boasted of being a regular guy, taking the subway to work, but had two SUVs pick him up at his townhouse because he didn’t like the stop closest to it.

But where we really feel his presence is in the tests. They are everywhere, and they mean everything. And though much of the state is rebelling against them, NYC lags far behind. Why? Because Michael Bloomberg set up a system, and this system has everything to do with Michael Bloomberg and nothing to do with community.

In Michael Bloomberg’s NYC, if you want to send your kid to a particular middle school, it may use test grades as criteria for admission. So if you opt your kid out of a test, too bad for you, and too bad for your kid. The city turns the wheel of fortune, and wherever your kid lands, that’s it.

This is in stark contrast to the rest of the state. Where I live, in Freeport NY, my kid goes to the same middle school no matter what grade she gets and whether or not she takes the test. We have a community, and we have a community school. Not only that, but we, the community, elect our school board and have genuine input into how it is run.

Michael Bloomberg wanted what he wanted, and he had all that money, so he was entitled to it. Old-fashioned democracy wasn’t efficient enough for him. Better that he should make all decisions, and if the voters twice voiced their preference for term limits, he’d change the law and buy himself another term anyway.

Thank God his polling must have revealed all his money couldn’t buy the presidency. Only one question remains.

What on earth do we have to do to exorcise his reformy ghost from New York City once and for all?

Categories Accountability, Bloomberg, Michael, Corporate Reformers, Education Reform, New York City, Testing

John Thompson: What’s the Matter with Oklahoma?

By dianeravitch

May 16, 2016 //

John Thompson, historian and teacher, lives and writes in Oklahoma, where he has a first-hand view of the assault on the public sector.

Most of my professional friends are focused on What’s the Matter with Oklahoma? Our state followed the rightwing playbook described by Thomas Frank’s What’s the Matter with Kansas?, and we face a series of worse case scenarios as the legislature and the governor avoid dealing with the $1.3 billion budget hole that was created by the Kansas playbook.

Being an educator, I worry just as much about the neo-liberal and liberal school reforms that have been imposed from above; these corporate school reformers are taking advantage of the potential catastrophe produced by the rightwing, and are kicking teachers, unions, and public schools while we are down. So, I was commiserating with a veteran progressive about a seemingly arcane quandary about how to communicate with professionals and philanthropists who should be on our side. My friend turned me on to Frank’s new Listen, Liberal or Whatever Happened to the Party of the People?.
http://www.listenliberal.com/

I can say enthusiastically that my friend was right about Listen, Liberal. But, I have to say reluctantly that Frank has nailed the reasons why so many neo-liberal Democrats have become some of public education’s worst enemies. I wish it weren’t true, but Frank pulls together the various strands of the story of how so many liberals have abandoned poor students of color, leaving them to the mercies of those who would shrink government to a size where it could be “strangled in the bathtub.”

Tragically, technocrats in the Obama administration, the Gates Foundation, and other “venture philanthropists,” doubled down on the teacher-bashing and union-bashing while coercing states into adopting most or all of the corporate reform agenda.

Franks doesn’t deny that the Republicans, who represent the “One Percent,” are worse. Democrats, however, have abandoned “the People,” as we became the party of the “Ten Percent.” Frank explains how the Democrats have become devoted to elite professionals, and how they have created a “second hierarchy” based on “credentialed expertise.” He borrows the words of David Brooks, the conservative whose initial support of President Obama was described as a “bromance.” Brooks praised Obama for the way he staffed his administration with like-minded professionals and creating a “valedictocracy.” In doing so, Franks explained why it is so hard for educators to get the Ten Percent to listen to why they should stop supporting corporate reformers and edu-philanthropists who are treat our students like lab rats in ill-conceived and risky top-down experiments.

The specific problem which baffled me was the question of why can’t we persuade more philanthropists who support early education and other humane, science-based pedagogies to distance themselves from “brass-knuckled” philanthropists who fund its opposite – the test, sort, reward, and punish school of reform. Perhaps today’s advocates for pre-kindergarten and wraparound services don’t know that neo-liberal, output-driven reformers used to ridicule those policies as “Excuses!” and “Low Expectations.” The idea that poverty, not “bad” teachers, is the enemy has long been derided by those test-driven, competition-driven reformers. Why is it that supporters of early education and/or full-service community schools, which are based on the idea that teaching in the inner city must become a team effort, will often go along with mandates for soul-killing, bubble-in accountability and attacks on unions?

The Obama administration, as well as so many other Democrats seeking a “Third Way,” have convinced themselves that “college can conquer unemployment as well as racism, … urban decay as well as inequality.” Had these professional elites shared on-the-job experiences with working people, or even listened to fellow professionals who study economic history, perhaps they would have subjected their assumptions to an evidence-based cross examination. But, without a basis in fact, they bought the reform spin and the claim, “If we just launch more charter schools, give everyone a fair shot at the SAT, and crank out the student loans” that education “will dissolve our doubts about globalization.” The person who may have drank the biggest dose of their Kool Aid, former Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, said it worst, “What I believe – and what the president believes, is that the only way to end poverty is through education.”

Perhaps because I have been such an Obama loyalist, I’ve ducked the hard realities which Frank lays out. “To the liberal class,” he observes, “every big economic problem is really an education problem.” Obama’s education policy may have increased segregation, undermined the teaching profession, broken the morale of many educators, and benefitted rightwing union-haters, as it drove down student performance, but it can’t face up to these facts because, “To the liberal class this is a fixed idea, as open to evidence-based refutation as creationism is to fundamentalists.”

Frank explains why my efforts to reach out to our erstwhile allies (who may still ally themselves with unions and educators on progressive social issues while attacking the teaching profession) haven’t gained traction. The seemingly weird idea that education reform can defeat poverty is “a moral judgment handed down by the successful from the vantage of their own success.” Frank then concludes with a bluntness that I wouldn’t dare express on my own. The Ten Percent’s prescription for better teaching as the cure for poverty is “less a strategy for mitigating inequality than it is a way of rationalizing it.”

Arne Duncan’s and the Obama administration’s reign of education policy error is the culmination of more than a generation of Democratic fidelity to the “learning class.” Under the names of neo-liberalism, futurism, the Democratic Leadership Council, and New Democrats, they have assumed that “wired workers” were destined to dominate the 21st century and both parties had to “compete single-mindedly for their votes.” President Clinton propelled the party down a path which ignores working people and less-respected professionals by assembling an administration with a “tight little group of credentialed professionals who dominated his administration.” It was a political monoculture where “almost everyone agreed” with their technocratic, meritocratic mentality.

Then, the Obama administration put this “professional correctness” on steroids. It forgot that “the vast majority of Americans are unprofessional: they are managed, not managers.” So, “Team Obama joined the fight against teachers unions from day one.” This became nearly inevitable as his administration was staffed by people “whose faith lies in ‘cream rising to the top’ (to repeat [Jonathan] Alter’s take on Obama’s credo)” and “tend to disdain those at the bottom.”

Sadly, Frank doesn’t have concise solutions. He provides little hope that accountability-driven school reformers will hold themselves accountable for either the education debacle they choreographed or for abandoning the overall fight against economic inequality. Frank mostly urges us to speak truth to our party’s power. He also makes a great case that the Democrats rejection of populism is “a failure for both the nation and for their own partisan health.”

Perhaps I’m being naïve, but I also find hope in listening to President Obama who re-found his voice after the 2014 election. And, in the short term, we must support Hillary Clinton, and hope she takes heed of the message delivered by Bernie Sanders and Listen, Liberal.

Categories Corporate Reformers, Duncan, Arne, Obama, Oklahoma, Unions

Round 3: My Debate with Whitney Tilson about Education Reform

By dianeravitch

May 13, 2016 //

This is the third segment of the debate between me and Whitney Tilson about education reform. Tilson is a key figure in the reform movement–which I usually call the corporate reform movement because it tries to adapt bottom-line, carrot-and-stick, measure-and-punish/reward approaches into education. Tilson was a founder of Democrats for Education Reform, which underwrites political candidates who support charters and high-stakes testing. DFER is a partner of the advocacy group Education Reform Now, which has the same goals. My position is that this movement is not about reform but about privatization by charters and vouchers. Whitney Tilson reached out and proposed an exchange, and I readily agreed. The way it works is like this: He sends me a statement of his views and questions, and I respond. We send our comments back and forth a few times. His comments begin with WT, mine begin with DR. If you want to see his post, where my comments are in blue, go here. Readers have asked why I am engaging in this exchange. First of all, I think it is always valuable to listen to people who disagree with your views. Second, this is a wonderful opportunity for me to correct some of Whitney’s ideas about testing and teaching that I think are misinformed. Third, it is a good opportunity to post my views on a blog where people normally would never see them.

Here is round 3.

Whitney Tilson writes:

WT: STOP THE PRESSES AGAIN!!! (continuing yesterday’s email)

My new BFF, Diane Ravitch, and I have continued our conversation and it’s gotten even more interesting, as we’ve moved past the high-level principles we mostly agreed on in our first exchange of emails (sent a couple of weeks ago and posted on her blog here and my blog here) and started engaging on the many issues on which we disagree.

Round 2 of our discussion, which I posted on my blog here and she posted here, covered many topics:

1) Whether reformers are now the status quo

2) Charter schools

3) Tests and how they should (and shouldn’t) be used

Today we continue with Round 3, which covers:

1) Who is the underdog in this battle

2) The tone of the debate and our shared desire to focus more on the issues and less on personal attacks

3) The details of the Vergara case – namely, a) the amount of time it takes teachers to earn tenure; b) how difficult it is for administrators to fire a tenured teacher; and c) whether layoffs should be done strictly by seniority

My original email is in italics, Diane’s comments are in blue (beginning with “DR:”), and my responses are in black (beginning with “WT:”).

Enjoy!

Whitney

DR: Whitney, let’s go back to the question with which this exchange began. You suggested that I was being insulting by referring to a “billionaire boys’ club.” Yes, there actually is a “billionaire boys’ club.” What else would you call the collaboration among the Walton Family Foundation, the Eli and Edythe Broad Foundation, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, along with another dozen or two dozen billionaires, such as the Laura and John Arnold Foundation, the Emerson Collective (Laurene Powell Jobs), the Dell Foundation, the Helmsley Foundation, the Bloomberg Foundation, the Fisher Foundation, etc. In addition to these billionaires, the U.S. Department of Education can usually be counted on to throw in hundreds of millions to fund whatever the billionaires fund.

WT: I think you’re being sexist in using the word “boys” because, for example, Melinda Gates plays as large (if not larger) role than her husband at the Gates Foundation, and Alice Walton, Carrie Walton Penner, and other younger, less known Walton women are deeply engaged in this area. If you want to call it the “billionaires club”, fine.

DR: It really is irrelevant whether I call it the “Billionaire Boys’ Club” or the “Billionaires’ Club.” It is a distinction without a difference. The point is that these very rich people have decided that they should control public education, even though none of them was ever a teacher, and few ever attended a public school or sent their own children to public schools. The reality is that this small group of people has a lock on almost all funding for education.

I am president of a national organization of educators and parents called the Network for Public Education. We support public education, and we oppose high-stakes testing and privatization. The doors of all these foundations are closed to us. So is the U.S. Department of Education. When I try to think of foundations that support our goals–which are widely shared by millions of parents and educators–I can’t use up the five fingers on one hand.

WT: I find it so interesting how both sides see themselves as the outmanned, outgunned, outspent underdog. I agree with you that a number of major foundations have provided major funding over many years to support the “reform” agenda. But: a) I think the vast majority of mainstream/family/community foundations tend to support the existing system without really trying to change it: funding after-school programs, scholarships, trips and other special programs, paying for teaching aides in classrooms, etc.); and b) The resources the two teachers unions’ bring to bear dwarfs the efforts of the handful of foundations you cite.

They are among the most powerful interest groups in the country. The NEA is the largest labor union in the country with just under 3 million members and the AFT has 1.6 million more, meaning that 2.0% of U.S. adults (above age 20) are members. Their combined revenues at all levels probably exceed $1.3 billion a year, not including their PAC funds, foundations, and a host of special funds under their control. But their political power isn’t just in their money, it’s their grassroots organization to get out the vote, etc. They can provide a candidate a turnkey campaign operation with filings, yard signs, mailings, telephone calls, volunteers, fundraising and crucial foot soldiers. I haven’t seen the latest statistics, but at one point teacher union representatives accounted for approximately 10% of the delegates at the Democratic National Convention, more than any state except California. They are very influential in electing school board members, which means that in many cases they are, in effect, negotiating with themselves. As one Southern governor said: “There’s only one thing you have to know about politics in my state. Every teacher has every summer before every election off.”

I don’t think I’m going to persuade you, but I hope you better understand why I feel like our side is the underdog here.

DR: The combined wealth of the Walton family, the Gates family, the Broad family, Michael Bloomberg, and the many other billionaires who fund the testing and charter movement—certainly more than $300 billion– dwarfs the assets and income of the two teachers’ unions. The puzzle to me is why these billionaires think they should run the nation’s public education system. They have no special knowledge of education. Knowing how to make money or inheriting money from your parents does not mean that you know more than professional educators. Aside from the question of their competence to take control of what they do not understand, there is the question of democracy. Public education belongs to the public, not to the highest bidder. Michael Bloomberg, who was a very good mayor in many respects, had total control of the New York City public schools for a dozen years, and no one today would say that they are a model for the nation. They struggle with the same problems as other cities that have large numbers of poor and minority students. How many years does it take for your idea of “reform” to take hold and benefit all children, not just a few?

WT: Specifically, I want to apologize to you for some of the things I’ve written about you in the past, in which I’ve made personal attacks and impugned your motives.

DR: I appreciate that. I didn’t realize until you told me that you had created a website called http://www.rebuttingravitch.com, and I don’t know the ad hominem things you have written about me. I would apologize for anything negative I wrote about you, but I don’t think I ever have. Sometimes, in the depths of frustration over the money and power arrayed against public schools and their teachers, I may have adopted a snarky tone, but I try to avoid ad hominem rhetoric. I can think of only one occasion (there might be more, but I can’t recall) in which I called out someone personally, and that was Ben Austin, who had arranged to get a Latina principal fired in Los Angeles, someone he never met, someone whose entire staff (excepting one person) resigned in sympathy with her. That made my blood boil, because he had an organization (Parent Revolution) funded with millions from Walton, Broad, Gates, and Wasserman, and the principal was on her own, with no funds to defend herself. I get very vexed by billionaires and their surrogates attacking hard-working educators who are doing their best under difficult circumstances. I know that those billionaires and their well-paid public relations spokespersons wouldn’t last five minutes in a classroom, but….I am human and sometimes my anger gets in the way of my efforts to remain civil.

WT: Thank you for accepting my apology. (By the way, I’ve made major changes to my web site at http://www.rebuttingravitch.org that reflect my attempt to engage solely on the issues.)

I cannot accept, however, your denials and rationalizations for the rhetoric you regularly use. Perhaps after all these years it’s become so deeply ingrained as to be instinctive and you’re not even aware of what you’re doing.

For example, in the paragraph above, in which you write about “billionaires attacking hard-working educators,” I don’t doubt the sincerity of your beliefs and I admire your passion, but it is inflammatory and insulting language.

DR: Hmm. I consider it a statement of fact. If billionaires feel insulted, they should think how teachers feel when they are fired based on flawed data, because Bill Gates thinks it is a good idea or Eli Broad believes in closing their schools. I have met some of those teachers. Losing your job and your reputation hurts worse than insults, and I still don’t consider my comments insulting.

WT: Can you not see the difference between the following statements:

1) “Members of the billionaire boys’ club, who wouldn’t last five minutes in a classroom, are attacking hard-working educators, using their well-paid public relations spokespersons, as part of their efforts to privatize public education for their own profit.”

DR: I don’t believe the billionaires are working for their own profit. They are already super rich. But they clearly don’t respect teachers, who work much harder than they do; they do have well-paid public relations spokespersons; and they do want to privatize public education with charters and vouchers. (And, by the way, there are for-profit corporations opening bad charter schools, whose goal is indeed profit. Eighty percent of the charter schools in the state of Michigan operate for profit without any accountability.) I certainly don’t think that Bill Gates and the Walton family want to make a profit. But they don’t discourage those who do use charters to make profits. I didn’t realize that billionaires had such thin skins. Or that they felt themselves to be outmanned, outgunned, and outspent (!) by those who support public education under democratic control. They are surely outnumbered, but I don’t believe they are outmanned or outgunned. They certainly are not outspent. They paid millions to underwrite blogs like Education Post and The 74. No one pays me to blog (nor does anyone pay the scores of teacher-bloggers who dominate social media). I have no public relations staff. All I have is a computer and the knowledge I have accumulated while studying and writing about the history and politics of American education over the past half century of my life.

WT: And:

2) “I disagree with the agenda being pursued by the so-called “reform movement” and its wealthy backers. I think that their ideas in most areas – for example, favoring more charter schools, vouchers and testing – end up doing more harm than good because they demoralize teachers, weaken unions, and rattle the foundations of education without improving it.”

The former is name-calling, demonizing, bullying and impugning motives, which is unlikely to lead to anything productive, while the latter is a well-articulated point of view that might lead to fruitful discussions and compromises.

I have met Bill and Melinda Gates, John Walton, Eli and Edythe Broad, Laurene Powell Jobs, John and Laura Arnold, Michael Bloomberg, Dan Loeb, Paul Tudor Jones and many of the other billionaires you cite, and I can assure you that they are just as passionate about helping kids get a better education as you are. In addition, every one of them understands, as do you and I, that having high-quality, motivated teachers in every classroom is by far the most important way to achieve our shared goal. While some right-wing dingbats and Fox “News” have indeed been guilty of unfortunate anti-teacher rhetoric (similar in many ways to your anti-billionaire rhetoric), they do not represent reformers, any more than the worst union bosses and their sometimes thuggish tactics represent teachers. Every reformer I know celebrates, not demonizes, teachers.

So while you (and the unions and some teachers) may view the policies we reformers support as “attacking hard-working educators,” they are certainly not intended as such – and, in reality, I don’t think they are. For example, in the Vergara case (discussed at length below), I don’t think it’s an “attack on hard-working educators” to file a lawsuit challenging statutes governing: a) the short period of time before a tenure decision must be made, b) the long and expensive process to remove even the most ineffective teacher, and c) the strictly-by-seniority layoff policy.

Feel free to disagree with us regarding our policy ideas – and how you think they’re doing harm, not helping. Feel free to say that we lack experience that you feel is relevant (you point out that many of us haven’t been teachers or worked in the system, which is true, but I’d argue that, on the topic of fixing a big, broken bureaucracy, a business background is highly relevant).

But you diminish yourself and the debate when you stoop (as you frequently do) to hurling schoolyard insults like “billionaire boys’ club” and impugning reformers’ motives saying that their goal is to destroy public education, driven by their own greed (exactly how the Gates, Broad, Walton, Arnold, etc. families are profiting from giving away hundreds of millions of dollars a year has never been clear to me).

And it’s not just billionaires you attack. Of John King, you once said: “He is acting like a petty dictator, threatening to hurt the children to retaliate against the adults who did not do his bidding.”

And as for my friend Ben Austin, your attack on him was beyond the pale (“loathsome” “useful idiot” “you ruined the life of a good person for filthy lucre”), yet you continue to defend the indefensible and have left what you wrote about him on your blog. Unlike you, I know Ben and I can assure you that he has an enormous heart who cares passionately about giving every kid a fair shot in life via a good education. You would see this for yourself if you’d accept his offer to meet (or even have a discussion) about your differences (his email address is baustin@studentsmatter.org and I know he’d be pleased to hear from you). (As for what happened at Weigand Avenue Elementary School in Los Angeles three years ago, I believe your narrative is contrary to the facts, as Ben detailed in his open letter to you dated 8/7/13.)

I asked Ben for his thoughts about our recent discussion and he replied:

“When Ravitch sentenced me to hell it was really one of the lowest moments on this whole journey for me.

I have never really understood her – she’s obviously a good person who cares about kids, is very smart, and has the very unique perspective of having fought passionately on both sides of this debate. But she is probably the most anti-intellectual voice in the whole national echo chamber. Her default is personal attacks and conspiracy theories.

As you note, I reached out to her multiple times to talk after she wrote all those terrible things about me (much of it incomplete or factually, provably incorrect), but she apparently wasn’t interested in meeting or even taking.

My observation and personal experience is that she often reaches hasty conclusions, based on incomplete or biased information, then, convinced in her righteousness, closes her eyes, ears and mind and attacks any opponent as a tool of the Koch Brothers and a “vile” human being. That’s often her shtick. You’d think it’d get old after a while.

It seems like we should all be able to adhere to the simple rule that no adult in the debate about the future of American public education should be allowed to use language they wouldn’t be allowed to use in my kids’ elementary school yard. Ravitch wouldn’t survive five minutes in the school yard without being called into the principal’s office for foul language and bullying.”

In summary, how would you feel if someone said “Diane Ravitch is a thinly disguised shill for the teachers unions because she’s friends with Randi, has accepted speaking fees from them, and has a personal vendetta against Joel Klein”?

I used to believe – and write – that, and I was wrong, which is why I apologized.

I hope that you might one day see that your rhetoric is sometimes similarly over-the-top and destructive and stop it.

DR: Whitney, I have met Michael Bloomberg, but I don’t know any of the other billionaires or their functionaries that you mention. I assume that they have good intentions, but they need to understand that the consequences of their actions and investments have created turmoil in American education and have not improved education at all. They are hurting children by their demands for testing, which consumes an inordinate amount of the school year. They are literally driving teachers out of their profession with their unsound ideas. They are damaging our nation’s public education system. If no one wants to teach, how does that improve the schools?

What do I want? I want all children to have the same kind of education that the billionaires want for their children and that I wanted for my children when they were young. I want to see all kids going to beautiful schools that have excellent facilities, experienced teachers, small classes, superb playing fields and gymnasia, the latest technology, and many opportunities to learn and grow. I want the equivalent of Sidwell Friends or Lakeside Academy or Dalton or Nightingale or the University of Chicago Lab School for all children. (By the way, the Lab School has a teachers’ union.)

I want the billionaires to become outraged about child poverty. I want to hear them say that it is a crying shame that half the kids in this country live in low-income families and nearly a quarter live in poverty. I want them to fight for major investments in infrastructure that create good jobs for the parents of these children. I want the Waltons to pay their one million employees $15 an hour so their children have a better life. I want the billionaires to use their enormous resources to fight against poverty and racial segregation, instead of complaining that teachers are uniquely responsible for overcoming poverty and inequality.

I guess I am thick-headed, but I don’t see my rhetoric as insulting or over-the-top or destructive. I have always strived to have a civil tone; four-letter words are not permitted on my blog. I sincerely believe that a small group of very wealthy people have spent money to weaken public education, by promoting high-stakes testing, constantly complaining about teachers, and investing in privately managed schools that enroll the students they choose. It is my considered judgment that these investments have made schooling worse for students and teachers. I am not a hot-head. I have a Ph.D. in the history of American education. There has never been a time in our history when the very existence of public education was at risk. It is at risk now. The billionaires’ antagonism towards public education and the people who teach in public schools has been destructive and demoralizing. I am in contact with a great many teachers and parents. I reflect what they complain about. Nothing I have written has caused any billionaire to change his (or her) course of action or to look at the consequences of their actions. My pen must be mightier than I know. I don’t think I have destroyed any billionaires, but the billionaires have been responsible for closing beloved schools, driving teachers out of their profession, and dividing communities. The billionaires have spent large sums buying elections in districts and states where they do not live, to make sure that people who agree with them win crucial seats. That undermines democracy. Why should they buy control of school boards when their children don’t attend public schools? Why should they buy state boards in states where they don’t live?

As for Ben Austin, I responded to his open letter here (I added this to our exchange after Whitney posted it; I forgot that I had written a reply to his open letter). I apologized for calling him “loathsome” but said that what he did to principal Irma Cobain was loathsome. I have never been invited to meet with him. I see by his email address that he now works for Silicon Valley billionaire David Welch, carrying the flame for the fight against tenure and seniority. If Ben wants to see me, he can come to Brooklyn anytime.

WT: The Vergara Case

This case was back in the news recently (when an appeals court overturned the trial’s judge’s initial ruling in favor of the plaintiffs), so let’s talk about it.

You wrote (long ago) that this case is about “a rich and powerful coalition of corporate reformers are trying to eliminate due process rights for teachers… My view: the trial continues the blame game favored by the Obama administration and the billionaire boys’ club, in which they blame “bad” teachers as the main culprit in low academic performance.”

Let’s put the rhetoric aside and see if we can agree on the facts: that the lawsuit challenges three specific things that the plaintiffs claim have disparate impact on poor and minority students (like the named plaintiff, Beatriz Vergara):

1) The amount of time it takes teachers to earn tenure (currently two years or 16 months in the classroom);

2) How difficult it is for administrators to fire a tenured teacher; and

3) How layoffs are done (current law mandates strictly by seniority).

(I posted a 54-slide presentation the plaintiffs prepared here and also attached it to this email.)

Can we agree that the lawsuit challenges these three things? (It’s have to have a debate on something without first starting by agreeing on the facts.)

Let’s go through each of these three:

1) How long do you think it should take for a teach to earn tenure? Note that the lawsuit doesn’t bash teachers (in fact it celebrates them – see pages 7-15 of the plaintiffs’ presentation), nor challenge tenure itself – it simply says 16 months in the classroom isn’t enough time to know if a teacher deserves to be tenured. Note also page 22, which shows that California is an outlier, one of only five states in which teachers can earn tenure so quickly. The majority of states, 32, require three years. That may not seem like much, but that’s 50% more time to make a very critical judgment. Do you really oppose extending the probationary period to three years???

DR: I don’t know what the right amount of time is to decide whether a teacher has earned due process rights. If there are good principals in place, they will not award tenure to anyone who is incompetent. In some cases, it might be as little as two years, in others, three or four. I don’t think that an administrator should be required to make that decision immediately. If they need more time, they should be able to take it. I have no objection to extending the probationary period to three years. This is a decision that should be made in the process of collective bargaining. Both sides must agree to set a timetable for a decision.

WT: My overall view on your comments related to the Vergara case is that I’m pleased at how much we agree on. We agree (as does the appellate court and pretty much every newspaper in the state) that change is needed, that our policies need to better support and retain great teachers and exit ineffective ones, and that the legislature needs to take the lead to fix this.

Regarding the first of the three challenged statues, that a tenure decision must be made within two years, I’m glad we agree that this is misguided. Where we disagree is whether a lawsuit is the right way to fix this this.

You argue that this “is a decision that should be made in the process of collective bargaining.” That sounds reasonable enough – except one must remember the context: this is the state of California, a very liberal state in which: a) Democrats control nearly all branches of government (something I’m generally very happy about, by the way); and b) the California Teachers Association controls the Democratic party in the state to such a degree that I question how much “bargaining” is really going on in the “process of collective bargaining” you talk about.

Additionally, the constitution of the state says that education is “essential to the preservation of the rights and liberties of the people” and courts have held that CA schoolchildren have a constitutional right to “substantially equal opportunities for learning” and that “the State itself has broad responsibility to ensure basic educational equality.” (slides 4-5)

The CA state constitution supersedes any labor contract (no matter how fairly collectively bargained it might be), so a lawsuit is an appropriate tool if provisions of any labor contract violate the constitution and the legislature fails to remedy this.

More on this below…

2) Your main concern about the Vergara lawsuit appears to be that it challenges the process that must be followed to dismiss a tenured teacher, which you say is an attempt “to eliminate due process rights for teachers.” But this statement is factually incorrect. There is nothing in the lawsuit that calls for teachers to be stripped of their due process rights – in fact, it specifically say the opposite, that “teachers will always have due process rights” (slide 37).

Rather, the lawsuit says that the current 17-step process (see slide 28) is so “lengthy, costly and burdensome” – costing LAUSD, for example, $238,000 and 4+ years to remove a single teacher (slide 30) – that it is effectively impossible to remove any teacher for poor performance.

Teachers agree that this is a huge problem: in one survey , 65% agreed with this statement: “Based on my experiences and observations, ineffective teachers with permanent status/tenure in my school are unlikely to be dismissed for unsatisfactory performance.” And 62% agreed that “Students’ interests would be better served if it were easier to dismiss ineffective teachers.” (See slides 33-34)

So the real question here isn’t due process vs. no due process – of course teachers should have due process to protect them. Rather, it’s whether the pendulum has swung too far. As slide 37 shows, all CA state employees have substantial due process protections in eight areas – which teachers also have – plus a dozen more! I think it’s clear that the pendulum has swung too far.

I assume you disagree. I’d be interested to hear why, and whether you’d make any changes to the current dismissal process in place in CA today.

DR: These are complicated issues. As the Appeals Court ruled, they are not matters of equal protection of the law; they are issues to be resolved through collective bargaining and through the legislative process. I oppose a process so burdensome that ineffective or abusive teachers are left in place and/or that it takes years and hundreds of thousands of dollars to remove them. If the process is so costly and so time-consuming that “bad” teachers remain in the schools, then that process should be reviewed, changed, and streamlined, without compromising the teacher’s right to a fair hearing, requiring evidence and an independent arbitrator. Bad teachers should be promptly fired. If they don’t have tenure, they can be fired without any reason. If they have tenure, they should get a hearing, to be sure that they are bad teachers, not just someone the principal doesn’t like. If the evidence is genuine, they should be removed.

WT: Other than the second sentence (“they are issues to be resolved through collective bargaining and through the legislative process”), we are in 100% agreement!

These are indeed complicated issues and I agree that there are, unfortunately, many, many cases of teachers being wrongly terminated (or threatened with termination). So I have no quarrel with tenure, due process and a “teacher’s right to a fair hearing, with evidence and an independent arbitrator.” I completely agree with you agree that teachers should be protected from arbitrary, capricious and unfair behavior by administrators/districts, whether in the context of termination or anything else.

But the devil is in the details – and it is here that we likely disagree. The key issue – and it’s a tough one – is how to develop a system that adequately protects good teachers, yet also allows principals/districts to remove ineffective ones.

DR: In California, principals can remove ineffective teachers within the first two years of hiring. Maybe it should be three years. Whether it is two years or three years, a good principal should be able to make the termination decision promptly. No one should give due process rights to an incompetent person.

WT: As I wrote in our previous discussion, I think in some states (like CA), the pendulum has swung far out of whack to the point that there’s an insane system in which it’s a four-year, quarter-million-dollar process to remove even the very worst teacher. That has to change – and since the legislature hasn’t acted, some reformers (rightly in my opinion) turned to the Vergara lawsuit.

You believe that those who disagree with the three statutes should seek remedy through the collective bargaining and the legislative process, not via court challenges. Allow me to explain why I disagree.

Let’s imagine for a moment that, as part of a collective bargaining process, a statute was passed that allowed every parent to pick their child’s teacher at school, until each teacher’s class was full – and white parents got to pick first, then black and Latino parents.

Obviously the courts would immediately overturn this statue because it’s plainly discriminatory toward minority parents and their children, resulting in the children getting far fewer great teachers (and, of course, far more ineffective ones).

You see where I’m going with this, right? The Vergara lawsuit is claiming that the three statutes at issue harm students, especially poor and minority ones, and are therefore unconstitutional.

Critically, the relief the Vergara lawsuit seeks is not for a judge to impose a new system (for instance, mandating three years rather than two to earn tenure) – rather, for a ruling that forces the legislature and the CTA, via the collective bargaining process, to revise these three statutes such that they comply with the state constitution.

I understand that we no doubt disagree on whether the three statutes do, in fact, harm any students, but I hope you better appreciate the argument for why a lawsuit is a valid remedy and the intent behind it: to help all schoolchildren, especially the most disadvantaged ones, get a better education by changing statutes that, the plaintiffs claim (and I believe), make it nearly impossible to effectively manage the system in the best interests of children.

DR: The Appellate Court rejected your arguments here. Tenure and seniority do not violate constitutional rights. Students in high-performing districts have teachers who have tenure and seniority. I think you have to overcome your obsession with the idea that bad teachers are to blame for poor academic performance. Look at the research. Test scores all over the world show achievement gaps between the haves and the have-nots. The gaps are usually not as large as they are in the U.S., because income inequality and poverty are so much greater here. But since “your side” doesn’t like to talk about income inequality and poverty, it is easier to talk about getting rid of bad teachers. In the meanwhile, plenty of good teachers are exiting because of the poisonous atmosphere that Vergara and teacher-bashing have created.

The reason the Vergara case attracted national attention was not because the Silicon Valley billionaire who funded it wanted to change the probationary period to three years and to streamline the process of hearing claims against tenured teachers, but because he wanted to get rid of tenure and seniority. The claim made by the plaintiffs was that poor and minority children were denied equal protection of the law because of the laws protecting their teachers’ tenure and seniority. Of the nine plaintiffs, as I recall, two attended charter schools, where teachers have no tenure or seniority. One had a teacher who had been recognized as Pasadena’s “teacher of the year.” And at least one had a teacher who did not have tenure or seniority. No harm was ever established to these nine plaintiffs.

WT: Yet again, instead of engaging on the issues of the case, you choose to attack the person funding it. What is your evidence for your statement that Dave Welch “funded it [not because he] wanted to change the probationary period to three years and to streamline the process of hearing claims against tenured teachers, but because he wanted to get rid of tenure and seniority”?

Yet again, unlike you, I know David Welch and I believe that he is motivated solely by what he believes is best for kids. As a highly successful businessman and serial entrepreneur, he is quickly able to grasp how the challenged statutes put principals and superintendents in a straightjacket that makes it extremely difficult, if not impossible, for them to put the best teacher possible in every classroom and, in particular, to make sure that poor and minority kids get their fair share of the teacher talent.

DR: It is true that I never met David Welch. But I know that behind the lawsuit lay the belief that children with low test scores would have high test scores if only the schools could get rid of tenure and fire teachers sooner, rather than later. As I argued in one of our other exchanges, teachers leave at an alarming rate now, with or without tenure. Many districts across the nation have teacher shortages because veteran teachers are leaving, and the number of new teachers coming into the profession has plummeted. The teacher-bashing has gotten out of control and is creating terrible consequences. It is certainly not improving the teaching profession; it seems to be ruining it. Our greatest need is not to get rid of teachers, but to develop ways of supporting people who want to teach, helping them improve, and retaining them for a satisfying career.

WT: Again, I agree with everything you write in this paragraph except for one sentence, the first one. Yet again, where is your evidence for your assertion that: “Behind the lawsuit lay the belief that children with low test scores would have high test scores if only the schools could get rid of tenure and fire teachers sooner, rather than later.”? This is as silly as saying, “Diane Ravitch believes that all teachers are identically effective and not one should ever be fired.” While rooted in a tiny shred of truth, it’s obviously a farcical pile of nonsense.

Similarly, having reviewed the lawsuit and spoken to the people behind it, the true underlying beliefs of the lawsuit, I believe, are that:

a) There’s a big range of abilities among teachers;

b) Having a great teacher – and especially a string of great teachers – can make a massive difference in life outcomes for a student;

c) The most disadvantaged students most need the best teachers and best schools to have any chance in life and escape the powerful (as you rightly point out) demography-is-destiny trap;

d) Teacher talent, both within schools and among schools, is NOT evenly and fairly distributed: by far, wealthy students get more than their share of the best teachers, and poor and minority students get more than their share of the least effective ones; and, lastly:

e) While there are many, many factors that lead to this gross injustice, one important one are the laws/regulations/understandings built into collective bargaining agreements.

I hope we agree on the first four, and suspect we’ll have to agree to disagree on e). But stop making false characterizations about the lawsuit and impugning the motives of those behind it.

DR: I agree that there is a wide range of abilities among teachers, as there is in every other line of work.

I would love to see every child have a great teacher every year, but you should know that the claim that a string of great teachers closes the achievement gap has never happened. Some teachers are “great” one year, not great the next year, probably because of the composition of their class. In any event, I don’t know how you identify a great teacher in advance. Do you mean a teacher who raises test scores every year? Is that a great teacher? How about one who inspires a love of music or history or science? Expecting that every teacher in a school will be a “great” teacher, however he or she is defined, is like hoping that a baseball team will have a bullpen of pitchers who can pitch no-hitters every week, or nine starting players who hit over .300. It is theoretically possible but hasn’t ever happened.

I agree that the neediest students should have the best teachers, as well as the best resources and smallest class sizes. And I agree that they don’t. Many teachers flee to the suburbs, where salaries are higher, schools are beautifully equipped, students come to school well-fed and healthy, and their parents can hire tutors if they have a problem.

Our society is unwilling to close the income gaps and inequality gaps that cause the opportunity gaps and score gaps. Now, that would be a worthy project for the billionaires! Work on root causes and stop castigating teachers.

WT: 3) The last thing the Vergara lawsuit challenges is the current CA law that when layoffs occur, districts must layoff last-hired teachers regardless of effectiveness.

I understand your concern that, in the absence of this law, senior teachers would be laid off to save money because they’re more expensive. Fair enough – but surely you don’t think the best answer is a crude and obviously flawed policy of strict seniority-based layoffs?

I’ve seen compromise proposals that include developing a comprehensive and fair teacher evaluation system and then limiting seniority-based dismissals only to those teachers who have consistently been rated ineffective.

Perhaps you feel that such an evaluation system doesn’t exist right now in CA, so in its absence the best policy is the current one, but can we at least agree on the principle that, if layoffs are necessary, we should strive to keep the best teachers and lay off the least effective?

DR: If I knew how to identify which teachers are the most effective, I would agree with you. Some teachers are highly effective with students with disabilities; some are highly effective with English language learners; some with gifted students; some with a very diverse mix of students. I am not saying that every teacher is equally effective, but that we do not now have any method of fairly evaluating who is most effective and who is least effective. The best system of which I am aware is Montgomery County’s Peer Assistance and Review program. New teachers get mentors; tenured teachers whose effectiveness is in doubt get mentors. Excellent teachers serve as mentors. Their progress is judged by peers and supervisors. If they can’t improve and won’t improve, they are asked to leave. This is a far more effective system that judging teachers by their students’ test scores. That is the worst way to evaluate teachers, because it favors those who teach in affluent districts, and it disadvantages those who teach English language learners, students with disabilities, gifted students, and others who are not likely to see big score gains year after year. The American Statistical Association said in 2014 that test scores should not be used to judge individual teachers because the teachers do not control most of the factors that affect test scores (like home and family income, the curriculum, the school’s leadership, the school’s resources, the effect of teachers from prior years, the student’s own motivation, etc.). According to ASA, individual teachers influence from 1-14% of test score variation.

I think that evaluation must be based on human judgment, not a pseudo-scientific system. Administrators should have a background as teachers, so they can fairly evaluate and help teachers. As for seniority, it is best to keep the best teachers, but those are not likely to be the young teachers in their first or second year; those are years when new teachers are developing their craft. I hate to see anyone laid off for any reason other than incompetence, laziness, hostile treatment of students, or moral turpitude, but if there must be layoffs due to budget cuts, then seniority may be the fairest way to make the decisions about who must be laid off. If you can think of a fairer way, let me know.

WT: I’m glad that we agree on the principle that, if layoffs are necessary, we should strive to keep the best teachers and lay off the least effective.

I also agree that the best teachers aren’t likely to be those in the first or second years – though some will be. And finally, I agree that, in most districts, there isn’t a foolproof (or even a very good system) for evaluating teachers. I understand and appreciate the concern about teachers being victimized by an imperfect system, and agree that our school systems need to make a lot more progress in this area.

The question is: what do we do in the meantime? Do we hold our noses and continue with a system, layoffs strictly be seniority, that we both know is unfair and hurts kids because the alternative might be more unfair and hurt more kids?

Apparently, your answer is yes. My answer is no.

In the absence of a perfect evaluation system (of which there is no such thing), I think we should simply let principals decide (subject to discrimination laws of course). It’s their job to know who’s making the greatest contribution to the school and student learning. They make the hiring decisions – why shouldn’t they also make layoff decisions? That’s what they do at the private schools my daughters and your grandchildren attend. What’s so different about public schools?

DR: My school-age grandson has attended a public elementary school in Brooklyn for four years. This year, he is attending a progressive independent school in Los Angeles (No testing! Very limited homework! Creativity!). He is thriving. At his Brooklyn public school, the principal was free to hire and fire teachers in their probationary period. She has some new teachers and some veteran teachers. It is a good school, despite the testing.

WT: You will no doubt raise the concern that principals will lay off senior (more expensive) teachers, to which I have two responses: a) it would be foolish to fire a great teacher making $55,000 and keep an ineffective one making $50,000; and b) if one teacher costs $50,000 and another $75,000 and they’re both equally effective, then I certainly hope the principal lays off the more expensive one – and then uses the $25,000 savings to, say, hire a part-time reading specialist or whatever he/she judges is most needed by the students.

You will also no doubt raise the concern that principals will just lay off teachers who they don’t like, even if they’re outstanding, and keep their good-for-nothing cousins, friends, sycophants, etc., to the detriment of students. No doubt there will be some of this, but principals displaying such unfairness and poor leadership will likely lose the confidence of their teachers, see their school’s performance decline, and (hopefully) soon be out of a job.

DR: Whitney, my reflection on this dialogue is that you want to do things to help kids, but you are focused on the wrong problems. You think that unions and contracts mean bad schools, but many (not all) of the world’s best school systems have teachers’ unions. In Finland, 100% of teachers and principals belong to the same union, and their schools are wonderful, no matter where they are located. You think that tenure and seniority are hurting poor and minority kids, but there is no evidence that this is the case. The best public schools in New York, Massachusetts, and Connecticut have teachers who belong to unions and have tenure and seniority. There is already too much teacher churn in low-income schools. Kids in poor schools need skilled, experienced teachers, but instead they get Teach for America, idealistic young kids who are not well prepared to help the students.

Pasi Sahlberg, the great Finnish educator, once wrote an article in which he proposed switching the teachers in a high-performing Finnish school with the teachers in a low-income, low-performing American school. He concluded that it would not have much impact, if any. The American teachers would discover that they were free to teach; the Finnish teachers would be overwhelmed by the poverty of the children in the American school and would not know how to help them.

So much of the reform agenda focuses on the teacher as the great problem of American education. This is wrong. By treating teachers as the problem, teachers feel demoralized and beaten down. They have no autonomy. They have a steady stream of outside consultants who arrive to lecture them. Mandates flow from the legislature, whose members couldn’t pass the eighth grade math tests. The teaching profession is in deep trouble. Good teachers are quitting. The pipeline of new teachers is drying up. Every teacher preparation program reports a sharp drop in enrollments.

I encourage you, in the spirit of this dialogue, to think hard about these issues. Stop blaming teachers. Stop believing that a supply of great teachers is waiting to get into the classrooms. The doors are open, and they are not there.

Please, think about the conditions in which children and families live. Think about the root causes of academic failure. Think about ways that schools might become wonderful places for children and teachers alike.

Imagine schools for all children that are like the schools you chose for your own children.

Think about what you can do—along with your colleagues in the philanthropic and financial communities—to change what matters most: The shameful fact that nearly a quarter of our children live in poverty.

I look forward to our next exchange.

Diane

WT: I look forward to hearing your thoughts.

Best regards,

Whitney

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Corporate Reformers, Education Industry, Education Reform, Poverty, Teacher Evaluations, Teacher Tenure, Teachers and Teaching, Testing

Whitney Tilson and I Debate Education Reform and the Billionaires’ Role, Part 2

By dianeravitch

May 12, 2016 //

Whitney Tilson, a key figure in the corporate reform movement, and I have continued an exchange about teaching, charters, and the movement he represents. He was among the founders of Democrats for Education Reform and Teach for America; he is also involved in Bridge International Academies, which opens low-cost, for-profit schools in poor countries. Another in this series will appear soon. He posted this on his blog this morning. You can read it there to see my remarks are in blue; when I copied and pasted to my site, all the blue disappeared, and I didn’t have time to recolor them. My comments are marked DR, his are WT. I am engaging in this dialogue so that his readers can learn what their critics say, not filtered but straight.

From: Whitney Tilson
Sent: Thursday, May 12, 2016 9:00 AM
Subject: Round 2 of my discussion with Diane Ravitch, on who’s the status quo, charter schools, and testing

If someone forwarded you this email and you would like to be added to my email list to receive emails like this one roughly once a week, please email Leila at leilajt2+edreform@gmail.com. You can also email her if you’d like to unsubscribe. Lastly, in between emails I send out links to articles of interest via Twitter (I’m #arightdenied) so, to get them, you must sign up to follow me at: https://twitter.com/arightdenied.
———————
STOP THE PRESSES AGAIN!!!

Our ongoing discussion covers many topics:
1) Whether reformers are now the status quo

2) Charter schools

3) Tests and how they should (and shouldn’t) be used

4) Who is the underdog in this battle

5) The tone of the debate and our shared desire to focus more on the issues and less on personal attacks

6) The details of the Vergara case – namely, a) the amount of time it takes teachers to earn tenure; b) how difficult it is for administrators to fire a tenured teacher; and c) whether layoffs should be done strictly by seniority
Because of its length, we’ve agreed to break it into two parts: Round 2 is below and will cover the first three topics. Tomorrow we’ll release Round 3, covering the remaining three.

My original email is in italics, Diane’s comments are in blue (beginning with “DR:”), and my responses are in black (beginning with “WT:”).

Enjoy!

Whitney
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Hi Diane,

I really enjoyed our first exchange of ideas. Thank you for engaging.

Since you had the last word, the onus is on me to respond – which, frankly, makes me feel overwhelmed because we’ve already touched on so many enormously complex and difficult issues that we could spend weeks discussing just one of them.

So, I’m going to approach this following the old maxim, “How do you eat an elephant? One bite at a time.” I’m not going to try to respond to everything, but rather just a few things and hopefully we can build from there.
So let’s talk about two things, one high-level and one nitty-gritty: 1) tone, language and motivations; and 2) the Vergara case.

Tone, Language and Motivations
Here’s another thing we can surely agree on: we (and our allies) have far too often let our rhetoric get away from us, leading us to make ad hominem attacks rather than sticking to the issues. Randi throws kids under the bus on behalf of her members, you’re motivated by a personal vendetta against Joel Klein, I’m part of the hedge fund cabal that wants to privatize public education for our own profit, reformers are anti-teacher, etc.
Can we just stop? Please?

Let’s agree to disagree without being disagreeable. It diminishes all of us. It blinds us to the many things we agree on. And it makes it much harder to reach compromises, which are usually necessary.

No doubt there are some folks on “your side” who, for example, are more focused on more jobs, higher pay, better benefits and job security, etc. for union members than on the best interests of kids, just as there are people on “my side” who wrongly bash teachers and are more focused on earning higher profits (like the online charter school operators) or busting unions than on the best interests of kids.

But it’s been my experience and observation over 27 years (I know, I know, that makes me a rookie!) that the vast majority of people engaged in this debate are motivated not by self-interest, but by a deep passion for ensuring that all children in this country get a good education that gives them a fair shot in life.

So let’s stop the rhetoric about “defenders of the status quo” and “throwing kids under the bus” (from my side) and “the billionaire boys club that demonizes teachers and wants to privatize public education for their own profit” (from your side).

DR: Whitney, I have to stop you here, to clear the record. I know that “your side” refers to anyone who believes in public education as a “defender of the status quo,” which is frankly absurd. The “status quo” is your side. You and your compatriots have controlled the U.S. Department of Education for the past eight years (at least). You got your favorite ideas imposed on the nation via Race to the Top. You were able, through Race to the Top, to get almost every state to agree to hand off public schools to charter operators, some of whom-frankly–are incompetent and fast-buck entrepreneurs–and to agree to evaluate teachers by the test scores of their students. You got whatever you wanted through Arne Duncan’s close association with your reform movement. So, yes, there is a status quo, and it consists of high-stakes testing (which American children and teachers have endured for 15 years) and privatization via charter. The charter movement has promoted free markets, competition, and consumer choice, which opens the door to vouchers, which are now found in some form in nearly half the states. Add this all up, and you have a disruptive status quo that is highly demoralizing to teachers, destroys unions, and rattles the foundations of education without improving it.

WT: I agree that we reformers were able to get some of our agenda implemented under Obama and Duncan, but completely disagree that we have become the status quo. (By the way, I know you object to the term “reformers”, but I don’t know what else to call us; if I use your preferred term, “status quo’ers”, all of our readers will be confused.) I looked it up and it’s defined as “the existing state of affairs, particularly with regards to social or political issues.”

How can the status quo be anything except the existing K-12 public educational system, which is the 2nd largest area of government spending (exceeding our military, trailing only healthcare) and by far the largest employer in the country at 7.2 million jobs (plus add 3.8 million more if you count higher ed) (per this data from the U.S. Department of Labor)?

I also disagree with your characterization of our agenda, for a variety of reasons.

DR: The existing public school system is saddled with high-stakes testing because of “your side.” It is saddled with policies like test-based evaluation of teachers because of Race to the Top (“your side”). Thousands of teachers and principals have been fired and thousands of community public schools have been closed and replaced by privately managed charters because of the policies of “your side.” Your side is in charge. Your side makes the rules and the laws. Your side demonizes teachers and public education.

WT: Charter Schools
I think high-quality charters are an important piece of the puzzle in improving our educational system. This is a topic on which I know we will forever disagree and it’s a big, complex one, so let’s agree to return to it in more depth in a future discussion – but in the meantime, if you (and our readers) would like to read my response to your critique of charters, I published an open letter to you on 12/3/10 that is posted here. Though I wrote it more than five years ago, I think it’s still quite timely.

Briefly, you always refer to them as part of an effort to privatize public education, which drives me crazy (I’m sure you’ll be pleased to hear) because charter schools are public schools! They receive public funds, are often situated in public school buildings, aren’t allowed to have admissions criteria (unlike many public schools like Stuyvesant) (yes, some charters cheat; so do many regular public schools), students have to take the same state tests, etc. They are simply public schools that aren’t overseen by the central bureaucracy – rather, by a board of directors made up of private citizens – and aren’t subject to the centrally negotiated union contract. This makes them different – but they’re still public schools, ultimately accountable, directly or indirectly, to elected officials the city or state in which they’re located.

As for charters opening the door to vouchers, I think, if anything, they’re a substitute. But regardless, I generally favor both – but the devil is in the details. I share your opposition to awful for-profit online charter operators like K12, but think we should expand high-quality charters that, as I noted in our last exchange, are willing to play by the same rules as regular public schools (e.g., take their fair share of the most disadvantaged students, backfill, etc.).

DR: Charter schools are not public schools. They have private boards; they are not required to have open meetings. Their finances are opaque. They choose the students they want and push out those they don’t want. When hauled into court or before the NLRB, their defense is always the same: we are not public schools, we are not state actors, we are private corporations operating schools on a contract with government. I am convinced: they are not public schools, because they say so themselves. They are neither transparent nor accountable. They leave the neediest students to the public schools, even as they drain resources from the public schools. They weaken the public schools by cherrypicking the most motivated students, excluding the neediest students, and taking away the resources that public schools require to function well. Charter schools are harming the education of the great majority of students, who are enrolled in public schools. We had a dual school system before the Brown decision of 1954; we should not go back and recreate a new one.

It has to be a little disturbing to you to realize that your agenda for charters is shared by all the Republican governors, as well as a few Democrats like Obama, Cuomo, and Malloy. You are also allied with Scott Walker, Rick Scott, Rick Snyder, Mike Pence, Paul LePage, Jeb Bush, and the Tea Party of North Carolina. Every Republican legislature loves charter schools, as it is an opportunity to resegregate the schools. The far-right American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) loves charter schools and has model charter legislation which is shared with their members in every state, as well as model legislation to eliminate collective bargaining and standards for teachers.

WT: Testing
Regarding testing, we actually agree on more than I expected. I agree with your critique that we reformers haven’t implemented it very well – which has certainly helped the anti-testing crowd give us a political drubbing. I share your concerns about testing (from our last exchange a few days ago: “teaching to the test, narrowing the curriculum, cheating”) and agree that “they favor those who come to school with advantages,” “that most testing should be designed by the classroom teachers, not by outside testing corporations,” and that standardized tests shouldn’t be given “more than once a year.”

Where we disagree, I think, is how the tests should be used. You wrote that “standardized testing should be used only diagnostically” and that it “should not figure into…the teachers’ evaluation.”
 Regarding the former, I’m not 100% sure what you mean by “only diagnostically,” but I believe that we need to use the results of standardized tests as one important measure – though not the only measure! – of how teachers, schools, districts, states, and our entire country are doing in achieving our goal of ensuring that every child gets a good education.

DR: Tests are diagnostic when they show what students know and don’t know, so instruction can be adjusted to help them do better. Today’s standardized tests have no diagnostic value. They rank students without giving any information about what they do and don’t know. Imagine going to a doctor with a sharp pain in your side. Your doctor says to you, “This is bad. You scored a 2 on a scale of 1 to 4. You are in the 30th percentile. Goodbye.” What you really want is a diagnosis. You want to know what is wrong and you want medicine that will stop the pain. Tests today are pointless and useless. All teachers learn is where their students rank, not what they need more help with.

WT: When tests show that half of black and Latino 4th graders are “below basic” readers (at least one year below grade level, often far more), this is critical information about this national disgrace. Of course it’s a separate discussion about what to do about this, which is rooted in how much of this problem is due to ineffective schools vs. other factors like poverty, but it’s critical to do the testing every year so, as a nation, we are regularly reminded of the problem, can take steps to address it, and track progress.

DR: We don’t need to test every student every year to know that kids need smaller classes and intensive help. Their teachers know that. No high-performing nation in the world tests every child every year. Testing is a measure, not a treatment. If we keep pouring hundreds of millions of dollars into testing without changing conditions in the schools, we will get nowhere. Whatever we need to know about student performance can be learned from NAEP (the National Assessment of Educational Performance), which tests American students every two years in reading and math and reports on state results and disaggregates scores by race, language, gender, disability, etc. The current onerous tests—lasting eight to ten hours for little children—are unnecessary.

WT: For similar reasons, it’s critical to know if the vast majority of children in a particular district, school or, yes, even classroom are, for example, reading or doing math far below grade level. I agree that it’s not necessarily a high school’s fault if, say, 90% of students are below grade level and the graduation rate is only 50% – that’s what tends to happen when students enter 9th grade three years below grade level – so the test results must be used carefully (and I know sometimes they’re not), but that’s not a reason to eliminate standardized testing or limit its uses. If there is no learning going on in an entire school – and there are, sadly, a lot of them – then we really need to know that!

DR: Be aware that 50% of students are always below grade level. That is the nature of grade level; it is a median. In any district where 80-90% are below grade level, you can be certain that there is a high concentration of poverty and racial segregation. Why assume that the teachers are bad? The root causes of low test scores are the same everywhere: poverty and segregation. What can be done to reduce those two harmful conditions?

WT: As for classroom-level data, we surely agree that it may not be a teacher’s fault if every child in her class is reading below grade level – they likely entered the class that way. But if they spend a year in a teacher’s classroom and still can’t read or do math (or whatever the subject is) better than they could at the beginning of the year, then something is wrong and we (broadly defined: the department head, principal, superintendent, parents, taxpayers, etc.) need to know that so corrective action can be taken – so, again, while it’s important to use data and test results correctly, we need the data!

DR: Your faith in standardized testing is greater than mine. I served on the NAEP governing board for seven years, and I saw questions that had two right answers or no right answers. Children have talents and skills that are not measured on these tests. We have been testing everything that moves for 15 years and we have very little to show for it. It is time to think differently. We should give more thought to how to help students and teachers and less money to measuring them. The nature of standardized tests is that they are normed on a bell curve. Half will always be below the median. If we gave drivers’ licenses that way, half the population would never get one.

WT: Now let’s turn to the issue of using standardized tests as part of teachers’ evaluations, a hugely complex and contentious issue.

I think standardized test results should be used as part (and only a small – less than 50% – part) of a teacher’s evaluation – while simultaneously acknowledging the validity of your many objections to this. Good testing should be able to measure, at least to some degree, what really matters: growth. The concept is simple: if students start the school year at a certain level, they should be at a higher level by the end of the year, so let’s measure that.

Now, before you go off on me for saying this, I’m well aware that, in practice, it’s not simple at all: tests are imperfect and results are inconsistent year to year; many subjects (like art) areas don’t lend themselves to measurement by tests; sometimes a class has more than one teacher during the year; some students move between classes; etc. I also agree that reformers could have done a better job of implementing the process of tying student test scores to teacher evaluations.

But I view these problems as good reasons why test results shouldn’t be weighted too heavily, should be based on growth/learning, not static scores, and need to be balanced by comprehensive reviews by peers and administrators – but not as reasons to completely reject using test results in teacher evaluations.

DR: Test scores should not count at all in evaluating a teacher’s performance. As three major scholarly organizations (the American Educational Research Association, the National Academy of Education, and the American Statistical Association) have said, test scores say more about who is in the class than about teacher quality. Those who teach students with disabilities, English language learners, and gifted students will not get big score increases, may see flat scores, and may still be good teachers. Those who teach in affluent suburbs may look like superstars, even though they are no better than those teaching in the inner city schools. Value-added measurement, as it is called, has not worked anywhere. It is invalid, unstable, and unreliable. A teacher may get a high score one year, and a low score the next year. A teacher may register gains in math, yet no gains in reading; does she get a bonus or will she be fired?

I think you should know that 70% of teachers do not teach tested subjects. Only 30% teach reading or math in elementary and middle school. How do we evaluate the majority? They are evaluated based on the test scores of students they don’t know and subjects they don’t teach. That’s neither fair nor rational. So it may sound simple to say that teachers should be evaluated on whether scores go up or down, but it doesn’t work for the 70% who don’t teach tested subjects and it doesn’t work for the 30% who do because they are not teaching randomly assigned and comparable students. I urge you (and your readers) to read this article by a teacher who quit: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/melissa-bowers/7-reasons-you-might-not-want_b_9832490.html.

WT: It would be like evaluating basketball players without looking at points scored per game. Of course this one statistic needs to be placed in a broader context (how many shots the player takes; rebounds; assists; steals; defensive prowess; whether someone has a good attitude and enhances (or diminishes) team cohesion, etc.) – but you gotta look at it!

DR: The purpose of playing basketball is to score points and win games. The purpose of education is not to get high scores but to develop good citizens who can think and act wisely, work with other people respectfully, love learning and continue learning when school is finished. What matters most can’t be measured on a standardized test.

WT: In summary, I really fear that the anti-testing backlash will put us on the path back toward the bad old days when school systems could give poor and minority students the worst schools – and even good schools could put such students into the low-expectations classrooms with the least effective teachers – without anyone being the wiser.
DR: After fifteen years of high-stakes testing, the conditions you fear are still in place. Poor and minority students are still in the schools with the lowest test scores. The achievement gap remains stubbornly large. Testing hasn’t helped the neediest children, because their needs are not addressed by standardized tests. We keep learning the same things every year, but doing nothing to change the causes. The anti-testing backlash, led by angry parents, will continue and grow. They don’t want their children to be labeled failures in third grade. They don’t want them to spend most of their time preparing to take tests. They don’t want them sitting for tests that take longer than the law school exams. And they don’t want their teachers fired if their students don’t get high scores. Why must this be inflicted only on public schools? If private schools were required to take these unnecessary and pointless tests, the rebellion would be joined by their parents too.

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

Don’t Believe the New York Times’ Editorial about Remediation

By dianeravitch

May 12, 2016 //

Yesterday the New York Times published a bizarre editorial about remedial classes in college.

The editorial says that former Secretary of Education Arne Duncan was right when he said that the students who opt out are poorly educated, and their parents are “white suburban moms” who were disappointed to discover that their children aren’t so smart after all. Duncan always liked to say that America’s children had been “dummied down,” and no one was willing to tell the unpleasant truth but him.

The Times‘ editorial said that large numbers of suburban students need remediation when they get to college. This conclusion, it said, was based on a study by an advocacy group called Education Reform Now.

The editorial referred to Education Reform Now as a “nonprofit think tank.” ERN is nonprofit but it is certainly not a think tank. ERN is the nonprofit (c3) arm of Democrats for Education Reform (DFER), the organization of hedge fund managers that loves charter schools, high-stakes testing, and Common Core. It has a vested interest in saying that American public schools are failing, failing, failing so as to spur its campaign to privatize public education.

ERN sponsors “Camp Philos,” an annual affair where important political figures meet in the woods with hedge fund managers to figure out how to reform public schools that none of them ever sent their own children to. In 2014, its star education reformer was Governor Cuomo. At its 2015 meeting on Martha’s Vineyard, Mayor Rahm Emanuel was a keynote speaker, sharing his knowledge of how to reform public education by closing public schools en masse.

The staff director of ERN is Shavar Jeffries, who ran for mayor of Newark and lost to Ras Baraka. Jeffries was supported by DFER, which hired him after his loss.

Consider the board of directors. Every one of them is from Wall Street.

The authors of the report are staff members at ERN who come from public policy backgrounds.

Curiously, the editorial has a link to the words “Education Department,” but no link to the ERN policy brief.

The New York Times‘ editorial board has been a tireless advocate for the Common Core and for high-stakes testing. It has been a reliable cheerleader for the corporate reform. Its editorials show little understanding of the opt out movement or of the opposition to the Common Core standards. It is sad that the nation’s most prestigious newspaper so consistently distorts important education issues. It must be very distressing to the Times’ editorial board that the New York Board of Regents is now led by an experienced educator who does not share their zeal to tear down the nation’s public schools and abet privatization.

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Common Core, Corporate Reformers, Education Industry, Education Reform, Opt Out, Parents, Privatization, Testing

Denis Smith: David Brooks Says that Individual Choice is Destroying Community but Wants More of It

By dianeravitch

May 11, 2016 //

Denis Smith, who served in the Ohio Department Olof Education, monitoring charter schools, has often reflected on the incoherence of the basic idea of chartering schools to compete with public schools. He reminds us here of the deep divide between traditional conservatives, who try to preserve community institutions and the new market-based “conservatives,” who love disruption and count themselves successful to the extent they destroy traditional institutions, icons, and brands.

In this post, he analyzes a column by David Brooks about how excessive individualism is tearing apart our social fabric. Smith wonders why conservatives don’t recognize that their own ideas contribute to the attack on social cohesion.

He writes:

“It’s not often that some of us can find common ground with the conservative New York Times columnist David Brooks, but his recent piece warning about “four big forces coursing through modern societies” struck a chord. On the other hand, while many might agree with him on some of the causal factors of massive societal change, Brooks and his fellow conservatives may in fact be enabling or even accelerating some of this change as a result of one of their public policy positions.

“The column and commentary by Brooks arose from his analysis of a new book, Commonwealth and Covenant, where the author, Marcia Pally, writes about the tendency in modern life to both explore as well as be “situated” – i.e., having a sense of community.

“Leave it to others to dissect the long-term impact of global migration, globalization, and the Internet to transform both individuals and those political entities called nation-states. But Brooks’ exploration of the fourth big force, individual choice, should make us want to further examine his identification of choice as one of the keys to social change and instability.

“All of these forces have liberated the individual … but they have been bad for national cohesion and the social fabric,” he observes. Nevertheless, he continues, “The emphasis on individual choice challenges community cohesion and settled social bonds.”

“Brooks is concerned about a now weakened social fabric that, as a result of global migration, globalization and the Internet, might appeal to alienated youth and, as one example, make ISIS attractive for those who might opt for that fourth force – individual choice. He then asks his readers: “In a globalizing, diversifying world, how do we preserve individual freedom while strengthening social solidarity”?

“Pally’s individualism, or “separability,” inevitably results in undesirable outcomes, including greed and control of scarce resources, but it is not clear if Brooks clearly discerns the consequences of this in our society caused by his party’s promotion of educational choice, and how such a policy further adds stress to scarce public resources while also impairing the process of community-building.

“His question about how we preserve freedom serves to illustrate the certainty of unintended consequences for conservatives, viz., how can you promote the concept of choice, particularly educational choice, as a desired public policy outcome, while also warning about weakened community cohesion and a frayed, tattered, strained social fabric?

“Can conservatives have it both ways? Nope.

“If Brooks is correct when he says “We’re not going to roll back the four big forces coursing through modern societies,” why would he and his fellow Republicans nevertheless encourage further weakening community cohesion and place additional stress on our social fabric by developing a parallel system of “public” education through charters, let alone vouchers?”

Categories Corporate Reformers, Education Industry, Education Reform, Privatization, Vouchers

Bombshell! Former Staff Member at Success Academy Alleges Cheating on Tests

By dianeravitch

May 10, 2016 //

Politico reports that a former central staff member of Eva Moskowitz’s Success Academy charter chain alleges widespread cheating on tests, as well as high staff turnover and demoralization.

“Success Academy CEO Eva Moskowitz did not approve of the finding — made by an “ethnographer” she hired to study her rapidly expanding charter school network — that some teachers at the high-performing network might be responding to the enormous pressure placed on them by cheating.

“So Moskowitz, Success’s combative founder, deployed senior managers to inform the staffer, Roy Germano, that he was banned from visiting schools for the remainder of the year. Moskowitz disparaged Germano to other employees, according to a memo written by Germano in July 2015 and obtained by POLITICO New York, and he was told to halt his research projects immediately.

“Germano was fired last August, approximately a month after the report was completed, and is now a research scholar at New York University.

“Germano’s reports and memo, along with a trove of other documents obtained by POLITICO — a separately commissioned internal draft risk assessment report, a compilation of exit interviews, and internal Success staffing records, among other documents — paint a picture of a growing enterprise facing serious institutional strain in the form of low staff morale, unusually high turnover, and the kind of stress that could drive teachers to exaggerate their students’ progress.”

Success Academy is the highest scoring charter chain in New York, possibly the nation. It is also very controversial, due to its no-excuses policies, it’s attrition rates, and its claim to have cracked the code of raising test scores of low-income minority children. At its last fundraiser, last month, it raised $35 million in one night, including a gift of $25 million from one of its hedge fund admirers.

Categories Charter Schools, Corporate Reformers, Harlem Success Academy, Testing

Four New Members Join “Chiefs for Change” to Promote Charters and Vouchers

By dianeravitch

May 9, 2016 //

Four new members joined the “Chiefs for Change,” which was established by Jeb Bush to promote school choice, charters, vouchers, online charter schools, the Common Core, and high-stakes testing. School choice has been shown to promote segregation, but that probably will not be a topic of discussion at the next meeting or any future meeting. Nor is there likely to be much attention to the many reports about the poor results obtained by virtual charters. Perhaps they might discuss the continuing lack of any evidence for the success of vouchers. Or the many charters that are low-performing and how they should be held accountable.

The new members include Carey Wright, state superintendent of Mississippi; Malika Anderson, Superintendent of the Achievement School District in Tennessee; Steve Canavero, Superintendent of Public Instruction in Nevada; and Lewis D. Ferebee, Superintendent of Indianapolis Public Schools.

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Chiefs for Change, Common Core, Corporate Reformers, Education Industry, Privatization, Segregation, Testing, Virtual Charter Schools, Vouchers

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Don’t Believe the New York Times’ Editorial about Remediation

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Bombshell! Former Staff Member at Success Academy Alleges Cheating on Tests

Four New Members Join “Chiefs for Change” to Promote Charters and Vouchers

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