Archives for category: Corporate Reformers
« Older Entries
Newer Entries »

Maryland State Board Votes to Make PARCC a Graduation Requirement, But Rhode Island Drops It

By dianeravitch
April 28, 2016 //
34

The Maryland State Board of Education voted to make PARCC the state’s high school graduation test. The passing score now will be a 3 on a scale of 1-5, but it will rise to a 4 in four years.

Meanwhile the State Commissioner of Education on Rhode Island, Ken Wagner, decided to drop PARCC as a graduation requirement because he knew the failure rate would be staggering. He said he didn’t want to penalize students for the system’s “failure to get them to high standards.”

Nobody mentioned that PARCC’s passing score is absurdly high and will never be reached by about half of all students.

 

The Maryland state board violated the first rule of educational testing: Tests should be used only for the purpose for which they were designed. PARCC was not designed to be a high school graduation test. It was designed to test mastery of the Common Core. Its passing marks were set so high that most of the 24 states that adopted PARCC have now dropped it, and only six states and D.C. still use it.

 

What will Maryland do with the thousands of students who will never earn a high school diploma? Did anyone think about that? You can be certain that most of them will be students with disabilities, English language learners, and children who live in high poverty. There is one loophole: students can create a project that is approved by their teachers and administrators.

 

The only objection to the new Maryland plan came from the ACLU, which said that there was no evidence that the PARCC raises achievement. Read that again slowly. No test raises achievement. Tests measure how well students do on a standardized test. They don’t improve students’ ability to pass standardized test.

 

Down the rabbit-hole in Maryland, where the legislature recently voted to approve vouchers, assuring that students may go to religious schools that teach creationism, orthodox Judaism, Catholic doctrine, and Islam.

 

 

Liz Bowie writes in the Baltimore Sun:

 

 

The new standard means students will not be required to achieve what is considered the national passing score until the 2019-2020 school year.

 

Thousands of students across the state will struggle to meet even that lowered standard. In 2015, 42 percent of Maryland students who took the Algebra I exam and 39 percent of those who took the English 10 test scored less than a three.

 

If the standard had been in effect last year, more than half of Baltimore County’s students would not have passed the math test and 35 percent would not have passed the English test.

 

In Baltimore, 70 percent would not have passed the math exam and more than half would not have passed the English exam.
The Maryland State Education Association, which represents most of the state’s teachers, has not taken a position on the draft regulations. Cheryl Bost, the group’s vice president, said that while the union is “pleased there is a transition plan,” teachers are concerned about whether they will be able to give students the individual attention they need to pass the exams.

 

Thousands of students, education officials say, will be taking the tests multiple times to try to pass, and many will likely use a loophole that allows students to demonstrate their knowledge by doing a project that is approved by their teacher and other administrators.
With such a large percentage of students failing the exams, teachers will have many more students doing projects who they must work with individually.

 

Baltimore County Superintendent Dallas Dance said he supports the phase-in approach.

 

But Bebe Verdery, the ACLU’s Maryland education director, objects to the high-stakes tests. Many states have repealed the tests, she said, because evidence does not show that they increase achievement.

 

“If the state board is going to persist in having high-stakes graduation exams, it is imperative they provide and guarantee high-quality instruction so that students have the opportunity to pass the test,” Verdery said.

 

 

Categories Accountability, Common Core, Corporate Reformers, Education Industry, High School Graduation, Maryland, Privatization, Testing

A Disillusioned Teacher Responds to the Tilson-Ravitch Exchange

By dianeravitch
April 26, 2016 //
58

Whitney Tilson received many comments on our dialogue. Many were positive. Others were not.

 

Here is a comment he received from a teacher who is disgusted with the attacks on the profession. She plans to leave. I showed her comment to a veteran teacher in NYC, who found them offensive to teachers like him who make a career of teaching. What he took from her comment was, “what does that make me? Lazy? Incompetent? Uncreative?”

 

I hope Whitney and his readers and fellow reformers learn from her comment. She is their ideal teacher, an Ivy League graduate, the “best and the brightest.” When even their favorites say “Enough is enough,” they should listen. The reform attacks on teachers–the test-based evaluations, the paperwork, the BS rubrics, the data-driven analytics, the litigious efforts to eliminate all job protections– are crippling teacher recruitment and retention.

 

 

She wrote to Tilson’s blog:

 
“So glad that you opened dialogue with her and acknowledged the nuances of the union challenge.

“You powerful rich people who have so much say over our daily lives scare the crap out of us teachers who have so little say over our own lives. =)

“It’s nice to hear you sound a bit more nuanced and respectful in your language.

“As a teacher who will probably quit soon, I just would add that the harder we make teaching and the more disrespectful we are to teachers, the more we lower the bar for what standard we hold teachers to. If ed reformers’ language about teachers and ideas about teachers continue to make more people like me quit (I’m a Yale grad, and I know of at least 6 Stanford grads and one other Yale grad who are all leaving the classroom at the end of this year), the only people who stay will be people who have little ambition, don’t really care, aren’t very creative, and don’t mind the constant indignities or the pervasive denial throughout the whole system. No offense, but you’re not going to make awesome teachers out of them. You need us.

“And this is an indictment of the WHOLE system, not public, not charter. Because let’s be honest: the public v. charter debate is just a giant distraction from the fact that we have a segregated school system and no one is doing anything about it. The only reason we have charter schools is because white people are so relieved they don’t have to integrate their kids with the poor kids of color… what white person wouldn’t support charter? It’s separate but equal! (Please forgive the sarcasm. But no one seems to be talking about the real issue any more).

Sincerely,

 

XXXXXXXXX

“A disillusioned, intelligent, innovative, caring, competent, and excellent urban public school teacher who is not going to last much longer”

 

 

Categories Corporate Reformers, Education Reform, Teacher Evaluations, Teacher Tenure, Teachers and Teaching

Mercedes Schneider Untangles a Nest of Reform Money and Connections

By dianeravitch
April 26, 2016 //
17

This is a fascinating post by Mercedes Schneider. You could call her a “follow the money” expert. She began wondering who was funding Education Post, the blog run by Peter Cunningham that celebrates corporate reform. Cunningham was assistant secretary for communications in the U.S. Department of Education, when Arne Duncan was Secretary of Education. We know from reports in the press that Education Post received $12 million from the Walton Family Foundation, the Eli Broad Foundation, and Michael Bloomberg. The press also noted “an anonymous donor.” Mercedes wondered about that anonymous donor, and she did some digging and found out who it is.

 

I won’t spoil the pleasure of reading this post. It reads like a detective story. Suffice it to say that almost everyone involved is deeply embedded in corporate reform, and most of the links in the web lead to the Obama administration and to the U.S. Department of Education. It seems clear that the latter was taken over by the corporate reform movement. The question is why. Why would a Democratic president front for the corporate takeover of public education?

Categories Accountability, Billionaires, Bloomberg, Michael, Broad Foundation, Charter Schools, Corporate Reformers, Education Industry, Technology, Testing

Rick Perlstein: How Corporate Elites Bought Control of the Chicago Public Schools

By dianeravitch
April 25, 2016 //
19

Rick Perlstein is a brilliant writer who usually writes about national politics. Since he lives in Chicago, he couldn’t help but notice the hostile takeover of the public schools by a small, interconnected corporate elite. He applies his journalistic and scholarly skills to unraveling this sordid story.

He begins with a story about an educator who was recently “reassigned” (fired) by the Mayor’s school board.

Perlstein writes:

“This past September, an award-winning Chicago Public Schools principal named Troy LaRaviere published a post on his blog that began, “Whenever I try to take a break from writing about CPS to focus on other aspects of my professional and personal life, CPS officials do something so profoundly unethical, incompetent and/or corrupt that my conscience calls me to pick up the pen once more.”

“What had Principal LaRaviere going this time? We’ll get there eventually. But first we have to back up and survey what brought the Chicago Public Schools to this calamitous pass in the first place. It’s hard to know where to begin. Though when it comes to the failings of America’s institutions you can rarely go wrong by looking to the plutocrats.

“Travel back with me, then, to July of 2003, when the Education Committee of the Civic Committee of the Commercial Club of Chicago — comprised of the chairman of the board of McDonald’s, the CEOs of Exelon Energy and the Chicago Board Options Exchange, two top executives of the same Fortune 500 manufacturing firm, two partners at top international corporate law firms, one founder of an investment bank, one of a mutual fund, and the CEO of a $220.1 billion asset-management fund: twelve men, all but one of them white — published “Left Behind: Student Achievement in Chicago’s Public Schools.”

“Chicago’s schools were in pathetic shape, these captains of industry explained: only 36 percent of eleventh graders met or exceeded state reading standards, only 26 percent reached math standards, only 22 percent were up to snuff in science, and 40 percent had by then dropped out.

“They found hope, however, in a new kind of educational institution called a “charter school” — “publicly-funded but independent, innovative schools that operate with greater flexibility and give parents whose children attend failing schools an option they do not have.”

“At that point Chicago had fifteen charters. The seven that were high schools scored an average of 17 percent higher on Illinois’ relatively new benchmark, the Prairie State Achievement Exam, said the report. Their graduation rates were 12 percent higher, attendance rates 8 percent higher, and dropouts 9 percent lower.

“So if a little was good, more must be better — right?

“Chicago should have at least 100 charter schools,” the Education Committee concluded. “These would be new schools, operating outside the established school system and free of many of the bureaucratic or union-imposed constraints that now limit the flexibility of regular public schools.”

“The problem was a school system that “responds more to politics and pressures from the school unions than to community or parental demands for quality,” and a municipal government that worries more about “avoiding labor discord and maintaining the political support of teachers and their labor unions than with advancing the education of children.”

Charters, though — poof! — possessed the magic power to make all the bad stuff disappear, because they bottled the stuff that made America great: “Competition — which is the engine of American productivity generally.” But how might schools, like convenience stores, compete? Just measure student performance, and close the schools that “underperform.” The 103-page report thus deployed the word “data” forty-five times, “score,” “scored,” or “scoring” 60 times — and “test,” “tested,” and “testing,” or “exam” and “examination,” some 1.47573 times per page.

“And, since these were the behind-the-scenes barons who veritably ran the city, it wasn’t even a year before the Chicago Public Schools headquarters on 125 S. Clark St. announced the “Renaissance 2010” initiative to close eighty traditional public schools and open precisely one hundred charters by 2010.

“Lo, like pedagogical kudzu, the charters came forth: forty-six of them, with names like “Infinity Math, Science, and Technology High School,” “Rickover Naval Academy High School,” “Aspira Charter School,” and “DuSable Leadership Academy of Betty Shabazz International Charter School.” Although, funny thing, rather than resembling the plucky, innovative — “flexible” — startups the rhetoric promised, the schools that flourished looked like factories stamped out by central planning. The skills most rewarded by Chicago’s charter boom became corporate marketing, regulatory capture, and outright graft.

“Left Behind” singled out one “stand out school”: the Noble Street Charter High School. Following the Renaissance 2010 report, Noble Street metastasized into the “Noble Network.” They opened sixteen schools, many named after the businesspeople who funded them, like Pritzker College Prep, Rauner College Prep, Rowe-Clark College Prep. (John Rowe and Frank Clark are both executives of the energy company Exelon, formed in a merger brokered by Rahm Emanuel in his investment banker days; Rowe was a member of the committee that authored “Left Behind” and also a member of the Noble Network’s board of directors.)

“Indeed, Noble runs just the kind of schools you’d expect to be sponsored by industrialists: their students are underprivileged waifs in uniforms who are fined for minor disciplinary infractions. The network is “founded,” its promotional materials promise, “on many of the same entrepreneurial principles that have built successful businesses — strong leadership, meaningful use of data, and a high degree of accountability.”

This is a well-written story of arrogance, greed, corruption, and deceit.

It is reassuring to see the Chicago story breaking out of the education media and into broader political discourse. The article “follows the money,” which is necessary these days. The character who is missing in this drama is Arne Duncan, who launched “Renaissance 2010,” which was a dismal failure. Why was he selected as Secretary of Education? Why was he allowed to impose the Chicago model on the nation? The public schools needed help and they were plundered. They became a plaything for Chicago’s elite. No one seemed to think about the children.

Categories Billionaires, Charter Schools, Chicago, Closing schools, Corporate Reformers, Education Industry, Emanuel, Rahm

Allie Gross: Detroit Charter School Fires 8 Teachers Without Explanation or Warning

By dianeravitch
April 21, 2016 //
4

Allie Gross has been reporting on the misadventures of the charter industry in Detroit in the Metro Times.

 

This week, she wrote about a charter school, University Academy, that fired eight teachers without any explanation or cause. When teachers have no union, the school doesn’t need to give any explanation about why teachers are fired.

 

Last fall, Allie wrote about the $3.5 million that Michigan doled out to charter applicants who never opened a school.

 

The latter article includes a useful summary of the U.S. Department of Education’s very costly investment in the charter industry:

 

In 1995, four years after the first charter school law was enacted, the U.S. Department of Education started its Charter Schools Program grant. The general gist of the initiative was state education agencies could vie for funding and then host their own competitions for sub-grantees who wanted to create or expand charter schools.

 

The goal of the grant is two-pronged: 1. It aims to expand the number of “high-quality” charter schools across the nation and, 2. It seeks to evaluate the effects of charter schools. The first aim is achieved through three types of grants that the U.S. Department of Education asks state education agencies to offer: planning grants, implementation grants, and, lastly, dissemination grants.

 

That first year the department gave out just over $4 million; today it doles out upward of $125 million. According to the Department of Education, the federal government has spent more than $3 billion on the charter sector in the past 20 years.

 

Michigan received $23 million from the program in 2007 and in 2010 decided to apply again, this time asking for $44 million. By this point the state had 240 charter schools, and as the application explained, there was an expectation of growth. Just a few months earlier lawmakers decided to lift the cap on the number of charter schools university-authorizers could sponsor.

 

This predicted expansion was highlighted in MDE’s application, as was the goal of ensuring authorizers would have high quality operators to choose from when they weren’t burdened with a cap.

 

In 1995, the same year that the Charter Schools Program grants started, Michigan opened its first charter school, a National Heritage Academy in Grand Rapids. Today, NHA, which was started by billionaire J.C. Huizenga, is the state’s largest charter school operator, with 48 different schools across Michigan. This multi-site, for-profit model has proliferated in Michigan — currently, 79 percent of Michigan’s charter schools are run by for-profit charter management organizations — and cracking this monopoly was a stated goal in MDE’s application. Specifically Michigan explained how “planning funds” could help level the playing field and empower grassroots community groups with charter school ideas.

 

 

Categories Charter Schools, Corporate Reformers, Detroit, Education Industry, For-Profit, Michigan, Privatization, Teachers, Unions

Help Sustain the Most Independent Source of Education News in Connecticut

By dianeravitch
April 18, 2016 //
0

Jonathan Pelto is the most independent and reliable source of education news in Connecticut. He has prodigious research skills and uses them to support public education as to expose skulduggery, frauds, and privatization. Jonathan took charge of organizing the Education Bloggers Network, which now has nearly 300 pro-public education bloggers. Jonathan compares them to the Committees of Correspondence that informed and encouraged the movement for independence before the American Revolution.

 

Jonathan needs our help to keep his blog alive.

 

Connecticut is overrun with corporate reformers–millionaires and billionaires– who live in exclusive enclaves like Greenwich, Darien, and New Canaan. They don’t send their children to public schools or even charter schools, but they want to control them. The corporate reformers are major supporters of Governor Malloy, who has shown deference to charter schools in his budgeting and his appointments.

 

We need Jonathan to keep shining the light on the state government and its cozy dealing with the state’s 1%.

 

 

You can contribute by going to this site.

 

 

 

 

 

Categories Charter Schools, Corporate Reformers, Education Reform

What Is HANY and Who Funds Them?

By dianeravitch
April 15, 2016 //
19

HANY is High Achievement New York. It has mounted a very costly campaign to oppose the opt out movement and to support high-stakes testing and the Common Core.

 

Who is funding their expensive campaign to maintain the status quo?

 

Fortunately, blogger and former teacher Deb Escobar has done the research and provides the answers. This will come as no surprise to readers of this blog. HANY is funded by the Billionaire Boys Club.

 

Who is the Man Behind the Curtain? Why, it is Bill Gates!

 

But he is not alone.

 

The purpose of this post is to pull back the curtain and let you know who is funding this massive campaign that aims to fix our “broken” system. Because, you know, it’s all for the children. Let’s start with their coalition members, beginning with Arva Rice, President and CEO of the New York Urban League, who previously was affiliated with Paul Tudor Jones (yes the hedge fund guy) and his Robin Hood Foundation.

 

Then there is New York Campaign for Achievement Now (NYCAN), part of the larger 50-state education reform group. The funding stream for 50CAN includes Eli and Edythe Broad Foundation, Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, Bush Foundation, JP Morgan Chase, and the Walton Foundation, among others. A veritable who’s-who of big money in the education reform game. The NY chapter adds more money from Gates, along with Bloomberg Philanthrophies, Kenneth M. Hirsch and William E. Simon.

 

Include Association for a Better New York, founded by real estate tycoon Bill Rudin. Their self-stated goal is to “promote neighborhood revitalization.” AKA gentrification. AKA keeping their fingers on the real estate prize in NY.

 

Coalition member Parents for Excellence in Bethlehem has bought the Common Core Gates funded spin. Co-President Kim Namkoong is a parent, also a mathematician and computer programmer. She is a face for the “How is My Kid Doing?” campaign that is funded by – you guessed it – the Council for a Strong America folks and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. The Bethlehem Parents for Excellence has a lackluster website (a surprise considering Namkoong’s stated occupation) that does not list its donors. They advocate for common core and testing.

 

Membership includes reformy groups Educators4Excellence and StudentsFirstNY. Educators4Excellence, also funded by the Gates Foundation, is comprised of anti-union young teachers, many of whom are alumni of Teach For America. See ed blogger Jonathan Pelto’s research on the group here. StudentsFirstNY is that pro-charter, pro-voucher group that shares its physical address with New York Charter queen Eva Moskowitz’ organization. NYS Families for Excellent Schools also shares that same address and is a hedge-funded PAC for education reforms.

 

The corporate reformers are a cozy group. There are not many of them, but they have so much money that they pop up again and again, singing the same tired old song. Test your children (not mine); put your children in “no excuses” charters (not mine); testing will make everyone smarter; the harder the tests, the smarter everyone will be and the more the achievement gap will close.

 

Evidence has nothing to do with their campaign. They do what the Man (or Men) Behind the Curtain want them to do.

Categories Charter Schools, Common Core, Corporate Reformers, Education Industry, Privatization, Testing

Steven Singer: Watch Out, Pittsburgh! The Privatizers Are Coming Again!

By dianeravitch
April 12, 2016 //
4

Steven Singer warns that the wealthy privatizers are gearing up to take back the public schools. At the last school board elections, parents, educators, and community leaders joined together to throw out the corporate reformers. The people who actually send their children to Pittsburgh public schools gained control of the board. One of the first decisions of the new board was to cancel a contract with Teach for America.

 

Corporate reformers can’t tolerate losing control of schools their own children don’t attend. Now they are coming back, with a PAC and lots of money, something that supporters of public schools are usually short of.

Categories Charter Schools, Corporate Reformers, Education Reform, Pittsburgh

Liberia Needs Free Public Schools, not Privatization and Outsourcing of Its Responsibility to Children

By dianeravitch
April 12, 2016 //
4

Liberia is seriously considering a proposal to outsource its elementary schools to foreign investors, notably Bridge International Academies, backed by wealthy Americans.

 

This Nigerian-born, American-educated journalist and historian thinks privatization is a terrible idea.

 

C. Patrick Burrowes writes that the plan to privatize what should be a government responsibility is a boondoggle.

 

He writes:

 

Poor Liberia! Few countries in the world have been as ill served by its government officials, as Liberia has been.

 

In the 1920s, Liberia earned the opprobrium of the world when some selfish officials opted to supply laborers by force to private foreign contractors. The cries and protests of ordinary Liberians went unheeded by them, until international pressure brought an end to their heartless scheme.

 

If this government is allowed to outsource the entire elementary school system, Liberia will enter the annals of infamy once again. At stake is not just the future of education in Liberia. If this proposal is allowed to pass, it will be the beginning of the end for universal public education, a concept with roots dating back to 1647. At stake is the future schooling of children around the world.

 

The proposal must be blocked, not just as a matter of principle. It must be opposed because it is based on faulty logic. Furthermore, its advocates provide no evidence to support their radical and disruptive experiment with the nation’s school system. Instead, they offer ideological buzzwords like “privatization” and “technology.”

 

But technologies cannot teach; people do. The top three factors for ensuring student success in early childhood education are: good teachers, good teachers, and good teachers. In other words, the quality of teaching and teacher-support are the strongest predictor of quality. If successful Liberians are humble and honest, we will readily acknowledge that we owe whatever careers we have today to the foundation laid by good elementary school teachers.

 

Throughout its history, Liberia produced thousands of such dedicated and self-sacrificing educators. The late Albert Porte and Dr. Mary Antoinette Brown-Sherman are just two well-known examples. Each of us could name several others who impacted our lives directly. Those teachers worked with few, if any, advanced technologies. Yet, their impact in the lives of students was immeasurable. So, why the urgent need now for the outsourcing of curriculum delivery and classroom management by cell phones?

 

The main reason is this: The Liberian educational system over the last decade has been driven by donors’ agendas, with little systematic planning based on local needs. Donors love giving chairs, buildings and other concrete objects that they can slap their logos on for all to see. It is fine to accept those inputs, but government should have its own master plan. The plan should determine allocation of resources, not the other way around….

 

Moments arise in history that tests the honor and moral fiber of a people. The forced-labor scandal of the 1920s was one. This educational outsourcing boondoggle is another. By our actions, let us prove ourselves worthy of the respect we want from the rest of the world and from our descendants.

 

 

Categories Corporate Reformers, Education Industry, International, Privatization

Laura Chapman Explains the Purpose of Standardized Testing

By dianeravitch
April 10, 2016 //
22

Laura Chapman, retired arts educator, explains the goals of standardized testing:

 

She writes:

 

 

“Here is another reason to opt out.

 

Test scores are collected and then marketed by greatschools.org. This non-profit is a sophisticated and well-funded system for gathering test scores and other information about students and parents, then selling that information. The website literally sells ads and licenses for access to test scores and other data on schools–public, private, and charter–with expansions planned for pre-school and daycare-centers.

 

This national data hog is funded by billionaire foundations unfriendly to public schools. The logos of the Gates, Walton, Robertson, and Arnold Foundations are prominently displayed. A list of 19 other supporters includes the Friedman Foundation for Educational Choice, Bradley Foundation, Goldman Sachs Gives, and New Schools Venture Fund among others. All of these supporters want to make public schools an artifact from the past.

 

Parents, if you patronize the tests, you feed the data hogs, and this one is one of the biggest.

 

Do not be naïve. Test scores are worth a lot of money and they are grist for publicity campaigns for projects and policies within and beyond your state. Here is an introduction to how greatschools uses test scores.

 

“The overall GreatSchools Rating is an average of how well students at a given school do on each grade and subject test. For each test, ratings are assigned based on how well students perform relative to all other students in the state, and these ratings are averaged into an overall rating of 1 to 10.”

 

“The distribution of the GreatSchools Rating in a given state looks like a bell curve, with higher numbers of schools getting ratings in the “average” category, and fewer schools getting ratings in the “above average” or “below average” categories.”

 

For states where ratings can also include student growth and college readiness information, the overall GreatSchools Rating is an average of how well students do on each sub-rating.” There are three sub-ratings.

 

1. Test Scores: “The test score sub-rating examines how students at a school performed on standardized tests compared with other schools in the state. Specifically, this rating compares student proficiency rates for each grade and subject with all schools in the state. “ (Note that “proficiency” is not defined).

 

2. Student Growth: This “sub-rating looks at how much progress individual students have made on reading and math assessments during the past year or more. This sub-rating is based on student growth models, which can vary from state to state. (Greatschools recycles data from each state’s value-added measure, percentile growth calculation or comparable “growth” measure. Growth is a euphemism for a calculation that requires the test scores of individual students for more than one year. These calculations, based on gains in test scores, are notoriously misleading. They assume, for example, that there are no major differences in the math and reading tests that a student takes in the third and the fourth grade).

 

3. College Readiness: This sub-rating combines a high school graduation rate with data about the student scores on college entrance exams (SAT, ACT). These “are indicators of how well schools are preparing students for success in college and beyond.”

 

Now comes the “weighting” of these dubious measures derived from test scores. Here you go. Begin quote:

 

Sub-ratings are weighted equally, though actual weights depend on the amount of data available per school and what grades that school serves.

 

For instance, a K-5 school has no college readiness data, so the overall rating would be based 50% on student achievement and 50% on student growth.

 

In contrast, the rating for a high school with data for all three measures would be based 33% on student achievement, 33% on student growth, and 33% on college readiness.

 

Each sub-rating represents how a school compares to all other schools in the state on each measure, and these sub-ratings are averaged into an overall rating.” More detail is at http://www.greatschools.org/catalog/pdf/New_Ratings_Methodology_Report.pdf

 

It is not surprising that this system gives the highest possible rating to the notoriously test-driven Success Academy in NY. Take a look at some other ratings here http://www.greatschools.org/about/ratings.page

 

Poke around the greatschools website to see how this non-profit can operate as a mega for-profit operation serving big box stores, and multiple industries— financial, real estate, charter expansions, testing and text publishers.

 

The gigantic “partner” basket at this website offers eclectic fare: It includes Walmart, Target, Yale Center for Social Emotional Intelligence, Survey Monkey, Forbes, US Department of Housing and Urban Development, Dunn & Bradstreet, US Department of Education, Goldman Sachs, and more .

 

“The website says that “A range of partners have been critical to GreatSchools’ success. We are grateful to these partners, a sampling of which can be found here.”

 

Look at the list and remember this is JUST a sampling and notice how partners are categorized.

 

CONTENT: 321 Fast Draw; Algonquin Books; Ashoka Foundation; Bay Citizen; California Watch; College Board; Common Sense Media; DK Publishing; Film Sight Productions; IDEO; Learning Ally; Learning and Leadership Center; Mind/Shift; National Center for Learning Disabilities; Parenting.com; Reading Rockets; Scholastic; Treasure Bay, Inc.; UCLA Department of Psychology; US Department of Education; Yale Center for Emotional Intelligence.

 

COMMUNITY AND FAMILY ENGAGEMENT: Families Empowered; Hillsborough County Public Schools; Iridescent Learning; KIPP; Magnet Schools of America; Miami Dade County Public Schools; Rocketship Education; Stand Up for Students; Step Up for Students; US Department of Housing and Urban Development

 

RESEARCH: Gallup Education; SurveyMonkey (see also Licensees); SRI; Rockman Et Al.

 

MARKETING & OUTBOUND MEDIA: Care2.com; Common Sense Media; Forbes; NBC News Education; The Bully Project; Univision.

 

LICENSEES: Apartments.com, Brain Pop; Digital Map Products; Dunn & Bradstreet; Fannie Mae; Maponics; Michael & Susan Dell Foundation; Military Child Education Coalition; Move Sales, Inc.; National Association of Charter School Authorizers; National Housing Trust; Onboard Informatics; Policy Map; Realtors Property Resource; SurveyMonkey; Target, US Department of Housing and Urban Development; Walmart; WolfNet; Zillow.

 

What do these “partners get” for signing on? At minimum, it is the opportunity to become an advertiser or license holder who can gain access to your student’s test scores—for a fee.

 

The greatschools website gives you some ad rates that direct you to https://selfserve.rubiconproject.com/advertise3/products/29619

 

At the bottom of the great schools rate page you can see that these advertising packages are offered via the Rubicon Project (bottom right of the page. Click on Rubicon Project to see what this “project “is.)

 

The Rubicon Project is the name for a company that scoops all of greatschools data and ratings and comments and personal information from users of the greatschools website and puts them in Rubicon’s “Advertising Automation Cloud.”

 

This data warehousing operation “brings buyers and sellers closer together on a robust advertising technology platform. One of the largest cloud and Big Data computing systems in the world, the Automation Cloud leverages over 50,000 algorithms and analyzes billions of data points in real-time to deliver the best results for sellers and buyers,” with 300 real-time data-driven decisions per transaction.”

 

Follow the money. The billionaire foundations gather the test scores and other information about schools. They are notoriously in favor of market-based education. The scores are translated into their dubious but “custom” rating scheme with direct links to Zillow (who has paid for a high end license).

 

The data and ratings and user data from the website migrate out from the greatschools website to Rubicon. For a fee, Rubicon facilitates rapid and custom access to the data and ratings from their “cloud,” (a data warehouse), promising clients they can “Efficiently find your target audience;” “build brand awareness,” “acquire new customers, and re-engage existing customers.”
https://selfserve.rubiconproject.com/advertise3/products/29619

 

I hope that this information gives parents another reason to opt out of the tests.

 

Greatschools has test data from every state, has a map of district boundaries searchable by zip codes, and it is seeking data well beyond that required by state or federal regulation such as such as schools safety, cleanliness, and parent involvement.

 

Do not feed the data hog. Do not make the billionaires smile. Opt of the tests.

 

 

Categories Accountability, Corporate Reformers, Testing
« Older Entries
Newer Entries »