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Breaking News! Bob Braun Reports that Pearson Is Spying on Social Media of Students Taking PARCC Tests

By dianeravitch
March 13, 2015 //
47

[Note from Diane: The link now says, “This Account Has Been Suspended.” I am not sure what this means. Some think his site crashed because of so many people trying to open it at the same time. Perhaps it will be back up soon. I hear it is posted on Bob Braun’s Facebook page. Read the comments below for that link.]

 

Bob Braun, an investigative reporter in New Jersey for the past 50 years, has learned that Pearson is spying on the social media accounts of students taking the PARCC tests.

 

 

Bob Braun writes:

 

Pearson, the multinational testing and publishing company, is spying on the social media posts of students–including those from New Jersey–while the children are taking their PARCC, statewide tests, this site has learned exclusively. The state education department is cooperating with this spying and has asked at least one school district to discipline students who may have said something inappropriate about the tests.

 

This website discovered the unauthorized and hidden spying thanks to educators who informed it of the practice–a practice happening throughout the state and apparently throughout the country. The spying–or “monitoring,” to use Pearson’s word–was confirmed at one school district–the Watchung Hills Regional High School district in Warren by its superintendent, Elizabeth Jewett.

 

Jewett sent out an e-mail–posted here– to her colleagues expressing concern about the unauthorized spying on students. She said parents are upset and added that she thought Pearson’s behavior would contribute to the growing “opt out” movement.

Categories Common Core, Corporate Reformers, Pearson, Privacy and Privacy Rights, Testing

Peter Greene: Competition Creates Better Marketing, Not Better Products or Schools

By dianeravitch
March 13, 2015 //
19

Peter Greene uses the example of Coke to show how market competition does not produce a better product. When faced with a loss of market share, Coca-Cola decided to put the same product into smaller cans. Maybe the failure of “Néw Coke” in 1985 taught them not to mess with the formula.

Similarly, in education, competition has not produced better education. Vouchers are used to send children to schools that teach creationism, that have no curriculum or certified teachers or to charter schools that push out low-scoring students and spend inordinate time on test prep.

Our slavish devotion to competition is destroying education.

Categories Charter Schools, Corporate Reformers, Education Industry, For-Profit, Vouchers

Robert Putnam: Yes, Poverty Matters. It Matters a Lot.

By dianeravitch
March 13, 2015 //
15

I recall reading Robert Putnam’s previous book, Bowling Alone, about the decline of civic life in America. It caused quite a stir. I am looking forward to reading his new book, Our Kids: The American Dream in Crisis. It seems certain to upset the “reformers,” as it blows away their assumptions that the schools are failing our children. As I read this review in Education Week, our society is failing our children, and we are not funding our schools in ways that help the neediest kids.

 

Sarah D. Sparks writes that Putnam “gathers a flood of research on the unraveling web of formal and informal supports that help students in poverty succeed academically and in life.

 

“If it takes a village to raise a child, the prognosis for America’s children isn’t good: In recent years, villages all over America, rich and poor, have deteriorated as we’ve shirked collective responsibility for our kids,” Mr. Putnam wrote. “And most Americans don’t have the resources … to replace collective provision with private provision.”

 

The attack on public education by the elites funding privatization is part of the shirking of collective responsibility. The drumbeating for “choice” is a way to replace collective responsibility with individual preferences, which are sure to intensify racial and economic segregation.

 

Sparks writes:

 

Mr. Putnam directly ties education to economic and social class; he speaks interchangeably of poverty and earning a high school degree or less, and of wealth and earning at least a four-year college degree.

 

Schools are not to blame for the academic gap between rich and poor students that starts before kindergarten, but, Mr. Putnam said, “the American public school today is as a kind of echo chamber in which the advantages or disadvantages that children bring with them to school have effects on other kids.”

 

He pointed to an analysis by the School Funding Law Center which found that as of 2009, 16 states had funding systems that provided less money per pupil to high-poverty school districts, while only 17 provided more per-pupil spending for districts with greater poverty. (An update of the study suggests those trends have worsened, with only 14 states providing significantly more money to high-poverty schools, and 19 states providing significantly less.)

 

Schools with 75 percent poverty or more offered one-third the number of Advanced Placement courses in 2009-10 than did wealthier schools—four each year on average compared to nearly a dozen each year at schools with 25 percent poverty or less.

 

Even where high-poverty schools get compensatory funding, Mr. Putnam told me: “Equalizing inputs is not equalizing outputs. Just because you have the same student-teacher ratio, just because you are investing the same dollars per kid, does not mean you are closing those gaps.”

 

For example, he noted in the book that high-poverty schools have more than twice as many disciplinary problems as low-poverty schools, and “equal numbers of guidance counselors cannot produce equal college readiness if the counselors in poor schools are tied up all day in disciplinary hearings.”

 

As a result, nearly 15 years after the federal education law was revised to “leave no child behind,” an analysis of the National Education Longitudinal Study data finds that even the brightest students in poverty can’t get ahead. Students in the poorest quarter of families who performed in the top third on national mathematics achievement were slightly less likely to graduate college than the worst math performers in the wealthiest quarter of families, 29 percent versus 30 percent.

 

The graph reproduced in this article starkly shows how poverty affects academic achievement and college graduation rates. This is not a problem that can be solved one student at a time. It requires a rearrangement of school funding so that schools enrolling poor students get the resources they need, not equal funding but more funding. It requires that the federal government invest in infrastructure programs that rebuild our crumbling highways and bridges and tunnels and sewers while creating meaningful work for men and women who can’t find jobs. That’s a tall order, but sooner or later our society must make decisions to do something significant to reduce poverty and inequality or to continue with the illusion that more high-stakes testing and more privatization of public education will solve those problems.

Categories Charter Schools, Corporate Reformers, Education Industry, Poverty, Privatization, Testing

Transcript: Juan Gonzalez on Hedge Funds and Charters

By dianeravitch
March 12, 2015 //
51

This is a great discussion, in which Amy Goodman of “Democracy Now” interviews Juan Gonzalez of the NY Daily News about the big money pushing charter schools. The discussion is based on this article.

“New York Hedge Funds Pour Millions of Dollars into Cuomo-Led Bid to Expand Charter Schools | Democracy Now!

In his latest column for the New York Daily News, Democracy Now! co-host Juan González reports on the tens of millions of dollars in hedge fund donations behind the push for charter schools in New York state. Gov. Andrew Cuomo is the single biggest recipient, hauling in $4.8 million. After winning approval for up to $2,600 more per pupil for charter school facilities, Cuomo is calling on the state Legislature to increase the state limit on charter schools.

AMY GOODMAN: Juan, before we move on with our first segment, you have a very interesting piece in the New York Daily News today, “Hedge fund executives give ’til it hurts to politicians, especially Cuomo, to get more charter schools.”

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Yes. Well, I wrote about an interesting symposium that was held at the Harvard Club yesterday, an all-day symposium titled “Bonds & Blackboards: Investing in Charter Schools.” And it was a meeting, basically, of hedge fund types sponsored by the Gates Foundation and by the Walton Foundation, basically—

AMY GOODMAN: Of Wal-Mart.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Of the Wal-Mart family—basically enticing more investors to begin to see how they can make money off of charter schools. An all-day symposium with a small protest of parents outside. But it really has marked the enormous change that’s occurred in New York politics and, I think, around the country, as a new report showed that hedge fund executives over the last decade have poured nearly $40 million into political contributions just in New York state. The prime beneficiary over the last few years has been Governor Cuomo, who has received almost $5 million. We’re talking about Carl Icahn, you know, the famous “corporate raider”; we’re talking about Paul Singer of the vulture fund, hedge fund guy; we’re talking about Julian Robertson of Tiger Management—some of the richest people in New York City. And they’re also, most of them, also major backers of charter schools.

AMY GOODMAN: How do they make money from charter schools?

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Well, that’s—I think a lot of it now is going to be coming in with the facilities financing that’s going to occur. aGovernor Cuomo pressed the Legislature, for instance, in New York state to begin providing what will be the equivalent of about $2,600 per child to build new facilities for charter schools, forcing Mayor de Blasio in New York City to share some of this cost. So there’s going to be a new revenue stream: In addition to direct funding from the state for pupil education, there’s now going to be a charter facilities fund that’s been set up. And, of course, the governor wants to lift the cap on charter schools to allow many more charter schools to be started in New York. And the amount of money is not just in the direct contributions; it’s also in money being given to new groups, the dark money that we’ve seen after the Citizens United case, where folks like Robertson and Dan Loeb have contributed as much as a million dollars apiece last year to a new group funding ads promoting Republicans for Senate seats in New York state, which would assure, again, support for charter schools. So it’s an enormous amount of money that’s being poured into these political campaigns specifically by hedge fund folks who are very close to charter schools. In fact, one charter network alone, the Success Academy, which I’ve reported on repeatedly, 19 members of the board of directors, or their family members, gave $600,000 to Governor Cuomo’s campaigns in the last—for his last two election campaigns. It’s an enormous amount of money, and it’s not getting much attention.”

Categories Charter Schools, Corporate Reformers, Cuomo, Andrew

Juan Gonzalez Investigates How Hedge Fund Millionaires Are Investing in Privatization

By dianeravitch
March 12, 2015 //
25

Juan Gonzalez, the crack investigative reporter for the New York Daily News, has written a stunning expose of the connection between hedge fund money and politicians’ support for privately managed charter schools.

 

He writes that parents demonstrated outside the  Harvard Club, where equity investors were meeting to learn about “Bonds & Blackboards: Investing in Charter Schools.” The conference was sponsored by the Gates Foundation and the Walton Family Foundation.

 

Inside, the investors were learning about how to use their money to expand the charter sector.

 

He writes:

 

Hedge fund executives have unleashed a tsunami of money the past few years aimed at getting New York’s politicians to close more public schools and expand charter schools.

 

They’ve done it through direct political contributions, through huge donations to a web of pro-charter lobbying groups, and through massive TV and radio commercials.

 

Since 2000, 570 hedge fund managers have shelled out nearly $40 million in political contributions in New York State, according to a recent report by Hedge Clippers, a union-backed research group.

 

The single biggest beneficiary has been Andrew Cuomo, who received $4.8 million from them.

 

Several of the governor’s big hedge fund donors, such as Carl Icahn, of Icahn Enterprises, Julian Robertson of Tiger Management, and Daniel Loeb, of Third Point LLC, are also longtime backers of charter schools.

 

Loeb is chairman of the board of the Success Academy network run by former City Councilwoman Eva Moskowitz. He’s given $62,000 to Cuomo, while 18 other members of the Success Academy board or their family members have given nearly $600,000 to the governor, according to state campaign records.

 

Gonzalez documents the showering of millions by hedge fund executives on other groups, such as New Yorkers for a Balanced Albany, Democrats for Education Reform, and Families for Excellent Schools. All of these names are ironic; the people who give to New Yorkers for a Balanced Albany don’t actually want “balance,” they want a corporate-friendly Legislature in which Republicans maintain control of the State Senate. Democrats for Education Reform includes many who are not Democrats, who have contempt for public schools and their teachers, and who are big supporters of charter schools and privatization. My favorite is “Families for Excellent Schools” because it implies that lots of poor and minority families joined together and raised $10 million overnight, when in fact the “families” are the families of billionaires who may never have set foot into a public school, except possibly when they were children, before they became Masters of the Universe on Wall Street.

 

Gonzalez concludes that all those millions invested in Cuomo’s campaign are paying off in his insistence on opening more charter schools.

 

 

 

 

Categories Charter Schools, Corporate Reformers, Education Industry, Privatization

MUST-READ: Thomas Picketty Slams Jeb Bush and Other Republicans Who Think School Choice Will Cure Inequality

By dianeravitch
March 11, 2015 //
21

Thomas Picketty, the French economist whose book “Capitalism in the 21st Century” was a huge bestseller last year, told MSNBC’s Krystal Ball that Republicans–most especially Jeb Bush–were decidedly on the wrong track in responding to inequality.

 

In a post on Salon.com, Picketty told the interviewer that:

 

“there’s a lot of hypocrisy” in the rhetoric of conservatives who condemn inequality while failing to support policies like an increased minimum wage and ramped-up infrastructure spending.

 

“You’re saying let’s tax the top and invest that money into education for all. [Jeb Bush] is a proponent of school choice, of giving schools vouchers so they can attend public school or private school, whatever they want. Is this a good solution in terms of dealing with what he calls the opportunity gap?” Ball asks Piketty.

 

“From what I can see, he doesn’t want to invest more resources into education. He just wants more competition… there’s limited evidence that this is working. And I think most of all what we need is to put more public resources in the education system. Again, if you look at the kind of school, high school, community college that middle social groups in America have access to, this has nothing to do with the very top schools and universities that some other groups have access to,” Piketty replies.

 

“[I]f we want to have more growth in the future and more equitable growth in the future, we need to put more resources in the education available to the bottom 50% or 80% of America. So it’s not enough just say it, as Jeb Bush seems to be saying, but you need to act on it, and for this you need to invest resources,” he says.

 

Asked about claims by Bush and other conservatives that a so-called “skills gap” is responsible for the growth in inequality, Piketty dings that narrative as simplistic.

 

“The minimum wage today is lower than it was 50 years ago, unions are very weak, so you need to increase the minimum wage in this country today. The views that $7 and hour is the most you can pay low-skilled worker in America today… I think is just wrong — it was more 50 years ago and there was no more unemployment 50 years ago than there is today. So I think we could increase the minimum wage,” Piketty says, adding that the U.S. should also invest in “high-productivity jobs that produce more than the minimum wage.”

 

Education is important, Piketty acknowledges, but education alone is not enough to ameliorate inequality.

 

“You need wage policy and you need education policy,” he says. “And in order to have adequate education policy, you also need a proper tax policy so that you have the proper public resources to invest in these public services. Also you need infrastructure. Many of the public infrastructure in this country are not at the level of what the very developed should have. You cannot say, like many of the Republicans are saying, we can keep cutting tax on these top income groups who have already benefitted a lot from growth and globalization over the past 30 years.”

Categories Charter Schools, Corporate Reformers, Education Industry, Education Reform, Jobs, Privatization

Jill Lepore: The Hoax of “Disruptive Innovation”

By dianeravitch
March 11, 2015 //
24

One of the shibboleths of the corporate reformers is their belief in “creative destruction,” “innovation, and “disruption” as an end in itself. These ideas justify their efforts to tear apart traditional public school systems, replace experienced teachers with inexperienced youngsters, close schools, and experiment with charters, vouchers, and anything else that will destroy the status quo. To be sure, some are in the school reform business to make money, but others see themselves as heroes of a movement that sees itself as blowing up “failing schools” and forcing fresh innovations into a stagnant sector of the economy.

 

This remarkable article by Jill Lepore, published by the Néw Yorker, explodes the dogmas of “disruption” as progress. I posted the article last year, but am posting it again because I see it as a classic. It sheds light on our narrative about how change happens.

 

Lepore attributes the fascination with disruption to the influential work of Harvard business professor Clayton Christensen. He popularized the idea that big companies die as they are overtaken by nimble start-ups that embrace innovation. Business leaders took heed and committed themselves to persistent re-invention and self-disruption, or buying up the start-ups before they overtook the established industry leader.

 

In education, we have seen the dogma of disruption in the policies of Arne Duncan, the Bloomberg administration of education in New York City (with its focus on closing schools and opening schools and closing the schools it opened), the Rahm Emanuel model (closing 50 public schools on the same day), the Broad Foundation, the Gates Foundation, the Walton Foundation, and business groups. They scorn incremental change and pursue the disruptive idea–like closing schools, the Common Core, federally funded tests–that will shake up schools across the nation with a series of bold and experimental strokes.

 

Do schools need to be disrupted by techniques borrowed from the business world? Do families need to be disrupted? Do communities need disruption? According to disruption theory, disruption is the precursor to success.

 

Lepore, it can be fairly said, demolishes disruption theory by showing that Christensen’s examples provide no evidence for the theory. To the contrary, the successful companies over the long haul were not the innovators that disrupted the industry, but those that changed incrementally, tinkering and constantly improving their processes and their products.

 

One of Christensen’s leading examples of disruption was the disk-drive industry. This was the subject of his doctoral dissertation. In his telling, a company called Seagate Technology fell by the wayside as competitors disrupted its market. But, Lepore shows, Christensen was wrong.

 

“In fact, Seagate Technology was not felled by disruption. Between 1989 and 1990, its sales doubled, reaching $2.4 billion, “more than all of its U.S. competitors combined,” according to an industry report. In 1997, the year Christensen published “The Innovator’s Dilemma,” Seagate was the largest company in the disk-drive industry, reporting revenues of nine billion dollars. Last year, Seagate shipped its two-billionth disk drive. Most of the entrant firms celebrated by Christensen as triumphant disrupters, on the other hand, no longer exist, their success having been in some cases brief and in others illusory…..

 

“As striking as the disruption in the disk-drive industry seemed in the nineteen-eighties, more striking, from the vantage of history, are the continuities. Christensen argues that incumbents in the disk-drive industry were regularly destroyed by newcomers. But today, after much consolidation, the divisions that dominate the industry are divisions that led the market in the nineteen-eighties. (In some instances, what shifted was their ownership: I.B.M. sold its hard-disk division to Hitachi, which later sold its division to Western Digital.) In the longer term, victory in the disk-drive industry appears to have gone to the manufacturers that were good at incremental improvements, whether or not they were the first to market the disruptive new format. Companies that were quick to release a new product but not skilled at tinkering have tended to flame out.”

 

Lepore systematically demolishes disruption theory. This is one of my favorite stories she tells:

 

“Christensen’s sources are often dubious and his logic questionable. His single citation for his investigation of the “disruptive transition from mechanical to electronic motor controls,” in which he identifies the Allen-Bradley Company as triumphing over four rivals, is a book called “The Bradley Legacy,” an account published by a foundation established by the company’s founders. This is akin to calling an actor the greatest talent in a generation after interviewing his publicist. “Use theory to help guide data collection,” Christensen advises.”

 

Lepore’s article is one of the best critiques of the corporate reform move my in education that I have read. The belief that education will improve if schools are closed and opened, closed and opened again, if change and turmoil are goals, if leaders are trained to accept disruption as a positive method, there we find the workings if disruption theory.

 

Lepore says it’s hooey.

 

She writes:

 

“Disruptive innovation as an explanation for how change happens is everywhere. Ideas that come from business schools are exceptionally well marketed. Faith in disruption is the best illustration, and the worst case, of a larger historical transformation having to do with secularization, and what happens when the invisible hand replaces the hand of God as explanation and justification. Innovation and disruption are ideas that originated in the arena of business but which have since been applied to arenas whose values and goals are remote from the values and goals of business. People aren’t disk drives. Public schools, colleges and universities, churches, museums, and many hospitals, all of which have been subjected to disruptive innovation, have revenues and expenses and infrastructures, but they aren’t industries in the same way that manufacturers of hard-disk drives or truck engines or drygoods are industries. Journalism isn’t an industry in that sense, either.

 

“Doctors have obligations to their patients, teachers to their students, pastors to their congregations, curators to the public, and journalists to their readers—obligations that lie outside the realm of earnings, and are fundamentally different from the obligations that a business executive has to employees, partners, and investors. Historically, institutions like museums, hospitals, schools, and universities have been supported by patronage, donations made by individuals or funding from church or state. The press has generally supported itself by charging subscribers and selling advertising. (Underwriting by corporations and foundations is a funding source of more recent vintage.) Charging for admission, membership, subscriptions and, for some, earning profits are similarities these institutions have with businesses. Still, that doesn’t make them industries, which turn things into commodities and sell them for gain.”

Categories Corporate Reformers, Education Industry, Scandals Fraud and Hoaxes

Hello, Gov. Cuomo, Two More Charters Fail in Albany: LINK ADDED

By dianeravitch
March 9, 2015 //
60

Now will the charter lobby stop boasting that they have the answers to low test scores?

Two charter middle schools run by the Brighter Choice Foundation were closed by the state’s Charter Schools Institute. At one time, reformers claimed that Brighter Choice was “the Holy Grail” of charter schooling. No more.

The two schools–one for boys, one for girls–pleaded for more time, sounding like public schools. They didn’t get it. They will close.

But long-time columnist Fred LeBrun writes:

“I have a sneaking suspicion that money and financing at stake over bricks and mortar are as much of a motivator for keeping those charters alive as is serving the community. Regardless, about 440 students after this academic year may well have to find an alternative school.

“Students, and parents, who had put their hopes in charters, Brighter Choice in particular, now find themselves associated with failed schools as defined by the Charter School Institute.

“It was five years ago that Brighter Choice got into the middle-school business, with fanfare and swagger.
The same year Albany’s first charter school, New Covenant, one of the first in the state, finally gasped its last after 11 years of teetering. The failure of New Covenant was devastating to the city’s minority community, which had invested heart and soul in it.
The leaders of Brighter Choice at the time coldly wrote off New Covenant as exactly the way not to start and run a charter school.

“But now that Brighter Choice has seen its own limitations at the middle- and high-school levels, we are not hearing quite the same bravado anymore.
I’ll get an argument, I know, but I believe that in the long run Albany is not better off for being a heralded laboratory for charters.

“In fact, a word Albany school district spokesman Ron Lesko used a while back about the effect of charters on the school district comes to mind. They’ve been ”destabilizing.” The school district has been left to constantly adjust to the ebb and flow of a transient student population and its resources have been diverted in the name of ”choice.”

“Can we really afford that choice? What has it done for the kids?

“Albany taxpayers have taken a hosing from charters, a redundant school system that adds extra cost to public education a strapped city can’t afford. State aid by percentage has been dropping away and more and more it is the local property taxpayer who supports this vital service to the community. The Albany school district sends more than $35 million a year to charters, and as state Comptroller Tom DiNapoli said, exactly where that money goes is not easy to figure out.

“The state is again at one of those crossroads over public education, with the governor’s unfortunate infatuation with this same charter movement.
For whatever reason, he continues to unfairly beat up traditional public education and those who serve it, and underfunds it to a deplorable degree. If he believes he’s preparing the way for charters as some sort of a rescue option, forget it. We’ve already seen that plan in action.

“Upstate, at least, there is zero reason for giving charters anything more than what they already have. Zero.”

Categories Charter Schools, Corporate Reformers, Cuomo, Andrew, New York

John Kuhn: The Big Error of “Accountability”

By dianeravitch
March 9, 2015 //
24

John Kuhn, Texas superintendent, is a brilliant orator and writer. In this article, he skewers the cheerleaders for high-stakes testing in Texas by showing how they cherry pick data to buttress their case for testing kids more and more instead of providing adequate resources for them to learn.

 

He begins by demonstrating how they situate their love of testing as a civil rights issue. They cite the Brown decision and in other ways claim that they love the children who are poor and needy and want the best for them. But what they never do is to advocate that the Legislature restore the billions of dollars that were cut from the schools attended by the children they claim to love.

 

Here is a small sample of a smartly argued and well documented analysis:

 

In “The Big Idea of School Accountability,” their slick apologia for high stakes testing and punitive accountability, both of which have dominated American education politics and pedagogy since the 1980s, Bill McKenzie and Sandy Kress start out on the high road. McKenzie is a high-ranking opinion-shaper at the George W. Bush Institute and a former editorialist for the Dallas Morning News. Kress was an architect of Bush’s No Child Left Behind Act of 2001 and, though he leaves this out of his bio attached to the essay, a long-time lobbyist for Pearson, the world’s leading vendor of K-12 standardized tests. The two edu-lobbyists begin their essay by mentioning historical moments in education policymaking and politics that would seem to appeal to a wide audience. They condemn segregation and celebrate Brown v. Board of Education. They praise the Elementary and Secondary School Act of 1965 (later renamed ESEA) and they celebrate its noble intention that “schools in disadvantaged communities would receive the resources to provide their students a decent education.”

 

Pay close attention to that statement, because it is the last time the authors will refer to resources as a necessary element to ensuring quality education in disadvantaged communities. Through the sleight of hand that has been perfected by the modern education reformer—and McKenzie and Kress are education reformers of the highest order—the writers deftly pivot from any and all talk of the need to provide equitable educational resources across all communities so that schools in even the poorest areas can deliver on the promise of education, and they spend the remaining pages of their article discussing something much easier on the taxpayer’s pocketbook: accountability, or the careful creation of just the right punishments to make teachers and students succeed in making learning happen, without respect to the pesky details of resources available to them (or unavailable to them, as they case may be). In the next paragraph—without establishing that the equity of resources LBJ’s law intended to guarantee was ever successfully attained—the writers begin to speak of campuses being “held responsible,” of the need to “hold schools accountable” and of “what should happen if schools do not show progress for all their students.”

 

Pivot complete.

 

The authors have shifted totally from an inconvenient conversation about fair and equitable investment in children and communities—investment that is adequate and comparable regardless of a student’s zip code or skin color—to one about holding children and communities responsible for their own outcomes. Accountability is constructed on the principle of blame and consequences as leverage to move schools and kids forward (blame and consequences, it should be noted, entirely directed at the teachers and students, with no consequence whatsoever reserved for citizens outside the schoolhouse who may or may not provide adequate fiscal supports for schools and children). At the urging of testing advocates like the authors of this essay, educational improvement via punitive test-based policies has eclipsed humane concepts of shared assistance and support for hurting American children (particularly anything resembling the investment of tax receipts) as the “civil rights issue of our time.” Educational accountability is designed as a low-cost replacement for social responsibility.

 

Children in America’s poorest neighborhoods lack all manner of opportunities and resources from birth that many American families take for granted. This isn’t to say they can’t learn. Of course they can learn, but there are obstacles they must overcome that society has kindly ensured do not litter the path of many other children from middle and upper class areas. From birth weight forward, all the data in impoverished zones is stacked against children, and elevating accountability for schools as our primary lever for improving these children’s lives has the effect of squelching any urgency and attention directed at efforts to feed and clothe and love and help them outside the school. We hear reformers speak of “the fierce urgency of the now” when they speak of improving schools, but we never hear it when they speak of improving lives. More than anyone in the United States, the poor child needs a hand up. More than any organization in the United States, the public school—the place where our children gather, and where they come as they are—needs support…..

 

Folks in the accountability camp like to say “we can’t throw money at the problem.” In fact, they apparently prefer actively pulling money away from the areas where the greatest problems exist. It is lunacy to believe that a testing program can do anything to help children who are being denied the same educational resources provided to their peers in wealthy communities. And to compare those under-funded students with their better-funded peers is nothing short of cruelty.

 

Thanks to the shift in focus toward testing and away from resourcing, in 2015 Texas sank to 49th in the nation in school funding (2). The accountability clique convinced lawmakers that funding was of little import; academic success could be forced upon children at a discount via test-based coercion and threats. An analogy might be if the Good Samaritan in the Bible story had stopped beside the injured traveler and, instead of lifting him out of the dirt and paying for his recuperation at an inn, had stood over him with a stopwatch and told him to hurry and get up, and assured him that he was comparing his time with that of uninjured people.

 

After quickly dismissing the topic of equitable funding for schools in poor areas, the authors praise bipartisanship and claim the legacy of Lyndon B. Johnson and Robert Kennedy as they discuss the debate surrounding ESEA. But even as they quote LBJ opining how his signature education law meant more “to the future of America” than anything he had signed before, they neglect to mention that what they are advocating in this essay—the continuation of required annual standardized testing in grades 3-8 and once in high school and significant punishments for schools, teachers, and students based on said tests’ results—were nowhere in LBJ’s bill.

 

Kuhn knows that reformers like to say that any reference to poverty means that you don’t believe poor children can learn. He knows that poor children can learn, but he also knows that poor children need at least the same resources as affluent children to learn. The “big error” of the accountability hawks is that they think that high-stakes testing is a substitute for resources. It is not. A brilliant and powerful essay.

Categories Accountability, Corporate Reformers, Education Industry, Poverty, Testing

Peter Greene: David Brooks Gets Everything Wrong (Again)

By dianeravitch
March 6, 2015 //
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Peter Greene here reviews David Brooks’ latest effort to advise the nation about education issues. Brooks argues that it would be a mistake to try to reduce poverty by redistributionist policies (I assume he means such policies as higher taxes on billionaires or direct benefits to those who are poor or government programs for job creation); instead, we should count on education to reduce inequality and poverty.

 

In earlier columns, he concluded that Geoffrey Canada’s Harlem Children’s Zone charters were “miracle schools” that had closed the achievement gap between white and black students (however, the miracle has not been sustained, even though Canada kicked out the entire entering class whose scores were low, and his schools spend substantially more than public schools with which they are compared); and Brooks endorsed the idea that teachers would produce higher test scores through a trick called “loss aversion,” where they are given a bonus at the beginning of the year, but the bonus is taken away if the scores don’t go up. In 2011, after he heard me speak in Aspen, Colorado, he wrote a column criticizing me for questioning high-stakes testing and charter schools, and of course, he complained that I said that poverty is a leading cause of low test scores. He seems to believe that testing and charters are the answer to poverty, even though after some 13 years of high-stakes testing and 25 years of charters, there seems to be more child poverty, not less.

 

In today’s column, Brooks claims that the way to prosperity is not to reduce poverty by, for example, creating jobs for people who want to work or raising taxes on the super-rich (that would be redistributionist, which is a very bad thing in his eyes), but by making sure that everyone goes to college. If everyone goes to college, then everyone will get good jobs, and no one will be poor. But where will all those new jobs come from? According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the 20 occupations that will supply the most jobs between now and 2022 are mostly low-paying. Except for registered nurses and managers, 18 of the 20 occupations are not high-wage occupations. Do we need to improve our schools? Yes, of course. Will that be enough to reduce poverty? No.

 

Greene writes:

 

Mostly Brooks wants to argue for education as the miracle engine of economic justice. And to make his argument, he trots out the work of Raj Chetty, a piece of research that proves conclusively that even researchers at Harvard can become confused about the difference between correlation and causation. (Chetty, for those of you unfamiliar with the “research,” asserts that a good teacher will result in greater lifetime earnings for students. What he actually proves is that people who tend to do well on standardized tests tend to grow up to be wealthier, an unexciting demonstration of correlation best explained by things we already know– people who score well on standardized tests tend to be from a higher-income background, and people who grow up to be high-income tend to come from a high-income background.)

 

Brooks also cites magical researcher David Autor of MIT, who believes that if everyone graduated from college with a degree, everyone would make more money because, reasons. Because if everyone had a college degree, flipping burgers would pay more? Because if everyone had a college degree, corporations would suddenly want to hire more people? The continued belief in the astonishing notion that a more educated workforce causes higher-paying jobs to appear from somewhere is big news to a huge number of twenty-somethings who are busy trying to scrape together a living in areas other than the ones they prepared for these days.

 

Brooks isn’t done spouting nonsense:

 

[Brooks writes:] “Focusing on human capital is not whistling past the graveyard…No redistributionist measure will have the same effect as good early-childhood education and better community colleges, or increasing the share of men capable of joining the labor force.”

 

Because the vast number of high-paying jobs currently going unfilled is….. what?

 

Brooks says that redistributionists don’t get it, that they believe that modern capitalism is fundamentally broken, but that their view is biased by short-term effects of the recession. I have two responses for that pair of thoughtbubbbles.

 

First, it’s not clear whether capitalism is broken or not because we are currently tangled up in some sort of twisted fun-house mirror version of faux capitalism where the free market has been obliterated by a controlled money-sucking machine run by the government on behalf of the oligarchs. I’m actually a fan of capitalism, but what we currently have in this country is not capitalism at all.

 

Second, your argument about the “temporary evidence” of the recession is invalid because the recession was (and is) not the result of some mysterious serious of natural events. The economy went in the tank because the CEOs and Wall Street put it there. The economy broke because the “capitalists” broke it, and consequently the recession itself is Exhibit A in the case against modern faux capitalism and the greedheads who run it.

 

Throwing all this back at a magical belief in education is simply another way to blame poor people for being poor. So sorry you need food stamps and health care, but if you’d had the guts and character to go to college and get a degree, you wouldn’t be in such a mess. Your poverty is just the direct result of your lack of character and quality. Well, that and your terrible teachers. But it certainly has nothing to do with how the country is being run. It’s all on you, lousy poor person. And also your teachers.

Categories Charter Schools, Corporate Reformers, Education Industry, Jobs, Poverty, Testing
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