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A Special Message to BATs about the PTA

By dianeravitch
February 7, 2014 //
32

This post is a continuation of the previous one.

I am addressing my many friends who are BATs.

I am asking you to work with your local PTAs to battle against privatization and to oppose attacks on teachers.

In state after state, public education is under attack. Teachers are under attack.

Build coalitions with parents, especially local PTAs.

We are natural allies.

PTAs want to strengthen their schools.

Work with them.

We must build a powerful coalition to support and improve our public schools and the teaching profession.

We are in this together, to do what’s right for children and for our society.

Alone, you lose.

Together, we win.

Categories Corporate Reformers, Parents, Privatization, Resistance

Debating Charter Schools in Minneapolis

By dianeravitch
February 7, 2014 //
63

A few months ago, I published a post about the charter schools in Minneapolis, which are expanding rapidly in that city, replacing unionized teachers with young and inexperienced Teach for America teachers.

The burgeoning of charters in Minneapolis has something to do with a very powerful family named Kramer. EduShyster reported that the family is a powerful organization for corporate reform. She writes:

Readers: meet the Minneapolis Kramers. Father Joel is the former publisher of the Minneapolis Star Tribune and took home $8 million when the paper was sold to McClatchy. These days he presides over Minnpost.com and a brood of young rephormers. Son Matt is the president of Teach for America, in charge of TFA’s “overall performance, operations, and effectiveness.” Son Eli, another former TFAer, is the executive director of Hiawatha Academies, a mini charter empire in Minneapolis. Meanwhile, daughter-in-law Katie Barrett-Kramer is a former TFAer who now serves as director of academic excellence at Charter School Partners, a non-profit organization devoted to expanding the number of charters in Minneapolis, including the ones her brother-in-law runs.

Now I have acquired a deep thirst just writing about the Kramer siblings and their dedication to the civil right$ i$$ue of our time. But there’s still more. Matt, who with his brother attended the tony Breck School (which I suspect is likely not a ‘no excuses’ school), also sits on numerous rephorm boards. Matt is the chair of the board of 50Canand a member of the board of Students for Education Reform.

EduShyster returned to the charter-TFA empire of the Kramer family in another post.

Who knew that one family could create a separate school system in a major American city?

In my post on the Minneapolis charters, I noted a study by Myron Orfield and the Institute on Metropolitan Opportunity at the University of Minnesota Law School, which was very critical of the charters, saying that they were more segregated than public schools and had worse results. John Bloomberg, an education writer for Bloomberg News, is also cited in the same post, expressing astonishment at the hyper-segregation in the charter schools of Minneapolis.

Now charter advocates have challenged these claims.

Orfield responds to them here.

 

Charter School Partners’ (CSP) January 6 blog post titled Minnesota Charters 2014: Part I: Building a high-impact charter sector, Closing the opportunity/achievement gap cited recent work by the Institute on Metropolitan Opportunity (IMO) updating our work on charter schools in the Twin Cities. The post seriously misrepresents some of our findings and we request that you make this response available on your web site along with your original post. (Readers are invited to download IMO’s original study on charters in the Twin Cities and two updates at http://www.law.umn.edu/metro/school-studies/school-choice.html).

Most importantly, the post implies that our work does not properly control for the fact that charters serve higher percentages of low-income students. This is simply not true. Our work shows that charters still under-perform their traditional counterparts even after controlling for the effects of school poverty rates on reading and math performance.

Two methods were used. A multiple regression analysis demonstrated that charter elementary schools have lower achievement rates on average after controlling for student poverty, race, special education needs, limited language abilities, student mobility rates and school size. Indeed, contrary to the claims in the January 6 post, the most recent statistical results imply that all else equal, the gap between charters and traditional schools widened between 2010-11 and 2012-13. In 2012-13 the proficiency rate for charters was 11.2 percentage points lower than traditional schools for math and 5.9 percentage points lower for reading. In 2010-11 the gaps were just 7.5 for math and 4.4 for reading.

Consistent with the earlier studies and other research, the multiple regression analysis showed that student poverty (measured by eligibility for free or reduced price lunch) was the dominant factor in the performance of schools in 2012-13. In 2012-13, the math performance of students in only 31 percent of charter schools was better than what would be expected given their poverty rate alone. The rest, 69 percent, under-performed expectations. Consistent with the regression analysis, this represented a significant step back from 2010-11 when 51 percent of charters out-performed expectations. Similarly, the reading performance of students in just 36 percent of charter schools was better than expected (compared to 39 percent in the 2010-11 analysis).

These results and other analysis in the report also refute the statement that the IMO “study ignores the impact of that high-achieving charters are having on these critical populations.” IMO’s study does in fact acknowledge that a few high-poverty charters are performing very well. But it also shows that a larger number of high-poverty charters are performing very poorly, even when accounting for the fact that they serve mostly low-income students. In fact, Charts 5 and 6 in the report clearly show that there are more students in under-performing charters than in the high-achieving ones.

While IMO acknowledges that a few charters are doing well, CSP essentially ignores all of the charters that are doing poorly. Only the “Strategic Framework” schematic in the post acknowledges poorly performing charters at all and it does so with an illustration that badly understates the size of the problem. Even in CSP’s own chart later in the post (“Minneapolis Charter Schools – 3 Year Average”), poorly performing charters greatly outnumber high-performing charters.

CSP is correct when they note that the data now available to IMO does not allow us to fully compare the impact of charter and traditional schools on individual students. However, if positive impacts on individual students are greater in charters then one would expect the proficiency gap between charters and traditionals to narrow over time. Once again, this is not what is happening. Despite the fact that a few charters seem to have shown improvement, the gap has actually widened in recent years. It is also worth noting that the method used in the CREDO study cited in the post does not represent the gold standard of analysis in this field, raising complicated research questions well beyond the scope of these comments that IMO addressed in its original study.

The post also says that, because the IMO study is region-wide, the work “ignores compelling data that show that charters in Minneapolis and St. Paul are significantly outperforming district schools…” We believe the region-wide scale is appropriate for a variety of reasons. Most importantly, charters are growing rapidly in the suburbs and suburban charters now represent about 40 percent of total regional charter school enrollment. In addition, school choice programs—the Choice is Yours Program in particular—make a number of suburban schools available to low-income city students, implying that the proper comparison group is in fact regional. (IMO’s work shows that, in contrast with the results for charters, schools available to low-income students through the Choice is Yours Program tend to out-perform their traditional and charter peers after controlling for poverty and other school characteristics.)

Nor does restricting the IMO analysis to Minneapolis and St. Paul provide the kind of “compelling” evidence of superior charter performance that CSP claims. When the statistical analyses described above are repeated for city schools alone the results show no advantages for charters. Not surprisingly, the multiple regression analysis (which controls for poverty and other school characteristics) shows that the gap is narrower in the cities but the results still imply that, all else equal, charters in the cities under-perform their traditional peers. (The gaps are roughly three percentage points for both tests. The coefficients are negative, but not statistically significant. While this is admittedly only weak evidence that city charters do worse, it is certainly not “compelling” evidence that they do better.)

The simpler comparisons controlling only for low-income percentages show similar results. City charters are slightly more likely to perform more poorly than expected given their poverty rates than traditional schools.

Finally, it is important to note that IMO’s studies look at much more than simply school performance (however defined). IMO’s original study and two updates have also examined:

  • Whether the charter system is more or less segregated than traditional schools. They are much more segregated and the situation is not improving. A disturbing proportion of charters in the Twin Cities are essentially single-race schools. In sharp contrast with the traditional system, where the percentage of schools which are integrated has increased steadily, the share of integrated charter schools has been stagnant. As a result, charter school students of all races are much more likely to be attending segregated schools than their counterparts in traditional schools.
  • The effects on the Minneapolis and St. Paul school districts of enrollment declines resulting from charters. Rapid enrollment declines hurt the districts because they require costly actions like school closures, teacher and staff cutbacks, and administrative reorganizations. As a result, districts losing students must devote effort and resources to deal with the costs of decline, often to the detriment of other educational priorities. Minneapolis and St. Paul now lose between 15 and 20 percent of their resident students to charters and more than half of total enrollment losses in the last decade have been to charters. As a result, both districts have teetered from one financial crisis to another.
  • Charter school closures. Although data for this is hard to come by, press coverage of closures suggests that charters are more likely to close as the result of financial mismanagement or, in some cases, malfeasance than because of the poor performance that many exhibit.
  • The growing, negative effects of suburban charters on the ability of traditional districts to pursue pro-integrative reforms. Increasing numbers of predominantly white suburban charters are locating near significantly more diverse traditional schools—schools which are often unstable and vulnerable to rapid racial and economic transitions. Whether by intent or not, more and more suburban charters are facilitating white flight from increasingly diverse traditional schools in the suburbs.

CSP seems to have little to say about these topics, only promising to discuss closures in a future post. Test results are not the only thing that schools produce. CSP should abandon its blinkered view and widen its work to include the very significant problems with the state’s current charter model.

Categories Charter Schools, Corporate Reformers, Minnesota, Segregation , Racial Isolation and Integration

Jonathan Pelto: Connecticut Commissioner Stefan Pryor Must Go! (LINK ADDED!)

By dianeravitch
February 6, 2014 //
11

Jonathan Pelto, a close observer of politics and education in Connecticut, says that State Commissioner of Education Stefan Pryor must go.

He is the leader of the privatization movement in the state, more devoted to charters than to public schools, which most children attend.

Pryor’s management of the Connecticut Department of Education has become the personification of what happens when arrogance, elitism and corporate driven interests replace a commitment to honesty, transparency and a commitment to doing what is right for the people public officials have a sworn duty to serve.

From the moment Stefan Pryor arrived in Connecticut, the Malloy administration’s education policy has been consistently designed to destroy local control, belittle and demean teachers, reduce parental involvement, undermine our public schools and divert scarce public resources to out-of-state consultants and carpetbagging staff. Pryor’s tenure has been dedicated to a preoccupation with turning our schools into little more than standardized testing factories.

Corporate reformers in Connecticut cynically manipulate rhetoric about the achievement gap to destroy public confidence in public education, ignoring the fact that Connecticut has one of the best school systems in the nation. The issue in Connecticut is and must be equity, not the destruction of public education.

Categories Charter Schools, Corporate Reformers, Privatization

A Connecticut Superintendent Speaks Out Against Failed “Reforms”

By dianeravitch
February 5, 2014 //
29

Tom Scarice, superintendent of schools in Madison, Connecticut, has already been named to the honor roll for his leadership and vision in bringing together his community to plan for the future of Madison public schools.

Now, he steps up and speaks out again to take issue with those, like Governor Dannell Malloy, who call for a “pause” in the implementation of misguided reforms.

In a letter to his state representatives, Scarice explains that education policy must be based on sound research and experience. What Connecticut is doing now, he writes, is merely complying with federal mandates that harm schools and demoralize teachers.

If every superintendent had Tom Scarice’s courage and understanding, this country would have a far, far better education system and could easily repel the intrusions of bad policies.

Here is his letter:

January 29, 2014

Senator Edward Meyer
Legislative Office Building,
Room 3200 Hartford, CT 06106
Representative Noreen Kokoruda
Legislative Office Building, Room 4200 State of Connecticut
Hartford, CT 06106

Dear Senator Meyer and Representative Kokoruda:

As a superintendent of schools it is incumbent upon me to ground my work with my local board of education. My work must be grounded in two areas: in accurately framing problems to solve, and most importantly, in proposing solutions grounded in evidence, research, and legitimate literature to support a particular direction. Any other approach would be irresponsible and I’m certain my board would reject such shortcuts and hold me accountable.

In our profession, we have the fortune of volumes of literature and research on our practices. We have evidence to guide our decision making to make responsible decisions in solving our problems of practice. This is not unlike the field of medicine or engineering. To ignore this evidence, in my estimation, is irresponsible.

Legislators across the state have heard from, and will continue to hear loudly from, educators about what is referred to as education reforms. Webster defines “reform” as “a method to change into an improved condition.” I believe that legislators will continue to hear from the thousands of educators across the state because the reforms, in that sense, are not resulting in an improved condition. In fact, a case can be made that the conditions have worsened.

To be fair, the reforms did, in fact, shine a light on the role of evaluation in raising the performance of our workforce. There were cases of a dereliction of duty in the evaluation of professional staff. This is unacceptable and was not the norm for all school districts.
However, I would like to make the case that these reforms will not result in improved conditions since they are not grounded in research, the evidence that supports professional decision-making, like a doctor or engineer. It is simply a matter of substance. The evidence is clear in schools across the state. It is not working.

We have spent the better part of the last 12 years with a test-based accountability movement that has not led to better results or better conditions for children. What it has led to is a general malaise among our profession, one that has accepted a narrowing of the curriculum, a teaching to the test mentality, and a poorly constructed redefinition of what a good education is. Today, a good education is narrowly defined as good test scores. What it has led to is a culture of compliance in our schools.

We have doubled-down on the failed practices of No Child Left Behind. Not only do we subscribe to a test and punish mentality for school districts, we have now drilled that mentality down to the individual teacher level.

We have an opportunity to listen to the teachers, administrators, parents, and even the students, to make the necessary course corrections. We know what is coming. We’ve seen it happen in other states. We can easily look at the literature and predict how this story ends. New York, Kentucky and so forth, these states are about one year ahead of Connecticut. Why would we think it will end any differently for our state? We can take action to prevent the inevitable.

We have an opportunity. You as legislators have an opportunity. Our students and communities are counting on us.
I am pleased to see that the Governor has asserted his authority to address this deeply rooted problem. But we cannot stop there.

I ask the following:

Do not be lulled into solutions that promote “delay.” Although the problem is being framed as an issue of implementation timelines and volume, I contend that this is much more about substance than delays. Revisit the substance of these reforms, particularly the rigidity of the teacher evaluation guidelines.

As you revisit the substance, demand the evidence and research that grounds the reforms, just as a board of education would demand of a superintendent. You will find, as I have, that the current reforms are simply not grounded in research. As legislators, demand the evidence, particularly the literature that illustrates the damaging effects of high stakes test scores in teacher evaluations. Demand the evidence that demonstrates that this approach is valid and will withstand legal scrutiny. Demanding evidence is how every local board of education holds their administrators accountable.

Build on the Governor’s first steps and create even greater flexibility for local districts to innovate and create. This is 2014…standardizing our work across all schools is not the answer. That’s the factory / assembly line mentality that got public schools into this mess. We need a diversity of thought, similar to a “crowd sourcing” approach, if we are to solve the problems of the 21st century. Above all, commit to the principle that “one size fits all” does not work. We would never accept that from individual teachers in their work with students, why should we accept “one size fits all” for very different school districts across the state? There are indeed alternative approaches that fit the context and needs of individual districts. I would be happy to provide with you with our example.

You, as legislators, can create the space for innovation to thrive. Promote innovation, not mere compliance.

Revisit the No Child Left Behind waiver that was filed with the U. S. Department of Education. This is consistently presented as the trump card in any discussion involving modifications to the reform package passed a couple of years ago. We’ve been told that we cannot make changes because of promises made to the federal government. Was there a lower threshold for compliance with the No Child Left Behind waiver? Can we take a more aggressive approach for our state and not be dictated to by the federal government to this degree? This resonates at the local level and ought to at least be considered.

Finally, do not be a cynic, but be a skeptic about the common core. How can this be done?

Demand the evidence to support whether or not the standards are age-appropriate for our youngest learners. Demand the input of early childhood experts like the 500+ nationally recognized early childhood professionals who signed a joint statement expressing “grave concerns” about the K-3 standards. Or perhaps seek input right here in Connecticut from the early childhood experts at the Geselle Institute in New Haven.

Demand the evidence that supports that every child should master the same benchmarks every year when we know that all children develop at different rates.

Demand an accurate accounting of the current and, more importantly, future costs of implementing the common core and the new Smarter Balanced (SBAC) testing system.

Demand the evidence that supports coupling the common core to unproven tests. In just weeks, many students will sit for these new tests. They will serve as subjects to “test out the test.” It is quite possible that you will hear even more from parents after the tests are administered. Be proactive and seek these answers in advance of the inevitable questions you will be asked.

I want to close by stating that I personally have between eighteen to twenty more years to serve in this state and I look at these problems in a very long-term sense. What can we do now, not for this year or next, but in the long-term to be the shining example for the rest of the country that Connecticut’s public education system once was considered? I’m committed to this work and I will continue that commitment for nearly two more decades.

I ask you to seize this opportunity.

Thank you.

Sincerely,

Thomas R. Scarice Superintendent

Categories Accountability, Administrators, superintendents, Connecticut, Corporate Reformers, Education Reform, Malloy, Dannel, Race to the Top, Standardized Testing, Supporting public schools, Teacher Evaluations

Idaho: Tom Luna Will Not Run for Re-Election

By dianeravitch
February 3, 2014 //
3

Another star in the corporate reform, teacher-bashing firmament goes dim.

Tom Luna, author of the deservedly malligned Luna laws, is not running for re-election.

The Luna laws were vintage corporate reform, but were soundly overturned in every county in red state Idaho.

Luna is known for his devotion to online learning. His campaigns always attracted generous support from the tech industry, and he in turn made it mandatory for high school graduation.

Quid pro quo.

Categories Corporate Reformers, Idaho

John Thompson: The California Tenure Case is a Sham

By dianeravitch
February 2, 2014 //
14

John Thompson, teacher and historian, didn’t use the word “sham,” but that was exactly his meaning in this good analysis of the case where the claim has been made that due process for teachers denies the civil rights of students.

The reality, as Thompson notes, is that the lawyers for the plaintiffs aren’t even trying to show that any child has been harmed because of tenure. They aren’t trying because there is no evidence. Teachers in high-performing districts have tenure, as do teachers in low-performing districts. Don’t expect the lawyers to introduce evidence about districts that abolished due process for teachers and closed the achievement gap, because there is none.

Taking away the right of teachers to a fair hearing before an impartial administrator won’t help a single child, and presumably the lawyers know it.

What it will take away is teachers’ academic freedom, and the lawyers don’t care.

What is the point of the Vergara case? It is to attack unions and due process rights for teachers. If teachers serve at the will of administrators, as John Deasy and the corporate reformers want, who will be brave enough to disagree with their principal, or to teach evolution, or to teach a challenged book that offends even a single parent? What teacher will speak out against the attacks on their profession? Surely not those who want to feed their family and pay their mortgage.

John Thompson feels sure that the plaintiffs will lose because they have no evidence for their claim that children lose when their teachers have due process. Let’s hope he is right.

Categories Corporate Reformers, Teachers and Teaching

Michigan’s “Educational Achievement Authority”: A Dismal, Frightening Failure

By dianeravitch
February 2, 2014 //
41

It is hard to choose which state has done the most to undermine public education: Louisiana, Tennessee, North Carolina, Ohio, and Wisconsin come to mind, but Michigan is right up there as a state whose Governor Rick Snyder is working hard to crush public education. There is the fact that some 80% of the charters in Michigan are run by for-profit operators. And note too that entire low-performing districts have been given to for-profit corporations.

But the worst of Snyder’s inventions is the deceptively-named Education Achievement Authority. Here the governor has gathered the state’s low-performing schools for special treatment.

Eclectablog, a Michigan blog, decided to go behind the claims of success and manufactured data, and instead to talk to teachers who work for the EAA. The stories are harrowing, including accounts of physical abuse, drugs in the schools, and an atmosphere of fear. Some teachers are afraid of violent teachers in schools where there is no discipline.

“Over the past couple of years, Republicans and the Snyder administration has attempted to resolve the problem of urban school districts that are failing to provide even the bare basics of a good education for their students by grouping them all together into a single “school district for misfit schools” called the Education Achievement Authority or EAA. As has been well-documented (see my interview with State Rep. Ellen Cogen Lipton HERE), the EAA has been a catastrophic failure. Instead of providing these disadvantaged children with the resources and environment they so sorely lack, the EAA has attempted to educate them on the cheap. They have resorted to “teaching by computer” but, rather than providing the students with the cutting edge technology that you might expect a school district like this to have, instead there are too few computers for the students, the software was nonfunctional for much of the school year, and the system crashes regularly.

“Worse yet, special needs students are woefully neglected, very possibly in violation of the federal Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA). Special plans for these students, called Individualized Education Plans or IEPs, are frequently not provided to the teachers which prevents them from making the accommodations needed for these students, accommodations required by law.”

Conditions for teaching and learning are abysmal:

““It’s dangerous for kids to come to school,” one teacher at an EAA elementary school told me. “We’ve found drugs in the school. We’ve found weapons in the school. We have a metal detector that doesn’t even work, nobody checks anyone on the way in.”

“The security problems are exacerbated by ridiculously large classroom sizes, something that’s only getting worse due to teachers leaving in droves. According to one teacher I spoke with, the classroom they teach in is about to go to almost 50 students. This is despite the fact that a quarter of the students have left the EAA system, a dramatic drop that reflects the dissatisfaction of the students’ parents with the education their children are receiving.

“One of the things that really has pushed me to speak out is that I learned from another teacher recently that I’m about to get another ten students in my class which will take me to almost 50 kids,” the teacher said. “Another teacher quit and, instead of hiring someone to replace them, they are just redistributing their students to all the other teachers. So, it’s just me and all these kids with no help, no paraprofessionals. It’s just dangerous. Beyond being able to educate that many kids at once all by myself, I’m not confident I can keep them safe from each other. They don’t fit in the room, there aren’t enough chairs, it’s not okay. I have this knot in my stomach and I’m worried sick and stressed out because of it.”

“Alone in a class of nearly 50 students with no student teachers, no paraprofessionals, and little support from school administrators when children act out violently. And many of these teachers are in their early twenties. The ones from Teach for America — roughly a quarter of the teachers in the EAA — had a scant five weeks of training before they were assigned to a classroom full of kids.”

Constant turnover damages morale:

““The bottom line is that the EAA is really bad for teachers and, more importantly, it’s really bad for students. The way they treat the teachers is causing them to leave. I would leave if…I’m almost there, to tell you the truth. The turnover rate is horrible for the kids. Any educator worth their salt knows that a lot of what you do every day and the success of it is dependent on the depth of the relationships that you form with your students and parents. And, for a lot of these students, school is the most stable thing in their life, especially in these high-risk, urban areas.

“So, when they constantly have instability at home and also instability at school with this revolving door of teachers…they’re in and they’re out because the district is treating them like crap. That’s horrible for kids. Not to mention the fact that class sizes are huge, the things that they feed them in the cafeteria are not nutritious, they have very minimal security.”

Governor Snyder plans to expand the EAA.

Categories Corporate Reformers, Michigan, Privatization

What Do Tennessee Teachers Really Think? Help This Video Go Viral!

By dianeravitch
February 1, 2014 //
29

The night before I addressed the Kentucky School Boards Association, I had dinner with a group of teachers and parents from Tennessee. The group included Mama Bears, BATS, and TREES.

One of the BATS was Lauren Hopson from Knox County, who teaches third grade children. She is smart, strong, experienced, and wise. She is also outspoken, as I learned by watching this video, in which she let the board know what teachers really think: They are tired of being pushed around. They are tired of an evaluation system tied to test scores. They are tired of pointless training. They are tired of foisting test after test on little children. They are tired of getting training from consultants with less experience than they have. They are tired of the charade foisted upon them by the state of Tennessee. They want to teach. What an idea!

When Lauren gave her talk, she had no idea it would be posted on YouTube. In a week, it had tens of thousands of views. Now it is over 100,000.

Help this video reach every parent and teacher. We can be the change. Social media can counter the billionaires who are trying to destroy our public schools and demoralize our teachers.

Categories Accountability, Corporate Reformers, Teacher Evaluations, Tennessee

Governor Haslam of Tennessee: Bad Collision with Facts

By dianeravitch
February 1, 2014 //
5

This blogger has gathered the latest wave of bad news from Tennessee, showing the emptiness of the Republican Governor Bill Haslam’s efforts to outsource everything public to whoever wants to make money.

Even though President Obama praised red-state Tennessee as a prime example of the success of Race to the Top, conveniently ignoring the other Race to the Top winners where NAEP scores stagnated, things are not going well for corporate-style reform in the Volunteer State.

Haslam and his TFA Commissioner Kevin Huffman (ex-husband of Michelle Rhee) have the support of a far-right legislature, but their plans are still in disarray.

Nearly half the superintendents bravely signed a letter protesting Huffman’s heavy-handed mandates (seems to be the custom with corporate reform superintendents, brooking no dissent from the peons). Now parents have formed a new organization to fight Haslam and Huffman’s plans to outsource as many public schools to private corporations as possible. And, of course, Chris Barbic, imported from Houston to perform a miracle, promised to gather up all the state’s lowest-performing schools and move them to the top of the state’s rankings within five years (the clock is ticking–better to make your utopian promises fuzzy, not so concrete).

Now comes Tennesseans Reclaiming Education Excellence, organized by parents across the state, and they injected an unknown quantity into educational debates in Tennessee: Facts. Facts!

….on Monday, the top-down, one-size-fits-all education policies Haslam has been pushing through the legislature met a formidable roadblock — a TREE.

As has been custom the past few years, corporate education organizations have trotted out their privatization policies at the beginning of each legislative session. Their glossy, well-funded presentations always grab headlines and typically re-affirm Republican efforts that privatize public schools, divert money from our students’ classrooms and devalue educators.

This year, however, a new group, Tennesseans Reclaiming Educational Excellence, kicked off the week with some analysis that threw cold hard facts into the discussion of reforms trumpeted by Haslam’s administration.

Several points of interest:

Elaine Weiss of the Broader, Bolder Approach to Education, was TREE’s featured presenter. From TNEdReport.com:

“Weiss discussed recent Tennessee education policy in the context of the drivers of educational inequality. She pointed to research suggesting that poverty is a significant contributor to student outcomes and noted other research that suggests as much as 2/3 of student outcomes are predicted by factors outside of school.”

The beauty of TREE’s press conference was two fold — one; they took some media coverage away from corporate education groups, and, two; they empowered our reporters with facts that have largely been missing from the education debate in Tennessee. Hopefully this presser will pay dividends for the weeks to come.

Categories Corporate Reformers, Education Industry, Privatization, Resistance, Tennessee

New Study: Cami Anderson’s “One Newark” Will Not Create One Newark

By dianeravitch
January 27, 2014 //
9

Cami Anderson, appointed by the Christie administration as superintendent of Newark, New Jersey, has a plan called “One Newark.”

Newark has been under state control since 1995.

Oddly enough, Anderson’s plan is not about “One Newark.”

“One Newark” would be a plan to unify the schools, the students, the families, and the community into a single purpose: educating the young.

But “One Newark” is about splitting Newark up into fiefdoms for charter operators.

Maybe the real name should be “Many Newarks.”

Bruce Baker and his doctoral student Mark Weber (aka Jersey Jazzman) did a study of the One Newark plan, and this is what they concluded:

On December 18, 2013, State Superintendent Cami Anderson announced a wide-scale restructuring of the Newark Public Schools. This brief examines the following questions about One Newark:

  • Has NPS identified the schools that are the least effective in the system? Or has the district instead identified schools that serve more at-risk students, which would explain their lower performance on state tests?
  • Do the interventions planned under One Newark — forcing staff to reapply for jobs, turning over schools to charter operators, closure – make sense, given state performance data on NPS schools and Newark’s charter schools?
  • Is underutilization a justification for closing and divesting NPS school properties?
  • Are the One Newark sanctions, which may abrogate the rights of students, parents, and staff, applied without racial or socio-economic status bias?

We find the following:

  • Measures of academic performance are not significant predictors of the classifications assigned to NPS schools by the district, when controlling for student population characteristics.
  • Schools assigned the consequential classifications have substantively and statistically significantly greater shares of low income and black students.
  • Further, facilities utilization is also not a predictor of assigned classifications, though utilization rates are somewhat lower for those schools slated for charter takeover.
  • Proposed charter takeovers cannot be justified on the assumption that charters will yield better outcomes with those same children. This is because the charters in question do not currently serve similar children. Rather they serve less needy children and when adjusting school aggregate performance measures for the children they serve, they achieve no better current outcomes on average than the schools they are slated to take over.
  • Schools slated for charter takeover or closure specifically serve higher shares of black children than do schools facing no consequential classification. Schools classified under “renew” status serve higher shares of low-income children.

These findings raise serious concerns at two levels. First, these findings raise questions about the district’s own purported methodology for classifying schools. Our analyses suggest the district’s own classifications are arbitrary and capricious, yielding racially and economically disparate effects.  Second, the choice, based on arbitrary and capricious classification, to subject disproportionate shares of low income and minority children to substantial disruption to their schooling, shifting many to schools under private governance, may substantially alter the rights of these children, their parents and local taxpayers.

========================================

Conclusions

One Newark is a program that appears to place sanctions on schools – including closure, charter takeover, and “renewal” – on the basis of student test outcomes, without regard for student background. The schools under sanction may have lower proficiency rates, but they also serve more challenging student populations: students in economic disadvantage, students with special educational needs, and students who are Limited English Proficient.

There is a statistically significant difference in the student populations of schools that face One Newark sanctions and those that do not. “Renew” schools serve more free lunch-eligible students, which undoubtedly affects their proficiency rates. Schools slated for charter takeover and closure serve larger proportions of students who are black; those students and their families may have their rights abrogated if they choose to stay at a school that will now be run by a private entity.[1]

There is a clear correlation between student characteristics and proficiency rates on state tests. When we control for student characteristics, we find that many of the schools slated for sanction under One Newark actually have higher proficiency rates than we would predict. Further, the Newark charter schools that may take over those NPS schools perform worse than prediction.

There is, therefore, no empirical justification for assuming that charter takeovers will work when, after adjusting for student populations, schools to be taken over actually outperform the charters assigned to take them over. Further, these charters have no track record of actually serving populations like those attending the schools identified for takeover.

Our analysis calls into question NPS’s methodology for classifying schools under One Newark. Without statistical justification that takes into account student characteristics, the school classifications appear to be arbitrary and capricious.

Further, our analyses herein find that the assumption that charter takeover can solve the ills of certain district schools is specious at best.  The charters in question, including TEAM academy, have never served populations like those in schools slated for takeover and have not produced superior current outcome levels relative to the populations they actually serve.

Finally, as with other similar proposals sweeping the nation arguing to shift larger and larger shares of low income and minority children into schools under private and quasi-private governance, we have significant concerns regarding the protections of the rights of the children and taxpayers in these communities.

 

Categories Corporate Reformers, New Jersey, Privatization
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