Archives for category: Corporate Reformers
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Melissa Harris Perry: Fabulous

By dianeravitch
October 26, 2013 //
90

Friends, I was interviewed this morning on MSNBC by Melissa Harris Perry and was incredibly impressed by her. Unlike most TV journalists, she had actually read the book.

She asked smart questions. She really gets it.

This was the best conversation I have yet participated in on national TV, including the panel that followed. No “Gotcha” questions, just a thoughtful effort to assess some important issues.

Here is the link: http://www.msnbc.com/melissa-harris-perry/watch/the-case-against-school-privatization-57195587667

Diane

Categories Corporate Reformers, Poverty, Race to the Top, Reign of Error

NY Principal: These “Reforms” Destroy Love of Learning

By dianeravitch
October 25, 2013 //
51

Tim Farley is a principal. His wife Jessica is a veteran teacher. They are also parents. In the letter here that Tim wrote, he speaks as an educator and a parent of the damage done by today’s ill-conceived policy changes, mistakenly called “reform.”

Tim Farley writes:

My wife and I are the proud parents of four school aged children. They are in grades K, 3, 5, and 7. I happen to be a building Principal in the district my children attend. I have been in education for 22 years. My wife was a teacher for 12.

The transformational changes to public education over the past few years has been quite alarming, not only from an educator’s perspective, but from a parent’s perspective as well.

We have observed a change in how our children are perceiving their educational experience. A couple of years ago, all of them were excited about school and all the wonderful things they would learn. My wife and I no longer observe this. Our children have lost their love of school.

Every week, at least two of our children have meltdowns over the developmentally inappropriate homework assignments, the poorly worded questions, the amount of homework that comes home, repetitive and inane assignments, etc.

We cast no blame on our children’s teachers. They are the kind of teachers every parent would want for their children. They are doing their jobs to the best of their abilities even though the great majority of teachers knows that the reforms they are implementing are truly harmful to children. However, they have no choice because their jobs are literally at stake. Administrators are terrified to speak out publicly because SED is quick to intimidate those who do not comply with their dictates.

My wife and I cast the blame exactly where it belongs: John King, Merryl Tisch, Andrew Cuomo, Arne Duncan, Barack Obama, Bill Gates, Rupert Murdoch, the Board of Regents, et al.

These corporate reformers did an excellent job in denigrating teachers and the profession. They systematically manufactured a crisis that US schools are not competitive internationally (e.g. – the PISA study that Dr. Tricozzi wrote that corrects the fallacy that our schools are failing). Our educational system isn’t perfect, but it is far from being in a crisis. Actually, we should be proud of our achievements. But accolades do not sell expensive data systems that deprive our students of their privacy. Accolades do not sell software that “fixes” the students who do not achieve at the same rate as their peers.

My wife and I are quite frankly disgusted. We can no longer tolerate the abuse of our children. We will likely pull our children out of a school district that we hold most dear; a district in which we have made our home for the past nine years. We will likely homeschool our children unless drastic changes to these reforms take place.

My feeling is that we will not be the only parents making a decision of this magnitude. Fortunately, my wife has many years experience as a teacher, so our children will do well. But I feel badly for the parents who would like to do the same thing but due to their individual circumstances cannot.

I’m tired. My wife is tired. My kids are tired. My teachers are tired. When will this insanity end? When will the parents rise up and take back their schools from the billionaires?

Signed,
Tired dad, educator, administrator

Categories Corporate Reformers, Education Reform, New York, Students, Teachers

My Life as a Double Agent

By dianeravitch
October 25, 2013 //
16

Fred Klonsky has an excellent summary and hilarious critique of Mike Petrilli’s review of “Reign of Error.”

Mike suggests that I was “a double agent,” hiding in plain sight in rightwing think tanks for thirty years, so I could one day exposé them.

This is funny.

Checker Finn and I founded the Educational Excellence Network in 1981. We published screeds about declining standards for years. Note: That is when my work as a double agent began. When Checker joined the Reagan administration, I took over his role as leader of the Network. Aha, I had to double down on our criticism of the schools to hide my secret identity.

Checker recommended me to Lamar Alexander, who invited me to take Checker’s old job as Assistant Secretary in charge of the Office of Educational Research and Improvement and Counselor to the Secretary. Wow, I was really embedded in the belly of the beast.

After leaving government, I spent nearly two years at Brookings (warning sign of double agent!), turned down the offer to hold the Brown Chair in education (now held by Grover “Russ” Whitehurst, head of education for George W. Bush, who fired me from my unpaid fellowship at Brookings in 2012), and returned to Brooklyn in 1994 and a research professorship at New York University. For a time, it appeared that my days as a double agent were over.

But opportunity soon knocked, and I was paid to be a fellow at the rightwing Manhattan Institute, on whose behalf I went to Albany to testify on behalf of charter schools. The legislation passed, demonstrating that my bona fides as a double agent were in good standing.

Also, after I left government service, all the while pretending to believe in testing, accountability, competition, and choice, I wrote several articles advocating these policies to maintain the pretense. More important, I was a founding member of Checker Finn’s Thomas B. Fordham Foundation (now called Institute, for tax purposes).

I was also a founding member of the Koret Task Force at the Hoover Institution, which consisted of the creme de la creme of the conservative intelligentsia. Now firmly established as a genuine rightwing critic of our failing public schools, I learned all the inside secrets. Nirvana for a double agent! I learned that most of my colleagues hated unions (I already knew that); I learned that testing was the sine qua non of education policy (I knew that too); I learned that the answer to educational malaise was unregulated choice. (No surprise.) I loved the lavish parties, the great wines, I actually liked and enjoyed my colleagues.

But, finally, after thirty years as a double agent, the burden of duplicity became too great.

I had to confess that I preferred children to plutocrats.

I had to confess that I had no faith in the transformative power of unregulated choice (especially after the economic meltdown of 2008).

I realized I could not betray my origins as a graduate of the Houston public schools.

I lost my faith, if faith it was. I blew my cover with the publication of “The Death and Life of the Great American School System.” Author Steve Brill said I sold out for the speaking fees that unions would surely shower on me. How clever of me to plan so far in advance. After many years as a double agent, I laughed at Brill’s theory. I knew where the real money was–and when I blew my cover, so well hidden for thirty years, I knew I was leaving behind the Hoover Institution, the Gates Foundation, the Broad Foundation, the Walton Foundation, and so many others willing to pay handsome fees to those they trust.

After my cover as a double agent was gone, I made a series of recommendations that Mike Petrilli ridiculed as pie in the sky:

Klonsky writes:

“Petrilli sneers:

“The skeptical, hard-nosed (if biased and data-slanting) Ravitch of the first half of her book turns into a pie-in-the-sky dreamer in the second half.

“Consider her “solutions”:

“1. Provide good prenatal care for every pregnant woman.

“2. Make high-quality early-childhood education available to all children.

“3. Make sure every school has a “full, balanced, and rich curriculum.”

“4. Reduce class sizes.

“5. Provide medical and social services to the poor.

“6. Devise actionable strategies and specific goals to reduce racial segregation and poverty.

“(She lists five other “solutions” that simply amount to rolling back reforms: Ban for-profit charters and charter chains; eliminate high-stakes standardized testing; don’t allow “non-educators” to be teachers, principals, or superintendents; don’t allow mayoral control of the schools; don’t view education as a “consumer good.”)”

Klonsky comments:

“That’s what Petrilli considers pie-in-the-sky.

“To me it sounds like a recipe for quality schools.”

Categories Accountability, Broad Foundation, Charter Schools, Corporate Reformers, Education Reform, Privatization, Vouchers

#2 at U.S. Department of Education Loves”No-Excuses” Charter Schools, Not Public Schools

By dianeravitch
October 23, 2013 //
53

A reader has done research on the new Undersecretary of Education. The “no-excuses” charters are known for their emphasis on strict discipline, conformity, and obedience to all rules. They typically have high rates of suspension and attrition.

http://www.forbes.com/sites/nicoleperlroth/2011/09/19/newschools-ceo-ted-mitchell-my-best-idea-for-k-12-education/2/

Public school parents should know who Arne Duncan and President Obama chose to run the nation’s public school system.

This is an interview with Ted Mitchell. Like all ed reformers, he makes no mention of the actual, existing public schools 90% of your kids attend. Instead, he tells of us his dream to turn all public schools into no excuses charter chains:

FORBES: What is your best idea for K-12 education reform?

“Ted Mitchell: Well, we think of education reform in two parts. There’s education reform—that is who has maximized the current production function of education–who is doing schooling as well as it can be done given the constraints we have today. And then there’s what schools should look like in the not too distant future. What are we really aiming at? We call those education 1.0 and education 2.0.

Let’s start with education 1.0 then. Which teachers or schools would you say are doing the best job of reforming the current system? I would highlight not all charter schools but the high performing, no excuses charter schools like KIPP and Aspire. Then there are a
few that are doing the very hardest work of all, which is turning around existing schools. Those are Mastery in Philadelphia and Unlocking Potential in Boston.

They have very high expectations for everyone in the building, kids and adults. They have a culture that supports achievement and they understand that traditionally under-served kids come to school with a set of issues that aren’t their fault—they come to school hungry, they come from broken homes—and these schools take them in whatever circumstances and characteristics they arrive and say: ‘Those are things we can deal with, but they’re not excuses for underachieving.’ The results are that these schools have pretty much eliminated the drop out rate, doubled the graduation rate and doubled the college-going rate of traditionally under-served kids.”

There’s no mention of existing public schools in the entire piece. Mr. Mitchell can’t find a single US public school that merits praise or meets his requirements.

These are not the words of an “agnostic”.

Categories Charter Schools, Corporate Reformers, U.S. Department of Education

Jeff Bryant on “The Empty Harvest” of School Reform

By dianeravitch
October 23, 2013 //
7

Jeff Bryant of the Education Opportunity Network surveys the wreckage of “test-and-punish” methods of reform. Such methods lead not to “reform,” but to bullied teachers, who are demoralized by their situation. Some leave, some hang on, but the results have been unimpressive.

Bryant sees a slow-motion collapse of the coercive “reform” movement, as its bold promises turn out to be empty. The reformers’ day on the hill is coming to an end.

As Bryant writes:

With the advent of No Child Left Behind, the accountability had its mechanism for targeting individual schools, but with the Obama administration’s Race to the Top program, the accountability arsenal aimed at individual classroom teachers too.

With Michelle Rhee as its celebrity cheerleader, the school accountability movement became the perfect PR campaign promising a way forward to ever increasing education “effectiveness.”

But all those years of promises for this: Studies can prove that teachers are capable of being manipulated by coercive management systems, but the wealth of improvement stemming from expensive new assessment systems has yet to fill the account left barren by the nation’s reluctance to invest in our children’s education.

Michelle Rhee-like accountability systems that have been in place a substantial amount of time have done no better than the one in D.C. A long-standing system in Tennessee, for instance, has done nothing to improve academic achievement and has revealed “almost nothing about teacher effectiveness.”

The most ardent reform enthusiasts now admit to “overselling, and underthinking [sic]” their cause, even as they try to dispel whatever is being proposed as a positive alternative.

Parents and public officials in places as diverse as rural Virginia and uptown New York Cityare more boisterously questioning the whole premise of ramping up more tests on students to determine the value of their teachers.

As the education reform movement’s empty harvest leads us into a winter of discontent, what’s needed are more proposals from multiple sources for a more positive way forward.

Far beyond the media spotlights focused on reform celebrities like Rhee, other credible voices are calling for a different course for accountability and an agenda based on opportunity and support for learning. No wonder more people are listening.

Categories Corporate Reformers, NCLB (No Child Left Behind), Privatization, Race to the Top, Teacher Evaluations, Teachers and Teaching, Testing

Minnesota Teacher of the Year: We Are Democracy’s Defense Against Tyranny of the 1%!

By dianeravitch
October 23, 2013 //
7

Conservative bloggers and pundits are raging against Minnesota’s Teacher of the Year.

Science teacher Megan Hall made an audacious statement. As we all surely know by now, only conservative bloggers and pundits are allowed to make audacious statements.

Hall told the annual gathering of Minnesota teachers:

“There is one other thing that I think about when I think about generosity. I think about all of the teachers in St. Paul public schools who gave up our cost of living raise in 2010 in an effort to limit class sizes in our district.

“Teachers are persistent and responsible and generous because we believe that every child in America, regardless of circumstances of birth, deserves a decent chance at a good life. [Applause] From where I stand, teachers create equality of opportunity. From where I stand, teaching is a profession that takes a gritty patriotism. And from where I stand, teachers are American democracy’s last line of defense against the tyranny of the 1 percent. [More applause]”

Shocking, isn’t it? How dare she! How self-centered! Why doesn’t she realize that she is putting teachers first, those greedy people who demand to be paid, to get health care, to collect pensions for a lifetime of easy labor in the classroom?

Why does she not show proper deference to the billionaires? Without them, where would she be? Doesn’t this teacher know that only billionaires put StudentsFirst? Billionaires work every day to make sure that zip code is no child’s destiny? The secret is to have so many homes that no one really knows what your zip code is, but that’s a story for another day.

Categories Corporate Reformers, Minnesota, Teachers and Teaching

David Greene: The Sound of Silence

By dianeravitch
October 23, 2013 //
14

David Greene, experienced teacher and mentor, was out of the country for afew weeks. When he returned, he was excited to hear echoes of our struggle against high-stakes testing, privatization, the theft of public schools, and data piracy in the mainstream news. Is the silence over? Are we on the cusp of the change we have all been hoping for?

An informed public will not permit a corporate takeover of its schools. An informed public will not give away personal information about their children to data mining.

David Greene writes:

THE SOUND OF SILENCE

I’ve been sitting relatively silently for a few weeks for a couple of reasons. I was out of the country for three weeks. Upon return I began new job. I was growing frustrated with the barking and lack of movement. I have been completing a book soon to be pubished. Other voices were more important to be heard.

Over the past few days however a number of events stirred the silence within me. First, I read Joe Nocera’s October 14th NY Times column, “A World Without Privacy”.

That was followed by a one-two punch of articles in The Local Gannett paper, The Journal News. The first, on October 16th validated what I am currently reading in Diane Ravitch’s brilliant new book, Reign of Error. The second article that moved me entitled “Study faults N.Y.’s teacher evaluations“, was written by Gary Stern, a reporter who seems to be figuring out what is really happening in the privatization process of public schools.

The third followed a day later also in The Journal News by Gary Stern was entitled, “Local parents seek ouster of N.Y. education commissioner”.

Finally, the one that moved me to this keyboard was in the October 20th edition of The NY Times Magazine entitled, “No diagnosis left behind”.

The fact that these articles came out within a week shows me the turn around in mainstream media we have been searching for may be coming sooner than I had thought. It inspired me to speak out again, to end my “sound of silence”.

One of my favorite songs of all time is Simon and Garfunkel’s “Sounds of Silence”. It is haunting and timeless. It speaks to the horrors in societies that are perpetuated when,

“ And in the naked light I saw ten thousand people, maybe more. People talking without speaking. People hearing without listening. People writing songs that voices never share. And no one dared disturb the sound of silence.”

Nocera’s column tells us how close to Orwell’s 1984 we have become as he compares Dave Egger’s new novel, The Circle to Orwell’s prophecies. Orwell’s, Big Brother government’s Ministry of Truth uses the big lie, repetitious slogans (ominously similar to chapters in Mein Kampf): WAR IS PEACE. FREEDOM IS SLAVERY. IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH. Egger’s private technology corporate world power (ALA Google, Facebook and Twitter) uses similar phrases: SHARING IS CARING. SECRETS ARE LIES. PRIVACY IS THEFT.

My God…. Is that not the strategy used by corporate education reformers and their governmental allies in stealing public education form the public and it’s employees?

“Fools,” said I, “you do not know. Silence like a cancer grows. Hear my words that I might teach you. Take my arms that I might reach you.” But my words, like silent raindrops fell; and echoed in the wells of silence.”

Have the “Emperor With New Clothes” actions of NY Commissioner John King awakened us from our sounds of Silence?

Has Gary Stern and Lo-Hud inadvertently become a leader in this new voice calling for his resignation by finally voicing the concerns of thousands of parents, students, and teachers in this article that finally doesn’t attack those voices as King does.

Has their expose regarding the improper use of invalid testing to evaluate teachers finally allowed other mass media publications and networks to come out of their sounds of silence and become:

“The sign [that] flashed out its warning in the words that it was forming. And the sign said, “The words of the prophets are written on the subway walls, and tenement halls?”

Finally, the NY TIMES reports, in “No diagnosis left behind” that:
“High-stakes standardized testing, increased competition for slots in top colleges, a less-and-less accommodating economy for those who don’t get into colleges but can no longer depend on the existence of blue-collar jobs — all of these are expressed through policy changes and cultural expectations, but they may also manifest themselves in more troubling ways — in the rising number of kids whose behavior has become pathologized.”

And, The No Child Left Behind Act, signed into law by President George W. Bush, was the first federal effort to link school financing to standardized- test performance. But various states had been slowly rolling out similar policies for the last three decades.

North Carolina was one of the first to adopt such a program; California was one of the last.

The correlations between the implementation of these laws and the rates of A.D.H.D. diagnosis matched on a regional scale as well. When Hinshaw compared the rollout of these school policies with incidences of A.D.H.D., he found that when a state passed laws punishing or rewarding schools for their standardized-test scores, A.D.H.D. diagnoses in that state would increase not long afterward.

Nationwide, the rates of A.D.H.D. diagnosis increased by 22 percent in the first four years after No Child Left Behind was implemented.

To be clear: Those are correlations, not causal links. But A.D.H.D., education policies, disability protections and advertising freedoms all appear to wink suggestively at one another. From parents’ and teachers’ perspectives, the diagnosis is considered a success if the medication improves kids’ ability to perform on tests and calms them down enough so that they’re not a distraction to others. (In some school districts, an A.D.H.D. diagnosis also results in that child’s test score being removed
from the school’s official average.) Writ large, Hinshaw says, these incentives conspire to boost the diagnosis of the disorder, regardless of its biological prevalence.

Times have changed. The words are now on Facebook and Twitter and the Blogosphere. They are increasingly in the streets, in the “public forums”, and in legislative, not tenement, halls.
And needed to get out! Let’s all of us, let out our sound of silence and change what is happening to us and to our children.

“Hello darkness, my old friend. I’ve come to talk with you again because a vision softly creeping left its seeds while I was sleeping, and the vision that was planted in my brain still remains within the sound of silence.”

Categories Childhood, Pre-K, K, Corporate Reformers, Testing

EduShyster Crashes Jeb Bush’s Party

By dianeravitch
October 22, 2013 //
11

Some party!

EduShyster crashed it and couldn’t find many happy events.

Hanna Skandera, one of the shrinking number of Jeb’s Chiefs for Change, was a no-show.

Tony Bennett, ex-Indiana chief, ex-Florida chief, was not sure whether to lecture on A-F grading systems. Rahm Emanuel insisted he was not a reformer, maybe just a passerby.

Was anyone happy? Sounds more like a wake than a party.

Are the reformers down in the dumps because they realize they ARE the status quo?

Who can you rail against when you control the federal government, the biggest foundations, and most states?

Just those darn teachers.

Categories Bush, Jeb, Chiefs for Change, Corporate Reformers

Seattle School Board Race Dominated by More than $200,000 from Wealthy Few

By dianeravitch
October 21, 2013 //
6

Sue Peters, parent activist, is running for the school board in Seattle.

She has raised $28,289.

Her opponent, Suzanne Dale Estey, has raised over $100,000, plus an independent PAC has raised more than another $100,000 for Estey.

That means that Sue Peters is outspent about 7-1.

Estey has raised more money for her contest than any school board race in the state’s history.

Read the list of Estey’s contributors: it is the same handful of wealthy entrepreneurs who have been pouring big money into election after election in Seattle and in the state of Washington, to promote charters, test-based evaluation, Teach for America, and other failed policies.

Few, if any, of Estey’s donors have children in the Seattle public schools.

Why are the rich buying up school board seats?

In Seattle, is democracy for sale to the highest bidder?

Categories Charter Schools, Corporate Reformers, Education Industry, Washington, DC

Who Is Funding the Campaign to Defeat Sue Peters for Seattle School Board?

By dianeravitch
October 20, 2013 //
10

I noticed that in the past two or three years, a number of extremely rich people are bundling funds and pouring them into local school board races.

Often the people making the campaign contributions do not live in the state or local community.

I wrote about this strange and new phenomenon in my book Reign of Error. 

It is a deliberate and coordinated campaign to seize control of education at the local level.

This turns out to be remarkably easy, as the people who run for school board usually are able to put up or raise $10,000-40,000 at best.

But the strangers can easily assemble (or “bundle”) many times that amount to elect their hand-picked candidate, who–if elected–will become a voice for privatization, charter schools, Teach for America, test-based evaluation of teachers, and every other policy that is guaranteed to demoralize teachers and hand public dollars over to nonpublic schools and entrepreneurs. This is a very small investment for corporate reformers in a very large prize.

We saw it in the state board elections in Louisiana, where millions flowed into the state to give Governor Bobby Jindal a compliant board. We saw it in Los Angeles, where Mayor Bloomberg sent a cool $1 million, and Michelle Rhee tossed in a quarter million dollars (thankfully, they lost).

We saw it in the Washington State charter campaign, where Bill Gates, the Bezos family (amazon.com), and the Walton (Walmart) family easily outspent the parent groups school boards, and civil rights groups to enact charter legislation, which had been turned down three times previously.

Now the target of big money is Sue Peters, a parent activist who is running for school board. She has antagonized the corporate reformers because she stands up for children, not for privatization. A PAC was created to defeat her.

This comment answers the question: Who is funding the campaign against Sue Peters?

Here are the main contributors to Sue Peters opponent’s PAC: Matt Griffin, Christopher Larson and Nick Hanauer.Matt Griffin is a real estate developer that is probably the person coordinating the giving. Twenty people essentially control Seattle’s elections:

http://www.thestranger.com/seattle/who-wants-to-keep-big-money-in-local-politics/Content?oid=17780106&show=comments&sort=asc&display=

Nick Hanauer desperately tried to get legislators to pass charter legislation in 2011. When legislators failed to pass charter legislation, Hanauer sent out a famous letter and called the legislators “stooges”. The following year, charter schools were put on the ballot and Hanauer contributed $1M to pass this initiative.

 
  
Categories Corporate Reformers, Education Industry, Privatization
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