Archives for category: Corporate Reformers
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Why Are “No Excuses” Schools Only for the Poor?

By dianeravitch
September 1, 2012 //
7

Jersey Jazzman heard Condoleeza Rice declare that “education is the civil rights issue of our time” and he wondered, why not say “civil rights is the civil rights issue of our time”?

He is especially disturbed by the idea that so many reformers are promoting a kind of schooling for poor children that they would find intolerable for their own. The people who fund corporate reform don’t want no-excuses schools for their children.

He asks an important question:

Why are the corporate reformers creating schools for poor and/or minority children that engage in practices that affluent parents would never accept for their own kids?

He argues:

 It is fundamentally anti-American to espouse one type of education for poor urban children and another type for affluent suburban children. If we really, truly cared about these most-neglected and most-deserving kids, we’d be working to make their lives as much like those of their suburban peers as possible – both in and out of the classroom.

Categories Charter Schools, Corporate Reformers, Education Reform

What Is a Failing School?

By dianeravitch
September 1, 2012 //
19

After a decade of No Child Left Behind and three years of Race to the Top, officials are getting much better at identifying “failing schools.”

Now we know.

A failing school is one with low test scores and low graduation rates.

A failing school enrolls large numbers of students who are eligible for free or reduced price lunch (i.e., poverty).

A failing school enrolls large numbers of African American and Hispanic students.

A failing school enrolls large numbers of students who are English language learners and new immigrants.

A failing school has disproportionate numbers of students with disabilities.

Based on current federal policy, these are the ways to “turnaround” these failing schools.

Fire the principal; fire half or all of the teachers; turn the school into a charter school under private management; close the school.

What, specifically, is done to address the educational needs of the students? See previous sentence.

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Corporate Reformers, Education Reform, Federal Waiver, NCLB (No Child Left Behind), Race to the Top

Paul Thomas Explains Why “No Excuses” Fails

By dianeravitch
September 1, 2012 //
6

Paul Thomas is an articulate and prolific critic of the status quo of free market reforms.

In a new article, he analyzes the nature of “no excuses” schooling and why it fails.

Thomas says that the debate about metrics is irrelevant. Getting higher test scores and graduation rates, he argues, doesn’t matter so much as how those rates are produced.

He writes:

The education reform debate is fueled by a seemingly endless and even fruitless point-counterpoint among the corporate reformers—typically advocates for and from the Gates Foundation (GF), Teach for America (TFA), and charter chains such as Knowledge Is Power Program (KIPP)—and educators/scholars of education. Since the political and public machines have embraced the corporate reformers, GF, TFA, and KIPP have acquired the bully pulpit of the debate and thus are afforded most often the ability to frame the point, leaving educators and scholars to be in a constant state of generating counter-points.

This pattern disproportionately benefits corporate reformers, but it also exposes how those corporate reformers manage to maintain the focus of the debate on data. The statistical thread running through most of the point-counterpoint is not only misleading (the claims coming from the corporate reformers are invariably distorted, while the counter-points of educators and scholars remain ignored among politicians, advocates, the public, and the media), but also a distraction.

Since the metrics debate (test scores, graduation rates, attrition, populations of students served, causation/correlation) appears both enduring and stagnant, I want to make a clear statement with some elaboration that I reject the “ends-justify-the-means” assumptions and practices—the broader “no excuses” ideology—underneath the numbers, and thus, we must stop focusing on the outcomes of programs endorsed by the GF or TFA and KIPP.

Instead, we must unmask the racist and classist policies and practices hiding beneath the metrics debate surrounding GF, TFA, and KIPP (as prominent examples of practices all across the country and types of schools).

Whether you agree or not, Thomas’s views deserve a wide hearing.

Let’s discuss what he says. Let’s think about it.

Categories Corporate Reformers, Education Reform, Gates Foundation, Bill Gates, KIPP Charter Schools, Teach for America TFA

Reformers Target Teacher Education

By dianeravitch
September 1, 2012 //
11

My friends at The Chalkface have thrown themselves into the fight to support public education, with a radio show, videos, and blogs.

Now they let you know–in language you won’ t hear from me–about the latest reformer attack on teacher education. The reformers want Arne Duncan to ignore the objections of major institutions of higher education. They want him to adopt regulations that would judge teacher education programs by the test scores of the students of their graduates.

Got that. The test scores of the students taught by the graduates of these institutions.

This is guaranteed to make teaching to the test the official doctrine of American education, top to bottom. It means imposing NCLB on higher education.

It is absurd. It is reckless. It is ___________. (Fill in the blank.)

Categories Accountability, Corporate Reformers, Duncan, Arne, Education Reform, Higher Education, Teacher Evaluations, Teachers and Teaching, Testing, U.S. Department of Education

More from Maine Showdown

By dianeravitch
August 30, 2012 //
12

A reader sends this update from Maine:

Follow up: Superintendent Perzanoski apologized Tuesday for putting his comments in an official school letter, but he did not back away from his actual comments:

http://www.pressherald.com/news/Brunswick-superintedent-apologizes-for-way-he-attacked-LePage.html

Too bad our governor can’t figure out that he should not use his own taxpayer-funded official time and venue to bully his school leaders.

Categories Corporate Reformers

Reformers’ Double Talk

By dianeravitch
August 30, 2012 //
31

A reader comments on the conflict between what reformers say and what they do:

Ironically, sometimes, what corporate sponsored “reformers” say they want is the exact opposite of what they really want.

For example, this week on Twitter, Arne Duncan was promoting student involvement in mock elections and said, “Watch the MyVoice National Mock Election 2012 PSA series, and get involved!” However, this is a man who believes in, and personally benefitted from, mayoral controlled education, which has meant recinding the democratic rights of citizens to vote for and elect their local school boards and, instead, turning education over to mayors who appoint puppet boards and Superintendents –which is how he got his job as CEO of schools in Chicago. (As rightwing ALEC promotes.) Of course, Duncan got appointed to his current position due to cronyism and a Congress that had a majority of Democrats at the time, so he really believes in voting only when it might be to his advantage (such as re-electing Obama).

Other times, what corporate sponsored “reformers” really want is deeply entangled in the language they choose to use to describe what they say they are against.

For example, Gates, Rhee and Duncan have claimed repeatedly that teachers are not “interchangable widgets”, in order to combat unions, seniority and lane and step pay schedules. However, when it comes to teaching children, they think it’s fine to use teachers as “interchangable widgets”, such as when they promote Teach for America, which has placed people like Rhee, who had a bachelor’s degree in government, in a classroom teaching 3rd graders, who are not very likely to be studying much, if anything, about government.

This TFA placement practice still exists today, according to Barbara Veltri, author of Learning on Other People’s Kids: Becoming a Teach for America Teacher,

“most corps report that they are teaching out-­of-­field and in Special Education classrooms, where they arrive with about 5 hours of training”

http://seattleducation2010.wordpress.com/category/teach-for-america/

I think the Common Core mandate on informational texts paves the way for using more teachers as “interchangable widgets” in classrooms. For example, English curriculum is likely to include reading books about people and events in history, which will make it easier to justify the placement of out of field teachers (not just TFAers), such as those with degrees in history teaching English classes –like Tony Danza.

Categories Common Core, Corporate Reformers, Duncan, Arne, Gates Foundation, Bill Gates, Rhee, Michelle, Teach for America TFA, Teachers and Teaching

This May Sound Familiar

By dianeravitch
August 30, 2012 //
8

A reader in the U.K. sent this editorial about business leaders’ complaints about poorly educated workers. He thought it was interesting to note that the same laments are heard on both sides of the Atlantic ocean. I have noticed that such laments are often concurrent with a big push to outsource jobs to countries that pay a small fraction of what local workers expect to be paid.

Yet, as I read the editorial, I remembered reading a few years ago that Sir Michael Barber, late of McKinsey, now at Pearson, was supposed to have successfully reformed the British education system. Barber is a big believer in targets and testing, accountability and school closing. His ideas have been influential in supporting the NCLB regime, giving it a patina of legitimacy, based in part on his reputation for having reformed British education.

Barber calls his philosophy of  education “deliverology.”

Apparently, “deliverology” saved British education, and now it needs to be saved again.

Schools have this nasty habit of getting unreformed not long after they were reformed. Arne Duncan reformed Chicago, but now it has to be reformed again. Paul Vallas reformed Philadelphia (and Chicago, too) but now it has to be reformed again.

Reforms have this odd life cycle: first comes the press release, then the sustained publicity campaign, and then the reforms quietly dissolve. And the cycle begins again. The Houston Independent School District is on the Broad Foundation’s list of possible winners of its annual prize. Houston was the first district to win the prize some years ago. Then it had to be reformed all over again. New York City has been reformed for the past decade, and chances are that the next mayor will want to reform the reforms.

The only question that remains is not whether the reforms will be reformed, but whether they will be replaced by something different (which would involve admitting that mistakes were made), or whether reformers will do more of the same, with greater intensity.

And so it goes.

Categories Chicago, Corporate Reformers, Education Reform, Houston, International

What the Maine Press Said

By dianeravitch
August 29, 2012 //
5

Yesterday I posted a letter that Superintendent Paul Perzanoski wrote to his staff in Brunswick, Maine. He defended educators against the bullying of the governor and–since the governor had such disdain for the state’s students, teachers and public schools– suggested that the governor should take a standardized test and publish his scores. Since I have often made the same suggestion, I admired him for saying so. Here’s the local press reaction.

There’s been quite a bit of reaction in the Maine press over Superintendent Perzanoski’s letter. The Portland Press Herald’s editorial was one of the more interesting for its cowardice (http://www.pressherald.com/opinion/editorials/school-heads-comments-about-governor-out-of-line_2012-08-24.html) by agreeing with the Superintendent’s points and then demanding that he apologize for getting “involved in politics”, which for the editors means criticizing our loud-mouth bully of a governor.

One of the funnier (although I assume unintentional) comments was:

Calling the governor a bully, as Perzanoski did, or implying that he’s not intelligent — “I think we should challenge (LePage) to take the SAT and make the results public” — is another way of telling people how to vote.

First, when I read the letter I took no inference that Mr. Perzanoski was making fun of our governor’s intelligence (which the Press Herald itself does from time to time); I thought he was pointing out that those who want to make test scores public should be willing to take the same test publicly themselves, since test scores traditionally have been private matters between students and teachers. Apparently, it was the editors of the Press Herald who thought the governor would not look so smart if asked to take a test.

Second, how these comments amount to “telling people how to vote” is beyond me, although the Press Herald may not think much of the voters in Brunswick since the editors think they are so easily suggestible.
Categories Corporate Reformers, Education Reform

What Can Be Done to Stop the “Vandals at the Gate”?

By dianeravitch
August 28, 2012 //
25

This is one of the sharpest commentaries I have read about the depredations of the Jindal-White gang in Louisiana, who are intent on destroying public education in the state as well as the teaching profession.

Everyone can pick their favorite line; there are many.

What I appreciate is the writer’s slashing criticism of the silent education professors, who have lost their tongues, unable or unwilling to defend the people they trained, mute in the face of the vandals at the gate.

 

Categories Corporate Reformers, Jindal, Bobby, Louisiana, Privatization, Teach for America TFA

Did He Miss Class That Day?

By dianeravitch
August 28, 2012 //
2

I posted earlier about Mayor Michael Nutter of Philadelphia, who said he could not see the difference between public, private and religious schools.

A teacher asks:

I wonder where these politicians are getting their education from. Did they miss class on the days when the Constitution and First Amendment were discussed?

Categories Charter Schools, Corporate Reformers, Education Reform, For-Profit, Philadelphia, Privatization, Vouchers
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