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Here is My Interview on CNN

By dianeravitch
August 22, 2012 //
36

Many readers have contacted me to ask why CNN has not posted Randi Kaye’s interview with me, rebutting Michelle Rhee’s assertions.

This reader, Michael Brocoum, made a copy of the interview and posted it on Youtube. Here it is.

As I mentioned in an earlier post, the interview began with a question about the National Assessment of Educational Progress (you will note that it is misspelled by CNN as the National Assessment of Educational Process). I don’t recall the precise wording, but the question went like this:

“You claim that test scores on NAEP are at their highest point in history, but how do you explain that the scale score for fourth grade reading is only 221? That’s 221 out of 500. That’s less than 50%. Isn’t 50% a failing grade?”

I then tried to explain that scale scores don’t work like that, that the question itself was a completely erroneous interpretation of scale scores. NAEP has a vertical scale, and scale scores in the 4th grade are lower than in the 8th grade. They can’t be converted into a grade in the way that Randi Kaye asserted, although they are useful as measures of progress.

Consider this: the average scale score for 4th grade is 221, but students scoring at the 90th percentile–our top students–have a scale score of 264. By Randi Kaye’s fallacious reasoning, they are failing too! In 8th grade reading, the students at the 90th percentile had a scale score of 307 (on a scale of 500). She would convert that to a grade of 61, which is borderline failing.

Wouldn’t you think that the editor or research staff at CNN would have prevented Randi Kaye from making such absurd assertions?

But it was of a piece with all the questions that followed. I felt as if I were being interrogated by someone who worked for StudentsFirst, not by a reporter seeking to ascertain either my views or the basic facts.

Rhee said at the outset of my interview that the answer to what she thinks is the terrible performance of our schools is merit pay. So Randi Kaye drilled in on that with two questions (one of them was dropped from the show before it aired). She ended up with a quote from someone named Lucas who said he wanted merit pay. That wasn’t exactly definitive, since I was able point out that merit pay has been tried again and again and has always failed to make a difference.

Categories Corporate Reformers, Michigan, NAEP, Privatization, Ravitch, Diane, Rhee, Michelle, StudentsFirst, Teachers and Teaching, Testing

Is This the True Goal of “Reform” Today?

By dianeravitch
August 22, 2012 //
32

I have often been struck by the uneven playing field that policymakers and legislators establish for charter schools and public schools. The public schools are increasingly strangled by regulations and by high-stakes testing and punitive evaluations, at the same time that the charter schools are exempt from most of the strangulation. I have heard many times from principals who say that they want to turn their public school into a charter so they can escape the tentacles of regulation that are wrapped tight around their school. And I have wondered whether the purpose of “reform” was to make public schools fail while the deregulated charter schools increase and thrive.

Here is another take on the current corporate reform movement, inspired by an earlier post about stagnant ACT scores:

The more conversations I have about the entire “reform” movement, the more convinced I am that it’s really about disbanding teacher unions so that the majority of education programs will eventually be part of a private industry thus paving the way for the privatizing of all public systems.

The evidence just keeps mounting to show that standardized testing is a flawed way to judge the efficacy of the public schools, and the mere fact that charters and private/parochial schools do not have the same “rigorous” standards as public schools points to the idea that “standards” are not really important at all to the reformers who push for these kinds of alternate schools.

Utilizing standardized tests that the reformers know are flawed is a tactic to devalue the people who teach in public schools so that they can be fired and a private interest can take over.

It’s as if these policy-makers have found a way to rig the game: Create new rules that make for impossible goals and then watch a good system that serves the public fail under these new rules. They have set up the game so that the players will fail no matter what–IF you believe the rules are sound.

It’s pretty evident that the main goal is to disband two of the largest public unions in the country using children as pawns. Once the AFT and the NEA are toppled, so they must think, the rest will follow, and the privatization of public systems in America will ensue.

I would not put it past our policy-makers to be trying to sell the public a bill of goods by pretending they care about the children at all, when in reality, they care about getting rid of union teachers and privatizing education so their buddies can “invest” and continually get rich.

This isn’t about parent choice (unless legal segregation is what they’re after), this isn’t about success, and this isn’t about getting rid of “bad” teachers. It’s about getting rid of unions and privatizing. To me, the evidence points to these intentions no matter how anyone else wants to spin it.

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Corporate Reformers, Education Reform, Teachers and Teaching, Testing, Unions, Vouchers

What We Can Learn from the New PDK/Gallup Poll

By dianeravitch
August 22, 2012 //
2

The annual Phi Delta Kappa-Gallup poll on education was released today.

The sponsors characterize public opinion as split, which is true for many issues.

We must see this poll in the context of an unprecedented, well-funded campaign to demonize public schools and their teachers over at least the past two years, and by some reckoning, even longer.

The media has parroted endlessly the assertion that our public schools are failures, they are (as Bill Gates memorably said to the nation’s governors in 2005) “obsolete,” and “the system is broken.” How many times have you heard those phrases? How many television specials have you seen claiming that our education system is disastrous? And along comes “Waiting for ‘Superman'” with its propagandistic attack on public education in cities and suburbs alike and its appeal for privatization. Add to that Arne Duncan’s faithful parroting of the claims of the critics.

That is the context, and it is remarkable that Americans continue to believe in the schools they know best and to understand what their most critical need is.

Here are the salient findings:

1. Americans have a low opinion of American education (how could they not, given the bombardment of criticism?): only 18% give it an A or B. And here is the real accomplishment of the corporate reformers: Those who judge American education as a D or F have increased from 22% to 30% in the past 20 years. Actually, their success in smearing U.S. education is even greater, because in 2002, before the implementation of NCLB, only 16% judged the nation’s schools so harshly. So the reform campaign has doubled the proportion of Americans who think the nation’s schools deserve a D or F.

2. When asked to evaluate the schools in their own community, 48% give them an A or B, which is the highest rating in 20 years.

3. When asked to evaluate the school their oldest child attends, an astonishing 77% give it an A or B. This is the highest rating in 20 years. Only 6% give it a D or F. This question elicits the views of informed consumers, the people who refer to a real school, not the hypothetical school system that is lambasted every other day in the national press or condemned as “obsolete” by Bill Gates.

4. When asked whether they have trust and confidence in teachers, 71% said yes. Americans continue to respect and admire teachers, despite the nonstop public bashing of them in the media.

5. When asked whether standardized test scores should be used to evaluate teachers, opinion split 52-47 in favor. Considering that the public has heard nonstop endorsements of this bad idea from President Obama, Secretary Duncan, and most other political figures–and very limited dissent–it is surprising that opinion is almost equally divided. How did so many Americans manage to figure out that this idea is problematic at best?

6. When people were asked to describe the teachers who had the greatest influence in their lives, they used words like caring, compassionate, motivating, and inspiring. Interesting that few remembered the teachers who raised their test scores.

7. There has been a big change in what the public sees as the biggest problems facing the schools today. Ten years ago, the biggest concerns were about discipline (fighting, gangs, drugs, lack of discipline, overcrowding). Today, the biggest problem that the public sees, by far, is lack of financial support. 35% chose that option. Among public school parents, it was 43%. Concerns about discipline almost faded away in comparison to concerns about the lack of financial support for the schools.

8. On the subject of vouchers, there was a surprising increase in the proportion who would support “allowing students to choose a private school at public expense.” It increased from 34% to 44%, which is a big jump. I recommend that future questioning ask about support to allow students “to choose a private or religious school at public expense.” That would be closer to the reality of voucher programs in Milwaukee, Cleveland, D.C., Louisiana, Ohio, and Indiana.

9. On the subject of charters, public opinion dipped, from an approval rating of 70% in 2011 to 66% in 2012. It will be interesting to see where this number goes as the public begins to understand more about charters in their own communities.

10. A question about the parent trigger was so vacuous as to be misleading. The question was “Some states are considering laws that allow parents to petition to remove the leadership and staff at failing schools. Do you favor or oppose such laws?” 70% favor, 76% of public school parents favor. This is a misleading question, however, as the parent trigger is not a matter of simply allowing parents to sign a petition, but of allowing parents to take control of a public school and hand it over to private management. My guess is that the public doesn’t know much about the parent trigger concept and hasn’t heard a discussion about the pros and cons. So, I don’t put much stock in the response–after all, why shouldn’t parents have the right to sign a petition to change the staff at their school? It does show how clever the corporate reformers are in framing issues that advance privatization and doing it in ways that are deceptive and alluring.

11. In a series of questions about the Common Core standards, most people believe they are a good thing and that they will make the nation more competitive globally; about half think they will improve the quality of education while 40% think they will have no effect. These answers exemplify why polls of this kind must be viewed with caution. I am willing to bet that the majority of respondents has no idea what the Common Core standards are; and willing to bet that 98% have never read them.

In future versions of the poll, I hope that questions will be asked about for-profit schools, privatization, and vouchers for religious schools. These are big issues today, and the poll should ask about them.

My takeaway from the 2012 poll is that the corporate reform movement has succeeded in increasing support for vouchers, but that the American public continues to have a remarkably high opinion of the schools and teachers they know best despite the concerted efforts of the reformers to undermine those beliefs. This is an instance where evidence trumps ideology. The reformers have not yet been able to destroy the bonds between the American people and their community’s schools.

 

 

Categories Budget Cuts, Charter Schools, Common Core, Corporate Reformers, Education Reform, Opinion Polling, Parent trigger, Parents, Teacher Evaluations, Teachers and Teaching, US Education, Vouchers

Will the Gates’ Agenda of Gathering Data about Teachers Abolish Poverty?

By dianeravitch
August 22, 2012 //
4

A previous post referred to Anthony Cody’s dialogue with the Gates Foundation about their insistence that teachers are the central problem in education today, not poverty. Anthony patiently explained why poverty matters, and the foundation’s response was noncommittal, really just a repetition of stale slogans like “poverty is not destiny.” Not surprisingly, some bearers of the reform flag assailed Anthony. This reader supports him and explains why:

The thing that makes this a “dialog” is that both sides answer each other. By claiming Cody said teachers aren’t important, or poverty is destiny, or any other outright lie, corporate “reformers” are now exposed, because Anthony’s blog is right there on the Gates website, for anybody to read.For instance, a manufactured corporate pundit wrote a column yesterday disputing a point Cody never made. He proclaims, “One More Time: Education is the Long-Term Solution for Fighting Poverty.”
http://dropoutnation.net/2012/08/20/once-more-time-education-is-the-long-term-solution-for-fighting-poverty/

It’s hard to make this a dialog, though, because he is hiding comments like the following one, which I posted yesterday. Here it is, in full:

Anthony Cody never said anything like “poverty is destiny”. What he says is that child poverty hurts children, and that it can be fought. He speaks for me, also, in that argument.

Like Anthony Cody, I believe that education can lift whole families out of poverty, for generations to come. I believe it so strongly that, like him, I’ve dedicated my life to the actual education of low-income kids in high-poverty schools and districts. On Monday, I’ll meet a new year’s worth of students. Based on previous experience, I’ll be able to move maybe 20% of them up to honors math and science next year. As their cognitive integration accomplishes Piaget’s great leap to abstract operations, all of them will learn. Many will find that chemistry opens the doors to the possible lives they had secretly dreamed of.

If you or the Gates foundation also believed that our work can transform their lives, it seems to me we’d be people you’d be willing to listen to. Instead, your “reform” is destroying schools, closing doors, and choking off lives.

Cody and I believe in great teachers too, we just don’t believe that statistics about teachers can make us greater. He pointed out that the Foundation’s “advocacy” is imposing harm, not benefit, on the children it purports to serve. What he actually said about the Gates Foundation’s leveraged philanthropy is this:

“In the name of reform, the Gates Foundation has wielded its political influence to effectively shift public funds, earmarked for the service of poor children, away from investment in those children’s direct education experience. Through the Race to the Top and NCLB waiver conditions, the US Department of Education has instead dedicated public resources to creating state and federal mandates for the Gates Foundation’s costly project — making sure every aspect of our educational system is “driven by data.”
Categories Corporate Reformers, Education Reform, Gates Foundation, Bill Gates, Poverty

Why Standardization Fails

By dianeravitch
August 22, 2012 //
28

Robert D. Shepherd has been in the education publishing industry for many years. When I was writing The Language Police a decade ago, Shepherd was a reliable guide to the vagaries of the publishing world. I also found him to be an acute observer of language and literature. I am happy he wrote this to share with you:

I would like to point the would-be reformers of American education to the work of that great political and social theorist Robbie Burns, who wrote in “To a Mouse” that “The best-laid schemes o’ mice an’ men / Gang aft agley.”

A bit of old-fashioned Scots skepticism with regard to this latest attempt at centralized planning of education, the Common Core State [sic] Standards, is in order. If history is any guide (and what other guide do we have?), the latest top-down reform efforts will fail miserably, and for predictable reasons.

The theory behind the latest “reform” efforts comes to use from the business community. In 1992, Robert Kaplan and David Norton published an article in the Harvard Business Review called “The Balanced Scorecard—Measures That Drive Performance.” Kaplan and Norton picked up on and refined a business truism—that you get what you measure and reward—and gave it a new spin: You shouldn’t rely simply on financial measures, which are backward-looking, but, rather, should create key performance indicators (KPIs) in four areas—finance, customer satisfaction, processes, and knowledge, and follow those carefully. The article set off a revolution in American business. Suddenly, everyone was talking analytics and performance measures and employee evaluation based on those, and it was only a matter of time until business people and politicians, ever thick as mosquitoes over a swamp, got together to apply the same reasoning to education. The theory was simple: Create standards and hold people accountable for achieving them. Thus NCLB was born. The Common Core State [sic] Standards can be thought of as NCLB v2.

So, what could be wrong with holding people (teachers, administrators, students) accountable to standards? As is so often true, the devil is in the details. If you read closely the supporting documentation coming from the CCSSO, Achieve, and the two testing consortia, you will find that in English Language Arts, the intent of the new standards is to make texts, and responding to texts, primary. The whole point is to produce students who, upon graduation from high school, can read, understand, and respond to college-level materials. The standards themselves, however, are simply lists of skills and concepts to be mastered. Since teachers’ and administrators’ jobs will be on the line, they will be incentivized to do everything in their power to make sure that students are working down the lists, mastering standard RL.1.1, then standard RL1.2, and so on. However much the standards-touting organizations attempt to communicate that there is a difference between standards and curricula, the whole apparatus of assessment and data-crunching will focus on the standards themselves, in isolation. How are African-American female students doing on standard SL.3.2a, according to the tests? In other words, states and local districts will inevitably treat the standards as curricula. We are already seeing, across the nation, online curriculum development tools cropping up for use by districts in their curriculum planning, and these tools inevitably begin, at the top of the page, with the standard to be covered.

In the old days, a teacher of 11th-grade American literature would do a unit on the American transcendentalists, in which students would read the likes of Emerson, Thoreau, and Dickinson. Teachers and students would focus on the ideas and texts of the transcendentalists—self reliance, communion with nature, the Oversoul, etc., and in the course of reading, discussing, and writing about these authors and their stimulating ideas, students would learn some concepts and skills. That’s as it should be. People’s brains are networks, connection machines, and new learning occurs when that learning is attached to an existing semantic network. You take a class in oil painting at a local community center. In the course of a week, you learn what gesso, a filbert brush, stippling, and chiaroscuro are. And the new learning sticks with you because it is connected in an experiential network that is meaningful to you. If, on the other hand, you tried to memorize a telephone book, you would mostly likely fail because brains are not good mechanisms for learning facts, concepts, and skills in isolation.

Now, to their credit, the various standards-touting organizations are aware of this, and they have issued a number of documents, like the Publishers’ Criteria from the CCSSO, emphasizing that skills and concepts listed in the standards should not be taught in isolation, that students should deal with related texts, with texts in related knowledge domains, across a school year and across multiple years. However, the elephant in the room is the standards themselves, which are JUST lists of concepts and skills. In practice, the tendency will be to force teachers into scripted work in which they know that it is November 28th because they are “doing,” today, standard RI.5.7. Just today I received in the mail a catalog from a textbook publisher containing its new Common Core State Standards offerings—workbooks that “do” one standard at a time, in order, treating the standards themselves as a curriculum.
So, that’s the first problem. Standards are not a curriculum, but in practice, that’s how they will be treated.

The first reason why the new standards regimen is likely to fail has to do with how people learn: they learn in semantically connected contexts that they care about in which the content is primary.
The second reason why the new standards regimen is likely to fail has to do with how people work. Let’s go back to business management theory for a moment. There is a body of theory in management called Social-Technical Systems Theory, the basic premise of which ought to be obvious: almost everyone wants to do a good job, to be able to be proud of what he or she does, to have his or her work recognized, and in order for that to happen, people have to have autonomy. Theodore Roosevelt put it this way (and here I am paraphrasing): If you want to get something done, find someone who knows how to do it and get the hell out of that person’s way. In other words, good managers don’t micromanage. They specify goals, but they don’t specify how the work is to be done. Suppose that you hire someone to clean your house or apartment and then stand over that person and tell him or her how to pour the water and cleaning solution, how to move the mop, and so on. Chances are that however much you are paying for this work, that person will not return again, for you have violated a fundamental law of human nature: we all HATE to be micromanaged because we value our freedom and autonomy. The blueprint for the new ESEA (the Elementary and Secondary Education Act) calls for 50 % of the evaluation of every teacher and administrator in a district receiving federal funds being based on improvement in test scores. So, inevitably, with their jobs on the line and fancy electronic data-collection systems in place, administrators will micromanage classrooms. Today is November 28th. You and your students need to be following this script so that the students can master standard W.3.2a for the test.
It’s not the INTENTION of the best of the standards makers to have teachers treat the standards as curricula or to have their work be micromanaged and scripted, but inevitably, that’s what will happen, and inevitably, a few years down the line, we shall see the new reform that throws out the old reform and starts all over again, promising another miracle cure for what ails the country’s education system. The best-laid plans of mice and men go often astray.

There’s one more problem that I would like to mention. The whole idea of a top-down, standardized education system is incompatible with fundamental principles of liberty and pluralism. There are no standardized teachers. There are no standardized students. And there shouldn’t be. No one’s five-year plan will work, and if it did, God help us. We wouldn’t end up with the diversity that we need. We need, very much, to get out of teachers’ way, to let them do what they, idiosyncratically, do. Let tens of thousands of flowers bloom. If you think back on the best teachers that you ever had, you will inevitably find that not one of them was following a script. Instead, their interests, and what you learned from them, were highly idiosyncratic. This person was PASSIONATE about Beowulf or analytic geometry, and you caught the windfall of that person’s passion. You got the bug. And that’s what we need in a pluralistic society, not robot students coming out of schools-as-factories, identically machined to have the same concept and skill sets, but, rather, the bustling, blooming variety of interests, inclinations, passions, and abilities that a complex contemporary society requires—some who are passionately interested in graphic design, some who are passionately interested in equity trading, some who are passionately interested in prenatal development, and so on. You can’t get rich diversity of skill sets from ANY list, however well vetted.

Categories Common Core, Corporate Reformers, Curriculum, Testing

Denial as a Reform Strategy

By dianeravitch
August 21, 2012 //
13

Reformers constantly deny any evidence that contradicts their narrative.

They insist that our public schools are failing, despite the clear evidence in the national assessments that test scores have never been higher for every group tested.

They insist that merit pay is necessary, even though it has never “worked,” in any sense of the word, not in raising test scores or in making teaching more attractive as a profession.

They insist that charters are better than public schools, even though study after study shows this is not true.

They insist that vouchers will “save” poor children, even though this has not happened in any of the districts that have vouchers (Milwaukee, Cleveland, D.C.).

Their goal is privatization.

Their goal is to push schools into a market-system despite any evidence that such a system makes any sense for anyone except those selling stuff to schools or wanting to take over schools and make a profit by cutting costs (teachers).

They are deniers.

This reader sees the denial strategy as part of a larger pattern:

They will not stop denying it [the evidence about charters], and they will continue to get promotion and protection from both silent support from fundraising and legislative action groups, and open PR/policy forwarded by elected officials. Truth is moot or arbitrary to them, and once light is shed on one false narrative (see “cake walk”, “shock and awe”, “shared sacrifice”, “lavish salaries…) they scurry for the shadows to gnaw away at another spot.

    Right now the narrative is that public schools are the burden fueling the poverty cycle, as opposed to the truth-that the poverty cycle burdens families and students, hampering academic success. The genius of the jokers driving the reform agenda is they have turned the struggling classes upon each other, fully intending to further dis-empower them all economically, and politically. Siphoning of the easiest to educate; protecting their own in gated communities and private schools others will never see; cementing a caste system that will entitle some to the education and knowledge they can afford, relegating the rest to street vendor markets or tech-support phone banks.

Categories Charter Schools, Corporate Reformers, Vouchers

What Will Happen to Chester Upland?

By dianeravitch
August 21, 2012 //
13

Sometimes something happens that is so astonishing, so breathtaking, and simultaneously so disturbing that I don’t know how to characterize it.

The public school district of Chester-Upland, Pennsylvania, is in financial trouble. It was under state control for many years. It was at one time managed by the Edison company. After years of inept state management, it was returned to local control in 2010. It has a for-profit charter school run by a politically connected millionaire that has attracted half the students in the district. The New York Times wrote about how the charter school was being sued by and losing resources to what one educator described as a “charter school on steroids.” The district went bankrupt earlier this year, and the teachers and staff worked without salaries. There have been massive layoffs and budget cuts and the facilities are in disrepair.

One way of looking at Chester Upland is that it has been brought down by state interference, state abandonment of its responsibilities, fumbled efforts at privatization, an inadequate tax base, poverty, budget cuts, and competition with a voracious charter school that sucks millions of dollars out of the underfunded public schools.

Education is a state responsibility. So what is the state doing to preserve public education for the children of Chester Upland?

Ron Tomalis, the secretary of education for the state of Pennsylvania, has appointed Joe Watkins as recovery manager for the school district. Joe Watkins is the head of the PAC in the state that advocates for school choice.

According to the local newspaper: “Watkins is the pastor of Christ Evangelical Church in Philadelphia and a Republican political analyst for MSNBC.
Watkins also is both a registered lobbyist and the chairman for Students First, an advocacy group supporting “comprehensive school choice.” Students First donated thousands of dollars to the campaign of Republican Gov. Tom Corbett, according to published reports…Having since appointed Watkins as Chester Upland’s chief recovery officer, the school board now has 14 days to determine whether it will work with Watkins to develop a financial recovery plan. If the board declines, Tomalis can petition the courts to place Chester Upland under receivership. The financial recovery plan can include closing schools, cutting staff and transforming schools into charters.”

What do you think will happen to the public schools of Chester Upland?

Categories Accountability, Corporate Reformers, Education Reform, Pennsylvania, Poverty

Who Is Promoting Vouchers in Pennsylvania?

By dianeravitch
August 21, 2012 //
9

An astonishing $6 million plus has been pumped into the voucher campaign in Pennsylvania in the last year alone.

As this article notes, Tea Party activists were getting cold feet about vouchers because they objected that vouchers might be too generous to poor children.

Not to worry: Governor Tom Corbett and his allies in the Legislature changed the formula to make sure that some of the hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars will be spread to more affluent districts.

All this money for vouchers will be extracted from public school budgets at the same time that Corbett & Co. are cutting those same budgets.

It seems as though the Republican conservatives want to decimate public education.

Who are these people?

In little more than a year, activists like Michigan’s Betsy DeVos, of the Amway fortune; the heirs of Wal-Mart founder Sam Walton; and three wealthy Main Line hedge-fund traders have doled out an astonishing $6-million-plus in campaign cash to top Harrisburg pols, while they and allies have spent millions more on rallies, inflammatory mailers and lobbyists.

Betsy DeVos’s group, the American Federation for Children, pushes for vouchers under the guise of it being a “civil rights” issue. Just trust the rightwing to protect the civil rights of poor children. And then there is the Walton family, which gives generously to anyone who promotes vouchers and charters (as well as TFA and KIPP and Rhee). And of course, the hedge fund managers. These are the 1%. They don’t have any use for public education. They use their vast resources to undermine the public sector and to advance the cause of privatization.

 

Categories Corporate Reformers, Pennsylvania, Privatization, Vouchers

Most Charters Avoid Students with Special Needs

By dianeravitch
August 21, 2012 //
47

We have seen this story again and again. A lawsuit against the charters in New Orleans and the District of Columbia filed on behalf of children with disabilities. A charter school in Minneapolis that literally pushed out 40 children with special needs, part of a pattern in which the nation’s largest charter chain–the Gulen-affiliated schools–keep their test scores high by excluding students with disabilities. Study after study showing that charters take fewer children with disabilities. Even a federal study by the GAO documenting that charter schools have a smaller proportion of children with special needs, to which the relevant federal official responded with a yawn and a promise to look into it someday.

And now the AP has documented the widespread practice, in which charters take fewer students with special needs, take those with the mildest disabilities, and harm the public schools that are expected to educate a disproportionate share of the neediest, most expensive to educate children.

As this movement, this industry, continues to grow, aided by lavish federal and foundation funding, abetted by a thriving for-profit sector, we must ask the same questions again and again: What is the end game? Are charters becoming enclaves for those who want to avoid “those children”? Will we one day have a dual school system for haves and have-nots? Will our public school system become a dumping ground for those unwanted by the charters?

And why is the U.S. Department of Education not asking these questions?

Categories Charter Schools, Corporate Reformers, Duncan, Arne, Education Reform, Special Education, U.S. Department of Education, US Education

Removing the Mask From Reform in Bridgeport, CT

By dianeravitch
August 20, 2012 //
8

Thanks to Linda from CT for this article:

Connecticut Post

 

Removing the mask from Bridgeport education reformers

Published 5:00 p.m., Wednesday, July 18, 2012

  • There is always more than meets the eye, particularly when a mask camouflages a hidden agenda.

Excel Bridgeport, a new education reform group, describes itself in flattering terms on its website. It announces:

“1. We want every child in Bridgeport to have the opportunity for a world class education;

2. We build knowledge in our community;

3. We empower community members to be leaders;

4. We partner with the district and hold them accountable.”

Who can disagree with the noble and laudable activity of empowering parents, building knowledge and accountability?

However, a look behind the mask reveals a different and disturbing reality.

Empowering parents, building knowledge and improving urban schools are not new ideas. Twenty years ago, the Bridgeport Futures Collaborative, a Casey-funded initiative, successfully established parent training programs. When Bridgeport Futures ceased operation, parent training was carried on by the Bridgeport Child Advocacy Coalition (BCAC), which continues to the present day. Also, groups such as the Child Guidance Center worked tirelessly to help parents remain involved in their children’s education.

Excel Bridgeport recently celebrated its one-year anniversary. It wants to head the parade of education reformers and consign established organizations to a subordinate role.

Anyone following the “reform efforts” currently ravaging the Bridgeport school district must have noticed the ubiquitous presence of Excel Bridgeport staff at government meetings. The executive director spoke before the City Council regarding charter revision. She urged the City Council to approve the mayor’s proposal for an appointed board of education rather than one elected by the people.

I guess that is how we empower parents.

The executive director addressed a recent Board of Education meeting urging the board to extend Superintendent Paul Vallas‘ contract, while heaping obsequious praise on him.

A quick look behind the Excel mask reveals the reason for the praise and source of the tentacles reaching into the City of Bridgeport under the banner of Excel.

Excel was incorporated on Dec. 15, 2010, by Meghan Lowney, of Fairfield. Official records reveal that Nathan Snow and Lee Bollert are also incorporators. Bollert is a member of Mayor Finch’s staff.

According to the website, in addition to Lowney and Snow, the current Excel board of directors includes the following individuals: Jonathan Hayes, Joel Green, Robert Francis, Carl HortonJr. and Joseph McGee.

Lowney serves in multiple capacities in and around Fairfield County. She is the principal of a consulting company, known as the Ripple Effect, executive director of the Zoom Foundation, aSteve Mandel-funded foundation, and the director of an entity known as Leadership Development Roundtable in Fairfield.

Those of you familiar with the state takeover of the city’s elected Board of Education on July 5, 2011, will recognize her as the “conspirator-in-chief” of the coup that led to the illegal removal of a democratically elected Board of Education by the state.

The now-infamous email exchange circulated among state officials began on Jan. 11, 2011, with an email introduction by Alex Johnston, the former head of ConnCan and education reformer extraordinaire, to Lowney and Allan Taylor, the chair of the state Board of Education.

In her first email to Taylor, Lowney confided, “A small group of us are strategizing a Bridgeport charter revision campaign that would result in mayoral control of the schools. This is a confidential conversation of course.”

So much for building knowledge in the community!

Nathan Snow currently serves as the president of the board of directors. He is the paid executive director of the Connecticut chapter of Teach for America, a major player in the national education reform effort of the rich and famous.

Bridgeporters will remember that he ran unsuccessfully for a seat on the Board of Education in 2009. After the election results were final, he set about trying to clandestinely defeat through bureaucratic machinations those who had defeated him in a free and open election.

Robert Francis, a shoreline resident, is a nonprofit guru and serves as the executive director of RYASAP. The school takeover has proven to be very advantageous for RYASAP; it has just entered into a long-term contract with the Vallas-led Board of Education, a contract negotiated before an elected board consisting exclusively of Bridgeport residents can scrutinize it.

So much for transparency and accountability!

Also on the board of directors is Joseph McGee, a former employee of People’s Bank and sometimes referred to as the Paul Timpanelli of the Stamford business community.

Still hidden behind another mask is the funding source for Excel, although one could surmise that billionaire hedge fund operator Steve Mandel and the Lone Pine Foundation are actively involved.

Shakespeare said that the entire world is a stage and all that glitters is not gold.

Watch carefully, as the masks are removed in the next act of the Excel production!

Carmen L. Lopez, of Bridgeport, is a retired Superior Court judge.

Read more: http://www.ctpost.com/opinion/article/Removing-the-mask-from-Bridgeport-education-3717349.php#ixzz23o2FmdvW

Categories Connecticut, Corporate Reformers, Education Industry, Education Reform
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