We have had animated discussions on this blog about whether the market model works for public education, whether parents should be smart shoppers, when business practices make sense (and don’t).
I just read an interesting piece on salon.com that covers some of the same grounds but offers some useful insights about why the market model does not work for public education.
Whenever I hear a corporate reformer complaining about teachers, I will think of Laura Recco of Cleveland. And it won’t be because of her students’ test scores. It will be because she was a brave and selfless woman who gave her life to save her children.
A reader passed along this message. Since I too am a member of StudentsFirst, I am surprised that I did not get this email. Readers may recall that I unknowingly became a member of StudentsFirst when I signed a petition at Change.org supporting teachers or calling for higher pay for teachers. The petition did not mention StudentsFirst, and I learned about my “membership” only when contacted by someone from Change.org. See my post about it here.
I am glad to see that StudentsFirst is not offering its members prizes to post on this blog (yet).
From: Catherine Robinson <crobinson@studentsfirst.org>
Date: July 26, 2012 9:58:12 PM EDT
To: Catherine Robinson <crobinson@studentsfirst.org>
Subject: rapid responses needed – and a contest!Hi all,
I’m going to be in Orlando all next week for the KIPP Conference. If you’d like to meet up and discuss ways you can get more involved in our movement, please let me know!Also, starting right now, there will be a monthly contest for the best rapid response. The more comments you leave on blog posts, the more times you can enter! Post a polite and persuasive pro-reform comment and email me the link so I can check it out.That’s all you have to do!At the end of the month (August 26th at midnight) I will announce the winner. Not only will that winner get a gift card to the restaurant or store of choice, but he or she will also be promoting the cause of real and transformative change in public schools! What could be better?Here are some links for your review:(Regarding Polk County’s at-risk charter schools) http://www.theledger.com/article/20120725/NEWS/120729506?tc=arI look forward to reading your comments!Have a wonderful weekend,Catherine
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A reader reminded me of a post by blogger Jonathan Pelto about Hartford, Connecticut, that shows how districts can “game the system” to meet testing target.
And that reminded me that Jon Pelto is someone you should know about. Subscribe to his blog if you want an insider’s view of education reform in Connecticut.
Pelto was a legislator for several years and cares passionately about public education. He knows how to follow the money and watches for conflict of interest and hidden lobbyists.
He has written many posts in opposition to Governor Dannel Malloy’s alliance with the hedge fund managers’ group called ConnCAN (now operating in other states as 50CAN). Pelto has called out all the players in the corporate camp, including the other Wall Street group called Democrats for Education Reform, the charter chain Achievement First, Michelle Rhee’s StudentsFirst, and Teach for America, all of which took a role in shaping and pushing Governor Malloy’s “reform” bill to funnel more money to charters than to the state’s poorest districts and to strip teachers of tenure. It’s all “for the children,” remember. Malloy said he would be happy to see more “teaching to the test,” and also said the achievement gap in his state made it necessary to take away teacher tenure. This is absurd; Connecticut has a large achievement gap because it has outsized income inequality, with large concentrations of urban poverty and intense concentrations of extreme wealth. But let’s not talk about that.
Pelto has been critical of State Commissioner Stefan Pryor, who was a founder of a Connecticut charter school, Amistad Academy, and chairman of its board for five years. That charter school is the flagship in the Achievement First charter chain. Pelto has been fearless in criticizing the claims of the powerful Achievement First chain, showing what a small percentage of ELLs it enrolls compared to urban districts in the state, and pointing out how Malloy’s budget showered far more money on this wealthy charter chain than on the state’s neediest students.
Pelto has posted several times about what happened in Hartford during the reign of Superintendent Steven J. Adamowski.Adamowski was brought in to raise achievement, and he did get the numbers up. Here is his account from his own blog. Some school superintendents ward off charter schools, but not Adamowski. He hasworked closely with the politically powerful charter chain, Achievement First.After his tenure in Hartford, he was appointed as “special master” to run the schools of Windham, Connecticut. There, his moves have been controversial, such as cutting back on early childhood education and AP classes.
Not surprisingly, Pelto has been critical of Adamowski’s close ties to the charter school industry and to conservative groups like NCTQ. Pelto repeatedly exposed the ties between Governor Malloy and corporate reformers, as well as the lobbying activities of Michelle Rhee’s StudentsFirst. Pelto has written scathing commentaries about the state takeover of Bridgeport and about Paul Vallas’s stewardship of the district. Pelto is one of the few commentators who has criticized the “reformers” in Connecticut for ignoring the impact of poverty on educational achievement. Please readthis.
Pelto has a dogged devotion to the facts and a well-honed sense of moral outrage: this article is the best exemplification of that combination, where he lambastes the state’s urban mayors for endorsing a budget that shortchanges their own city’s children.
Yesterday a judge in California ruled in a case involving the state’s so-called “parent trigger” law that parents who signed a petition to convert their school to a charter would not be permitted to rescind their signatures. They could choose to sign, but they could not change their mind afterwards.
This was a law passed in 2010 by the legislature to allow parents at a low-performing school to seize control of their school, fire the staff, and hire a charter operator to run the school.
In fact, the law was a stealth tactic by charter advocates to gain a larger market share by duping parents.
This is an excellent summary of what happened, written by San Francisco parent advocate and journalist Caroline Grannan.
An organization called Parent Revolution, funded by the Gates Foundation, the Broad Foundation and the Walton Foundation, has led the “parent trigger” efforts.
It has sent paid organizers into two communities in California to gather signatures. Both ended in legal limbo as supporters and opponents challenged the validity of the signatures.
In the second of the two districts, the targeted school was Desert Trails in Adelanto, where Parent Revolution circulated two petitions. One called for improvements in the two schools, the other called for the conversion to a charter. When only the petition to convert to a charter was presented to the local school board, the battle was on.
As the wrangling intensified, a number of parents asked to have their names taken off the petition. They had changed their mind. They did not want their school converted to a charter.
The judge ruled yesterday that they were not permitted to take their name off the petition.
This was exciting for charter advocates, even winning them a celebratory editorial in Rupert Murdoch’s Wall Street Journal.
The Wall Street Journal exulted:
The ruling effectively hands Desert Trails to the parents, ordering the district out of their way as the judge says they can “immediately begin the process of soliciting and selecting charter school proposals.” This represents a potentially revolutionary power shift. For all the PTA meetings and solemn assurances from superintendents and union leaders that parent input into public schools is sacred, the ability of parents to force change has typically been nil.
The editorial sounds as though the Journal joined Occupy Wall Street and would be equally happy if disgruntled tenants seized control of public housing or other public facilities. Somehow, I doubt it.
There are complicating factors to the ruling. One is the inevitable appeal: If parents sign a petition, why should they not be free to take their name off? Is their choice only for one time, never for the future?
And the ruling ignores the clear language of the law, which does allow parents to remove their names from a petition: The language in the “Final Statement of Reasons” on the Parent Empowerment Act states, “Nothing in these regulations precludes a parent/guardian from withdrawing his/her signature from a petition at any time,” according to the Victorville Daily Press, the local daily newspaper.
And the other, as pointed out in a recent Los Angeles Times editorial, is that charter operators have lost their appetite for taking control of low-performing schools. They much prefer to start new schools, where they can select the students. This increases their odds of producing high test scores.
Florida parents will be watching this controversy closely, as Jeb Bush and Michelle Rhee and ALEC will be back next year, after losing on the “parent trigger” this past spring. The united opposition of Florida parents stopped the move to create another way to convert public schools to private management.
One of the much-hyped new ideas of our time is the “School of One.” This is a new use of technology in the classroom.
It was declared a success in 2009 by Time magazine before it was ever implemented anywhere.
It was created by TFA alum, Broad-trained, ex-Edison, ex-NYC DOE executive Joel Rose and implemented on a pilot basis in the New York City public schools.
There are two different stories embedded in The School of One.
There is the story of the business of education, and School of One is a cutting-edge venture in edu-business.
The other is whether it is pedagogically sound. On this count, Gary Rubinstein has posted an informative review.
Here is a blog that says that a school with low test scores is like a failed restaurant.
We know what happens when a restaurant fails.
It closes. It goes bankrupt. The hungry customers go somewhere else.
He is an entrepreneur who is now in the business of reforming schools.
Here is his analysis:
Struggling schools are like failed restaurants. The kitchen staff are the educators. Maybe the chef is the chapter union leader. The restaurant owner/manger is the school administration. Customers are the kids. And Eli Broad or one of the education agencies he funds is Gordon Ramsey. He comes in with honest, straightforward observations, and tells you what’s going wrong. Sometimes it’s the chef that’s the problem and the management is too disengaged to fix it. Sometimes it’s the management, inhibiting the talent of a bunch of great cooks. In most cases, the restaurant is neglected – dirty and infested. Disgusting actually, especially if you look in the secret places, behind and underneath things, as LA Unified knows all too well.
Well, gosh, wouldn’t you be thrilled to have Eli Broad come to your school and tell you how to fix your problems? Wouldn’t you want to have a guy who made billions in the home-building and insurance industry tell you what’s wrong and what to do?
Or are you just a lousy chef working in a rat-infested building without the sense to do anything about it?
The William Penn Foundation in Philadelphia paid for the services of the Boston Consulting Group (the group that spawned Bain).
BCG recommended privatization of a large number of schools in the city, allegedly to save money. But as we know, charters don’t save money and on average, they don’t get better results. But they do manage to compete with public schools for limited public funding.
Now we learn that the foundation was not content to bring in the hired guns of BCG, it also put $160,000-180,000 into PR to promote the recommendations to the citizens and legislators.
These guys will do whatever they can to make sure public education does not survive in Philadelphia.
To whom is the William Penn Foundation accountable? Who elected them to rearrange the lives of the people of their city?
Make no mistake. The privatization movement is in full cry.
There are big profits to be made in the education industry.
Rupert Murdoch’s corporation just split into two divisions, with one focused on education and publishing, headed by Joel Klein.
Says the story: Mr. Klein said being a part of the spunoff publishing company (which would include the troubled British tabloid The Sun) could help ease concerns among educators.
I don’t know about you, but I don’t want any data about my grandchildren in Murdoch’s data base.
According to the story linked above, Rupert Murdoch tweeted: “Only way to restore American dream and have real meritocracy is fix terrible public K-12 education.”
And of course, Murdoch and Klein know how to fix it.
Trust them.
I wish someone would tell them that NAEP scores are at their highest point in history, in reading and in math, for grades four and eight, for whites, blacks, Hispanics, and Asians.
But they wouldn’t listen.
They have a business to run.
The New York Daily News (owned by billionaire Mort Zuckerman, who also owns U.S. News & World Report) often runs editorials applauding the “reforms” of the Bloomberg administration. Its editorials are anti-union, anti-teacher, and consistently supportive of the policy of closing schools that have low test scores.
But the New York Daily News has excellent reporters who don’t follow the editorial line. They just report the news. And the story today is stunning.
The headline summarizes the story: “Bloomberg’s New Schools Have Failed Thousands of City Students: Did More Poorly on State Reading Tests than Older Schools with Similar Poverty Rates.”
This analysis shows the abject failure of the policy that has been the centerpiece of the Bloomberg reforms for the past decade.
Closing schools and replacing them with new schools is also the centerpiece of the Obama-Duncan “turnaround” strategy.
Here is an excerpt from the news story. Note that the grandmother of a student in Brooklyn makes more sense than the six-figure bureaucrats who run the New York City Department of Education. Tanya King of Brooklyn for Chancellor!
…When The News examined 2012 state reading test scores for 154 public elementary and middle schools that have opened since Mayor Bloomberg took office, nearly 60% had passing rates that were lower than older schools with similar poverty rates.
The new schools also showed poor results in the city’s letter-grade rating system, which uses a complicated formula to compare schools with those that have similar demographics.
Of 133 new elementary and middle schools that got letter grades last year, 15% received D’s and F’s — far more than the city average, where just 10% of schools got the rock-bottom grades.
“It’s crazy,” said Tanya King, who helped wage a losing battle to save Brooklyn’s Academy of Business and Community Development, where her grandson was a student.
The school opened in 2005, then closed in 2012.
Instead of closing struggling schools and replacing them with something else that doesn’t work, King says, the city should help with extra resources to save the existing schools.
“You have the same children in the school,” she said. “What’s going to be the difference? Put in the services that are going to make the school better.”
Her grandson Donnovan Hicks, 11, will be transferred next fall for the seventh-grade into another Bloomberg-created school, Brooklyn’s Peace Academy, where just 13% passed the state reading exams this spring.
