Archives for category: Corporate Reformers
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Oh No! I Am a Member of StudentsFirst

By dianeravitch
June 21, 2012 //
23

After I blogged about Change.org dropping Michelle Rhee and Jonah Edelman, I got an email from a representative of Change.org asking me to explain its policy on my blog. I told him my concern was not with its policy, but with the deception involved in signing people up as members of an organization they did not wish to join. On our third exchange of emails, he informed me that I was a member of Students First. He said his records showed that I had signed one of its petitions a year ago. He gave me a website where I could view my member profile, but I was unwilling to click on the link for fear that doing so would reconfirm my “membership.” Maybe the second click would put me in a category of “active” membership.

This is horrifying. I never knowingly signed to join Michelle Rhee’s Students First.

When Rhee boasts of her huge membership, she is counting people like me who were snared without their knowledge. She is using my name to inflate her numbers.

This is deceptive practice. It is fraudulent. There ought to be a way to bring a complaint to the Federal Trade Commission or some other watchdog agency to protest the deceptive capture and misuse of my name and that of many others.

I choose the organizations I join with care and forethought. I didn’t choose to belong to Students First.

Michelle Rhee, take my name off your membership list!

How can I do it without clicking the website of the organization that entrapped me? Is there a place to click that says “remove my name?”

On a happier note, a reader informed me that a Chicago teacher named Jen Johnson started the ball rolling with a campaign called “Change.org: Stop Supporting Union-Busters” Petition.”

We must celebrate every small victory. We must remember that lone individuals can make a difference.

Change begins with one person.

Sometimes change begins with one writer, like Thomas Paine, or one speaker, like Martin Luther King Jr.

Change begins with one and then multiplies. Many people signed the petition, others wrote. I mentioned Aaron Krager in the earlier post. Another post may have played a part in changing Change.org.

Diane

Categories Corporate Reformers, Education Reform, Rhee, Michelle, Stand for Children, StudentsFirst

Pearsonizing Our Children

By dianeravitch
June 7, 2012 //
3

On Tuesday, I posted a blog at Bridging Differences (Education Week) called “The Pearsonizing of the American Mind.”

The title was a reference to Allan Bloom’s bestselling book of the 1980s, The Closing of the American Mind. His book referred to the insidious ways that popular culture interferes with the goals of liberal education. My article described the ways in which one giant corporation was taking control of the education “industry,” through testing, online instruction, ownership of the GED program, online charter schools, and proprietary control of instructional materials for the Common Core. Truly, the reach of Pearson across all of American education is astonishing.

As often happens, I got many wonderful comments. This one came from a regular reader who (from the moniker) is a chemistry teacher:

Yes, our focus has to be on the “locus of control”. Pearson and Gates goal in testing isn’t to improve education outcomes; it’s to increase market control. For corporate reformers, holding districts, schools, teachers and children (yes, children!) “accountable” means having the legal power to take control of them, and run them for their own purposes. Yes, we’ve politically given actual legal authority over our children’s minds to the same monopolists who crashed our finance system. The price isn’t just the damage of the testing, though. Now that they own our public schools, the corporatists have removed many unprofitable costs. Brick and mortar buildings, breathing teachers, playgrounds and libraries, are now all hopelessly out of the reach of many children. With the advent of the common core and the “revolution” of online delivery of proprietary learning materials, our children can sit home in front of a screen, not even moving around the room, and be assessed by computer programs aligned to the one true Core. We’ll have Pearsonized their minds, their lives, and their bodies. Here is one true example of the cost we contemplate: “She’s pretty typical. She is a very sedentary child, has been for a long time, really has no experience with activity, no way to think about being active. She’s relatively socially isolated, doesn’t really have very many social opportunities. She’s homeschooled. She has a number of medical problems, in addition to her diabetes.” http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/health/jan-june12/diabetes_06-06.html

We must worry about what we are doing to our children, our society and our future as we drift along into a world we did not make and do not want.

Diane

Categories Corporate Reformers, Gates Foundation, Bill Gates, Pearson, Testing

Was I Mean to Eli Broad?

By dianeravitch
June 4, 2012 //
15

This morning my former colleague Mike Petrilli at the conservative Thomas B. Fordham Institute wrote a paean of praise in honor of billionaire Eli Broad. He began it by saying:

It wouldn’t be super-hard to poke fun at Eli Broad. (Diane Ravitch did a mean-spirited version of that when she called him and his peers “The Billionaire Boys Club.”) Here’s a man who made his fortune  building tract housing in the ‘burbs,  who micromanages grants down to the penny, a man who names more than a few things after himself (the Broad Prize, the Broad Fellows, and his latest museum project, simply The Broad). He’s the 1 percent of the 1 percent of the 1 percent, and not ashamed of it, either.

I was surprised to hear Mike say that it was “mean-spirited” of me to refer to him and Bill Gates and the Walton Family Foundation as members of “the Billionaire Boys’ Club.” They are billionaires and they are guys. So I wrote Mike and asked him if I had said anything that was inaccurate, and he said, no, nothing inaccurate, just mean-spirited.
I admit I didn’t realize that people as powerful as Eli Broad (“the 1 percent of the 1 percent of the 1 percent”) were so sensitive to criticism. If I offended him, I am truly sorry. I don’t aim to offend.
But I hope that he will give some thought to how his actions affect the lives of other people, people he will never meet. Certainly he is not sensitive to the pain that he causes parents and communities when he sends out graduates of his Broad Superintendents’ Academy to close down their neighborhood schools. No matter how much they cry, he doesn’t hear them.
And he doesn’t give a hoot when parents and educators complain that the people he trains have an unpleasant habit of taking control of the state or district political machinery and short-circuiting democratic control of public education. For a chilling reminder of the Broad methods, read this account of a letter from a former employee of the New Jersey Department of Education.
I wouldn’t want Eli Broad to think I was mean-spirited in describing him and his foundation. I didn’t intend to be mean at his expense. In turn, I wish he would be sensitive to the feelings of parents and educators who love their local public school and don’t want anyone to turn it into a charter run by outsiders. I know it is hard for extremely wealthy people (“the 1 percent of the 1 percent of the 1 percent”) to put themselves in the shoes of the “little people,” the people who are pulling down $40,000 or $50,000 or even $70,000 a year. It’s hard for a triple 1-percenter to imagine why such people care so much about their school or their job or their career or having a decent pension for their old age. But, Mr. Broad, if you should read this, please remember: They have feelings too.
Diane
Categories Broad Foundation, Corporate Reformers, Gates Foundation, Bill Gates, Ravitch, Diane, Walton Foundation

The Silence of the Reformers

By dianeravitch
June 2, 2012 //
8

In district after district, budget cuts are decimating the curriculum. Teachers are laid off, programs are cut, class sizes are rising, libraries are closing.

This is insane. We are supposed to be in the midst of a great education “reform” movement, but for reasons that are not obvious, the alleged reformers never say anything about budget cuts. They don’t care if the public schools are devastated. They claim to care about education, but budget cuts don’t seem to cross their radar screen.

The more they are silent, the more it demonstrates that they don’t care about education; they don’t even care about children. They care about power. They care about gaining control of public schools and of the funding stream that goes to public schools.

So, those who are silent reveal their fundamental beliefs. The more that public schools are impaired, the better the case for privatization.

In fact, we can discern a train of events. First, the reformers’ favorite experts assure us that we spend way too much on education. Second, the message is amplified by public figures like Bill Gates, even Arne Duncan (remember his claim at the conservative American Enterprise Institute that reduced budgets are “the new normal”?). Third, public schools feel the devastation of the budget cuts as class sizes rise to 35 then 40 or more; as the arts are eliminated; as libraries close; as facilities are untended because custodians were dismissed. In the final act of this play, the reformers step forward to save the children from their “failing” schools.

Those who claim to be reformers should speak out against the budget cuts or lose all credibility. If they do not, we will know them for what they are and we will know what they want.

Diane

Categories Budget Cuts, Corporate Reformers

Don’t Believe the Romney Hype

By dianeravitch
June 1, 2012 //
1

The Romney campaign released its education policy paper last week, which included a number of factual inaccuracies.

One of them, which we are likely to hear more of during the course of the campaign, is that Romney presided over a dramatic improvement in academic achievement in Massachusetts while he was governor. In fact, during his time in office, as Jeb Bush states in the introduction to the Romney plan, Massachusetts’ students were recognized as first in the nation in fourth and eighth grade tests of math and reading.

He refers, of course, to the National Assessment of Educational Progress, which has been testing state-level performance in those grades since 1992.

Romney’s plan states that no new money is needed to improve education. What is needed, he believes, is school choice: vouchers, charters, online learning, tutoring, in short, a free market of choices.

Mitt Romney had the good fortune to be elected as governor of Massachusetts in 2003. He was in that office until 2007.

Be it noted that the Massachusetts Education Reform Act (MERA) was signed into law by Governor William Weld in 1993. It doubled state funding of education. It established foundation funding for every district in the state, with more funding for those that needed it. It authorized the creation of curriculum frameworks and tests, as well as graduation requirements and tests for incoming teachers. Massachusetts added new funding for early childhood education and professional development.

There are three salient points to be made about the Massachusetts reform:

1. It was successful: Massachusetts is indeed at the top of NAEP in fourth and eighth grades, in reading and math.

2. It was expensive: state funding increased from $1.3 billion to $2.6 billion from 1993 to 2000.

3. Mitt Romney had nothing to do with its success.

Diane

Categories Charter Schools, Corporate Reformers, Education Reform, Romney, Mitt

Musical Chairs at DC Think Tanks

By dianeravitch
May 31, 2012 //
1

This may seem to be inside baseball for most of my regular readers, but it is nonetheless worth noting.

The DC think tanks exercise undue influence on the national media, because they are located in our nation’s capitol, and the media assumes it is worth paying attention to people who spend full time thinking. Unfortunately, almost every DC think tank is funded by the Gates Foundation, and they seem to think the same way about education issues. The one consistent outlier is the Economic Policy Institute, which is not Gates-funded and which consistently tries to figure out why most people in this country are left behind when corporate interests are put first.

So, it is of more than passing interest that corporate reformer Kevin Carey of Education Sector has just moved to the New America Foundation, which until now had not been a DC player on education issues. He brings some of the Ed Sector staff with him, enabling New America to join with other voices for corporate reform and to get additional funding from advocates for corporate-style policies.

And of even greater interest is that Education Sector, once thought of as centrist, or at least center-right, has now shifted decisively to the right as privatization advocate John Chubb steps up to be interim CEO and Hoover Institution economist Margaret (Macke) Raymond leads the board of directors. Also prominent in the Ed Sector hierarchy is a DFER executive from Illinois. Ed Sector can now reliably be viewed not only as a cheerleader for education reform (which it always was), but as an usually  strong voice for privatization.

Diane

Categories Corporate Reformers

Who Are These New “Advocacy” Groups?

By dianeravitch
May 30, 2012 //
1

Education Week recently published a series of articles about the new “advocacy” groups that are reshaping education policy.

The series is well worth reading. But do so, I suggest, by first reading Chapter 10 of my book The Death and Life of the Great American School System, as well as the update at the end of the paperback edition. Chapter 10 is called “The Billionaire Boys Club.” It is about the three biggest foundations in the education field: the Gates Foundation, the Walton Foundation, and the Broad Foundation. Over time, the funding priorities of these foundations have begun to converge around charters and teacher evaluation as the keys to school reform. Walton adds vouchers to the mix, but otherwise shares the agenda. The agenda looks amazingly like the Mitt Romney policy agenda, i.e., the Bush education agenda, the Milton Friedman choice agenda.

The new advocacy groups are not disparate. They are critics of public education. They think it is a failure. They are critics of teachers’ unions. They oppose seniority and tenure. In fact, they don’t think teachers should have any job protections whatever. They think teachers are paid too much. They take test scores as the ultimate measure of education quality. They don’t question the validity or reliability of standardized tests. They think that high test scores equals high achievement. They don’t like local school boards because they slow down the rush to charters.

What do they favor? They favor charters. Some, not all, favor vouchers. They favor privatization. They favor the removal of teacher certification. They want teachers’ compensation tied to student test scores. They favor merit pay. They favor firing teachers whose students don’t get higher scores. They favor closing schools whose students get low scores. They favor No Child Left Behind and Race to the Top. They like mayoral control. They have no objection to for-profit organizations taking over schools or providing online instruction.

The new advocacy organizations differ around the edges, but mostly they are pushing an agenda that will privatize public education and de-professionalize teaching.

Diane

Categories Corporate Reformers, Education Reform

Yuck: US DOE Supports For-profit Entrepreneurs

By dianeravitch
May 20, 2012 //
4

Yesterday I engaged in an unexpected exchange on Twitter with Justin Hamilton, who is press secretary to Secretary of Education Arne Duncan.

It started after I retweeted a blog by master-teacher Nancy Flanagan. Nancy’s blog took issue with a listing of the up-and-coming stars of American education, which focused heavily on the entrepreneurial sector and forgot teachers. Nancy listed some of the outspoken teachers who are emerging stars in the profession, like Julie Cavanaugh and Brian Jones, two New York City teachers who starred in “The Inconvenient Truth Behind ‘Waiting for Superman.'”

When I retweeted Nancy’s blog, I asked “Who will transform education: entrepreneurs or educators?”

I don’t have the exact sequence, but Jersey Jazzman (one of my favorite bloggers) recapitulated the tweets and blogs here: http://jerseyjazzman.blogspot.com/2012/05/weasels-in-department-of-education.html?spref=tw.

Before long, Hamilton responded to my tweet by saying that we should not choose between entrepreneurs and educators, but should count on both of them to transform education.

We then had a lively exchange, in which I made clear, in tweet after tweet, that my reference to “entrepreneurs” referred specifically to the for-profit education industry, which seeks to get rich by coming up with new ventures in education. In our twitter exchange, I referred specifically to the for-profit charter industry (most charters in Michigan for-profit) and also to the for-profit cyber charters,which make big profits and get poor results. I asked why Secretary Duncan has never spoken out against the depredations of this industry, which uses lobbyists to buy access to children.

Hamilton responded with an ad hominem tweet, saying that I was an entrepreneur because I get paid to make speeches and to write books.

That seems to be the default position of the U.S. Department of Education, to go personal when they can’t defend what they are doing. A year ago, Secretary Duncan claimed that “Diane is in denial” after I debunked his claims about miraculous turnarounds that happen by firing the staff. (See my earlier post “Psychologizing Female Critics”).

My takeaway from our exchange: the US Department of Education welcomes for-profit entrepreneurs and will never turn its back on them, no matter how paltry their results or how constricted their definition of “education.” The advance of corporate greed into the education sector, in my view, has nothing to recommend it. Corporations will seek to replace teachers with computers, will shave costs wherever possible, and will deliver a product that is as cheaply produced as possible in order to maximize profits. I fail to understand what that has to do with education, as I understand the meaning of the term.

Diane

Categories Corporate Reformers, Duncan, Arne, Education Reform, U.S. Department of Education

The Failure of Corporate Reform (2)

By dianeravitch
May 15, 2012 //
2

It turns about that Houston has been awarding test-based bonuses for years. It turns about that tying test scores to scores has not been good for teachers or students. It turns out that the ratings jump around from year to year. They are inaccurate, unreliable, and unstable. Value-added assessment, as everyone recognizes, creates massive pressure to raise scores on standardized tests of questionable value. The more pressure, the less reliable the scores. The more pressure, the more teaching to the test and the more cheating.  (http://nepc.colorado.edu/blog/houston-you-have-problem)

Value-added assessment is inherently incapable of producing better education because it does not measure better education. It only measures test scores. Higher test scores are a byproduct of better education. If you aim for the scores, you miss the target. The target is deeper understanding, greater knowledge, more thoughtful writing, more careful observation, a greater love of learning. The very act of measuring destroys the target instead of bringing it closer.

Categories Corporate Reformers, Houston, Testing, Texas

The Failure of Corporate Reform (continued)

By dianeravitch
May 15, 2012 //
1

The current era of school reform has nothing to do with improving education or helping kids and everything to do with imposing business values on schools, specifically, (1) subjecting schools to measurements that distort their goals and (2) privatizing public schools so as to disable the public responsibility for public education.

This project has many tentacles, such as opening privately managed charter schools, evaluating teachers based on the test scores of their students, merit pay, vouchers, etc. It all boils down to the same basic goal: to set unrealistic targets for school performance and to use those metrics to advance privatization.

The corporate reforms fail and fail and fail and fail, and eventually their unending failure will break through to the larger public.

Just yesterday, Jay Matthews of the Washington Post, who has dependably supported the corporate reforms, explained that he no longer believes that it is usefl to evaluate individual teachers by the test scores of their students. (http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/class-struggle/post/why-rating-teachers-by-test-scores-wont-work/2012/05/13/gIQAJb5lMU_blog.html). Jay now understands that this doesn’t work. The one-year models don’t work. Family income has a bigger effect on test scores than teachers. He still sort of believes in value-added assessment, because over three years, he thinks, you can identify the best and the worst teachers. But as Jay probably knows, states are hanging single-number ratings around the necks of teachers that discourage all teachers, including the very best ones. Teachers feel demeaned when all their hard work turned into a number based on their students’ test scores.

Note to Jay: No other nation in the world is evaluating their teachers by the test scores of their students. Not in the short run and not in the long run. Other nations have education systems led by educators, not politicians and businessmen. They understand that test scores reflect the students’ efforts, as mediated by many influences, such as the resources of the school, family income, and the many teachers with whom the students have interacted. It’s tough to disentangle those influences and pin them on one teacher. Teachers know that. Businessmen and politicians don’t.

I hope Jay has read the reports of the Metlife Survey of the American Teacher and the Scholastic-Gates report on what teachers want. They express profound disregard for the numbers that reformers hold dear. How will we replace the hundreds of thousands of teachers who feel contempt, rather than respect? Jay is absolutely right at the end of his column when he writes about the importance of teamwork. Teachers don’t see themselves in competition with the teacher in the next class; they think they are on the same team, working towards common goals. Not higher test scores, but better educated students, more independent persons, more thoughtful citizens. Measure that.

Diane

Categories Corporate Reformers, Teachers and Teaching
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