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John Thompson: What Andrea Gabor Teaches Us, Part 2

By dianeravitch
April 18, 2019 //
5

 

This is the second part of John Thompson’s review of Andrea Gabor’s book, After the Education Wars. 

Gabor analyzes why “Reform” failed and where we go from here.

John Thompson writes:

A first review of Andrea Gabor’s excellent After the Education Wars concentrated on the progressive reforms that should have informed the improvement of New York City schools. Billionaires like Bill Gates and Mike Bloomberg essentially imposed a set of policies that virtually guaranteed “Taylorism,” and turned so many schools into sped-up 21st century versions of Henry Ford’s assembly lines. Gabor then draws on that history to offer advice on how educators can “recover the road not taken.”

https://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/andrea-gabor/after-the-education-wars/

Each of Gabor’s chapters teaches invaluable lessons, but I learned the most from her account of New York City’s lost opportunities. I still would like to learn more about Eric Nadelstern’s efforts to work within the reformers’ system. It’s often speculated that some billionaires now sense that their experiments failed and they now place their faith in “personalized,” online instruction. But they still seem to misunderstand Nadelstern’s experiences and ignore his warning, “‘Virtual communities don’t raise children, people do.’”

Although the nuances of education reform in Massachusetts are often lost on true believers in high stakes testing, Gabor shows how the policies that actually worked in Boston and Brockton were actually much closer to New York’s progressive reforms than the test and punish mentality which challenges them. First, Massachusetts improved its schools through a well-funded, well-planned, openly deliberated, and patient process. Its accountability test, the MCAS, was transparent and iterative. Its graduation targets were only set at a sophomore level, and schools were allowed time for preparation. Individual teachers weren’t held accountable for test results and charters were not used to scale up a battle between traditional public schools and choice schools, with test scores as the ammunition.

In both Brockton High School and the very different schools in Leander, Tx, critical thinking and literacy were stressed. Both progressive approaches to school improvement were consistent with Edwards Deming’s continuous improvement.

They both believed in group efforts to improve school, and embraced vigorous debate over policy. It wasn’t much of a shock to read about Massachusetts’ efforts to build intrinsic, as opposed to extrinsic, motivation, but it was an especially nice surprise for this Oklahoman to learn about similar efforts in Texas. In my state, we heard plenty about the supposed “Texas Miracle,” where test and punish drove the creation of bogus test score gains. It was a joy, however, to read about Leander’s campaign based on “driving out fear” in order to protect teachers’ autonomy and empower collaborative school improvement.

It was doubly fun to read about a Texas administration which used an I Love Lucy video during its “Culture Day.” Gabor provides this summary of the assembly line where Lucy and her friend Ethel need to pick chocolates, wrap and send them down to the packing room:

A stern supervisor hovers over them. “If one piece of candy gets past you … you’re                                                 fired.

… the assembly line gradually speeds up and the two friends start shoving chocolates they can’t wrap fast enough into their mouths, down the front of their uniforms, and under their caps.

The Lucy and Ethel video clip … has become a Leander metaphor for fear and the systemic havoc it unleashes.

Although the chapters on Massachusetts and Leander mostly stress the ways that the progressive school improvement path was taken, both end on cautionary notes. Massachusetts recently defeated Question 2, but corporate reformers who funded the lifting of the charter school cap still threaten the state’s gains, and the new Texas teacher evaluation law could be a mortal threat to collaboration and trust in Texas.

Then Gabor turned to the alleged New Orleans (NOLA) mass charterization success. NOLA has often been proclaimed as the rare victory which is proof that the concept of accountability-driven, competition-driven reform can improve the education outcomes of poor children of color. Gabor shows, however, the New Orleans’ portfolio model provides another example of how reform has most hurt the poorest children of color. Yes, studies by the Education Research Alliance documented impressive gains for a brief time. But, she notes that it didn’t study high school results or control for no-excuses schools’ pedagogies. The gains occurred when NOLA funding was at its peak, and its Darwinian tactic of counseling out traumatized and disabled children inflated test scores. Moreover, by 2012, New Orleans had between 12,195 to 15,781 disconnected youth, who were out of school and not in a job.

It is now clear that NOLA is another example of reformers’ “self-congratulatory” public relations spin, and another illustration of, “Noisy transformations [that] are often more mirage than miracle.” As in other schools where venture philanthropists claimed transformative gains, its charter schools competed “by skimming off the most engaged parents, [which] it turns nearby public schools into dumping grounds for the most troubled kids.” Once again, reformers produced gains for some by “essentially writing off the bottom 20 to 30 percent of poor children.”

We in Oklahoma City witnessed the same dynamics that Gabor documented. As Gates and other edu-philanthropists were deciding that they needed to “teacher proof” the classroom, a bipartisan Oklahoma City coalition led a collaborative, openly-debated effort to build trusting relationships, and our district began to improve. Then came No Child Left Behind, and as in the systems described by Gabor, our humane, holistic efforts were eventually abandoned. After a superintendent from the Broad Academy doubled down on micromanaging a sped-up assembly line, my once-improving school dropped to the lowest-performing mid-high on Oklahoma. I studied the paper records of my high school students and discovered the reality reformers ignored, but that should inform the next era of school improvement.

Almost without exception, my struggling students had been doing well in school until tragedies hit their families. Cancer and heart disease dwarfed all other causes of failures, and many teachers saw what was happening. When family illnesses caused kids to fall off the instruction assembly line, school didn’t have the resources to help them get on track. Rather than tackle those problems in a collaborative manner, doomed market-driven solutions were forced on us, increasing segregation.

As school choices proliferated, the students who survived multiple traumas (ACEs) were left behind in schools serving neighborhoods with extreme concentrations of generational poverty. Those schools suffered the most from high stakes testing conducted in an aligned and paced, worksheet-driven curriculum. My students were acutely aware that powerful adults had fought an intense battle over their schools, and that they were lab rats in an experiment that turned them into drill-and-kill factories.

So, what should guide the next reform era? First, we can build on points where most people agree, such as the hard-won conclusion that “standardized tests have no place in kindergarten.” And we may be getting to the point where nearly all sides agree that schools need better funding.

Gabor ends with praise of David Kirp and the early education reforms, and the team effort to improve New Jersey’s Union City. Rather than seek better, quantitative clubs and socio-engineer the building of “a better teacher,” we should return to the promising path of peer review teacher evaluations. And as Gabor repeatedly explains, the next era’s school should be founded on trusting, collaborative, and respectful relationships.

Categories Accountability, Corporate Reformers, Education Industry, Privatization, Testing

John Thompson: What Andrea Gabor Teaches Us, Part 1

By dianeravitch
April 17, 2019 //
7
John Thompson, who recently retired as a teacher in Oklahoma, here reviews Andrea Gabor’s fine book, After the Education Wars. His review appears in two parts. He is interested in Gabor’s critique of why “reform” failed and where we go next.
He writes:
We are near the end of the 21st century’s second decade, and some fervent corporate school reformers finally seem to be understanding that their experiment turned an unconscionable percentage of schools into sped-up versions of a Model T assembly line. We need a new era of humane, holistic school improvement. A first step is reading and discussing Andrea Gabor’s After the Education Wars.  Now that corporate reform failed, Gabor explains, we must learn the lessons of history and “recover the road not taken.”

https://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/andrea-gabor/after-the-education-wars/

The progressive reformers who preceded the corporate reformers of the last generation operated in a manner that was consistent with the “continuous improvement” philosophy of Edwards Deming. As Gabor and Deming explain about schools and other sectors, “Variation is as ubiquitous as air and water.” Deming said, “Only the employees closest to a given process can identify the variation that invariably diminishes quality.” That is why it was necessary to shake up the systemic hierarchy and “drive fear out of the workplace and foster intrinsic motivation.”

Gabor acknowledges the inherent flaws of the pre-reform education administrative sector. Her deepest dive into that “status quo” was her account of how progressive New York City educators, like Deborah Meier, carved out the holistic and inclusive road which reformers refused to take. Meier et.al battled the district’s “compliance managers.” Their methods embodied “creative noncompliance.” Then, Meier and her era’s reformers personified a value system consistent with Deming’s call for “a participative, collaborative, deeply democratic approach to continuous improvement.”

Meier and other progressive education reformers in New York, Massachusetts, and Leander, Tx, respected the essential role of trusting relationships. They needed educators to unite for a team effort, but they also understood the folly of trying to mandate unanimity. It would have been easier to order all teachers to obey the normative dictum which was embraced by the corporate reformers, and be “on the same page.” But they knew that the alternative to open collaboration would be “resistance, secrecy and sabotage.” If Meier and other school leaders emulated the management model of New York City and other large districts, and mandated teacher compliance, “‘the braver and more conscientious [would] cheat the most, but even the most timid can’t practice well what they don’t believe in.’”

Venture philanthropists like Bill Gates and Mike Bloomberg initially shared some of the values which motivated progressive reformers. Both groups initiated small schools in order to offer more personalized services, and the corporate reformers first seemed to not be bewildered by the key component of continuous improvement – building trust. In a sharp contrast to the reckless pace of change that would soon be imposed on public education, the Gates Foundation visited Meier’s Julia Richmond High School for a year before starting its small school campaign. I was shocked to learn that Gates’ Tom Vander Ark invested so much time in visiting schools. But, as Gabor discovered, “The Gates man was smitten with Julia Richmond, but he didn’t see what was actually happening there.”

A progressive principal told Vander Ark about 25 times that “small is a necessary, but not sufficient.” But, he was apparently so obsessed with “scaling up” reforms that the need for collaboration was subordinated to a focus on “design attributes” that could drive nationwide transformation. Vander Ark was more impressed with the “design coherence” of Success Academy than the Julia Richmond culture of trust. Because of their commitment to rapid transformations, Gates, Bloomberg, and other corporate reformers rejected the essence of Meier’s approach and pushed its “antithesis,” which resulted in the “no-excuses charter movement’s focus on behavioral conformity and control.”

Another factor was the Billionaires Boys Club’s hubris. The reformers “distrust of education culture” was combined with “suspicion – even their hatred – of organized labor and their contempt for ordinary public school teachers.” They displayed “the arrogance that elevated polished, but often mediocre (or worse), technocrats over scruffy but knowledgeable educators.” Eventually, Gabor wrote, “to be an educator in Bloomberg’s New York was a little like being a Trotskyite in Bolshevik Russia – never fully trusted and ultimately sidelined, if not doomed.”

It wasn’t just in New York City where the opportunity to learn from veteran, progressive reformers was lost. Across the nation, the accountability-driven, competition-driven reformers’ well-funded public relations campaigns “turned teacher-bashing into a blood sport.” They then sought to “teacher proof” the classroom. Consequently, canned curriculum and mind-numbing lessons drove much of the joy of teaching and learning out of the nation’s schools.

New York City’s lost opportunity morphed into a national tragedy as technocrats continued to worship data but not recognize that the most important educational factors are immeasurable. Their “Taylorism” was combined with a failure to recognize the dangers of “Schumpeterian” disruption on children. And the more that educators resisted reward and punish policies, the more reformers sought better hammers to force compliance. After tougher principal evaluations did not produce enough obedience, value added teacher evaluations sought to hold every single educator accountable for meeting their quantitative goals. Then, reformers overreached by simultaneously imposing Common Core high stakes tests and accountability metrics that were theoretically but not actually aligned with each other.

I entered the classroom as a 39-year-old rookie, but one who had a decade of experience in the inner city. Nearly 1/5th of my first years’ students would listen, learn, and yet refuse to do a single assignment. They didn’t disrupt our lessons as they often did the classes dominated by worksheet-driven instruction. Clearly, part of their noncompliance was a political statement, and they were glad to say why they resisted and why they would soon drop out of school. The common narrative was that they had been robbed of an education when growing up in our district’s teach-to-the-test era in the wake of “A Nation at Risk.” And they bitterly protested that the worst of the drill and kill was imposed on inner city schools.

This was the early 1990s and a new era of test-driven reform was being organized. During our discussions, I said that if reformers would read Catch 22, they would know that compliance couldn’t be forced, and that the system would respond with destructive games to make the accountability metrics come out right. One of my brightest students, who learned every day but who was so fed up with drill and kill that he would have nothing but zeros in every class when he dropped out, offered a better metaphor. During the famous scene in the comedy, I Love Lucy, Lucy fell behind when boxing chocolates on an assembly line. Teachers and students responded to test-driven reform in the same way, tossing out and even eating the product.

Back then, there was a common phrase which Oklahoma progressives repeated, “Feed the Teachers or They Will Eat the Kids,” which anticipates a second post on Gabor’s account of progressive reformers trying to change that reality in NYC, Massachusetts, and Leandor, Tx, as corporate reformers recreated Lucy’s sped-up assembly lines in NYC, New Orleans, and many or most urban schools. It will also review her proposals for a new era that needs to come After the Education Wars.”

Tune in tomorrow, same time, same place, to read the concluding section of Thompson’s review.

Categories Accountability, Competition, Corporate Reformers, Disruption, Education Industry, Education Reform, Privatization

Bob Braun: The Political Machine That Is Taking Over Newark’s School Board

By dianeravitch
April 16, 2019 //
4

 

Bob Braun is one of the keenest investigative reporters in the nation, who worked for New Jersey’s leading newspaper—the Star-Ledger—for half a century. Now, retired, he keeps watch over the corporate privatization of New Jersey’s public schools, especially those in Newark. That city, it’s schools, and it’s children have been in a Reformer Petri dish for decades.

The schools were taken over by the states in the 1990s. At last, the state has restored an elected board, but the politicians are maneuvering to gain control of the board.

Sadly, Mayor Ras Baraka is leading the effort for a takeover by the charter industry, after running as the anti-charter candidate for mayor.

There is a school board election in Newark on Tuesday.

Read the latest story here. 

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Corporate Reformers, Education Industry, New Jersey, Newark, Privatization

Laura Chapman on the Latest Reformer Inititiative: A Mushroom

By dianeravitch
April 14, 2019 //
27

 

Reformer groups and programs and projects pop up so often that I’m tempted to call them mushrooms, although stinkweeds would work too. I met Matt Gandal, described below, when he worked for Checker Finn at the Thomas B. Fordham Foundation. As long as the foundations keep pumping money into their hobby, there will be more mushrooms. She wrote this comment a month or so ago:

 

Laura Chapman describes the latest Reformer mushroom:

 

Meanwhile, the self-appointed members of the “Education Strategy Group” will command the National Press Club March 8 for a launch of “Level UP, Aligning for Success.”

The program will focus on “how we are collectively working to improve student preparation and increase success in postsecondary education and training,” especially “the preparation of students of color, students from low-income backgrounds and first-generation college students.”

Level Up is described as a coalition, a collaboration, and effort to provide “a playbook of high-impact strategies that K-12 and higher education leaders can collaboratively use to increase student success.”

The Founder (2012) and President of the Education Strategy Group, Matt Gandal, is not embarrassed to offer a brief resume that reveals his 20 year association with perfectly terrible policies for education. He was as a senior advisor to Secretary of Education Arne Duncan where he led the “Reform Support Network” created as an enforcement arm for compliance (implementation) of Race to the Top.

Before that job, Gandal claims to be a founder and executive vice president of Achieve—infamous for its promotion of the Common Core State Standards—and the antecedent American Diploma Project. If you have not read Common Core Dilemma: Who Owns Our Schools by Mercedes Schneider please do so. If you know the history of those bad ideas just be aware that they are not dead yet, not by a long shot. Gandal also claims to have held a leadership position in Chester Finn’s Educational Excellence Network. What more do you need to know?

Gandal ”was the author and chief architect of Making Standards Matter, an annual American Federation of Teachers report (beginning in 1992) purporting to evaluate the quality of the academic standards, assessments and accountability policies in every state. He also helped to drum up anxieties about standards in the United States in relation to other industrialized nations.

So, that is the leadership for the “Education Strategy Group.” The group functions as an advocacy shop for varied efforts to sustain the Common Core, with the attached aim of preparation for “college and career,” where career refers to workforce training.

This is a partial list of past and present “clients” for the Education Strategy Group: Delaware Department of Education, Georgia Department of Education, Maryland Department of Education, Rhode Island Governor’s Workforce Board, Indiana Department of Education, Indiana Commission for Higher Education, Ohio Department of Education, Ohio Department of Higher Education, Baltimore City Public Schools.

These are also listed as if clients: Council of Chief State School Officers (CCSSO), National Governors Association (NGA), Partnership for the Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers (PARCC), Southern Regional Education Board (SREB), American Association of State Colleges & Universities (AASCU), United States Chamber of Commerce Foundation, myFutureNC, New America.

Credits indicate support from the Charles A. Dana Center, Collaborative for Student Success; Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation; Helios Education Foundation; Rodel Foundation of Delaware; J.P. Morgan Chase; Carnegie Corporation of New York; Joyce Foundation; Lumina Foundation; Abell Foundation; Strada Education Network; and Belk Foundation,

Two of the service “stories” of the Education Strategy Group focus on “The Collaborative for Student Success,” a project of the New Venture Fund. The Collaborative is also a creature of deep-pocket funding from groups unfriendly to public schools: the Bloomberg Foundation, Carnegie Corporation of New York, ExxonMobil, Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, and The Charles and Lynn Schusterman Family Foundation.

“The Collaborative for Student Success (CSS)” is a platform designed to reassert the general idea that standards are not high enough and they are a panacea. The CCS is also one among several non-profits (e.g., Bellwether Education Partners) that have elected to review and criticize state ESSA plans. You can see the CCS effort here with a direct link (no surprise) to the charter loving Walton funded 74 Million http://schoolimprovement.the74million.org

In other words, the National Press Club will become a forum for the launch of “Level UP, Aligning for Success.” The question is whether any one in the audience will have done enough homework to grasp this latest effort to shore up failed education policies. The National Press Club is for hire, and the launch of “Level UP, Aligning for Success” provides another venue for billionaire foundations and corporate friends to promote policies and practices that have no basis in professional wisdom. I hope members of the National Press Club will ask pointed questions about this latest PR effort to keep the the standards movement in place–a major effort to discredit public education. The link to the Walton funded 74 Million leaves no doubt about whose interests this PR campign serves.
http://edstrategy.org/level-up-launch/

 

 

Categories Accountability, Corporate Reformers, Education Industry, Privatization, Testing

Julia Keleher: The Destroyer of Public Schools in Puerto Rico

By dianeravitch
April 6, 2019 //
17

 

Julia Keleher will one day have engraved on her tombstone: “She Destroyed the Public Schools in Puerto Rico.” She joins the blog’s Wall of Shame for her shameless assault on public schools, the teachers’  union, and the students of Puerto Rico.

Keleher resigned her position as Puerto Rico’s Secretary of State earlier this week. Her resignation comes after two years of top down education reform. She was hated by the Island’s teachers. She’s closed more than 350 schools in Puerto Rico, worked hand in hand with Betsy DeVos to undercut public schools by bringing vouchers and charters to the island, undermined special education services for students and threatened to turn over 30 schools to fly-by-night companies with no experience who want to cash in on schools.
She is the Betsy DeVos of Puerto Rico, although she was neither born nor raised there. She was born in Philadelphia, where she attended Catholic school. She received her BA from the University of Pennsylvania and graduate degrees from the University of Delaware and the for-profit Strayer University. There is no indication on her Wikipedia bio that she ever taught, though she has done consulting, data-driven management, web-based stuff, project management, and worked for the for-profit Sylvan tutoring services. She is a Republican. She was imported to Puerto Rico to disrupt the public schools on behalf of Wall Street and the power elite.
After she resigned, she was initially given a $250,000 a year job in the treasury department but she was forced to resign that backup position after newspapers in Puerto Rico questioned her ethics.
The Yale Education Leadership conference still invited her to keynote its ed reform conference yesterday that’s supported by the Walton Foundation, Broad, 50CAN (funded by Jonathan Sackler of the opioid industry) and other right-wing organizations. Puerto Rican students from Yale wrote an open letter to Yale and to Julia Keleher which they distributed before she spoke. Imagine that: A conference on education funded only by right-wing foundations! Now there is a balanced discussion!
The letter is below.

To the Yale School of Management Education Leadership Conference:

I am disappointed, yet not surprised, that this year’s Education Leadership Conference has chosen to host Julia Keleher as one of their keynote speakers for leaders in education reform. Keleher’s “reform” of the Puerto Rican public education system does not serve to solve any of its problems but rather to mutilate it in order to benefit all but those Puerto Rican citizens who actually rely on high quality public schools. This celebration of Keleher’s work only displays the way in which members of elite institutions like the Yale School of Management can be so blind to the reality and context of life in Puerto Rico.

 

To Former Secretary of the Puerto Rico Department of Education Julia Keleher:

 

During your time as the Secretary of the Puerto Rico Department of Education, you promoted the closing of over 400 public schools. You boasted that schools were mostly back to normal just weeks after Hurricane Maria, despite the fact that many schools still did not have power well into January of 2018.

 

Rather than overseeing plans that would put the public school system onto a path of genuine recovery and growth, you pushed the creation of charter schools. In addition to this quasi-privatization of public schools, you blatantly spoke out about your intentions to meld schools with the private sector. You even boldly stated that students in Culebra should start being trained to be streamlined into the tourism industry, as if tourism should be prioritized as the only viable option for young Puerto Rican students as they grow up.

 

Even now as you step down from your former position, you will receive a salary of $250,000 just to serve as an advisor the education department of Puerto Rico. This is more than 10 times the average salary of a teacher in Puerto Rico, which only further highlights the longstanding disrespect you have exemplified for the public school teachers of PR. You have described unionized teachers engaging in peaceful civil disobedience as “violent” in attempts to invalidate their defense of an uncompromised public school system. Teacher unions have been part of the foundation of Puerto Rican cultural preservation, as they were key activists in the fight against English-only education efforts in the 1900’s and for keeping Puerto Rican history and cultural traditions in curriculum.

 

PR’s community of teachers has already been damaged by recent anti-union legislation, and your proposed charter schools would only further harm it as teachers and locally elected school board members are largely left out of their decision making process. These charter schools which you proudly explain are schools that use government funding yet are run privately (or in other words, not run democratically) further expose the colonial government practices already present in PR, which you uphold.

 

Beyond the political tone-deafness of the “reform” you have implemented in Puerto Rico, your sureness of their success only speaks to how little you understand life in Puerto Rico and the students you are meant to serve. PR residents know how long it can take to travel around the island due to road congestion and a lack of reliable public transportation. Forcing teachers to work 2 hours away from home through your merging of public schools is hugely disrespectful to their time and value. Working parents also cannot just drive their children to far away schools when buses are not available. Furthermore, the higher number of buses that would be required to transport students to school would only worsen the air pollution which causes Puerto Rican children to suffer some of the highest rates of asthma in the world.

 

Charter schools also consistently underserve and exclude students with special education needs, which account for more than 40% of all Puerto Rican students. This must not be ignored in plans for PR’s public school system.

 

The island’s limited funds for public education should be used to repair and update existing school buildings, not spent on unnecessary and detrimental charter schools and temporary trailers. You have relied on the emigration of families after Hurricanes Maria and Irma to justify your closing of schools, but basic logic dictates that closing schools would only worsen the conditions that made them leave in the first place. For many Puerto Ricans, moving to the mainland US was not meant to be a permanent relocation, but your “reform” only makes it harder for families to eventually return to their homes. You are closing pillars of local communities, which in turn weakens the entire island’s social and economic progress.

 

Though perhaps said jokingly, perhaps said in attempts to ameliorate the image of a non-Puerto Rican undermining the island’s public school system, you have referred to Puerto Rico as your “adopted land.” Though being Puerto Rican is not just about where you live and the diaspora is an integral part of the community, a fundamental part of Puerto Rican identity is a deep shared history of struggle and resilience, which you can never be a part of. This is especially true with your commitment to your role remaining outside of the sphere of the island’s politics. While the support of public education should always be bipartisan, no current administrative position in Puerto Rico is apolitical, especially not under the undemocratically appointed fiscal control board of PROMESA.

 

Sincerely,
Adriana Colón-Adorno

 

Yale College Class of 2020

 

Supporters of this Letter:

Dr. Adriana Garriga-López

Department Chair and Associate Professor of Anthropology at Kalamazoo College in Michigan

Agarriga@kzoo.edu

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Corporate Reformers, Education Industry, Education Reform, Privatization, Puerto Rico

Garn Press Publishes a Collection of My Most Important Essays

By dianeravitch
April 2, 2019 //
16

 

Garn Press, one of the nation’s valuable independent publishers, has compiled a collection of my most important essays. I am grateful for their hard work and dedication in bringing the book to fruition.

The book is titled “The Wisdom and Wit of Diane Ravitch.”

It contains selected essays published on this blog, the New York Review of Books, Huffington Post, and elsewhere.

I am grateful for the prodigious research that went into this effort by publisher and literary scholar Denny Taylor and her team, as well as the elegant design.

Yohuru Williams, the great scholar of African-American history and my colleague on the board of the Network for Public Education, wrote the introduction.

Should there be any royalties, I have asked that they be given to the Network for Public Education.

To learn more about the book, open any of these links:

Visual Press Release – Enhanced
Best Retail Link Amazon
Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Common Core, Corporate Reformers, Privatization, Testing

Tom Ultican: Atlanta School Board Votes for Privatization

By dianeravitch
March 27, 2019 //
8

 

Tom Ultican has been writing about differentcities where the Destroy Public Education Movement has made extraordinary gains. Atlanta has fallen into the clutches of the DPE as a result of Teach for America’s success in electing its alumni to the school board, which hired a superintendent committedto the DPE agenda.

Ultican writes:

“On March 4, the Atlanta Public School (APS) board voted 5 to 3 to begin adopting the “System of Excellent Schools.” That is Atlanta’s euphemistic name for the portfolio district model which systematically ends democratic governance of public schools. The portfolio model was a response to John Chubb’s and Terry Moe’s 1990 book, Politics, Markets, and America’s Schools, which claimed that poor academic performance was “one of the prices Americans pay for choosing to exercise direct democratic control over their schools.”

“A Rand Corporation researcher named Paul Hill who founded the Center on Reinventing Public Education (CRPE) began working out the mechanics of ending democratic control of public education. His solution to ending demon democracy – which is extremely unpopular with many billionaires – was the portfolio model of school governance.

“The portfolio model of school governance directs closing schools that score in the bottom 5% on standardized testing and reopening them as charter schools or Innovation schools. In either case, the local community loses their right to hold elected leaders accountable, because the schools are removed from the school board’s portfolio. It is a plan that guarantees school churn in poor neighborhoods, venerates disruption and dismisses the value of stability and community history.

Atlanta’s Comprador Regime

“Atlanta resident Ed Johnson compared what is happening in APS to a “comprador regime” serving today’s neocolonialists. In the 19th century, a comprador was a native servant doing the bidding of his European masters; the new compradors are doing the bidding of billionaires privatizing public education.

”Chalkbeat reported that Atlanta is one of seven US cities The City Fund has targeted for implementation of the portfolio district governance model. The city fund was founded in 2018 by two billionaires, John Arnold the former Enron executive who did not go to prison and Reed Hastings the founder and CEO of Netflix. Neerav Kingsland, Executive Director of The City Fund, stated, “Along with the Hastings Fund and the Arnold Foundation, we’ve also received funds from the Dell Foundation, the Gates Foundation, the Walton Family Foundation, and the Ballmer Group.”

“City Fund has designated RedefinED as their representative in Atlanta. Ed Chang, the Executive Director of RedefinED, is an example of the billionaire created education “reform” leader recruited initially by Teach for America (TFA).

“TFA is the billionaire financed destroy-public-education (DPE) army. TFA teachers are not qualified to be in a classroom. They are new college graduates with no legitimate teacher training nor any academic study of education theory. Originally, TFA was proposed as an emergency corps of teachers for states like West Virginia who were having trouble attracting qualified professional educators. Then billionaires started financing TFA. They pushed through laws defining TFA teachers as “highly qualified” and purchased spurious research claiming TFA teachers were effective. If your child is in a TFA teacher’s classroom, they are being cheated out of a professionally delivered education. However, TFA provides the DPE billionaires a group of young ambitious people who suffer from group think bordering on cult like indoctrination.

“Chang is originally from Chicago where he trained to be a physical therapist. He came south as a TFA seventh grade science teacher. Chang helped found an Atlanta charter school and through that experience received a Building Excellent Schools (BES) fellowship. BES claims to train “high-capacity individuals to take on the demanding and urgent work of leading high-achieving, college preparatory urban charter schools.”

“After his subsequent charter school proposal was rejected, Chang started doing strategy work for the Knowledge is Power Program (KIPP). This led him to a yearlong Fisher Fellowship training to start and run a KIPP charter school. In 2009, he opened KIPP STRIVE Academy in Atlanta.

“While complicit in stealing neighborhood public schools from Atlanta’s poorest communities, Chang says with a straight face, “Education is the civil rights movement of today.”

“Chang now has more than a decade working in billionaire financed DPE organizations. He started in TFA, had two billionaire supported “fellowships” and now has millions of dollars to use as the Executive Director of RedefinED. It is quite common for TFA alums like Chang to end up on the boards of multiple education “reform” organizations.

“Under Chang’s direction, RedefinED has provided monetary support for both the fake teacher program, TFA, and the fake graduate school, Relay. In addition, they have given funds to the Georgia Charter School Association, Purpose Built Schools, Kindezi School, KIPP and Resurgence Hall.”

Keep reading to learn the scope of the civic disaster in Atlanta, where DPE is rapidly applying its failed ideas and dismantling public education.

The sad part of DPE is that it proclaims lofty goals but eventually has to confront its failures, which are predictable.

Categories Accountability, Atlanta, Charter Schools, Corporate Reformers, Education Industry, Portfolio District, Privatization

Steven Singer: Accountability Begins at the Top, not in the Classroom

By dianeravitch
March 23, 2019 //
25

 

Steven Singer has a straightforward and sensible proposition: accountability should begin with the people who make the rules and allocate resources.

Instead they have created a blame game for those who try to play by the rules they created, not matter how wrong those rules are.

Read the following and read his post to learn the Code of Conduct he has devised for those who make the rules.

He writes:

 

School Accountability Begins With the People Who Make the Rules: A Code of Conduct for Politicians and Test Makers

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Standardized testing is all about accountability.
 

We’ve got to keep schools accountable for teaching.
 

We’ve got to keep students accountable for learning.

 
It’s kind of a crazy idea when you stop to think about it – as if teachers wouldn’t teach and students wouldn’t learn unless someone was standing over them with a big stick. As if adults got into teaching because they didn’t want to educate kids or children went to school because they had no natural curiosity at all.
 

So we’ve got to threaten them into getting in line – students, teachers: march!

 
But that’s not even the strangest part. It’s this idea that that is where accountability stops.

 
No one has to keep the state or federal government accountable for providing the proper resources.

 
No one has to keep the testing companies accountable for creating fair and accurate assessments.

 
It’s just teachers and students.
 

So I thought I’d fix that with a “Code of Conduct for Politicians and Test Makers.”

 
After all, that’s what we do when we want to ensure someone is being responsible – we remind them of their responsibilities.
 

You see, the state and federal government are very concerned about cheating.

 
Not the kind of cheating where the super rich pay off lawmakers to rig an accountability system against the poor and minorities. No. Just the kind of cheating where teachers or students try to untie their hands from behind their backs.

 
They’re very concern about THAT.

 
When you threaten to take away a school’s funding and fire teachers based on test scores, you tend to create an environment that encourages rampant fraud and abuse.

 
So the government requires its public servants to take on-line courses in the ethics of giving standardized tests. We have to sit through canned demonstrations of what we’re allowed to do and what we aren’t allowed to do. And when it’s all over, we have to take a test certifying that we understand.
 

Then after we proctor an exam, we have to sign a statement swearing that we’re abiding by these rules to ensure “test security.”
 

This year, for the first time, I’m supposed to put my initials on the answer sheets of all of my students’ Pennsylvania System of School Assessment (PSSA) tests to prove….  I don’t know. That I was there and if anything went wrong, it’s my fault. Burn the witch. That sort of thing.

Even our students have to demonstrate that they’re abiding by the rules. Children as young as five have to mark a bubble on their test signifying that they’ve read and understood the Code of Conduct for Test Takers.
 

I still don’t understand how that’s Constitutional.

 
Forcing children to sign a legal document without representation or even without their parents or guardians present – it sure looks like a violation of their civil rights.
 

But that’s what accountability looks like when you only require certain people to be accountable.

 
So back to my crazy idea.
 

Perhaps the corporate flunkies actually designing and profiting off these tests should be held accountable, too. So should lawmakers requiring all this junk.
 

Maybe they should have to sign a “Code of Conduct for Politicians and Test Makers” modeled after the one the rest of us peons have to use to sign our lives away.

 

Read Steven’s “Code of Conduct for Politicians and Test Makers.”
 

 

Categories Accountability, Corporate Reformers, Education Industry, Education Reform, Testing

This Is a Book You Should Read: Noliwe Rooks’ “Cutting School”

By dianeravitch
March 18, 2019 //
20

I just finished reading Noliwe Rooks’ superb book, Cutting School: Privatization, Segregation, and the End of Public Education (The New Press). Please buy a copy and read it. It is a powerful analysis of racism, segregation, poverty, the history of Black education (and miseducation), and their relationship to the current movement to privatize public education. She dissects the profitable business of segregation.

You will learn how cleverly the captains of finance and industry have managed to ignore the root causes of inequality of educational opportunity while profiting from the dire straits of poor children of color. In fact, as she shows, financiers and philanthropists have used and misused Black children throughout our history, for their own benefit and glory, not the children’s.

The book is both highly contemporary and at the same time, probably the best history of Black education that I have read. Rooks understands that the fight for equality runs through the schoolhouse door, and she documents how white elites have managed to block access, narrow access, or literally steal from Black families trying to gain access to high-quality education. She knows that charter schools and vouchers are a sorry substitute for real solutions. She understands that the rise of the profit-driven education industry has benefited the profiteers far more than the Black children they claim to be “saving.” “Saving poor kids from failing schools” turns out to be a lucrative business, though not for the kids.

Rooks invents a new term to describe the current “reform” movement: Segrenomics. In her telling, a sizable number of entrepreneurs and foundations, and organizations like Teach for America, have enriched themselves while advertising their passion for equity. Segregation and poverty have given them a purpose, multiple enterprises, career paths, and profit.

My copy of the book is covered with underlinings, stars, asterisks, and other notations, as is my way when I become enthusiastic while reading.

She bluntly states, “The road necessarily traveled to achieve freedom and equality in the United States leads directly through public education…Schools that educate the wealthy have generally had decent buildings, money for materials, a coherent curriculum, and well-trained teachers. Schools that educate poorer students and those of color too often have decrepit buildings, no funds for quality instructional materials, and little input in structure or purpose of the curriculum, and they make do with the best teachers they can find.” Differences based on class and color have been a constant in American history, and they remain so today.

She notes the rise of the for-profit industry in education, now associated with charter schools, cybercharters, and other forms of school choice. The new for-profit arrangement, which she calls “segrenomics, is “the business of profiting specifically from high levels of racial and economic segregation…The desire that some have to profit from racial and economic segregation in education, coupled with the active desire members of segregated communities of color have for quality education, has led to our current moment where quality education is for some a distant mirage, and the promise to provide it is profitable for others.”

Rooks was director of the African American studies program at Princeton University for a decade and is now director of graduate Africana studies at Cornell University. She interacted frequently with idealistic elite white college students who could not understand her skepticism about the “reform movement.”

Rooks describes the past thirty years as an era when “government, philanthropy, business, and financial sectors have heavily invested in efforts to privatize certain segments of public education; stock schools with inexperienced, less highly paid teachers whose hiring often provides companies with a ‘finders’ fee’; outsource the running of schools to management organizations; and propose virtual schools as a literal replacement for—not just a supplement to-the brick and mortar education experience. The attraction, of course, is the large pot of education dollars that’s been increasingly available to private corporate financial interests…Charter schools, charter management organizations, vouchers, virtual schools, and an alternatively certified, non-unionized teaching force represent the bulk of the contemporary solutions offered as cures for what ails communities that are upward of 80 percent Black or Latino.” Such policies are never prescribed for affluent white communities, she notes.

She suggests that those who seek to profit from racial and economic segregation should be penalized. Without a real and meaningful penalty, the profit-seekers will continue business as usual.

The fundamental argument of her book is that public education for Native American, Black, Latino, and poor youth is being purposefully unraveled, while wealthy elites are plundering the money that should have been spent on their education.

Rooks recounts the history of Teach for America, which had its beginnings at Princeton University. Wendy Kopp had an idea, visited corporate chieftains, raised money, created a powerful board of directors, and started an enterprise that became fabulously wealthy. Rooks observes that she didn’t spend time talking to the students or parents or the communities that she planned to save. TFA created a career path for idealistic and ambitious elite college graduates, who wanted to try their hand at teaching without committing to it as a professional obligation. TFA offered more benefits to those who joined it, she writes, than to those it claimed it wanted to “save.” It provided a resume builder and an entrée into powerful financial and political networks.

She analyzes a number of well-known “reform” organizations, not only TFA, but Democrats for Educational Reform and Students for Educational Reform. The latter was also founded at Princeton, by students who realized that their venture was so lucrative, so swaddled in grants from foundations, that they dropped out of college to tend to the millions heaped upon them. Helping poor children, it turned out, was indeed a rewarding business. She sees TFA, DFER, and SFER through the lens of segrenomics, business ventures that depended on “saving” poor children without disrupting the institutional and systemic roots of poverty and racism that engulf the world in which they live. She calls out “reformers” for their insistence that they could safely ignore segregation or poverty, because their aspirations alone would be enough to “fix” the lives of poor children.

Her richly documented history of Black education in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries is fascinating. In the nineteenth century, most Blacks lived in the South, and the whites who controlled the segregated South did as little as they could get away with to educate Black children. Some opposed doing so, while others thought that Blacks should be equipped with no more than basic literacy and vocational training so that they could contribute to the economy, albeit as manual workers. In the main, the Northern philanthropists adjusted their ideals to the white Southerners’ low esteem for people of color. The philanthropists contributed money to build schools for Black children, but required impoverished Black communities to raise matching funds if they wanted a school. Given the desperate poverty of those communities, raising the matching funds required enormous sacrifice. In one of the most moving passages in the book, she describes a 1925 meeting in a small rural town in Alabama, where a Black representative of the Rockefellers’ General Education Board met with the sharecroppers to discuss raising money to build a school. The representative wrote to his supervisors that “’one old man, who had seen slavery days, with all of his life’s earnings in an old greasy sack, slowly drew it from his pocket, and emptied it on the table.’ He then turned to address the crowd and said, ‘I want to see the children of my grandchildren have a chance, and so I am giving my all.’ What he had to offer was $10. The sum total he had been able to save throughout the totality of his life.’” The assembled crowd raised $1,300 that night and eventually contributed $6,500 to match the gift of the Rockefellers.

As I read this, I felt a mix of emotions. Tremendous sadness but also rage at the Rockefellers, who could have just opened their wallets and given the community the school they so desperately wanted and needed without demanding such sacrifice. The foundation officer who read this account from Alabama must have had a heart of stone. The same stories about penurious philanthropists were repeated across the South, where local white officials typically diverted (stole) money meant for Black education and reapportioned it to white schools.

I have read other histories of Black education, but none that so deftly tied together the past and the present. The term “segrenomics” aptly captures the financiers’ fascination with “helping” black children but avoiding any change in the social policies that might lift their families out of poverty and promote genuine integration. The fact that philanthropists today eagerly underwrite segregated charter schools and insist that TFA  or merit pay or standardized tests can cure poverty represents continuity with their nineteenth century counterparts.

Rooks brings valuable historical, sociological, and philosophical insight into contemporary debates. Her analysis echoes the argument made by Anand Giriharadas in his bookWinners Take All: when the wealthiest elites claim that they are “saving” the world, beware. They are actually protecting the status quo and their own dominant position in society.

You will enjoy watching this YouTube video in which Professor Rooks explains her views about education reform, elite white students, and the lingo of reform. 

 

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Corporate Reformers, Democrats for Education Reform, Education Industry, Education Reform, History, Hoax, Poverty, Privatization, Race, Racism, Teach for America, Virtual Charter Schools, Vouchers

Rochester, New York: Students, Parents, and Educators Fight State Takeover of Public Schools

By dianeravitch
March 7, 2019 //
7

Supporters of public schools are fighting a proposal for a state takeover of the Rochester public school district in New York.

State takeovers have not worked anywhere. The Michigan Education Achievement Authority was a disaster and has closed down. The schools in the Achievement School District in Tennessee made zero gains as compared to similar schools not in the state district. Contrary to public relations, the New Orleans takeover district performs below the state average in one of the nation’s lowest performing states, and its “gains” relied on a mass exodus of poor kids who never returned and a mass influx of additional money from the federal government and foundations.

 

From Rochester: Please open the link and sign the petition to stop a state takeover.

No To Government Takeover of the Rochester City School District

LOCAL AND STATE POLITICIANS

No_takeover

Wealthy private interests and local and state politicians are working overtime to demonize, vilify, and discredit the Rochester City School District in order to create a pretext for a mayoral or state takeover of the public school system. They desperately want to create a siege mentality against the public school system.

Research and experience show that such measures are profoundly counterproductive and harm schools and the public interest.

Government takeovers of urban public school systems always reduce accountability and transparency, increase testing, leave schools worse off, and increase the number of charter schools.

There is an alternative!

The citizens of Rochester have the constitutional right to decide whether their school board is to be appointed or elected. It is not permissible for local or state politicians to ignore that constitutional right and to bypass the will of the citizens of Rochester and transfer many of powers of the school Board to wealthy private interests and their political representatives. Defend Public Education!

 

 

 

 

Categories Accountability, Corporate Reformers, Education Industry, New York, Privatization
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