On two occasions, Steven Singer’s posts have been blocked by Facebook. Both posts were about privatization.
He has pondered why this happens.
He has two theories.
Archives for category: Corporate Reformers
Kevin Welner of the National Education Policy Center has written a thoughtful (and optimistic) commentary on the Gates Foundation’s latest big bet on reforming education. The new one will invest $1.7 billion in networks of schools in big cities, in the hopes that they can work together to solve common problems.
Welner, K. (2017). Might the New Gates Education Initiative Close Opportunity Gaps? Boulder, CO: National Education Policy Center. Retrieved [date] from http://nepc.colorado.edu/publication/bmgf.
Welner notes that the previous big initiatives of the Gates Foundation failed, although he believes that Gates was too quick to pull the plug on the small schools initiative in 2008, into which he had poured $2 billion. Gates bet another $2 billion on the Common Core, and that was sunk by backlash from right and left and in any case, has made no notable difference. Gates poured untold millions into his plan for teacher evaluation (MET), but it failed because it relied too much on test scores.
Welner says that Bill Gates and the foundation he owns suffer from certain blind spots: First, he believes in free markets and choice, and he ends up pouring hundreds of millions into charters with little to show for it; second, he believes in data, and that belief has been costly without producing better schools; third, he believes in the transformative power of technology, forgetting that technology is only a tool, whose value is determined by how wisely it is used.
Last, Welner worries that Gates does not pay enough attention to the out of school factors that have a far greater impact on student learning that teachers and schools, including poverty and racism. These are the factors that mediate opportunity to learn. Without addressing those factors, none of the others will make much difference.
Welner is cautiously optimistic that the new initiative might pay more attention to opportunity to learn issues than any of Gates’ other investments.
But he notes with concern that Gates continues to fund charters, data, technology, and testing. He continues to believe that somewhere over the rainbow is a magical key to innovation. He continues to believe in standardization.
It seems to me that Kevin Welner bends over backwards to give Gates the benefit of the doubt. With his well-established track record of failure, it is hard to believe he has learned anything. But let’s keep hoping for the best.
Gary Rubinstein knows Michael Johnston from his days in Teach for America. He wishes Mike would stop telling tall tales about the school he briefly ran.
Mike said that the school he ran had a 100% graduation rate and college acceptance rate. Gary points out that 44 seniors graduated and got accepted to college, but there were 73 students in tenth grade two years earlier. That’s a 60% graduation rate, not 100%.
Now Mike Johnston is running for Governor of Colorado. He has built a reputation in the state as an education “reformer.” After graduating from Yale, he taught in Mississippi as a member of Teach for America, earned a degree at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, then a law degree, then was principal of a small school in Colorado where he claimed the school had a graduation rate of 100% and all were accepted into college. Based on this record, he ran for and was elected to the State Senate at the age of 35.
I met Mike Johnston in 2010, when I visited Denver to talk about my then-new book “The Death and Life of the Great American School System: How Testing and Choice Are Undermining Education.” I was scheduled to debate Johnston at a luncheon before about 100 of Denver’s civic leaders. At the very moment I was in Denver, the Legislature was debating Johnston’s legislation to evaluate teachers and principals by the test scores of their students. Johnston called his law, SB 10-191, the “Great Teachers, Great Principals Act.” It required that test scores would count for 50% of every teacher and principal’s evaluation.
On the day we were to debate, Johnston was late. I spoke. Minutes later, Johnston arrived, not having heard anything I said about choice and testing. He spoke with great excitement about how his new legislation would weed out all the bad and ineffective teachers in the state and would lead to a new era of great teachers, great principals, and great schools.
Johnston, as Gary Rubinstein points out, is very much an Obama Democrat. Arne Duncan, whose Race to the Top squandered $5 Billion, has endorsed Johnston’s candidacy for governor.
Seven years later, even Colorado reformers acknowledge that Mike Johnston’s grandiose promises fell flat. In an article in Education Week, Colorado reformer Van Schoales admitted that the punitive SB 10-191 didn’t have much, if any effect.
He wrote:
“Implementation did not live up to the promises.
“Colorado Department of Education data released in February show that the distribution of teacher effectiveness in the state looks much as it did before passage of the bill. Eighty-eight percent of Colorado teachers were rated effective or highly effective, 4 percent were partially effective, 7.8 percent of teachers were not rated, and less than 1 percent were deemed ineffective. In other words, we leveraged everything we could and not only didn’t advance teacher effectiveness, we created a massive bureaucracy and alienated many in the field.
“What happened?
“It was wrong to force everyone in a state to have one ‘best’ evaluation system.”
“First, the data. We built a policy on growth data that only partially existed. The majority of teachers teach in states’ untested subject areas. This meant processes for measuring student growth outside of literacy or math were often thoughtlessly slapped together to meet the new evaluation law. For example, some elementary school art-teacher evaluations were linked to student performance on multiple-choice district art tests, while Spanish-teacher evaluations were tied to how the school did on the state’s math and literacy tests. Even for those who teach the grades and subjects with state tests, some debate remains on how much growth should be weighted for high-stakes decisions on teacher ratings. And we knew that few teachers accepted having their evaluations heavily weighted on student growth.
“Second, there has been little embrace of the state’s new teacher-evaluation system even from administrators frustrated with the former system. There were exceptions, namely the districts of Denver and Harrison, which had far fewer highly effective teachers than elsewhere in the state. Both districts invested time and resources in the development of a system that more accurately reflects a teacher’s impact on student learning. Yet most Colorado districts were forced to create new evaluation systems in alignment with the new law or adopt the state system, and most did the latter. This meant that these districts focused on compliance (and checking off evaluation boxes), rather than using the law to support teacher improvement.
“Third, we continue to have a leadership problem. Research shows that teacher evaluators are still not likely to give direct and honest feedback to teachers. A Brown University study on teacher evaluators in these new systems shows that the evaluators are three times more likely to rate teachers higher than they should be rated. This is a problem of school and district culture, not a fault with the evaluation rubric.
“Fourth, all of Colorado’s 238 charter schools waived out of the system.
“We wanted a new system to help professionalize teaching and address the real disparities in teacher quality. Instead, we got an 18-page state rubric and 345-page user guide for teacher evaluation.
“We didn’t understand how most school systems would respond to these teacher-evaluation laws. We failed to track implementation and didn’t check our assumptions along the way.”
Unfortunately, when the time came to change the law, Sen. Mike Johnston joined with five Republicans on the State Senate Education Committee to defeat a proposal to fix his failed law.
The rejected proposal, “originally introduced with bipartisan sponsorship, would have allowed school districts to drop the use of student academic growth data in teacher evaluations. It also would have eliminated the annual evaluation requirement for effective and highly effective teachers.”
But Johnston preferred to keep his law in place, despite its failure. It remains today as the most regressive teacher evaluation law in the nation. And it has had seven years to demonstrate its ineffectiveness.
Gary Rubinstein calls on Mike Johnston to stop making the false claim in his campaign literature that his high school’s graduation rate was 100%.
I call on him to renounce and denounce SB 10-191.
Make a clean break of it, Mike. Set things right. Show you are man enough to admit you were wrong.
North Carolina is one of the states where the legislature has been working overtime to pass programs to harm public schools. Charters, vouchers, cybercharters, Teach for America, and regular assaults on the teaching profession.
That context makes it especially surprising and gratifying to see that the editorial board of the News-Observer wrote a strong critique of the GOP Tax Plan because it hurts public education.
This is a fantastic editorial:
There’s no doubt that tax-cut proposals in the House and Senate will increase income inequality today, but provisions in the bills could also weaken the earning power of many in the future by eroding the quality and the diversity of public schools.
One change that as approved by the Senate and also found in the House bill extends a tax benefit for college savings accounts to cover tuition for private elementary and secondary education. The change means that those who can afford to save money for non-public school tuition will be able to see that money grow tax-free.
Extending the tax break won’t mean much for families of modest incomes since they can’t afford to save large amounts for pre-college schooling, but it will have the effect of making high-priced private schools less costly to the wealthy. The Senate version of the change offered by Republican Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas even allows those who home school to draw up to $10,000 annually out of the tax-favored accounts to cover loosely defined school expenses. In the end, the change reduces tax revenue to give the wealthy a break on private education costs.
This relatively narrow adjustment will be joined by sweeping proposals in both the House and Senate tax bills that limit federal deductions for state and local taxes. Those changes will make it harder for local and state governments to raise taxes to support public schools. Together, the changes will lighten the tuition bill at private schools while adding to the tax burden that supports public schools.
Of course, higher education is also threatened by provisions in the tax plans that would include levies on endowments and on tuition benefits provided to graduate students and children of college employees. But the plans’ broader threats are to public schools, which are already being undermined by Republican-backed efforts to increase the number of charter schools – publicly funded but privately run – and to expand the use of tax funds for private schools through voucher programs. Now that “school choice” movement has gained support at the federal level with the appointment of Betsy DeVos – a charter and private school advocate – as the U.S. education secretary.
Fueling re-segregation
As Republicans cut away at the financial foundation of public schools they are also accelerating the re-segregation of all schools at the elementary and secondary levels. Adding charters and using tax dollars to subsidize private and sectarian school tuition is leading to a great sorting by race. And that, rather than enhancing education, deprives children of learning through exposure to classmates of different racial groups and economic backgrounds.
In a recent report on charter schools, The Associated Press found the number of charter schools has tripled over the last decade and racial isolation has grown with them. Charters tend to be overwhelmingly white, or overwhelming one minority. The AP reported: “While 4 percent of traditional public schools are 99 percent minority, the figure is 17 percent for charters. In cities, where most charters are located, 25 percent of charters are over 99 percent nonwhite, compared to 10 percent for traditional schools.”
The trend worries even some charter school advocates. Pascual Rodriguez, principal of a Milwaukee charter where nearly all the students are Hispanic, told the AP: “The beauty of our school is we’re 97 percent Latino. The drawback is we’re 97 percent Latino … Well, what happens when they go off into the real world where you may be part of an institution that’s not 97 percent Latino?”
The AP report mirrors what an October News & Observer report found about racial segregation in North Carolina charter schools. The report found that the schools are more segregated and have more affluent students than traditional public schools.
Christine Kushner, a member of the Wake County Board of Education and a former chair of the panel, said that despite efforts to foster diversity in the Wake County school system, the state’s largest, minorities are the majority, largely because of an increase in Hispanic students and more white students enrolling in schools outside of the system. She said Wake schools remain strong, but their reduced diversity both in race and income is a setback.
“It’s troubling to me that we are going backward because I think diverse schools are what’s best for all children and economics and history affirm that,” she said. School choice is fine, she said, but public schools need to have the resources “to be the first choice for all parents.”
Good public schools and strong support through taxes are inseparable. But the tax bills in Congress are adding to the forces that are splitting that bond and jeopardizing public education.
Read more here: http://www.newsobserver.com/opinion/editorials/article188972429.html#storylink=cpy
As this article by Matt Barnum in Chalkbeat shows, Kansas City did not want to hand its public schools over to the corporate reform movement, and it kicked out the privatizers a few years ago.
But the privatizers are back, with a new name, and a local native-born leader touting the virtues of the “portfolio model” and a “common enrollment application” for public schools and charter schools. The new approach is funded by the privatization-loving Walton Family Foundation and the Kauffman Foundation. OneApp, the common enrollment system is intended to confuse parents about the differences between public schools and charter schools, and give the appearance that they are the same. They are not. Charter schools choose their students; public schools do not. Charter schools may close without warning; public schools do not. Charter schools are not willing to take the students with the greatest needs; public schools are required to do so.
And so far, many education leaders in Kansas City seem to have fallen for the “portfolio model,” which is a stealth way of importing privatization.
The Kansas City superintendent, Mark Befell, is approaching the new bait warily. But the stars are aligning to put Kansas City into the grasp of the privatizers.
Bedell, the district superintendent, says that SchoolSmart may be too focused on creating new schools and expanding successful ones at the expense of helping existing, low-performing schools.
“I think the only concern that I have is their initial focus has been primarily on schools that are emerging, schools that are high performing,” he said. “You want to really move an urban school system like ours, you have a larger share of your schools that are low performing, we need to put resources in those schools.”
But, Bedell said, “Fortunately, [Sufi] listened to that and [SchoolSmart] provided support for me and some of my schools that have been struggling.”
SchoolSmart KC has also promoted the idea of a common enrollment system for district and charter schools.
“Participation in common, unified enrollment systems must also be required so that all families have equal access to schools,” Sufi said in recent testimony to the Missouri state legislature. “Such a system will also promote equity where our least advantaged families have equal access to quality options.”
Bedell is skeptical of this idea.
“Nope, not interested in it,” he said flatly, saying that he believed some charter schools were selectively enrolling and pushing out certain students, which made it difficult to build a positive relationship between the two sectors.
“One of the things that we’re looking to do is go and visit some of the other cities — Denver, Indianapolis, Camden — where the [district–charter] partnerships are working well,” said Bedell. Incidentally, those are three cities often promoted by advocates of the portfolio model.
Meanwhile, some remain wary of who is funding SchoolSmart. In addition to local philanthropies, SchoolSmart identifies the Walton Foundation as one of its core investors. Sufi said Hall, Kaufman, and Walton had together made a 10-year funding commitment of over $50 million.
“Philanthropy can have its own agenda too — that’s OK, there’s nothing wrong with that, but I think everybody just needs to be aware,” said Wolfsie, the Kansas City school board member. “Funders, they have a say what [SchoolSmart KC’s] strategic direction probably will be — otherwise they may not fund.”
If history and experience are guides, charter schools will take the best students, and leave the rest for public schools, which have even fewer resources to educate them.
Both the Walton and Kauffman foundations have been strong supporters of charter schools; Kauffman even founded its own (high-performing) charter school in Kansas City.
Matt Barnum of Chalkbeat here describes the spread of the gospel of the “portfolio model” of schooling.In his article, Barnum shows how Indianapolis has fallen hook, line, and sinker for privatization of its public schools.
I first heard the term used by Paul Hill of the Center for the Reinvention of Public Education at the University of Washington, a leading thinker in the privatization movement.
The basic idea is that school boards should treat their schools as if they were a stock portfolio. Some will be public schools run by the district; others will be privately managed. If a school gets low scores, close it and open a new one. If a school is not performing well, turn it over to private management. Buy and sell schools as you would buy and sell stocks in a portfolio. Disruption? No problem. Chaos? No problem.
That’s the basic idea.
For this to work, you need both supply (a willing number of charter operators, ready to move in) and demand (dissatisfied parents). So it is necessary to create dissatisfaction with the repeated claim that “our schools are failing” and to put public schools and charter schools on an equal footing by having a common enrollment system (the OneApp or some other name that gives the appearance that charters are public schools, even though they choose their students and operate under different rules and laws).
How was Indianapolis snookered into privatizing its public schools en masse? Barnum credits the work of the Mind Trust, a faux-liberal group that worked closely with the faux-liberal Stand for Children, which is a passthrough for the funding of corporations and corporate reformers.
The district is actively turning over schools to charter operators, and it’s rolling out a common enrollment system for district and charter schools that could make it easier for charters to grow. Nearly half of the district’s students now attend charters or district schools with charter-like freedoms.
It’s a remarkable shift that many in Indianapolis credit to — or blame on — the Mind Trust, a well-funded local nonprofit with a clear vision for improving education in Indianapolis.
Since its founding in 2006, the organization has called for dramatic changes to schools; recruited outside advocacy, teacher training, and charter groups; and spent millions to help launch new charter and district schools. The Mind Trust’s vision has also won support from the school board — which was elected with the financial backing of Stand for Children, an advocacy group recruited by the Mind Trust.
Stand for Children is an enemy of public schools and professional teachers. It is the conduit for privatization dollars. It has fielded candidates to run against supporters of public schools, in efforts to replace them with privatizers on school boards. It led efforts in Illinois and Massachusetts to curtail the power of unions and to reduce entry requirements for teachers.
Barnum’s article shows how the efforts of the corporate reformers are spreading even as the performance of charters is faltering, and news of charter scandals, frauds, and embezzlements is growing. The charter movement simply ignores the NAACP’s call for a moratorium on new charters, as well as their underlying demand for greater investment in the schools that enroll children with the greatest needs.
The charter movement is inextricably tied up with the funding of the Koch Brothers, the DeVos family, Eli Broad, and Bill Gates. Advocacy for charter schools is inextricably connected to the far-rightwing ALEC and Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos.
Charters are the gateway drug to vouchers.
The proponents of the charter movement, as author Katherine Stewart said in her recent article in The American Prospect, are “the useful idiots” of privatization; they have paved the way for the religious extremists and fundamentalists who control some of the largest charter chains and receive the largest number of vouchers.
The privatization of public education is a dagger aimed at democracy, with the aid and support of the Gates Foundation, the Walton Family Foundation, the Broad Foundation, the Mind Trust, Stand for Children, and others who believe neither in public education nor in democratic control of public schools.
Every time that international test scores are released, there is a predictable clamor to “do something.”
President Obama said that our ranking on an international test was “a Sputnik moment” and reason to push harder for the “remedies” in Race to the Top. We now know that Race to the Top was a failure that had no positive results. Schools were closed, teachers were fired, many new charter schools opened, and performance on the NAEP in 2015–five years after the launch of Race to the Top–went flat.
Now we have the results of the latest international test, the Progress in International Literacy Study (PIRLS), and the news for fourth graders in the U.S. was not good.
The United States tumbled in international rankings released Tuesday of reading skills among fourth-graders, raising warning flags about students’ ability to compete with international peers.
The decline was especially precipitous for the lowest-performing students, a finding that suggests widening disparities in the U.S. education system.
The United States has traditionally performed well on the Progress in International Reading Literacy Study, an assessment given to fourth-graders in schools around the world every five years. In 2016, however, the average score in the United States dropped to 549 out of 1,000, compared to 556 in 2011. The country’s ranking fell from fifth in the world in 2011 to 13th, with 12 education systems outscoring the United States by statistically significant margins. Three other countries roughly tied with the United States; they scored higher, but the differences were not notable.
What happened?
The Common Core (aka Common Core State Standards) was introduced across the nation in 2010-2011. The students now in fourth grade were the first cohort to get Common Core, starting in kindergarten.
Their reading scores went down, and it appears that the children who were likeliest to see declines were the lowest performing students.
The Common Core standards were written hurriedly, funded entirely by one man (Bill Gates), and rushed into implementation without any field testing whatsoever. Gates not only paid the hundreds of millions of dollars to fund the writing of Common Core, but he spent many more millions (some have estimated as much as $2 billion) to persuade advocacy groups and education organizations to support the adoption and implementation of the standards.
Would the FDA approve a drug for national use without field testing?
Of course not.
Our children were guinea pigs, and the experiment failed.
Almost every state in the nation has adopted Common Core. Some have rebranded it, but it is still Common Core.
What will states do now?
One of the most prominent advocates for Common Core was Jeb Bush, who is close to Betsy DeVos. They loved Common Core, because they expected it would cause widespread failure and hasten support for the privatization of public schools.
DeVos reacted to the declining scores on PIRLS by advocating for more school choice, more charters and vouchers.
In 2012, Joel Klein and Condoleezza Rice wrote a report claiming that public schools were so awful that they endangered national security. Their recommendations: more charters, more vouchers, and Common Core.
Friends, we can’t let these nihilists destroy our democratic system of public education.
Schools improve when they have adequate funding, not competition. Schools improve when students live stable lives, with access to food, medicine, and decent living conditions. Schools improve when they are staffed with professional teachers, not temporary, untrained teachers.
Common Core has failed our nation and our students. So have the privatizers.
Since the passage and signing of No Child Left Behind on January 8, 2002, the U.S. has been on the wrong track.
Can the “reformers” please admit their errors and change their ways? Or are they determined to keep pushing the same failed strategies without regard to evidence?
Andrea Gabor is the Michael Bloomberg Professor of business journalism at Baruch College of the City University of New York. She is also a deeply knowledgeable scholar of corporate education reform. She debunked the alleged “New Orleans miracle” in the New York Times.
In this post, she expresses her concern about the fawning praise for Eva Moskowitz’s charter schools and explains why Eva’s charter schools are not a model for public education.
She writes:
It is we—that is American citizens—who should be terrified because Success Academy is entirely in-sync with the Trump era. It is unapologetically anti-democratic, anti-union, segregated and relentlessly test-driven. And, it should be noted, the CMO has not yet graduated a single high school student.
At a time when we are facing an existential threat to our democracy—one enabled by a decades-long obsession with standardized tests that narrowed curriculum and helped kill off civics education—the championing of Success Academy by writer as influential as Elizabeth Green, she is the founding editor of ChalkBeat and author of Building a Better Teacher, is worrying indeed.
Let’s be clear. Judging by its roster of 46 schools, there are potentially thousands of families who are happy with the education Success Academy provides, and many more who might have been if they had won the network’s lottery—though parents have complained of the CMO’s harsh, and even abusive, ‘boot-camp-like” culture—see here and here. Indeed, hundreds, if not thousands of children have been pulled out by their families (or forced out) because of the network’s strict demands for behavioral compliance and its single-focused pursuit of high test scores…
But Green fails to address key questions about the kind of education Success kids get—and at what cost. She certainly doesn’t question whether the ever-changing, bubble-in test-scores are the best—or even a good–measure of learning. While she acknowledges giving up on democratic control of schools and districts, she never considers the historic, foundational role of public education in a democracy—and the civic cost of autocratic education systems. Nor does Green consider the successful public-school networks amid what she, rightly, describes as the crushing bureaucracy that has often stifled New York City schools—even though she has published stories about them!
Green also glosses over—and, in some cases, omits entirely—the considerable problems with the Success Academy model, including widespread creaming and credible allegations of abusive behavior toward children. Although Green’s own book points out that the best teachers have years of experience, she says not one word about Success Academy’s high teacher attrition rate. Some Success Academy schools lose over half of their teachers each year; few last more than three years.
Gabor writes that there are excellent models within public education of success, and she refers specifically to the New York Performance Standards Consortium, which has used a progressive model of education with great results.
Gabor despairs of those who think that democracy is the problem, and charter schools are the answer. To give up on democracy is to fall into the snare of the Trump agenda. Let the authoritarian leader solve all problems.
Why anyone believes that a strict authoritarian school is just right for all or most American children is a puzzle. It may be right for some, but it is not a model for public education.
Mercedes Schneider reports on a study funded by the Race to the Top program of the U.S. Department of Education and the Walton Family Foundation which concludes that state takeovers of low-performing schools in Tennessee made no difference. The schools remained low performing. That is, the takeovers failed. The schools taken over did not vault from the bottom of state rankings to the top. The so-called Achievement School District failed. The study can be found here.
This finding is no surprise to readers of this blog, as Gary Rubinstein has followed the progress–or lack thereof–of the ASD since its inception and has regularly reported that the low performing schools were not making any gains. Rubinstein said after six years of watching that the ASD was “a colossal failure.”
This is the abstract of the study by Ron Zimmer, Gary T. Henry, and Adam Kho:
In recent years, the federal government has invested billions of dollars to reform chronically low-performing schools. To fulfill their federal Race to the Top grant agreement, Tennessee implemented three turnaround strategies that adhered to the federal restart and transformation models: (a) placed schools under the auspices of the Achievement School District (ASD), which directly managed them; (b) placed schools under the ASD, which arranged for management by a charter management organization; and (c) placed schools under the management of a district Innovation Zone (iZone) with additional resources and autonomy. We examine the effects of each strategy and find that iZone schools, which were separately managed by three districts, substantially improved student achievement. In schools under the auspices of the ASD, student achievement did not improve or worsen. This suggests that it is possible to improve schools without removing them from the governance of a school district.
Schneider’s post includes additional quotations from the study.
And she finds it amusing, as do I, that the study was funded by the Walton Family Foundation, which is spending $200 million a year on new charters, every year. Add that to the $263 million that Betsy DeVos handed out from the U.S. Department of Education and that is a half billion a year to open new charters, from only two of the many sources committed to privatization.
After 25 years of the charter “experiment,” there is a growing body of evidence that they do not have a “secret sauce,” other than selection and attrition. That is not a replicable model for American education.
Jeff Bryant has a warning for Democrats: Beware of corporate education reform.
Leave it to the Republicans.
Don’t promote privatization and charters. Don’t bash teachers. Don’t beat up on unions. You erode your base.
He points to Denver and Virginia. In Denver, a candidate for school board won, even though she was outspent nearly 5-1.
In Virginia, Ralph Northam made clear his opposition to charters.
Listen, Democrats.
Diane Ravitch's blog 