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Big Tech Cashes In on Fears of “Learning Loss”

By dianeravitch
August 14, 2023 //
41

Alec MacGillis of ProPublica wrote recently in Raw Story about the feeding frenzy that accompanied Big Tech’s sales pitch: the tech industry claims that its hardware and software can cure learning loss. The salesmen dazzle teachers and administrators with promises and swag. The irony, as the story points out, is that “learning loss” was associated with remote learning, lack of personal interaction with their teachers. Why not more of the same that exacerbated the problem?

For the nation’s schoolchildren, the data on pandemic learning loss is relentlessly bleak, with education researchers and economists warning that, unless dramatic action is taken, students will suffer a lifelong drop in income as a result of lagging achievement. “This cohort of students is going to be punished throughout their lifetime,” noted Eric Hanushek, the Stanford economist who did the income study, in ProPublica’s recent examination of the struggle to make up for what students missed out on during the era of remote learning.

For the burgeoning education technology sector, however, the crisis has proven a glimmering business opportunity, as a visit to the industry’s annual convention revealed. The federal government has committed $190 billion in pandemic recovery funds to school districts since 2020, and education technology sales people have been eagerly making the case that their products are just what students and teachers need to make up lost ground.

“We’re huge in learning loss,” said Dan DiDesiderio, a Pittsburgh-area account manager for Renaissance Learning, a top seller of educational software and assessments. He was talking up his company’s offerings in the giant exposition hall of the Philadelphia Convention Center, where dozens of other vendors and thousands of educators gathered for three days late last month at the confab of the International Society for Technology in Education. For DiDesiderio, who was a school administrator before joining Renaissance, this meant explaining how schools have been relying on Renaissance products to help students get back on track. “During COVID, we did see an increase across the board,” he said.

Renaissance is far from the only player in the ed tech industry that is benefiting from the surge in federal funding, and the industry enjoyed a huge wave of private funding as the federal tap opened: The annual total of venture capital investments in ed tech companies rose from $5.4 billion to $16.8 billion between 2019 and 2021 before tailing off.

The largest chunk of the federal largess, $122 billion that was included in the American Rescue Plan signed by President Joe Biden in March 2021, requires that schools put at least 20% toward battling learning loss, and companies are making the case that schools should spend the money on their products, in addition to intensive tutoring, extended-day programs and other remedies. “The pandemic has created a once-in-a-lifetime economic opportunity for early stage companies to reach an eager customer base,” declared Anne Lee Skates, a partner at venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz, in a recent article. (Her firm has invested in ed tech companies.) The federal funds “are the largest one-time infusion of funds in education from the federal government with almost no strings attached.”

Five days before the convention, the National Center for Education Statistics had released the latest devastating numbers: The decline in math scores for 13-year-olds between the 2019-20 and 2022-23 school years was the largest on record, and for the lowest-performing students, reading scores were lower than they were the first time data was collected in 1971.

But the mood was festive in Philadelphia. The educators in attendance, whose conference costs are generally covered by their district’s professional development funds, were excited to try out the new wave of nifty gadgets made possible by the advances in artificial intelligence and virtual reality. “For a lot of us, it’s like coming to Disneyland,” said one teacher from Alabama.

One could also detect the slightly urgent giddiness of a big bash in its final stages. Schools need to spend most of their recovery funds by 2024, and many have already allocated much of that money, meaning that this golden opportunity would soon close. And summer is the main buying season, with the fiscal year starting July 1 and with educators wanting their new tools delivered in time for school to start in the fall.

Hanging over the proceedings was an undeniable irony: The extent of learning loss was closely correlated to the amount of time that students had spent doing remote learning, on a screen, rather than receiving direct instruction, and here companies were offering more screen-based instruction as the remedy. Few of the companies on hand were proposing to replace the classroom experience entirely with virtual instruction, but to the degree that their offerings recalled the year-plus of Zoom school, it could be a bit awkward. “A lot of people don’t like us, because we can do remote-school stuff,” said Michael Linacre, a salesperson for StarBoard Solution, before demonstrating one of the cool things a StarBoard whiteboard could do: He jotted 1+2= with his finger and up popped 3. “There’s a mixed feeling about that now.”

Most of the vendors were not about to let that awkwardness get in their way, though, as they cajoled teachers to listen to their pitch, often with the lure of free swag.

Categories Corporate Reform, Curriculum, Data, Disruption, Education Industry, Technology

Curt Cardine: Arizona Takes Steps to Eliminate Local Control of Schools

By dianeravitch
July 21, 2023 //
9

Curt Cardine, a veteran school administrator and researcher, has written frequently about Arizona Republicans’ efforts to privatize education.

Pathway Making Community Connections (MC2) Asset Management and Educational Consulting

Curtis J. Cardine MS Organizational Management, Leadership and Change

3873 E Cavalry Ct.

Gilbert, AZ 85297

603-209-0009 cjcardine@yahoo.com

 

Legislative Alert:

Recently the legislature requested the data on in-district “choices” and open enrollment data from districts other than the one that the child resides in.

The current way these placements from outside of your districts are “paid for” is that the child’s state dollars follow the child to their new district. This, of course, is not what it cost the receiving district to take on the out of district placement. This new “look” at how many parents take advantage of district choices is the prelude to an attempt to change how “choices” are funded.

I have been involved with the concept of school choice since my undergraduate days at University of Massachusetts at Salem. At that time I had the privilege of attending presentations by Dr. Ray Budd, the originator of the term, “Charter School” (UMass Amherst in 1973). Dr. Budd’s vision was locally controlled charters started by certified teachers with financial oversight by local school boards.

My district in NH was one of the ten school districts chosen to receive federal funding for five years for Public School Choice. At that time the federal government put up $180 M to fund “choice” of which $20 M went to school districts. The Department of Education managed this program for 5 years. The bias built into the first level of funding in 1999 was toward “Public privately owned, charter schools”.

Modifications of Dr. Budd’s vision by the charter industry and state legislatures have included:

• Private firms finances monitored by the school district, (California is an example)

• State Boards for Charter Schools or University oversight of finances and academic performance (Arizona Model)

In order to accommodate the ‘choice” of parents the first step in establishing “choice” was to create Open Enrollment. Arizona did this prior to initiating choice. The other first step was to declare the state to be a “Right to Work” state (first enacted in 1946 during the height of the effort by the federal government to fund other types of schools with federal funding).

As you know these steps preceded the establishment of privately owned charter schools in 1994. The antithesis of Dr. Budd’s model.

Through the efforts of “the Conservative Caucus” (state and national level) and ALEC (The American Legislative Exchange Council) and locally by the AZ Chamber of Commerce, The Goldwater Institute, and the Charter School Association charters, (followed by various scholarships, and now universal vouchers) have grown exponentially in this state.

Critical Analysis of this latest move by the “Conservative Caucus” and AZ Legislature

Why gather this data now?

This latest request for data on district choice is the next step in attempting to declare that district borders are not relevant. The data, which was recently shared in an AZ Administrator’s Association online presentation by Dr. Anabel, will show how many parents are choosing different schools than the one within their local schools’ boundaries and out of their district.

The “backpacks full of cash” theory of financing the myth of “choice” has always thought of local taxes as a method of funding ‘choice’. There has always been pushback to allowing this funding to “follow the child” whether it was to a charter or a private school.

It is the considered opinion of this researcher and experienced administrator that the next funding that the “choice” advocates will go after is through a state property tax replacing local and county taxes for education. This will be another blow for local control of education.

This new form of taxation for “all choices” needs to be fought from day one, i.e. before the legislature attempts to change things.

The lesson from the latest round of “universal vouchers” is indicative of the high cost to the state for this ‘choice” for people who were in private school already and paying, as they should, for their child’s education. The addition of home schooling to the voucher program and de-facto always in place at charter schools with online programs is creating an economic issue that this change in taxes will claim it is compensating for.

The state’s self-induced economic issue will be used to advocate for this change in taxation for “all choices”.

If you are receiving this notice it is because you have dealt with Pathway MC2 currently or in the recent past. Please feel free to share this with your colleagues.

Thank you for your time.

Curtis J. Cardine

Please feel free to contact me using the address and phone data in the header.

Categories Accountability, Arizona, Charter Schools, Data, Education Industry, School Choice

NPE Releases Bombshell Report on Latest CREDO Study!

By dianeravitch
July 19, 2023 //
117

The Network for Public Educatuon just released a careful analysis of the latest CREDO study, which claimed that charter schools get better results than public schools.

Not so fast, writes Carol Burris, executive director of NPE. Burris reviewed the data and methodology and found multiple problems with both. The statistical differences between the two sectors, she saw, were the same in 2023 as in CREDO’s first charter study in 2013, which were then described as insignificant.

Even more troubling, CREDO’s work is funded by pro-charter billionaires. How is this different from a study of nicotine safety funded by the tobacco industry? And yet mainstream media accepted the CREDO report without questioning its data, its methodology, or its funders.

Billionaires behind the bias: Unmasking CREDO’s agenda

The Network for Public Education released a response to CREDO’s third national report, revealing the true agenda of a research arm of the conservative Hoover Institution. In its report, CREDO uses cherry-picked charter management chains and flawed methodology that embellishes results and discredits public schools and “mom and pop” charter schools.

NEW YORK, NY — Today, the Network for Public Education released ‘In Fact or Fallacy? An In-Depth Critique of the CREDO 2023 National Report a well-researched response that traces the funders and the bias in CREDO’s data, reporting methods, and conclusions.

CREDO’s report is meant to compare test score growth in math and reading for students in charter versus public schools. But once the curtain is pulled back, the conclusions are dangerously misleading to the public as well as policymakers who depend on accurate research to make informed education-related decisions and policies.

Carol Burris, Executive Director of NPE and the report’s author, says: “CREDO is not a neutral academic institution. They are an education research arm of the pro-charter Hoover Institution, and it’s time they are treated as such. We call on policymakers, the general public, and parents to disregard the results of CREDO studies that take tiny results and blow them up using CREDO-invented “Days of Learning.” Their studies are becoming nothing more than propaganda for the charter industry.”

CREDO’s latest report identifies two nonprofits as underwriters of the latest study – The City Fund and The Walton Family – which gave CREDO nearly $3 million during the years of the study. The City Fund is bankrolled by pro-charter billionaires, including John Arnold, Reed Hastings, and Bill Gates. They have a well-established history of supporting the expansion of charter schools and funding agendas to break up school districts and turn them into a patchwork of “portfolio districts.” The goal of the City Fund is to transform 30-50% of city public schools into charter schools.

CREDO also masks its connections to the conservative think tank the Hoover Institution, but the CREDO report authors’ current biographies and resumes link the organizations. CREDO’s Director and the report’s first author is the Education Program Director for Hoover.

NPE says it is time for state agencies to end their research relationship with CREDO and offer detailed student data to credible and independent research organizations instead.

The NPE report takes an honest look at CREDO’s report with the following key sections:

  • A history of CREDO and its connection to the Hoover Institution.
  • Scholarly critiques of CREDO methodology.
  • Trivial differences exaggerated by the CREDO-created construct, ‘Days of Learning’
  • Bias in the “Virtual Twin” methodology.
  • Serious errors in the identification of schools run by Charter Management Organizations.

According to Diane Ravitch, the President of the Network for Public Education, “CREDO and the billionaires who fund them are trying to discredit public schools to persuade the public that public schools are inferior to privately-managed schools. How is this different from the tobacco industry funding research on cigarette safety?”

“It is clear the CREDO reports are now part of a long-game strategy to undermine, weaken, and defund public education. Why does CREDO consider differences that favor public schools in their first report as “meaningless” and “small” but characterize nearly identical differences favoring charters in its third report to be “remarkable”? Same outcomes. Different characterizations,” Ravitch said.

In light of our findings, The Network for Public Education asks CREDO the following question:

Does CREDO represent the interest of its funders and the pro-school choice Hoover Institution or the interests of the public, who deserve an unbiased look at real outcomes for our nation’s charter and public school students?

“Unless CREDO is held accountable, its reports will continue to move from “in fact” to misleading fallacies. And that does a disservice to the charter and public school sectors alike,” concludes the NPE report. 

The Network for Public Education is a national advocacy group whose mission is to preserve, promote, improve, and strengthen public schools for current and future generations of students.

###

Categories Accountability, Bias, Billionaires, Charter Schools, Corporate Reform, Dark Money, Data, Disruption, Education Industry, Funding, Research, Walton Foundation

David Berliner Comments on Gloomy Report by Kane and Reardon About Learning Loss

By dianeravitch
May 18, 2023 //
28

The New York Times recently published an article by Thomas Kane of Harvard and Sean Reardon of Stanford lamenting that parents had no idea how much the pandemic had set back their children’s education. (“Parents Don’t Understand How Far Behind Their Kids Are in School”). Most parents, when asked, respond optimistically that they expect their children to bounce back from whatever academic losses they suffered.

Kane and Reardon think it’s time to dash their optimism. First, there are the NAEP scores showing setbacks in reading, math, and history. “By the spring of 2022, according to our calculations, the average student was half a year behind in math and a third of a year behind in reading.”

Working with researchers from other institutions, they reviewed data from 7,800 communities in 41 states, where 26 million students are enrolled, about 80% of all students in public K-8 schools.

Their biggest conclusion: “The pandemic exacerbated economic and racial educational inequality.” Also: “test scores declined more in districts where schools were closed longer” but “Students fell behind even in places where schools closed very briefly…” However, “the educational impacts of the pandemic were not driven solely by what was happening (or not happening) in schools. The disruption in children’s lives outside of school also mattered: the constriction of their social lives, the stress their parents were feeling, the death of family members, the signals that the world was not safe and the very real fear that you or someone you love might get very sick and die.”

There is much more to read and ponder in the article.

I sent the article to my esteemed friend David Berliner, who is widely recognized as the nation’s pre-eminent education research expert.

Dr. Berliner kindly replied:

Dear Diane,

I am afraid that medical issues for both me and my wife will keep me from a formal response to the nonsense that was produced by two extraordinary researchers. Their credentials and analysis are perfect. I respect their analytic skills—but if you’ll excuse my Yiddish, they have no sechel. [Editor’s note: “sechel,” roughly translated, is common sense.] Let’s look at what they conclude.

 

 

  1. Kids who miss a lot of school do less well on tests of what they learned in school. DUH! I really think I could have predicted that!
  1. Parents who are with their kids many hours per week think their kids are recovering nicely, but these researchers, who never assess a real live kid, say the parents are wrong. That is not wise, if you ask me.

 

  1. Given the history of NAEP, it appears that the kids today will be back where kids were a few years back on tests like NAEP, and the loss probably extends to all the state tests and even PISA may show it. But,…. those kids who scored lower a few years ago, and whose todays’ kids match by their lower test scores, have helped the US economy remain one of the strongest in the world. Those lower test scoring kids of the previous decades helped make America hum. Why won’t today’s kids, with the same level of formal school knowledge, do the same?

Furthermore, we have the Flynn effect in IQ—today’s kids are well above their grandparents in IQ and their grandparent didn’t have nearly as much schooling as today’s kids. And still the economy hummed. American kids are “smarter” than ever if you believe that is what is measured with IQ tests.

Furthermore again, the wonderful 8-year study, which you know quite well, showed that kids who missed a lot of their traditional high school education not only did fine in college but excelled. The kids of many families, surely the better educated families, who missed a lot of formal schooling did not miss all of their education—they just got a different one, and it is not clear that they will be hampered forever because of that.

Among the authors speculations, is raised the question of a 13th high school year. But public schools are terribly underfunded now, so where the hell is there going to be money for a 13th year, or for an additional year of junior high, or more days of schooling per year, or summer school for all? More days of school means more expenditure of funds and I don’t think America has the money, or the will, to allocate such money.

And would colleges reject this generation of kids, as the authors worry about? Naw! The elites are always rejecting the talented but lower scoring kids as well as the kids whose families can’t make some part of the tuition. These two researchers are at Harvard and Stanford, and I seriously doubt if their freshman classes will be “less” smart. Getting full tuition out of parents, not just assessing student credentials, seems to have a lot more sway in the decisions of many higher education institutions than we want to admit. It is also quite noticeable that college enrollments have been falling dramatically over the last few years, so the way I see it is that if you take the time and put in the energy to apply to a college, you stand a really good chance of getting into some place reputable, even if your SATS or GRE’s are few points lower on average than the freshman class of, say, 2018.

Diane, you and I both remember when Ivan was going to wipe the economic floor with the progeny of Joe six-pack. Or when Akito in Japan was going to wipe the same economic floor with Joe’s progeny. Now its Li in China who will do so. But somehow, we Americans muddle through. I bet we will again.

Should we worry. Sure. But I just can’t get excited about this creative, well-done study, with zero policy options that make sense.

My conclusion is that American kids are behind where they were. OK. Attending school again will catch them up. No big deal.

The real issue is that many kids were already way behind, and they seem to almost all have a major character flaw…. they are poor! That’s Americas’ real problem, not a slightly lower score on a current state test whose predictive power of future achievements and earnings is quite limited.

Categories Accountability, Data, Disruption, Education Reform, Health, Inequality, Poverty, Research, Science, Standardized Testing

Tom Loveless: Why NAEP “Proficient” is a High Standard, Not “Grade Level”

By dianeravitch
April 20, 2023 //
35

As I wrote in an earlier post, NAEP Proficient is not the same as “grade level.” NAEP Proficient is equivalent to an A or an A-. Secretary of Education Cardona made the egregious error of saying at a Congressional hearing on April 18 that 2/3 of the students in this nation were below grade level. He was wrong.

Tom Loveless, then of the Brookings Institution (now retired), wrote an excellent article in 2016, providing a history of NAEP and explaining just how high the standard for NAEP Proficient is. He was responding to the wildly inaccurate claims of rightwing ideologues, who said the same things that Secretary Cardona said.

Here are some excerpts from his article, “The NAEP Proficiency Myth.”

Equating NAEP proficiency with grade level is bogus. Indeed, the validity of the achievement levels themselves is questionable. They immediately came under fire in reviews by the U.S. Government Accountability Office, the National Academy of Sciences, and the National Academy of Education.[1] The National Academy of Sciences report was particularly scathing, labeling NAEP’s achievement levels as “fundamentally flawed.”

Despite warnings of NAEP authorities and critical reviews from scholars, some commentators, typically from advocacy groups, continue to confound NAEP proficient with grade level. Organizations that support school reform, such as Achieve Inc. and Students First, prominently misuse the term on their websites. Achieve presses states to adopt cut points aligned with NAEP proficient as part of new Common Core-based accountability systems. Achieve argues that this will inform parents whether children “can do grade level work.” No, it will not. That claim is misleading….

Today’s eighth graders have made it about half-way to NAEP proficient in 25 years, but they still need to gain almost two more years of math learning (17 points) to reach that level. And, don’t forget, that’s just the national average, so even when that lofty goal is achieved, half of the nation’s students will still fall short of proficient. Advocates of the NAEP proficient standard want it to be for allstudents. That is ridiculous. Another way to think about it: proficient for today’s eighth graders reflects approximately what the average twelfth grader knew in mathematics in 1990. Someday the average eighth grader may be able to do that level of mathematics. But it won’t be soon, and it won’t be every student.

In the 2007 Brown Center Report on American Education, I questioned whether NAEP proficient is a reasonable achievement standard.[2] That year, a study by Gary Phillips of American Institutes for Research was published that projected the 2007 TIMSS scores on the NAEP scale. Phillips posed the question: based on TIMSS, how many students in other countries would score proficient or better on NAEP? The study’s methodology only produces approximations, but they are eye-popping….

Singapore was the top scoring nation on TIMSS that year, but even there, more than a quarter of students fail to reach NAEP proficient. Japan is not usually considered a slouch on international math assessments, but 43% of its eighth graders fall short. The U.S. looks weak, with only 26% of students proficient. But England, Israel, and Italy are even weaker. Norway, a wealthy nation with per capita GDP almost twice that of the U.S., can only get 9 out of 100 eighth graders to NAEP proficient.

Finland isn’t shown in the table because it didn’t participate in the 2007 TIMSS. But it did in 2011, with Finland and the U.S. scoring about the same in eighth grade math. Had Finland’s eighth graders taken NAEP in 2011, it’s a good bet that the proportion scoring below NAEP proficient would have been similar to that in the U.S. And yet articles such as “Why Finland Has the Best Schools,” appear regularly in the U.S. press….[3]

NAEP proficient is not synonymous with grade level. NAEP officials urge that proficient not be interpreted as reflecting grade level work. It is a standard set much higher than that. Scholarly panels have reviewed the NAEP achievement standards and found them flawed. The highest scoring nations of the world would appear to be mediocre or poor performers if judged by the NAEP proficient standard. Even large numbers of U.S. calculus students fall short.

As states consider building benchmarks for student performance into accountability systems, they should not use NAEP proficient—or any standard aligned with NAEP proficient—as a benchmark. It is an unreasonable expectation, one that ill serves America’s students, parents, and teachers–and the effort to improve America’s schools.

Categories Accountability, Cardona, Miguel, Data, Education Industry, Extremism, Fake, NAEP, Standardized Testing

Secretary Cardona, NAEP Proficient Is NOT Grade Level!

By dianeravitch
April 19, 2023 //
45

For the past dozen years, since the attack on public schools went into high gear, the same lie has been trotted out again and again to defame public schools. The slanderers say that 2/3 of American students are reading “below grade level.”

At Congressional hearings on the education budget on Tuesday April 18, the same ridiculous claim was made by U.S. Secretary of Education Miguel Cardona. He said that only 33% are reading at proficiency. He said this is “appalling and not acceptable for the United States. 33% of our students are reading on Grade level.” (At about 45:00).

This is nonsense. Its’s frankly appalling to hear Secretary Cardona repeating the lie spread by rightwing public school haters. He really should be briefed by officials from the National Assessment Governing Board before he testifies again.

On the NAEP (National Assessment of Educationsl Progress) tests, “proficient” does not represent grade level. Proficient is a high bar. Although the federal testing agency does not equate its achievement levels to letter grades, I would estimate (based on my seven years of experience as a member of the NAEP Governing Board) that “proficient” is about the same as an A or an A-. Do we really expect that every student merits an A? I don’t think so.

The website of the National Center on Education Statistics states clearly:

Achievement Levels

NAEP student achievement levels are performance standards that describe what students should know and be able to do. Results are reported as percentages of students performing at or above three NAEP achievement levels (NAEP Basic, NAEP Proficient, and NAEP Advanced). Students performing at or above the NAEP Proficient level on NAEP assessments demonstrate solid academic performance and competency over challenging subject matter. It should be noted that the NAEP Proficient achievement level does not represent grade level proficiency as determined by other assessment standards (e.g., state or district assessments).

Could it be any plainer? Students who score at or above NAEP Proficent “demonstrate solid academic performance and competency over challenging subject matter.” Furthermore, the NAEP Proficient level “does not represent grade level proficiency.”

Would someone please tell Secretary Cardona? When he repeats the lies of the rightwing propagandists, he maligns every teacher and student in the nation.

Someone should also inform Secretary Cardona that the NAEP achievement levels are set by panels of educators and non-educators; as such, they are subjective judgments. They have been used on a trial basis for 30 years without getting definitive clearance by testing experts commissioned by Congress to review their validity. “The latest evaluation of the NAEP achievement levels was conducted by a committee convened by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine in 2016. The evaluation concluded that further evidence should be gathered to determine whether the NAEP achievement levels are reasonable, valid, and informative. Accordingly, the NCES commissioner determined that the trial status of the NAEP achievement levels should be maintained at this time.”

Please, Secretary Cardona, stop saying that “only 33% of American students can read proficiently” and that “only 33% are reading at grade level.”

It’s not true.

When asked about vouchers, Secretary Cardona said he opposes them because they take money away from public schools. That’s true, but far from the whole truth. 75-80% of vouchers subsidize students who already attend private schools. They are a transfer from the public to the affluent. Kids who leave public schools to use vouchers lose academic ground, and most return to their public school within two-three years in need of help catching up. Vouchers fund religious schools that may discriminate against students, families, and staff who do not share their religion or who are gay or who have disabilities. They choose the students they want.


Furthermore, religious schools indoctrinate. Some religious schools teach fake science and history. Religious schools force taxpayers to pay for religious views they do not share.

There are many reasons to oppose vouchers but Secretary Cardona seems unaware of them. I recommend that he invite veteran voucher researcher Joshua Cowen of Michigan State University to brief him on why vouchers for religious and private schools are a pernicious and ineffective policy.

Categories Data, Education Reform, Fake News, Fraud, Hoax, Lies, NAEP, Propaganda, Rhee, Michelle, Standardized Testing

Gary Rubinstein: Attrition at Success Academy Worse Than Ever

By dianeravitch
April 14, 2023 //
44

Gary Rubinstein has been following the attrition rates at Success Academy for years. His interest was piqued by literally unbelievable claims issued by the public relations team at Success Academy. The charter chain, a favorite of former Mayor Bloomberg and Rupert Murdoch’s New York Post, has very high test scores. It has also been in the news for high attrition rates. It is a truism that the best way to get high test scores is to get rid of kids who don’t get high test scores.

Gary looked at the latest boasts and did some new checking of Success Academy’s claims:

On April 5th The New York Post published their annual ‘100% of Success Academy students get accepted into four-year colleges’ editorial. The class of 2023 will be the sixth graduating class of the infamous charter chain and according to the first paragraph of the editorial, Success Academy has accomplished this feat six years in a row.

I’ve been fact checking claims like this for about 12 years now and if you follow me at all you know that of course the 100% four year college admission statistic is a lie, but you will want to know how much of a lie it is this time.

What I usually do to check these claims is go to the New York State Education portaland go through the different schools. The quickest calculation is to simply compare the number of Kindergarteners who started the school twelve years earlier to the size of the graduating class. This is not the most accurate thing to do since Success Academy only used to ‘backfill’ students who leave up until 3rd grade, but it is still a pretty informative number. As I’ve reported in previous blog posts about four of the first five graduating classes, this led to senior to kindergarten ratios of 2018: 16/73=22%, 2019: 26/83=31%, 2020: 98/353=28%, 2021: Pandemic so I wasn’t able to do this one, and 2022: 137/538=25%.

Success Academy complains that this way of doing is makes the attrition seem worse than it is because it is equivalent to about a 10% attrition per year. But these numbers are actually inflated because they don’t account for the number of students who left and then were replaced in the early years. I once got data on this from the State and was able to use it to get a more accurate number of 22% for the class of 2021.

Looking at the year to year attrition, the thing that always jumps out at me is how almost half the students who are in 9th grade will graduate on time four years later. For this years analysis I found one of the most bizarre examples of short term attrition I think I have ever seen.

So The New York Post editorial mentions that 100% of the 117 students at Success Academy got into 4 year colleges. Looking back at the 2010-2011 school year, there were seven Success Academy schools that had a combined enrollment of 726 students. (For five of the schools I found Kindergarten stats for 2010-2011 but for the Harlem-5 school I used the 78 1st graders in 2011-2012 and for Bronx-2 I used the 93 2nd graders in 2012-2013). So this quick calculation leads to the lowest ever senior to Kindergarten ration of 117/726=16%. And remember, this is an overestimate since it doesn’t count all the students who left but were replaced.

But the craziest statistic I think I’ve ever come across in this type of research is the number of 11th graders that were in the school just one year earlier. It is hard to get this data sometimes because I had to look at Harlem-1 and Harlem-3 schools even though I think there is just one high school, it is kind of confusing. But it shows that Harlem-1 had 89 11th graders in 2021-2022 and Harlem-3 had 81 11th graders in 2021-2022. So this is 170 eleventh graders in 2021-2022 and now ‘100%’ of them are 117 students. But of course 117/170=69%. So where did 31% of the eleventh graders who were at Success Academy last year go? Well it is doubtful that so many would transfer out. It would be like dropping out of the marathon with 100 yards to go. Though it is possible that some transferred out when they were told that they would have to repeat 11th grade

Please open the link and read the rest of this important post.

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Cheating, Data, Education Industry, Harlem Success Academy, New York City

Jan Resseger: Schools Were at the Heart of the Chicago Mayoral Race

By dianeravitch
April 6, 2023 //
7

Jan Resseger nails the central issue in the Chicago mayoral race: school reform. Pail Vallas tried to make the race about crime and his promise to control it. But the deciding issue was education, and their very different visions for improving it.

How do we know? Vallas has no record as a crime-fighter. He has a long resume as a school superintendent, starting in Chicago. He was the ultimate technocrat, who ruthlessly imposed his test-and-punish and school closing-choice ideology, regardless of how parents, students, and teachers felt about it.

Brandon Johnson was a social studies teacher and then a community organizer for the Chicago Teachers Union. He was the antithesis of Vallas. He knew that the root of school problems was not in the schools but in the social and economic conditions in which children were growing up.

Brandon is the heir of the late, great Karen Lewis. She changed the narrative when she led a citywide strike in 2012. She organized communities and teachers. She continues to be our greatest visionary of what education should be.

How about that, Brandon!

For another account, read Chalkbeat Chicago.

Johnson’s win marks a stunning achievement in the grassroots movement started by Chicago Teachers Union leadership roughly a decade ago to focus on issues beyond the classroom, such as affordable housing, public health, environmental justice, and police reform.

“We have ushered in a new chapter in the history of our city,” Johnson said. “Whether you wake up early to open the doors of your businesses, or teach middle school, or wear a badge to protect our streets, or nurse patients in need, or provide child care services, you have always worked for this city. And now Chicago will begin to work for its people…”

Vallas, a torch bearer for school choice and charter schools who has supported voucher expansion, faced criticism and applause for his complicated schools’ legacy. Johnson taught at Jenner Academy of the Arts and Westinghouse College Prep before becoming a union organizer for the Chicago Teachers Union. His education platform, which aligns closely with the teachers union, promises more staff, free transit for students, and green schools…

The CTU called Johnson a “protege” of the late former union president Karen Lewis, who almost ran for mayor herself in 2015 before being diagnosed with a brain tumor.

“You don’t have a Brandon Johnson without a Karen Lewis,” said CTU president Stacy Davis Gates said. “She transformed the political debate in our city. She showed Chicagoans how to stand up and demand what their schools and their city need and deserve. Tonight affirms Karen’s dream of a city that works for us all, not just a privileged few.”

Categories Charter Schools, Chicago, Corporate Reform, Cruelty, Data, Democracy, Disruption, Duncan, Arne, Education Industry, Elections, Failure, Funding, Hope, Unions

John Thompson: Emily Oster Was Wrong About the Pandemic

By dianeravitch
January 15, 2023 //
43

John Thompson is a historian and a retired teacher in Oklahoma. He is also a meticulous researcher. Emily Oster is an economist at Brown University who said early in the pandemic that it was safe to open schools.

Thompson writes:

New post on Network for Public Education.

John Thompson: COVID and Schools

John Thompson takes a look at Emily Oster’s crusade to get school buildings open.

He writes:

When I started following Emily Oster’s links and critiquing her analyses of COVID in schools, I first worried about her simplistic conclusions such as, “The evidence is pointing in one direction. Schools do not, in fact, appear to be major spreaders of COVID-19.” Since Diane Ravitch posted on epidemiologists Abigail Cartus’ and Justin Feldman’s research, I better understand where Oster was coming from, and how “Oster’s emphasis on individualism and personal choice ring sweetly in the ears of the rightwing philanthropists.”

Oster went “viral” when arguing that educators’ fears were “overblown,” and that kids are “simply very unlikely to be infected.” But, as she made those claims, Oster ignored evidence that schools were significant spreaders, such as the CDC’s summaryof Wisconsin infections from Sept 3 to Nov16, 2020. That state’s schools were the 4th largest source of infections, following long term care and corrections facilities, and colleges; an estimated 14% of infections were linked to schools.

On the eves of Thanksgivings, when common sense said that holiday surges through Christmas and the New Year would be inevitable, Oster would double down on attacks on educators for not immediately reopening classrooms.As Rachel Cohenexplained, Oster’s 2020 data “reflected an extremely small and unrepresentative sample of schools.” There was not a single urban traditional public school reporting data across 27 states in her dataset, including from Florida [and] Texas…” Then, in November, Texas became the first state to have a million infections.

Worse, Cohen reported, “Rebekah Jones, a former Florida Department of Health data scientist who says she was fired in May over a refusal to manipulate her state’s COVID-19 stats, has publicly pushed back on Oster’s claims.” Jones “offered Oster full and free access to their data. ‘But she [Oster] basically decided to just pick what data she wanted, not what’s available.’” Jones added, “‘It’s offensive to researchers, when you see something so unabashedly unscientific, and when the opportunity to do something scientific was there.’”

Before long, I worried that Oster, an economist, was following in the path of economists who didn’t know what they didn’t about public schools and didn’t listen to educators regarding the flaws in their data-driven corporate school reforms. For instance, Oster seemed to disregard about 20% of the U.S. population [who] lived in homes with at least two adult generations or grandparents and grandchildren under 25 in 2016, according to an analysis of census data by the Pew Research Center. And the dangers of spreading COVID from students to older family members was greater in low-income Black and Brown households.

Also, Oster ignored qualifications made by researchers, such as the Duke University study finding that masks can minimize the spread in schools. Inresponse to my questions on methodology, co-author Daniel Benjamin volunteered what it takes to safely reopen schools:

Is that there is 99% mask compliance for every person in the mainstream curriculum that steps on school property. It’s the mitigation strategies—distancing, masking, hand hygiene that are crucially important. If a school district does not do these things, they will likely make the pandemic worse by being open. This is why we don’t advise “you should open” or “you should go remote”…. It’s all about the public health measures.

At that time, I worried about Gov. Ron DeSantis and Oklahoma Gov. Kevin Stitt citing Oster while pressuring schools to open up and drop protections. Neither did I understand why more journalists were not challenging her misuse of sources, and her repeated attacks on teachers unions, especially in publications funded by the Billionaires Boys Club. I sensed Oster’s methodology would cost lives. But, I didn’t want to prejudge researchers at a time when lives were on the line, so I didn’t connect the dots.

But Cartus and Feldman connect the dots and write about Oster’s important role in making:

The “data-driven” case for peeling away successive layers of COVID mitigations: first ending remote instruction in favor of hybrid learning, then ending hybrid learning in favor of a full return to in-person instruction, then eliminating quarantine for those exposed to the virus. … Her vision for schooling during the pandemic ultimately involves abandoning universal public health measures altogether, turning masking and vaccination into individual, personal choices.

Cartus and Feldman address my question why her work “attracted little scrutiny.” It was more than journalists and experts being unaware of the differences between the highest poverty schools and the schools their children attend. Most importantly her work:

Has been funded since last summer by organizations that,without exception, have explicit commitments to opposing teacher’s unions, supporting charter schools, and expanding corporate freedom. In addition to grants from the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, the Walton Family Foundation, and Arnold Ventures, Oster has received funding from far-right billionaire Peter Thiel. The Thiel grant awarded to Oster was administered by the Mercatus Center, the think tank founded and financed by the Koch family.

Cartus and Feldman went deeper than I did in explaining the damage that Oster prompted. For instance, in her “2020 article in The Atlantic, ‘Schools Aren’t Super-Spreaders,’ Oster “assured readers in no uncertain terms that COVID transmission simply did not occur in schools at a rate that would necessitate closures.” But the analysis underlying the piece “drew on a sample of miniscule size—a mere two weeks of school data, reported in the second half of September 2020.” The sample was also biased by the fact that it was collected only from schools voluntarily participating in the Dashboard.

Cartus and Feldman then noted what so many journalists ignored, “The second half of September 2020 coincided with the very beginning of a national uptick in cases that would eventually become the punishing surge of winter 2020-21.”

When the press mostly failed to investigate the red flags that Oster’s work should have raised, “it became an article of faith that the laws of physics governing viral transmission don’t apply to schools, even as evidence of in-school viral transmission has mounted throughout the pandemic.”

Oster et.al’s “declarations of victory ignore[d] a growing body of research that has found schools contribute substantially to community coronavirus transmission, especially in the absence of adequate mitigation. The proclamation of “choice” that she justifies is really:

The ‘choice” to cast off obligations to others: the permission she offers affluent parents to disengage from the social contract. While the privileged seek a return to normalcy—or some sicker, poorer approximation of it—COVID will continue to infect and kill the working class and people of color at disproportionate rates.”

Now, history may be repeating itself. To quote National Public Radio, “People say they are done with COVID, but COVID is not done with us.” When we take stock of the interrelated harm done by anti-vaxers, anti-maskers, rightwingers, and their funders, as well as mistakes made by the CDC, we must draw upon Cartus’ and Feldman’s first draft of the history Emily Oster’s stardom.

You can view the post at this link : https://networkforpubliceducation.org/blog-content/john-thompson-covid-and-schools/

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Categories Accountability, Billionaires, Data, Economics, Health, Science

Gary Rubinstein: Low-Performing Charter Chain Wins $500,000 Prize for Excellence

By dianeravitch
January 10, 2023 //
7

Entrepreneur Steve Perry opened a charter chain called Capital Preparatory Schools, which recently was a finalist for the Yass Prize, which acknowledges outstanding charter schools. The chain won a prize of $500,000, which it will use to expand. The first-place winner was Arizona Autism Charter Schools, which won $1 million. The Yass Prize is called a STOP award, meaning Sustainable, Transformational, Outstanding, and Permissionless.

On the federal government website for charter schools, the Yass prize is described thus:

The mission of the STOP Awards is to identify and support more best in class education providers who can tackle the challenges and deliver an education for students that is Sustainable, Transformational, Outstanding and Permissionless. The STOP Foundation for Education is not just a philanthropy. And the STOP Award is not just a prize. It’s a movement intended to transform education for everyone. Complete the online application form.

The prize is administered by the Center for Education Reform of Washington, D.C., which supports charter schools, vouchers, and virtual charters, and opposes public schools.

Capital Prep operates in New York City and Connecticut. Its schools were recognized for providing outstanding education, and because 100% of its graduates were accepted at four-year colleges and universities since 2006. Its school in Harlem was co-founded by musician Sean Combs, also known as P. Diddy.

Gary Rubinstein has a history of examining charter schools that claim miraculous results. He took a close look at the Capital Prep Schools and learned from state data that they are actually low-performing schools. Please open the link to see his documentation.

He writes:

The 100% college acceptance graduation rate….implies that the students at the school have been successful in their academics. So I thought I’d go to the public New York State data site to see if this is the case.

In general, the test scores at the Perry / P. Diddy school are some of the lowest in the city. Most notable is that in their 8th grade class of 71 students, exactly 1 scored a passing score of a 3 on the recent state tests…[Scores range from 1-5].

School wide, only 6% of the students in all grades got a 3 on the math state test.

For the older grades, I see that no students passed the Geometry or the Algebra II Regents exams.

Now I’m not saying that test scores are everything, but when only 1 out of 71 8th graders gets a 3 on the state test, this definitely runs counter to the image that the 100% college acceptance rate is supposed to indicate.

The New York Capital Prep schools have only been open for a few years, but the Connecticut Capital Prep schools have been around for over 15 years. So I also looked at the Connecticut publicly available data, which has a lot of useful information on it.

One thing I found was that their Four-Year graduation rate has been as low as 56% in recent years…

On the college readiness index, the school fared very poorly…

The college entrance rate for 2020 was not 100% but about 77%…

That school also had 0% passing an AP exam even though 38% took an AP exam…

So anytime you see a claim that some school is beating the odds because they have a 100% college acceptance rate, you should know that there is usually more to the story than that one statistic.

Again, open the link.

Categories Charter Schools, Corporate Reform, Data, Education Industry
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