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The D.C. “Miracle” Disappears

By dianeravitch
July 27, 2019 //
69

I am reposting this post because the main link was dead and I fixed it. Also, it was originally titled “The D.C. ‘Miracle’ turns to Ashes,” and a reader said a miracle can’t turn to ashes. So it has a new title.

 

A year ago, reformers were touting D.C. as their triumphant example. Those graduation rates!

Unfortunately, like every other reformer tale, it was a hoax. The graduation rate was phony. Students were walking across the stage without the necessary attendance or credits. Metrics!

From PBS:

“Critics view the problems, particularly the attendance issue, as an indictment of the entire data-driven evaluation system instituted a more than a decade ago when then-Mayor Adrian Fenty took over the school system and appointed Michelle Rhee as the first chancellor. Rhee’s ambitious plan to clear out dead wood and focus on accountability for teachers and administrators landed her on the cover of Time magazine holding a broom. But now analysts question whether Rhee’s emphasis on performance metrics has created a monster.”

Ya think?

And the teacher-turnover rate is 25% a year! 

The national average? Only 16%. In fact, D.C.’s teacher turnover rate (across both traditional public and public charter schools) is higher than other comparable jurisdictions, including New York, Chicago and Milwaukee.

For both public and charter schools, the highest turnover is taking place at schools with the most at-risk students, with the rate pushing past 30% in Wards 5 and 8.

This is the fruit of Michelle Rhee’s work. A district that continues to have the largest achievement gaps of any urban district tested by NAEP, a phony graduation rate,  and a startlingly high teacher turnover rate. Another “reform” hoax.

Categories Accountability, Data, District of Columbia, Education Reform, Graduation rates, Hoax, Teachers

Peter Greene: The Essential Foolishness of the Fordham-CAP “Moonshot”

By dianeravitch
July 7, 2019 //
17

 

Peter Greene writes here about the “moonshot” to transform American education, co-sponsored by the conservative Thomas B. Fordham Institute and the allegedly liberal Center for AMERICAN Progress. Peter points out that this collaboration demonstrates that both sides of the DC Establishment endorse corporatedceducarion reform (despite its manifest failure for the past 25 years).

He compares their competition to education’s version of the self-driving car.

He writes:

Do you mean something that’s promoted relentlessly but is still far off in the future? Or do you mean a program that faces major obstacles that tech-cheerleaders just sort of gloss over?

Perhaps you meant a tech-based solution that strips all participants of power and agency and gives it instead to a bunch of programmers? Or did you mean a new tech initiative that promises to make a bunch of people rich?

Or do you mean something that can fail with really catastrophic results?

All their goals are stated as measurable results.

And he notes:

These goals are all about changing numbers; they are an open invitation to apply Goodhart’s or Campbell’s Laws, in which focus on a measurement leads to that measurement being rendered useless. This is about coming up with ways to make better numbers. Yes, one way to improve numbers can be (though not always) to improve the underlying reality those numbers are supposed to represent. But those techniques are hard to scale, expensive and not easy to devise. There are always simpler methods.

If you want a piece of this action, the group is open to submissions of 500 words until the end of the month. But remember– this is not about coming up with a self-driving car. It’s about coming up with a marketing package that makes it look like a self-driving car has been perfected. It’s about doing a good job of using modern CGI to fake your presence on the moon without all the hard work, expense and challenge of actually getting a rocket up there.

Categories Accountability, Campbell's Law, Charter Schools, Corporate Reformers, Data, Education Industry, Education Reform, Privatization, Testing

Jersey Jazzman Offers Advice to the Media About Covering Charter Schools

By dianeravitch
May 23, 2019 //
3

 

Jersey Jazzman, aka Mark Weber, is a teacher in New Jersey who took the time to earn a Ph.D. So he could decipher the studies and research usedto make decisions about schools.

In this post, he explains to the media how to cover charter schools.

He noticed that Senator Bernie Sanders’ proposal to ban for-profit charter schools unleashed a wave of commentary about charter schools. Many people have no idea what they are. They don’t know that they are privately managed but publicly funded and that most charter schools operate with little or no oversight. It’s a sweet deal to get public money with no one checking the books.

He writes:

I can’t say I’m surprised, but it looks like Bernie Sanders’ latest policy speech on education – where, among other things, he calls for a ban on for-profit charter schools and other charter school reforms — has generated a lot of fair to poor journalism that purports to explain what charters are and how they perform.

Predictably, the worst of the bunch is from Jon Chait, who cheerleads for charters often without adhering to basic standards of transparency. Chait’s latest piece is so overblown that even a casual reader with no background in charter schools will recognize it for the screed that it is, so I won’t waste time rebutting it.

There are, however, plenty of other pieces about Sanders’ proposals that take a much more measured tone… and yet still get some charter school basics wrong. I’m going to hold off on citing specific examples and instead hope (against hope) that maybe I can get through to some of the journalists who want to get the story of charters right.

The first warning is not to accept the claims that CREDO makes, especially not its assertion that it can measure “days of learning.” It can’t.

Second point, don’t accept the assertion that “charter schools are public schools.” They get public money but bot everything that gets public money is “public.” Like Harvard and Boeing.

Third point, do charter schools strip funding from public schools? JJ is not sure but Gordon Lafer is. See his study here on the fiscal drain that charters impose on public school. 

4) The “best” charter sectors get their gains through increased resources, peer effects, and a test prep curriculum — and not through “charteriness.”

Read the rest for yourself. JJ is always worth reading.

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Data, Education Industry, Research

Pearson’s Plans for 2025: Make Sure You Are Seated When You Read This

By dianeravitch
May 19, 2019 //
31

Pearson has plans for the future. Its plans involve students, education, and profits. Pearson, of course, is the British mega-publishing corporation that has an all-encompassing vision of monetizing every aspect of education.

Two researchers, Sam Sellar and Anna Hogan, have reviewed Pearson’s plans. It is a frightening portrait of corporate privatization of teaching and of student data, all in service of private profit.

Pearson 2025: Transforming teaching and privatising education data, by Sam Sellar and Anna Hogan, discusses the potentially damaging effects of the company’s strategy for public education globally. It raises two main issues of concern in relation to the integrity and sustainability of schooling:

  1. the privatization of data infrastructure and data, which encloses innovation and new knowledge about how we learn, turning public goods into private assets; and
  2. the transformation and potential reduction of the teaching profession, diminishing the broader purposes and outcomes of public schooling.

You can also find a radio program featuring one of the researchers which discusses these issues at http://www.radiolabour.net/hogan-140519.html

 

Categories Data, Education Reform, For-Profit, Pearson, Privatization, Testing

Nathan Robinson: Race to the Top was a Disaster That Should Never Be Repeated

By dianeravitch
February 3, 2019 //
55

 

 

This article by Nathan Robinson, editor of “Current Affairs,” brilliantly explains why Race to the Top was not only a failure but a disaster.  

Schools in Detroit were crumbling, but Detroit got not a penny of the windfall.

Here is a sample:

“There is something deeply objectionable about nearly every part of Race To The Top. First, the very idea of having states scramble to compete for federal funds means that children are given additional support based on how good their state legislatures are at pleasing the president, rather than how much those children need support. Michigan got no Race to the Top money, and Detroit’s schools didn’t see a penny of this $4.2 billion, because it didn’t win the “race.” This “fight to the death” approach (come to think of it, a better name for the program) was novel, since “historically, most federal education funds have been distributed through categorical grant programs that allocate money to districts on the basis of need-based formulas.” Here, though, one can see how Obama’s neoliberal politics differed in its approach from the New Deal liberalism of old: Once upon a time, liberals talking about how to fix schools would talk about making sure all teachers had the resources they needed to give students a quality education. Now, they were importing the competitive capitalist model into government: Show results or find yourself financially starved.

“The focus on “innovation,” data, and technology is misguided, too. Innovation is not necessarily improvement—it’s easy to make something new that isn’t actually any better. The poor learning outcomes of online courses are evidence that sometimes the old methods are best. An Obama administration report on how schools innovated in response to RTT is mostly waffle about “partnering with stakeholders” but also contains descriptions of “21st century” measures like the following:

The majority of Race to the Top states reported to the RSN that they are using or expanding their use of social media communication to keep stakeholders engaged and informed. Ohio, for example, embraced Twitter to communicate with teachers, principals and district leaders during its annual state conference in 2012. “One of the keys to success on Twitter is tweeting a lot — five to seven times a day — morning, noon and at night,” said Michael Sponhour, executive director of communications and outreach for the Ohio Department of Education (ODE). Ohio measures its success on Twitter by the number of tweets that are “retweeted” by its followers; about 70 percent of ODE’s tweets are retweeted, he said.

“So people at state departments of education are being paid to tweet morning, noon, and night, with nearly ⅓ of the tweets not getting so much as a single retweet, while St. Louis’ beautiful old public school buildings are closed, abandoned, and auctioned off. Delaware “was able to use RTT funds to place data coaches in every school,” even as the steam pipe kept leaking onto that playground in Detroit.

“The pro-RTT literature promotes the education reform line of Bill Gates and charter advocates, stressing the need for “accountability” and “evaluation.” There is a mistrust of teachers: The premise here is that unless teachers have the right incentives, they will perform badly. There is an underlying acceptance here of the free market principle that government services do not perform well because they lack the kind of economic rewards and punishments that exist in the private sector. So we should introduce competitive marketplaces in schools (i.e., charterize the system) and do constant assessments of teacher job performance to weed out the Bad Teachers. Race To The Top literature talks about “turning around failing schools,” not “fixing inequality in schools,” and some civil rights activists criticized the program for failing to consider school segregation and inequality in its picture of the country’s educational woes. …

”RTT was wrong in a thousand ways. It prioritized data collection for its own sake, and in spite of its focus on “achievement” and evidence-based policy, didn’t actually boost achievement and wasn’t based on evidence. It was just free market ideology. Instead of talking about adding yet more assessments of teacher performance, we should be talking about the fact that teachers across the country have to buy their own school supplies, and the profession offers too much work for too little pay to attract good candidates who will stay for the long term. No more races to the top. What we need is a race to make sure every school has a music teacher, every building is safe and beautiful and well-maintained, every child is well-fed, every classroom is full of books and supplies, and every teacher has what they need in order to help children discover the world of knowledge.“

 

 

 

 

Categories Data, Duncan, Arne, Education Industry, Education Reform, Failure, Obama, Privatization, Race to the Top

Washington, D.C.: Who Should Control Access to Data About the Schools?

By dianeravitch
November 27, 2018 //
6

Thanks to Leonie Haimson, whose comment brought this excellent article by Rachel Cohen to my attention.

There is a political battle going on in D.C. about school data and who controls it.

Another article on the same subject was written by Ruth Wattenberg, a member of the D.C. State Board of Education, who argues that the Mayor must not be allowed to control the data.

Some City Council members have proposed an independent research collaborative, housed in the D.C. Auditor General’s Office, but the Mayor is opposed. She wants to maintain control.

Whoever has the data must be independent, nonpartisan, and trustworthy.

Cohen writes:

In the wake of a series of DC Public Schools scandals, Ward 3 Councilmember Mary Cheh came forward with an idea: an independent research collaborative that would conduct studies on the city’s public schools, including charters. This collaborative, outlined in draft legislation, would have an advisory board comprised of 16 education stakeholders who would drive the research agenda.

Cheh’s concept has precedent. Other cities, like Chicago, San Diego, and Houston, have similar research collaboratives, commonly referred to as “research practice partnerships” or RPPs. Local education advocates and Cheh’s colleagues on the Council have come out in strong support of her proposal.

But Cheh’s plan also has detractors, and many of them are the appointees of Mayor Muriel Bowser. At a six-hour public hearing held on July 13, several officials tapped by Bowser spoke out against this so-called “Education Research Collaborative.”

And at the same hearing, the public learned that the executive branch was exploring the launch of its own separate education research consortium with the Urban Institute, a national think tank located in D.C. The news sparked concerns that Bowser was seeking to undercut the Council’s push for independent oversight.

At the core of all this politicking: Who gets access to data about D.C.’s public schools, and how do they get to use it?

Cheh’s bill, introduced in April, has eight other co-sponsors, a Council supermajority which could override a potential veto from the mayor. The Council set aside $500,000 in its most recent budget for the auditor to “incubate” this pilot research consortium. (That funding becomes available in October, when fiscal year 2019 begins.) It would be launched initially in the Office of the DC Auditor, an agency outside of the executive branch. Supporters say that after a few years they would look for a new home—be it a local think tank, university, or its own independent agency.

The chair of the education committee, At-Large Councilmember David Grosso, has not yet taken a position on the bill, but in May he tried to steer the dedicated $500,000 to after-school programs instead. His effort failed 12-1.

The research collaborative was conceived of in response to the host of education scandals which emerged over the last year, including news that high school graduation rates were massively inflated and that the public schools chancellor knowingly violated a school choice policy he himself wrote. While local and national leaders have long looked to D.C.’s education reforms as a model for the nation, today many parents, community members, and even elected officials have voiced a lack of confidence in the gains reported by the school system, fearing information has become too politicized under mayoral control.

“I call the information that we get from our education agencies ‘PR,’” says At-Large Councilmember Robert White. “It can be very difficult to get hold of unbiased data….”

“Our hope is to get accurate, reliable, credible data, and then to use this data in a research partnership to understand whether the policies we are pursuing are really working,” says Cheh.

The Mayor’s office is fighting the proposal to house the agency in the Auditor’s office. She and her allies claim it would politicize the data and the research. Supporters of the proposal say that it would politicize the office if it is controlled by the Mayor.

The person in whom I have the greatest trust in D.C. is Mary Levy, who has been tracking D.C. data for many years and faithfully reporting what she finds without fear or favor. She opposes letting the mayor control the data.

Mary Levy, a longtime budget analyst for D.C. schools, is more blunt. “This idea is an infant in the cradle,” she tells City Paper. “And if you don’t put it in the auditor’s office it’s going to die in its cradle.”

If the agency controlling the data and research is not trustworthy, the money will be wasted and the residents of the city will remain in the dark.

It is bizarre that D.C., which claimed to be “data-driven” after the onset of the Michelle Rhee era and mayoral control in 2007, continues not to have reliable and accurate data more than a decade later.

Categories Data, District of Columbia

Washington, D.C.: Does Anyone Know if the Reports About Staff Turnover Are Accurate?

By dianeravitch
November 27, 2018 //
9

Valerie Jablow, D.C. parent, blogger, and activist, read two reports on teacher and principal attrition and retention. One of them was prepared by the highly respected D.C. civil rights attorney Mary Levy, who has been tracking data in D.C. for many years. Levy looked at both public schools and charter schools.

One conclusion: staff turnover is startlingly high, especially in schools with the most disadvantaged students.

Overall, our public school teacher turnover rates dwarf national averages and have socioeconomic implications, such that the more at risk students a school has, the higher its teacher turnover. The data examined by Levy from the last 3 years alone show that fully a quarter of our public school teachers leave each year—a much higher rate than other jurisdictions. The result is that over half a decade, most of our publicly funded schools will see the majority of their teachers leave.

Our DC public school principal turnover is high as well, averaging about 25% annually. Although that is closer to the national average for principal turnover, in DC it is (like teacher turnover) also correlated with socioeconomics, such that schools with the most at risk students often have the most principal turnover.

Levy had to hand-calculate some of the data because data-collection is slipshod:

For one, we have this data on teacher turnover in DCPS only because Levy herself has spent years comparing staff rosters for individual DCPS schools and budgets and reported what she found. Consider, for a moment, the painful irony of Levy being commissioned to do a report on teacher attrition in DCPS through a painstaking process of backing out data that the school system may already have in a better format–and, for all any of us knows, could provide in a much easier way.

For another, the charter school data on teacher turnover is suspect, as Levy discovered that a number of charter schools appeared to have confused teacher attrition with retention in their required annual reports.

Thus, whenever the reported teacher attrition rate in a charter school was higher than 50%, Levy painstakingly compared staff rosters from one year to the next in the same school. Roster comparisons were, however, inexact because different schools defined “teacher” in different ways, and the rosters themselves changed in form and format from year to year. (Not to mention that the attrition/retention confusion happened within LEAs–so each school had to be looked at separately.) Nonetheless, Levy recorded how many teachers appeared to stay and leave each year; used that to determine whether the reported high rate of attrition above 50% was accurate; and, if it was not accurate, flipped the percentage.

Imagine that! The schools reporting data often didn’t know the difference between retention and attrition! Are any of the data credible when the people responsible for reporting don’t inow the meaning of basic terminology?

D.C. public schools have been controlled by the mayor and by “reformers” including Michelle Rhee and Kaya Henderson (now looking for a new chancellor since Antwan Wilson left) since 2007, and there in no accurate data collection and analysis program.

Foundations including Gates, Walton, and Broad have poured tens of millions into DCPS, and there is no accurate collection and analysis program.

Whenever D.C. makes a claim about graduation rates, test scores, teacher and principal attrition and retention, they are probably just guessing. Or boasting. They really don’t know.

If you want to learn more, you can attend this meeting:

This Wednesday November 28, from 6 pm-8 pm, the DC State Board of Education (SBOE) and teacher advocacy group EmpowerEd will hold a joint forum on staff retention in DC’s publicly funded schools. The forum will be held at Walker-Jones Education Campus, 1125 New Jersey Ave. NW. RSVP here.

Categories Accountability, Data, District of Columbia, Education Reform, Principals, Teachers

NYC: No Charter Waiting Lists! Charters Hire Firm to Market Their Brands

By dianeravitch
November 4, 2018 //
13

Susan Edelman of the New York Post reports that the NYC DOE is under investigation by federal and state officials for giving personal information about students to a marketing firm hired by charter schools.

https://nypost.com/2018/11/04/department-of-education-probed-for-pitching-charters-to-public-school-kids/

Wait! What about the long waiting lists?!

She writes:

“The city Department of Education reduces its enrollment by giving student names and addresses to a private vendor that produces mass mailings to help charter schools woo families.

“The longtime marketing practice has now come under investigation by state and federal officials after a Manhattan mom complained it violates student privacy rights.

“Each year my family receives a large number of pamphlets and flyers from charter schools, promoting and marketing their schools and urging me to apply, ” Johanna Garcia wrote to state and US officials.

“While Garcia has three kids in public schools, flyers have targeted her daughter who qualified for a gifted and talented program, she wrote, but not two other children with special needs.

“The DOE says it gives only student names, grade levels and addresses to Vanguard Direct, a bulk-mailing company, and forbids the company to share the data with anyone else.

“Charter schools — which are privately run but get taxpayer funds based on enrollment — hire Vanguard to send out hundreds of thousands of marketing materials aimed at recruiting kids.

“Major customers include charter chains Success Academy, Uncommon, KIPP, and Achievement First, said DOE spokesman Douglas Cohen. The DOE receives no payment from Vanguard, he said.

“In response to Garcia’s complaint, the New York state and US education departments said they are probing whether the marketing deal violates FERPA — a federal law which requires schools to get parent permission before releasing student information, except in limited cases.

“But Leonie Haimson, co-chair of the national Parent Coalition for Student Privacy, said the reasoning makes no sense: “School districts lose funding and space when students enroll in charters. Why would the DOE use its own employees for that purpose?”

“Garcia agreed. “Vanguard makes money. Charter schools make money. All on the backs of regular public-school students.”

“The practice began more than a decade ago under ex-Mayor Mike Bloomberg, when Success Academy CEO Eva Moskowitz said she needed the DOE data to market her charter schools. It has continued despite Mayor de Blasio’s less-friendly relationship with charters.

“Chancellor Richard Carranza told a town hall meeting in Harlem last week that DOE schools should better market themselves to stem the rise of charter schools, Patch.com reported.

“But charter schools say they rely on the mailings to fill seats.”

Categories Accountability, Bloomberg, Michael, Charter Schools, Data, Education Industry, Education Reform, New York City, Privacy and Privacy Rights, Privatization

Ohio: State Plans to Take Over East Cleveland District Despite Inaccurate Data

By dianeravitch
October 8, 2018 //
14

This is an outrageous story.

The state of Ohio Plans to take over the East Cleveland school district despite the fact that the state’s data are wildly inaccurate.

CLEVELAND – After digging into the state Department of Education’s report cards for current and planned state takeovers, News 5 found there are some issues within the report cards of at least one district — East Cleveland.

“We found some inaccuracies within the report card,” said Tom Domzalski, East Cleveland School District’s director of research, data and assessments.

Domzalski said “without a doubt,” the district and students are performing better than the state’s report card reflects.

An example of one of the errors in the state report card was that it showed that only 90.9 percent of principals in East Cleveland have a college degree, but state law requires principals to have a bachelor’s and master’s degree. According to East Cleveland officials, all of their principals do.

So where did the state come up with the 90.9 percent? That’s unclear, but it’s not the only problem.

There are errors, inconsistencies and numbers from last year within the document reflecting East Cleveland School District’s 2018 failing grade.

“One times .15 percent is not .075 percent,” Domzalski said, pointing out errors in the math published on the first page. “…the math just isn’t correct.”

According to Domzalski, the inconsistencies don’t stop there.

“In terms of our prepared for success measure, we are showing that students are not taking college credit courses. That’s not true,” he said.

When the state was informed about multiple errors in the East Cleveland report card, the officials said it was too late, nothing could be done.

Is it political meanness or bureaucratic inertia that prevents the state from acknowledging and rectifying its errors?

Categories Accountability, Data, Education Reform, Ohio

Steven Singer: The Six Biggest Problems with Data-Driven Instruction

By dianeravitch
October 1, 2018 //
31

Steven Singer writes here about the mechanistic, anti-child implicationsand consequences of data-driven Instruction. He identifies six issues. I offer only the first of these problems. To learn about the other five, open the link.

He writes:

No teacher should ever be data-driven. Every teacher should be student-driven.

You should base your instruction around what’s best for your students – what motivates them, inspires them, gets them ready and interested in learning.

To be sure, you should be data-informed – you should know what their test scores are and that should factor into your lessons in one way or another – but test scores should not be the driving force behind your instruction, especially since standardized test scores are incredibly poor indicators of student knowledge.

No one really believes that the Be All and End All of student knowledge is children’s ability to choose the “correct” answer on a multiple-choice test. No one sits back in awe at Albert Einstein’s test scores – it’s what he was able to do with the knowledge he had. Indeed, his understanding of the universe could not be adequately captured in a simple choice between four possible answers.

As I see it, there are at least six major problems with this dependence on student data at the heart of the data-driven movement.

So without further ado, here is a sextet of major flaws in the theory of data-driven instruction:

The Data is Unscientific

When we talk about student data, we’re talking about statistics. We’re talking about a quantity computed from a sample or a random variable.

As such, it needs to be a measure of something specific, something clearly defined and agreed upon.

For instance, you could measure the brightness of a star or its position in space.

However, when dealing with student knowledge, we leave the hard sciences and enter the realm of psychology. The focus of study is not and cannot be as clearly defined. What, after all, are we measuring when we give a standardized test? What are the units we’re using to measure it?

We find ourselves in the same sticky situation as those trying to measure intelligence. What is this thing we’re trying to quantify and how exactly do we go about quantifying it?

The result is intensely subjective. Sure we throw numbers up there to represent our assumptions, but – make no mistake – these are not the same numbers that measure distances on the globe or the density of an atomic nucleus.

These are approximations made up by human beings to justify deeply subjective assumptions about human nature.

It looks like statistics. It looks like math. But it is neither of these things.

We just get tricked by the numbers. We see them and mistake what we’re seeing for the hard sciences. We fall victim to the cult of numerology. That’s what data-driven instruction really is – the deepest type of mysticism passed off as science.

The idea that high stakes test scores are the best way to assess learning and that instruction should center around them is essentially a faith based initiative.

Before we can go any further, we must understand that.

Categories Corporate Reform, Data, Teachers and Teaching, Testing
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