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Jim Miller: Who Will Save Us from the Billionaire “Saviors”?

By dianeravitch
September 26, 2018 //
26

Jim Miller, professor at the San Diego City College, has posed exactly the right question: Who will save us from “our billionaire saviors?” The question was inspired by Andrea Gabor’s excellent new book After the Education Wars, and by the possibility that billionaire Michael Bloomberg will run for the Democratic nomination for president in 2020.

In New York City, we remember him as a data-driven, test-loving, top-down Reformer, who hired non-educator Joel Klein to terrorize teachers and principals and introduce choice and charters. The result was a public relations success and an education failure. Much boasting, vast disruption, constant reorganization. Change for the sake of change. Bloomberg is one of the billionaires identified in the NPE report about the super-rich who fund anti-public education candidates in state and local elections.

Miller writes:

After failing to prop-up Antonio Villaraigosa’s flagging gubernatorial campaign last June, Michael Bloomberg apparently spent the summer pondering whether it would be wiser for him to personally save the United States rather than waste his time trying to rescue California by proxy. Last week the New York Times reported that Bloomberg was mulling a run for the Presidency as a Democrat because that represented the most viable path to victory. As the Times story observed, while Bloomberg has engaged in some good work on guns and the environment, many of his other positions might not be very likely to win over the liberal base of the Democratic Party…

As Andrea Gabor, (ironically) the Bloomberg chair of business journalism at Baruch College/CUNY, writes in her excellent new book After the Education Wars: How Smart Schools Upend the Business of Reform, Bloomberg’s reign in New York hardly represented a golden era for education: “to be an educator in Bloomberg’s New York was a little like being a Trotskyite in Bolshevik Russia—never fully trusted and ultimately sidelined…”

The business reformers came to the education table with their truths: a belief in market competition and quantitative measures. They came with their prejudices—favoring ideas and expertise forged in corporate boardrooms over knowledge and experience gleaned in the messy trenches of inner-city classrooms. They came with distrust of an education culture that values social justice over more practical considerations like wealth and position. They came with the arrogance that elevated polished, but often mediocre (or worse), technocrats over scruffy but knowledgeable educators. And most of all, they came with their suspicion—even their hatred—of organized labor and their contempt for ordinary public school teachers.

What this has resulted in, according to Gabor, is that the corporate reformers “adopted all the wrong lessons from American business.” Rather than innovating by harnessing “the energy and the knowledge of ordinary employees,” who are the most “knowledgeable about problems—and solutions” because they know the process, the billionaire boys club has favored a punitive, hierarchical, undemocratic, one-size fits all approach that has hurt students more than it has helped them.

Wedded to a factory-style approach to education, corporate reformers “focused on a Taylorite effort to standardize teaching so that teachers can be easily substituted like widgets on an assembly line. This despite the fact that, on average, ‘unions have a positive effect on student achievement’ and the best charter schools are often the independent charters that give teachers voice, often via union contracts.” All of this reflects the fact, Gabor reminds us, that “the corporate education-reform movement has deeply undemocratic roots.”

What this movement has brought us is not pretty. We have systematically devalued the “art” of teaching in favor of a dumbed-down, accountability regimen that prefers standardization and over-testing to empowering educators and students to think more creatively and independently. It has assailed teachers and attacked educational culture to such a degree that it should be no surprise that our society has become increasingly anti-intellectual and hostile to fact-based analysis. As Gabor observes of the Trump era:

[T]he election of this larger-than-life Chucky demagogue, with his multiple bankruptcies and divorces, his sexual predations and business malfeasance, his hate-filled speeches and tweets, also represented a failure of corporate-style education reform as it has taken shape over more than twenty years. Among an electorate that often favors “ordinary” people they can identify with, Trump, the consummate philistine—unread and uninterested, crude, unthinking, and disdainful of facts and any attempt at rational truth—holds up a dystopian mirror of the electorate…

It may not have been the intended outcome of those who simply wished to produce a more useful workforce, but it does show the profound limits of their debased instrumentalism. Hence Gabor again observes: “Corporate education reformers cannot be directly blamed for the ascendance of Trump. However, over two decades of an ed-reform apparatus that has emphasized the production of math and ELA test scores over civics and learning for learning’s sake has helped produce an electorate that is ignorant of constitutional democracy and thus more vulnerable to demagoguery.”

Gabor’s thorough study does more than just criticize the failures of corporate education reform. She outlines how multiple examples of innovative educational practices across the country have defied the technocratic dictates of the well-heeled and focused instead on “bottom-up” strategies that have relied heavily on “a participative, collaborative, deeply democratic approach to continuous improvement, drawing on diverse constituencies—including students, teachers, and local business leaders—in their effort.”

Thus, there are some insights to be found in approaches that rely on “local democracy” that can help do right for our children and the society at large. Following these examples, rather than the lead of self-important billionaires, is where we can find hope for a better education system and a more democratic society.

As for Bloomberg, maybe he should just go away and let the people lead. We’ve had too much “reform” from self-declared rich saviors and philanthrocapitalists already. In fact, it’s long past time that we save ourselves from them.

Categories Accountability, Billionaires, Charter Schools, Corporate Reformers, Data, Education Industry, Education Reform, Privatization, Testing

Audrey Hill: The Hoax of the Great White Savior

By dianeravitch
August 21, 2018 //
14

Audrey Hill tells a fascinating story about Michael Johnston, the highly accomplished TFA alum from Colorado who was briefly a principal, then became a very influential state senator, and recently tried unsuccessfully to run for the Democratic nomination for governor. While Johnston was in the State Senate, he wrote a bill for evaluation of teachers, principals, and schools called SB 191 (2010), which tied evaluation firmly to test scores and was one of the most punitive in the nation. Standardized test scores count for 50% of overall evaluation. He pledged that his bill was historic and would produce “great teachers, great principals, and great schools.” Eight years later, it is clear that it had no effect other than to demoralize teachers (who are among the most underpaid in the nation. It did not produce great teachers, great principals, or great schools, yet Michael fought to keep it in place until he was term limited out of the legislature.

But that is not what Audrey Hill writes about in this post. She writes about the bald-faced whoppers that charter advocates tell.

She quotes Johnston telling a group of innocent young college graduates about the miracles he accomplished when he was a principal because he believed (!) She has a tape of his 21 minutes of self-praise.

She begins:

At a Teach for America fundraiser, DFER politician and then Colorado Senator, Mike Johnston, tells a story that will be brief because (he jokes) he doesn’t want to keep his audience from dessert. He launches into a narrative about a scrappy, young, founding principal who beat all the odds because he believed in truth and hope. Johnston’s story is peppered with the names of students and their stories. Over the course of 21:53 minutes, we meet Tasha, Flavio, Jermaine and Travis (the 44th kid). He weaves from story to story and then back to how he and others (mostly TFA alums) fight against a system that has been catering to “an old set of interests with a wrong set of priorities,” and he ends by telling an eager, young audience that they are the army who, through sheer force of will “…would hoist America onto its shoulders and carry it across the water…”

What Johnston is saying at that moment (without a shred of irony) is that what America needs most is to be saved by an army of over-privileged youth right out of selective college who will move, with all deliberate speed, into positions of influence and power and more privilege. To return to the 2010 ed reform documentary, they are the Supermen that America has been waiting for, and they will, through sheer force of will (and a rehabilitated mid 20th century vernacular), fix all the things. The message is classic trickle down theory:

More privilege for the over-privileged helps the underprivileged.<!–more–>

Despite all obstacles, 100% of his seniors graduated from high school!

What he didn’t say was that 40% of the class never made it to senior year (the dirty little secret).

There was an increase in the graduation rate, but what Hill notices is the 40% who disappeared and were forgotten.

However, modest improvements don’t sell privatization, unfair labor practice and fast track careerism… all goals in the private interest that are sold alongside the goals of the public interest. Ed Reform makes serving a private interest virtually indistinguishable from serving the public one. It becomes easiest for a rising star to make the pragmatic, commonplace choice to accept whatever half truth or lie of omission keeps the train running. So, 40% of juniors have got to go. But, this article is not about Johnston. It is about other stakeholders: the 45th kids, the families that love them, and the teachers that teach them. And, it asks one question about removing a large share of a junior class…

Celebrating the personal success of students going off to college does not require celebrating the fake success of a business model. Students going off to college deserve all the accolades, but their interests are not served by the disappearance of 40% of their peers at the end of 11th grade. The only interests that are served by a school’s 100% Forever Mission Accomplished party are the private ones… the career of the rising star, the reputation of a school network, the agenda of the wealthy donors that fund them.

What Audrey Hill has discovered is that reform is not about the kids. It is about the heroes of their story, the privileged elite who make up stories about saving them. The saviors are the heroes! They can fudge the data as much as they want, and a credulous media won’t care. Their funders won’t care either.

As a result, a disposing school can remove as many students as they wish to fulfill their 100% Forever claim. They can hold onto non-disruptive kids and use their per pupil dollars for years and still not return a high school diploma. They can create a culture of winners (who gets to stay) and losers (who’s got to go). They can use fake data to suggest that superior performance is a result of at-will employment, ending due process, high class size with exceptional teachers, blended learning, daily test prep, low community agency, mayor controlled school systems, two hour bus rides to school, high but unpublished attrition rates. They can dump any educator, any child, any parent who displeases them and effectively dampen protest and oversight. They can maintain a parasitical relationship to living public schools and return only those students who they do not prefer. They can pursue instability with no concern for the people they are supposed to serve.

All of these are the bad policies of more privileged people on the backs of less privileged people… the kids that are removed or taught in test prep factories, the teachers that labor every day under a cloud of undeserved censure, the schools that are shamed by fake data, and the users and benefactors of public education itself. The mission is not only NOT accomplished, it is subverted and harnessed to an entirely different mission serving the oldest set of interests and the wrong set of priorities.

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Colorado, Corporate Reformers, Data, Teach for America

William Mathis: Everything Important Cannot Be Measured

By dianeravitch
August 21, 2018 //
38

The following was written by William Mathis, vice-chair of the Vermont State Board of Education and Managing Director of the National Education Policy Center in Boulder, CO.

Education Reforms: Everything Important Cannot be Measured

We’re now in our seventieth year of national crisis. “Society is in peril of imminent collapse unless we do something about education,” is the mantra. It would seem that if we had an “imminent” crisis a lifetime ago, something bad would have happened by now. While doomsayers can go back to the Mayan calendar, we can start with the 1950s with Admiral Rickover attacking the “myth of American educational superiority” and unfavorably comparing the United States to other nations. He proclaimed education as “our first line of defense.” This was followed by the “Nation at Risk” report in 1983 which proclaimed that our schools were besieged, “by a rising tide of mediocrity that threatens our very future as a Nation and a people.” Unfavorable test score comparisons and military metaphors remain popular with the reformers. These prognostications failed to come true.

Perhaps, the reformers got it wrong.

Attributed to Einstein, “Everything that can be measured is not important and everything important cannot be measured.” In focusing on what is easily measured, rather than what is important, we fail to grasp the real problem. To be sure, tests measure reading and math reasonably well and we need to keep tests for that purpose. But that’s only one part of education. Schools also teach children to get along with others, prepare young people for citizenship, encourage creativity, teach job and human skills, integrate communities, teach tolerance and co-operation, and generally prepare students to be contributing members of society. These things are not so easily measured.

Even if we limit ourselves to test scores, as a society, we misread them. That is, the low scores are strongly affected by circumstances outside the schools. Children coming from violent, economically challenged and drug addicted homes, as a group, are not going to do as well as their more fortunate classmates. As the family income gap between children has widened, the achievement gap has also widened.

A Stanford professor compared all the school districts in the nation using six different measures of socio-economic well-being and found that a stunning 70% of test scores could be predicted by these six factors. When the PARCC tests, which are used to test “college and career readiness” were compared with freshman grade point average, the tests only predicted between one and 16% of the GPA. What this means is that the tests do a better job of measuring socio-economic status than measuring schools.

This pattern has been solidly and consistently confirmed by a mountain of research since the famous Coleman report in 1966. It pointed to family and social problems rather than schools. So what did we do? We collected more data. We now have “data dash-boards.” Countless ads on the web tout this lucrative market and proclaim how people can “drill down,” create interactive charts and visuals to provide “deep learning.” They display all manner of things such as differences by ethnic group, technical education, graduation rate and a myriad of exotic esoterica. By all means, we need to continue to collect this important data. The problem is that we already know what the dash-board tells us. What it doesn’t tell us is the nature of the real problems and how to correct them. First, we must look to those things outside the school that affect school performance. Second, in addition to hard data, we must use on-the-ground observations to see whether we provide legitimate opportunities to all children, whether the school is warm and inviting, and whether the curriculum is up to date and well-delivered.
By concentrating only on the easily measurable, we squeeze the life out of schools. We devalue, deemphasize and defund things that lead to a better life, better schools and a better civilization.
Finally, it misses the most essential point. Parents want their children to grow and lead productive, happy lives and contribute to society. They want their children to practice civic virtue and have loving relationships. But these things are not easily measured by a test. “Everything that can be measured is not important and everything important cannot be measured.”

William J. Mathis is Managing Director of the National Education Policy Center and Vice-chair of the Vermont State Board of Education. The views expressed here are not necessarily those of organizations with which he is affiliated.

[i] https://www2.ed.gov/pubs/NatAtRisk/risk.html
[ii] Haran, W. J. (may 1982). “Admiral Hyman G. Rickover, USN: A Decade of Educational Criticism, 1955-64.” Loyola Dissertation. Retrieved July 3, 2018 from https://ecommons.luc.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=3077&context=luc_diss
[iii] https://ww w.washingtonpost.com/news/answer-sheet/wp/2015/02/12/whats-the-purpose-of-education-in-the-21st-century/?noredirect=on&utm_term=.cead22f07401
[iv] Reardon, S. F. (July 2011). “The Widening Academic Achievement Gap Between the Rich and the Poor: New Evidence and possible Explanations. Retrieved July 3, 2018 from https://static1.squarespace.com/static/58b70e09db29d6424bcc74fc/t/59263d05c534a59e6984a5fd/1495678214676/reardon+whither+opportunity+-+chapter+5.pdf
[v] Reardon, S. F. (April 2016). School District Socioeconomic Status, Race and Academic Achievement. https://cepa.stanford.edu/…/school-district-socioeconomic-status-race-and-academic-achievement
[vi] http s://www.washingtonpost.com/news/answer-sheet/wp/2016/05/27/alice-in-parccland-does-validity-study-really-prove-the-common-core-test-is-valid/?utm_term=.12cf542ae0cf
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Categories Accountability, Data, Education Reform, Research

Larry Cuban: Today’s Reformers and the Revival of Taylorism and the Cult of Efficiency

By dianeravitch
July 31, 2018 //
8

Larry Cuban wrote an insightful post about the Reformers’ revival of the ideology of social efficiency that was popular a century ago.

He writes:

“The current incarnation of “Taylorism” and focus on student outcomes can be seen in the standards, testing, and accountability movement launched over three decades ago in the wake of A Nation at Risk report. The application of business practices and lingo under the umbrella of scientifically acquired evidence reappeared anew albeit with different labels.

“Since the 1980s, reforms that called for uniform curriculum standards and increased testing while holding districts and schools responsible for student outcomes aimed to harness education to a stronger economy. With the increased power of computers to gather and analyze data, new techniques to prod schools to teach more, better, faster, and cheaper appeared (see here, here, and here) *

“The frequent gathering and parsing of test data, school-by-school, district-by-district, state-by-state, and nationally became a major enterprise. The lure of increased productivity and efficiency through evidence-based decision-making in light of huge (and available) data-sets has led to increasing use of algorithms to grade performance of individual schools, evaluating teacher performance, and customizing online lessons for each student (see here and here).

“States and districts now evaluate the performance of schools based on test scores, growth in achievement, graduation rates, and other measures and then assign rankings by issuing a grade to each school ranging from an A to a F, awarding one to five stars, or similar systems. Such grades signal parents which schools are high-performing and attractive to enroll their children and which schools are to be avoided—an efficient way of sorting out schools especially since parental choice in public schools has expanded.

“Determining which teachers are productive, i.e., “effective,” using students’ test scores has occurred in many states and big city districts. Such outcome measures should not shock anyone familiar with the spreading influence of the business model (e.g., earning profits, market share, and return on investment) upon schooling.

“Policymakers’ concerns over inefficiency in sorting effective from ineffective teachers (most districts graded 90-plus percent of teachers satisfactory) led to an embrace of an economic model of providing incentives to increase organizational productivity and efficiency.

“Within classrooms, both effectiveness and efficiency have come to the fore in customizing lessons for individual students. Earlier efforts to introduce “teaching machines” in the 1920s and later in the 1950s testify to the history of educators seeking ways to tailor teaching and learning to fit individual students. With the spread of faster and cheaper technologies since the 1990s, new classroom models of integrating devices and online programs took hold in many schools. The growth of huge data-sets of information on student performance in math, reading, and other school subjects also segued into a Niagara of software spilling over schools in the past two decades. The rationale for extensive buying and distributing of new devices and software has been to make teaching and student learning faster, better, and individualized.”

This mode of thinking, mandated and imposed as federal policy, threatens to extinguish childhood and the joy of learning.

What works in an automated warehouse is not what should be applied to a schoolroom.

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

Economists with Common Sense about Education

By dianeravitch
March 24, 2018 //
46

 

Many of us on this blog criticize economists because it often seems that the only thing they value is scores on standardized tests. If they can’t measure a thing without precision, it doesn’t matter. They think they can measure teacher quality by student test scores, they can measure schools by test scores, they can measure students with test scores. As Daniel Koretz showed in his book The Testing Charade: Pretending to Improve Schools, the tests are misused and abused to make these judgments. They aren’t good enough to label students, teachers, or schools, and their misuse distorts the measures (Campbell’s Law).

Now a group of scholars seeks to rescue schools from the iron grip of standardized testing. (Among the authors is my favorite economist of education, Helen Ladd of Duke University.) They argue that test scores are not the only things that matter in education. They say that schools should be informed by evidence, not driven by it. 

Decisions should be driven by what we value, what our goals are, not simply by test scores.

They write:

Although evidence clearly contributes to thoughtful policy-making, evidence cannot and should not drive policy decisions. When we make decisions, or policies, we are driven by a desire to achieve a set of goals. The role of data is to provide evidence on how our choices are likely to affect the realization of our goals. Evidence informs decisions so that, if the evidence is good and we interpret it well, the results of our decisions align better with what we value.

A challenge for many decision makers is to think clearly about the values they are seeking to realize. In education, decision makers are often motivated by the desire to improve student outcomes and increase educational equity. Yet both “student outcomes” and “equity” are vague terms. Which student outcomes, or combination of outcomes, are most valuable? Do we care about students’ understanding of trigonometry or their ability to run fast? Do we want to work towards all students having more equal cognitive skills or to increasing the skills of the least well off? Without more precise understandings of which outcomes we care about and which distributions of those outcomes are fair, decision makers lack orientation. Their decisions may end up relying on data about outcomes that happen to be available rather than about outcomes that align with their goals.

In a new book, Educational Goods: Values, Evidence, and Decision-Making (University of Chicago Press, 2018), we seek to spell out a set of educational values and distributive principles and to illustrate how they, along with a small number of non-education values, can be combined with the relevant evidence to improve education decision making. Two of us (Ladd and Loeb) are social scientists who bring a familiarity with the use of evidence, and two (Brighouse and Swift) are philosophers who operate in the realm of values.

This group of scholars is thinking differently. For example:

While educational goods and their distribution are central to education policy decisions, other values come into play as well. While it may at first seem like these additional values are too numerous and ill-defined to specify, in fact, only a small set of values—we identify five of them—typically come into play in education decision making. Think again of the possibility that equalizing educational goods would require extensive intervention in the family. Respect for parents’ interests limits the pursuit of distributive goals. Think of another independent value – what we term childhood goods. Childhood goods are the experiences that students have in childhood that contribute to their flourishing even if they do not build their capacities. These goods may include purposeless play, as well as the joys of learning or laughing. We may be unwilling to undertake an educational approach that develops students’ educational goods if it, in turn, makes the students miserable in the process. The other independent values—respect for the democratic process, freedom of residence and occupation, and other goods (e.g. heath care or housing)—may also put a brake on what should be done to pursue educational goods and their valuable distribution.

 

 

Categories Data, Economics, Research, Testing

The Schott Foundation Proposes A New Way to Measure Cities and Their Support for Good Schools and Healthy Children

By dianeravitch
March 16, 2018 //
6

 

The Schott Foundation for Public Education is one of the small number of foundations that unabashedly supports public educations and understands its importance in a democratic society. Under the leadership of its dynamic president, John Jackson, it seeks not to privatize schools but to make them much, much better places for children to learn and grow to their full potential.

Schott recently developed a new measurement, which it calls “the loving cities index.” 

The brilliance of this measure is that it quantifies not test scores or other measures that can be corrupted and gamed, but measures the environment and those who hold the levers of power.

“As racism and hate continue to dominate the national dialogue, the Schott Foundation for Public Education released the Loving Cities Index, a multi-state report that aims to reverse historical local policies and practices rooted in racism and bias and replace them with policies that create local loving systems from birth and promote an opportunity to learn and thrive.

“By providing this new framework, the Loving Cities Index helps cities evaluate how well they are doing at providing all children – regardless of race, gender or zip code – with the supports and opportunities they need to learn and succeed. Noting that after decades of education reform, parental income remains the top predictor of student outcomes, the report challenges the notion that school-based reforms alone can provide students a fair and substantive opportunity to learn.

“The report also highlights a large and growing body of research showing a clear connection between economic and racial inequality and opportunity gaps in areas like housing, health care and community involvement. These issues lie outside of the traditional education realm, but are intimately linked to high school and college attainment.”

Categories Data, Education Reform, Equity, Health, Love

Arizona Senate Votes to Replace School Letter Grades with “Data Dashboards”

By dianeravitch
March 9, 2018 //
33

 

Data Mania continues to dominate conversations and legislation.

The Arizona State Senate just voted to replace worthless school grades with “dashboards.”

”Senate Bill 1411 unanimously passed the Arizona Senate on Tuesday. It creates a dashboard that shows — instead of a single grade for a school — a series of grades that represent academics, progress towards college and career readiness for high schools, and English language learner assessments.”

And the Great Data God smiles.

At least they didn’t expand vouchers again in their search for pointless levers to compel improvement.

Categories Arizona, Data

Tom Ultican: D.C. Reform is a Mighty Fraud

By dianeravitch
March 7, 2018 //
11

 

Ever since D.C. Mayor Adrian Fenty took control of the D.C.public schools and named Michelle Rhee as its leader, corporate reformers have hailed the long-struggling district as a model of school reform. Rhee was a blazing meteor in the world of reform, appearing on the covers of national magazines and as a frequent guest on national TV. She starred in “Waiting for ‘Superman,’” and prominent reform-loving journalists burbled in print about her miraculous achievements.

She “knew” that “bad teachers” caused low student test scores, so she set about firing teachers and principals and designed an evaluation system tied to test scores to weed out the bad apples.

Her stle was mean. She gloried in her lack of empathy and her contempt for collaboration.

Now, Tom Ultican (like John Merrow before him, whom he cites) dismantles the Rhee legacy as a fraud, an exemplar of the Destroy Public Education Movement, a testament to the failure of the “portfolio model.”

Inflated test scores, inflated graduation rates, doctored data, a regime of deception and boasting. A model of corporate reform. Educators in Atlanta were sentenced to jail for the same things that happened in D.C. yet D.C. was hailed as a model.

Rhee is gone. Her successor Kaya Henderson is gone. Her successor Antwan Wilson is gone. But the hype and spin survives. When will the Mayor and City Council and people of D.C demand accountability?

Categories Accountability, Corporate Reform, Data, District of Columbia, Education Reform, Fraud, Rhee, Michelle, Scandals

Gary Rubinstein: The Hidden Attrition at Success Academy

By dianeravitch
January 5, 2018 //
36

 

Supporters of Eva Moskowitz would have us believe that she has created a national model for the education of poor black students. Her proof: Her schools have very high test scores.

But, as Gary Rubinstein points out in this post, very few of the students who start in Eva’s charter chain actually persist. The attrition rate is high. Since Eva adds and subtracts students until the third grade, the actual attrition rate may be even higher than what is reported.

He writes:

“Something that I think has not been reported widely enough is the attrition rate for Success Academy students. Success Academy opened in 2006 with 83 Kindergarteners and 73 first graders. Eleven years later there are now 17 twelfth graders set to be the first graduating class. So we know for sure that at least 56 out of the initial 73 students, which is 77%, have left Success Academy before graduating. But it is likely more than 77% attrition because Success Academy allows ‘backfilling’ in the early grades. We don’t know how many of those 17 students currently in twelfth grade were among the 73 original first graders in 2006 and likely we will never know. But even assuming that all 17 were among the original students, that is still 80% attrition. Even over an 11 year period, that amounts to about 10% attrition per year for that cohort.”

For a chain that claims to be “public,” Success Academy is very secretive about its data.

 

Categories Data, Harlem Success Academy, Hoax

Tom Ultican: Don’t Be Hoaxed by Bad Education Policies Based on Junk Science

By dianeravitch
December 18, 2017 //
9

Tom Ultican writes a warning about a program called the National Math and Science Initiative.

“The National Math and Science Initiative (NMSI) was founded by a group of Dallas area lawyers and businessmen. Tom Luce is identified as the founder and Rex Tillerson, the CEO of ExxonMobil and present US Secretary of State, provided the financing…

“Tom Luce is a lawyer not an educator but his fingerprints are all over some of the worst education policies in the history of our country. His bio at the George W. Bush Whitehouse archives says, “… Luce is perhaps best known for his role in 1984 as the chief of staff of the Texas Select Committee of Public Education, which produced one of the first major reform efforts among public schools.” The chairman of that committee was Ross Perot.”

Luce can claim credit for Texas’ expensive and wasteful obsession with testing and data. Hundreds of millions of dollars—maybe billions—were squandered by Texas in pursuit of data and scores. Thanks, Tom Luce.

Ultican writes:

“Mark Twain said, “To a man with a hammer, everything looks like a nail.” For Ross Perot, the founder of Electronic Data Systems the problems in education looked like data problems. He and his Chief of Staff, Tom Luce, decided standardized testing and data analysis were the prescription for failing public schools. Unfortunately, standardized testing is totally useless for analyzing learning and public schools were not actually failing.

“Tom Luce was also directly involved in implementing NCLB (a spectacular education reform failure) while serving at the US Department of Education.”

So Luce helped deploy billions of dollars more in data gathering.

Now the NSMI is promoting Luce’s philosophy of teach to the test and bribes.

The fact that these policies have failed dramatically for 15 years at the national level and for 30 years in Texas does not slow the momentum of their advocates.

Categories Accountability, Data, Education Industry, Hoax, Merit pay, NCLB (No Child Left Behind), Privatization, Standardized Testing, STEM, Texas
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