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William Mathis on the Illusory Graduation Rate of Students in D.C. Voucher Schools

By dianeravitch
May 15, 2017 //
36

Trump recently told a group of students attending voucher schools in D.C. that they were very lucky because the graduation rate of the voucher program was 98%. That was far more than the evaluation of the program, which claimed a rate of 82%. But when I re-read the final evaluation report on the program, I couldn’t understand how the evaluators arrived at 82%. Newspaper accounts regularly say that the D.C. voucher program had no effect on test scores but a higher graduation rate. But was it true? What was the attrition rate? How did the evaluators arrive at 82%?

So I asked William Mathis of the National Education Policy Center to explain what was behind the numbers. He very kindly untangled the data for me and wrote the following:


Donald Trump’s Phantom 98% Voucher Graduation Rate

William J. Mathis

​Education secretary Betsy DeVos joined Donald Trump at the White House to pitch school vouchers touting the “98% graduation rate” from the District of Columbia program. Now, a 98% graduation rate would be a superlative figure for any school but coming out of urban Washington, this would be nothing short of phenomenal. Some might claim divine intervention would be required.​​

Here’s why: For the baseline year of 2010, the federal government’s official, national, on-time graduation rate reached an “all-time high” of 80%. When the District of Columbia’s 2010 graduation rate was compared to the 50 states, it came in dead-last with 59%. It maintains the dubious last-place ranking. Thus, to reach 98%, the DC voucher program would have to leap over all 50 states including top-scoring Iowa (88%). Such a miraculous ascent rightly raises a skeptical eye.

To sort this out, inquiring minds would first go to the source of the numbers. The president’s remarks were based on a 2010 University of Arkansas study of Washington DC which estimated the actual graduation rate of 70% for traditional public schools and 82% for voucher schools. This would be pretty good given DC’s official rate of 59% for that year. But this is a long way from Trump’s imaginative 98%.

​So what’s the difference between the researchers’ rate and the real rate? The University of Arkansas’ numbers were based on a telephone survey of parents which had a response rate of only 63% despite some aggressive follow-up. For students who had not yet graduated, they asked the parents to forecast whether their student would, in fact, graduate. Since the control group had a response rate similar to the voucher students, the researchers concluded they could compare the groups. But this quickly runs into problems. The first of which is the low response rate to the telephone survey. It is reasonable to infer that respondents would differ from non-respondents. The second problem is relying on the parents’ forecast that their child would graduate rather than using the actual school district count of drop-outs and non-graduates. These errors would result in inflated numbers.​

​The third problem is selection effects. That is, the parents who elected to participate in the voucher program are parents who are more likely to be involved and motivated to advance their children’s education. As is clearly known, parental involvement is a key to educational success. Parents must register for the program and the on-line application program requires the parent to establish an account with email address and password. Then, social security numbers, date of birth, proof of income, proof of DC residence and tax ID numbers are required. This suggests a multitude of selection problems including non-computer literate parents, computer availability, privacy protection and any number of other reasons that people may not want to be in a government data base.

​Mystifying to the reader, only 351 out of 1293 students used their voucher for all years (27%). The remaining 73% dropped out of the program but whether they graduated is unclear. We just don’t know what happened to these students.
Trump and DeVos failed to mention that this same study showed test scores for the voucher students remained flat. They also overlooked a newer DC study with even less positive findings. In this federally sponsored 2017 study, test scores dropped for both experimental and control groups. But voucher program students dropped more than the traditional students in both reading and mathematics. Further, 82% of the voucher group changed schools after the first year. All in all, there are no transcendent intercessions here. It’s just a weak design garnished with exaggeration.

While Trump argues for billions in new tax breaks for voucher schemes, there is no evidence that they are an effective reform strategy. To the contrary, the segregative effects could be quite harmful. Large-scale voucher studies in Louisiana, Indiana and Ohio also show negative numbers. So in light of these facts, what did the federal government do? They prohibited further studies of the program and called for greater federal support of voucher programs.

Categories District of Columbia, Education Reform, Graduation rates, Vouchers

Mother Jones: DeVos’ Favorite “Reform” Gets Horrible Grades

By dianeravitch
May 2, 2017 //
18

Edwin Rios of Mother Jones writes here about the dreadful evaluations on Betsy DeVos’ favorite form of school choice: Vouchers.

Researchers used to find that students who received vouchers saw little or no difference in their test scores.

Now a new body of research is reporting that students (who enter the program with low scores) actually lose ground when they transfer to a voucher school.

We had seen these discouraging reports before about Louisiana, Indiana, and Ohio.

Now the latest study from D.C. reaches the same conclusion. Students are negatively affected by switching from a public school to a voucher school.

The logic seems clear. The public school has experienced and credentialed teachers. Many voucher schools do not.

School choice advocates (aka reformers) used to claim that they were “saving poor kids from failing schools.”

DeVos, however, told the Washington Post that when the choice movement is fully implemented, all three sectors (public, charter, and voucher) will have the same results. “When school choice policies are fully implemented,” she said, “there should be no differences in achievement among the various types of schools.”

In other words, the children who are now low-performing will continue to be low-performing, and all three sectors will have the same outcomes they have now.

Remind me of the reason for school choice?

Categories Betsy DeVos, Charter Schools, District of Columbia, Failure, School Choice, Vouchers

Congress Reauthorizes DC Voucher Program, Despite Evidence of Negative Effects, and Restricts Future Research

By dianeravitch
May 2, 2017 //
20

Emma Brown and Peter Jamison report that Congress reauthorized the D.C. Voucher program, on the heels of a federal evaluation showing that vouchers have a negative effect on students who use them.

Now we know that vouchers don’t “save poor children from failing schools.” They actually do educational harm to those children. The purpose of vouchers is choice for its own sake.

Even more surprising is that the new language in the reauthorizatuon bars the use of randomized field trials–long considered “the gold standard”–in future evaluations. RCT is a means of comparing similar groups.

Thus, Congress demonstrates that it not only doesn’t care about the effects of vouchers, but doesn’t want to learn about them in the future.

“The D.C. study was conducted using what’s known as the gold standard in scientific research: An experimental design, comparing the performance of students who received a voucher through a citywide lottery to the performance of their peers who applied for a voucher and didn’t receive one. The study was designed to comply with the law as currently written, which requires the “strongest possible research design” for determining the vouchers’ effectiveness.


“The reauthorization rolls back that language and prohibits the department’s researchers from using that gold standard. Instead, it says that researchers must use a “quasi-experimental” design, comparing voucher recipients to students with “similar backgrounds” in D.C. public and public charter schools.


“Researchers say this approach is generally weaker because it creates uncertainty about whether the comparison is fair.

“This program has been studied rigorously since it began in 2004, using an approach that the field of medical research would regard as common practice,” said Mark Dynarski, who co-authored the D.C. study released last week. “If rigor is rolled back, a future study might lead to more questions than answers.”


“Rep. Gerald E. Connolly (D-Va.) called the research change an “egregious dilution” of serious science, accusing his Republican counterparts of trying to escape empirical data that might not back up their school-choice philosophy.”

Categories District of Columbia, Vouchers

What DeVos Said About Evaluation of D.C. Voucher Program

By dianeravitch
April 27, 2017 //
33

A federal evaluation of the D.C. voucher program came up with negative results. Students in elementary schools who participated saw their scores drop, a finding similar to recent studies in Louisiana, Indiana, and Ohio.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/education/federal-study-of-dc-voucher-program-finds-negative-impact-on-student-achievement/2017/04/27/e545ef28-2536-11e7-bb9d-8cd6118e1409_story.html

What did Betsy DeVos say?

“DeVos defended the D.C. program, saying it is part of an expansive school-choice market in the nation’s capital that includes a robust public charter school sector.


“When school choice policies are fully implemented, there should not be differences in achievement among the various types of schools,” she said in a statement. She added that the study found that parents “overwhelmingly support” the voucher program “and that, at the same time, these schools need to improve upon how they serve some of D.C.’s most vulnerable students.”

So her assumption is that voucher programs are not likely to have better outcomes than public schools. Students who are performing poorly in public schools will perform poorly in voucher or charter schools. As long as parents are satisfied, that’s it. Reform.

That’s quite a theory of action. Or inaction.

Categories Accountability, Betsy DeVos, District of Columbia, Education Industry, Privatization, Vouchers

New Study Shows Negative Effects of Vouchers in D.C. Program

By dianeravitch
April 27, 2017 //
5

Voucher advocates have protected D.C.’s voucher program, known as “Opportunity Scholarships,” since it was created in 2004 despite lack of strong evidence for its benefits. Evaluations have found little or no improvement in test scores. This new evaluation shows negative effects on test scores in the elementary grades for those who enrolled in voucher schools. This echoes studies in Louisiana, Indiana, and Ohio, where voucher students lost ground as compared to their peers who were offered vouchers but stayed in public schools. In the past, the D.C. evaluation team was led by Patrick Wolf of the University of Arkansas, the high temple of school choice. The evaluation team for this new study was led by Mark Dynarski of Pemberton Research and a group of Westat researchers. Dynarski, you may recall, wrote a paper for the Brookings Institution calling attention to the negative impact of vouchers in Louisiana and Indiana. Previous evaluations showed higher graduation rates in voucher schools, but also–as is now customary in voucher schools–high rates of attrition. Of those who don’t drop out and return to public schools, the graduation rate is higher.

The Washington Post reports:

 

Students in the nation’s only federally funded school voucher initiative performed worse on standardized tests within a year after entering D.C. private schools than peers who did not participate, according to a new federal analysis that comes as President Trump is seeking to pour billions of dollars into expanding the private school scholarships nationwide.

The study, released Thursday by the Education Department’s research division, follows several other recent studies of state-funded vouchers in Louisiana, Indiana and Ohio that suggested negative effects on student achievement. Critics are seizing on this data as they try to counter Trump’s push to direct public dollars to private schools.

Vouchers, deeply controversial among supporters of public education, are direct government subsidies parents can use as scholarships for private schools. These payments can cover all or part of the annual tuition bills, depending on the school.

Education Secretary Betsy DeVos has long argued that vouchers help poor children escape from failing public schools. But Sen. Patty Murray (Wash.), the top Democrat on the Senate Education Committee, said that DeVos should heed the department’s Institute of Education Sciences. Given the new findings, Murray said, “it’s time for her to finally abandon her reckless plans to privatize public schools across the country.”

DeVos defended the D.C. program, saying it is part of an expansive school-choice market in the nation’s capital that includes a robust public charter school sector.

 

“When school choice policies are fully implemented, there should not be differences in achievement among the various types of schools,” she said in a statement. She added that the study found that parents “overwhelmingly support” the voucher program “and that, at the same time, these schools need to improve upon how they serve some of D.C.’s most vulnerable students.”

DeVos’ statement suggests that neither vouchers nor charters will ever outperform public schools. The goal of choice is choice, not better academic achievement or better education, not to “save poor kids from failing schools,” but to provide choice.

 

 

 

 

Categories District of Columbia, Research, Vouchers

D.C.: New Millions Added to Increase “High-Quality Seats” in Charters

By dianeravitch
April 5, 2017 //
13

One of the strange ideas in the privatization movement is that only charters are able to provide “high-quality seats.”

There seems to be a magical place where charter operators go to buy chairs that are unavailable to public schools.

Only charter operators can buy those chairs. Those chairs are “high-quality seats.”

The Citybridge Education Foundation in D.C., financed by billionaires Katherine and David Bradley, is putting up the money to add new charter schools and to help revamp some low-performing public schools in the District, in search of those elusive “high-quality seats.”

What is it about those “high-quality seats”? Does that mean the teachers are ill-prepared Teach for America recruits? Does that mean that the school gets to exclude low-performing students or students whose disability status and language needs make them a “bad fit” for “high-quality seats”?

Where is the warehouse where they keep those “seats”?

Categories Charter Schools, Corporate Reformers, District of Columbia, Education Industry, Privatization

DeVos Wants More Vouchers in DC, Despite Lack of Results

By dianeravitch
March 24, 2017 //
17

The Republicans are set to expand the D.C. Voucher program, even though no evaluation has shown better test scores for D.C. voucher students and a high attrition rate.

Students who get a voucher will check their constitutional rights at the door. The voucher schools may exclude students with disabilities and LGBT students. DeVos doesn’t care.

Republicans have already started moving HR 1387, the SOAR Reauthorization Act. This bill would reauthorize the DC voucher program (the only federally funded voucher program in the country), and the group that administers the program has said they expect to provide “hundreds” of new vouchers to DC students with Republicans in charge.

The bill was passed out of committee earlier this month on a party line vote, and we expect the bill to hit the House floor soon. Just as telling as the final vote on the bill was how the committee voted on amendments, and this headline says it all: GOP lawmakers refuse to protect LGBT students and those with disabilities in school voucher bill.

This is the first voucher bill being moved this year – and while Betsy DeVos refused to say during her confirmation hearing that schools taking federal money should have to abide by IDEA and provide the same services and protections to students with disabilities as public schools, members of Congress may soon have a chance to go on record themselves about this very issue when the SOAR Reauthorization bill is voted on.

Categories Betsy DeVos, District of Columbia, Special Education, Vouchers

DFER Launches Phony Phone Campaign in DC to Promote Common Core and High-Stakes Testing

By dianeravitch
March 4, 2017 //
10

The hedge-fund manager group called Democrats for Education Reform (DFER) is conducting an aggressive telephone campaign in D.C. to promote the Common Core and high-stakes standardized testing. The rhetoric is deceptive, as usual.

Jeffrey Anderson writes in the Washington City Paper:

“In a one-party city with a civic focus on education, an advocacy group like Democrats for Education Reform (DFER) sounds as wholesome as Mom and apple pie. Everyone in D.C. is a Democrat, right? Who isn’t in favor of education reform?

“Aided by such safe assumptions, the New York-based PAC recently injected itself into a complicated school debate when it employed phone banking that connected D.C. residents with their respective school board members.

“Residents around the city received calls on behalf of DFER to tell them that the Office of the State Superintendent of Education (OSSE) is proposing to “hold schools accountable not only for the academic achievement of students but also for the growth that students make on their achievement at whatever level they start out.”

“Sounds like a winner, right?

“The callers then offered to direct residents to their representative on the D.C. State Board of Education to “let them know you support this proposal.” They then asked, “May I put you through?”

“What the campaign does not tell citizens is that the proposal presents the school board with complex decisions in an ongoing policy debate that is central to a virtual culture war over public education reform in America.

“Nor does it disclose that Democrats for Education Reform is a PAC that raises money from corporations, foundations, and influential philanthropists to back political candidates who favor standardized testing and the Common Core standards—and apparently seeks to directly influence elected school board members on contentious policy issues.

***

“OSSE’s draft plan is based on the federal “Every Student Succeeds Act,” which requires states to create a new school accountability system beyond the standardized math and reading tests of “No Child Left Behind.” The idea of Every Student Succeeds is to provide states with flexibility to also measure performance in science, social science, art, and other indicators of school quality.

“Under the plan DFER is promoting, 80 percent of school accountability for elementary and middle schools is based on standardized tests in reading and math and a complex formula meant to determine student “growth.” (Most of the remainder is based on attendance and re-enrollment.) The accountability system not only rates schools relative to one another but also sets guidelines that will influence educational and administrative priorities.

“Proponents of the plan, such as DFER’s D.C. director Catharine Bellinger, believe that a school rating system should be based on single test scores that reflect performance on college and career-ready exams, such as the Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers (PARCC).”

Here is a safe bet: Not one member of the board of DFER sends their children to a school that is ranked by test scores or uses standardized tests to rank students.

Now that DeVos is leading the national movement for privatization, DFER can concentrate its energies on testing and ranking other people’s children.

Categories Accountability, Common Core, Corporate Reformers, Democrats for Education Reform, District of Columbia, Education Industry, Privatization, Testing

Feds Cite D.C. Charters for High Suspension Rates, Especially for Black Students

By dianeravitch
February 15, 2017 //
24

A new report from the Federal Government Accountability Office criticized charter schools in D.C. for their high suspension rates. Will Betsy DeVos care?

Washington Post columnist Joe Davidson writes:


A new Government Accountability Office (GAO) report says suspension and expulsion rates for charters in the capital city are double the national rate and disproportionately high for black students and those with disabilities.

During the 2013-2014 school year, for example, “D.C charter schools had about a 13 percent suspension rate, while the national rate for all charter schools was about 6 percent,” the GAO reported. “This was also true for expulsions, with charter schools in D.C. reporting double the rate of charter schools nationally.”

The agency that oversees charter schools in the District acknowledges it has issues, but it also had problems with the GAO’s findings. In a response included in the report, the D.C. Public Charter School Board said the GAO “reaches some inaccurate conclusions and from these draws ill-advised recommendations” because it did not use more recent data.

Data from the 2014-2015 and 2015-2016 school years show that “steady and significant progress has been made every year in reducing out-of-school discipline,” the board said in response.

If there is good news here, it’s only by comparison. D.C. charter suspension and expulsion rates did fall from the 2011-2012 to the 2013-2014 academic years. Also, the charter suspension rate is only a little higher than that of the city’s traditional public schools.

But that’s not good enough.

When D.C. charter schools kick students out, they are not allowed to return, the GAO reported. They generally transfer to a traditional public school.

“In contrast, D.C. traditional public schools generally do not expel students,” the GAO said. “Instead, D.C. traditional public schools generally use long-term suspensions (greater than 11 days) and temporarily transfer these students to an alternative middle and high school.”

It’s no surprise that the greater suspension and expulsion rates for charter schools fall heavily on black students. From preschool discipline and throughout the criminal justice system, studies have shown that black people are treated more harshly than white people for similar conduct.

The GAO “found that the rates of suspension for Black students in D.C. charter schools were about six times higher than the rates for White students and the rates for students with disabilities were almost double the rates for students without disabilities.”

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Discipline and Suspensions, District of Columbia, Education Industry, Privatization, Race

Jeff Bezos Loves Charters and Privatization

By dianeravitch
January 4, 2017 //
24

Who is Jeff Bezos? Jeff Bezos founded Amazon. He is a billionaire. He loves charters and privatization of schools. In 2013, he bought The Washington Post, which had been a bastion of liberal thought under the ownership of the Graham family.

 

Bezos did not introduce charter-love and teacher-bashing to the Washington Post. While the news staff always played it straight, the Post editorial board was madly in love with Michelle Rhee during her stormy tenure. In their eyes, Rhee could do no wrong. She was their Joan of Arc. Even now, after a decade of Rhee-Henderson control, the Post still worships Rhee, as this article by editorial page editor Fred Hiatt showed.

 

When Bezos bought the Post in 2013, investigative journalist Lee Fang revealed in The Nation that Bezos is a generous supporter of school privatization.

 

Lee Fang wrote:

 

“There’s one area where Bezos has been hyper-active, but it is largely unknown to the general public: education reform. A look at the Bezos Family Foundation, which was founded by Jackie and Mike Bezos but is financed primarily by Jeff Bezos, reveals a fairly aggressive effort in recent years to press forward with a neoliberal education agenda:

 

• The Bezos Foundation has donated to Education Reform Now, a nonprofit organization that funds attack advertisements against teachers’ unions and other advocacy efforts to promote test-based evaluations of teachers. Education Reform Now also sponsors Democrats for Education Reform.

 

• The Bezos Foundation provided $500,000 to NBC Universal to sponsor the Education Nation, a media series devoted to debating high-stakes testing, charter schools and other education reforms.

 

• The Bezos Foundation provided over $100,000 worth of Amazon stock to the League of Education Voters Foundation to help pass the education reform in Washington State. Last year, the group helped pass I-1240, a ballot measure that created a charter school system in Washington State. In many states, charter schools open the door for privatization by inviting for-profit charter management companies to take over public schools that are ostensibly run by nonprofits.

 

Other education philanthropy supported by the Bezos Foundation include KIPP, Teach for America and many individual charter schools, including privately funded math and science programs across the country.”

 

Lee Fang says there is one good result of Bezos taking over the Post. It used to be controlled by for-profit Kaplan University and avoided negative coverage of the sham industry.

 

He wrote:

 

“For now, the change in ownership will probably only benefit the Post’s education coverage, given the newspaper’s long relationship with Kaplan, which helped prop up the paper’s finances for years while the Post either largely ignored the issue of for-profit colleges or sent its executives to Capitol Hill to lobby against better oversight of the industry.

 

“Part of the ugly history of the Post is its reliance on a predatory for-profit college called Kaplan University. Though Washington Post blogger Lydia DePillis seemed to whitewash this relationship yesterday by referring to Kaplan as only a “lucrative test prep business,” in reality, Kaplan University was one of worst for-profit colleges in the country.”

 

 

 

Categories Charter Schools, Corporate Reformers, District of Columbia, Education Industry, Privatization, Rhee, Michelle, School Choice
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