Mike Klonsky, Chicago activist, had a dream that was actually a nightmare.
It involved Arne Duncan running for mayor, Rahm running for president.
A nightmare.
Archives for category: Duncan, Arne
Thanks to Jennifer Berkshire for tweeting out this article.
Rahm’s big idea about requiring that high school students have a college acceptance or a military enrollment or a specific job or they can’t graduate was not his own. It was suggested to him by…..guess…three guesses….one guess: Arne.
Between the two of them, they have had charge of the Chicago Public Schools for 16 years. How, exactly, have they reformed the schools and made them better for students? Other than closing public schools (Rahm did that to 50 in a single day, which ought to be the first line in his Wikipedia entry) and Arne was first to close public schools for turnarounds (some of his original turnarounds have also been closed), what has changed for most students?
I am writing this post for the journalists who cover education. Please fact-check every word that DeVos says. She literally doesn’t know what she is talking about.
This is the New York Times’ report on Betsy DeVos‘ press conference at Brookings.
She claims that the Bush-Obama policies of test-and-punish failed because throwing money at the problem doesn’t work. Any teacher could have told you that NCLB and Race to the Top were failures, not because they threw money at the problems, but because they spent money on failed strategies of high-stakes testing, evaluating teachers by test scores, closing schools, and opening charters.
She is so ill-informed that she would be well advised never to speak in public.
Her comparison of selecting a public school to hailing a taxi is offensive: schooling is a right guaranteed in state constitutions, taking a cab or car service is a consumer choice. She was echoing her mentor Jeb Bush, who compared choosing a school to buying a carton of milk, when he addressed the GOP convention in 2012.
As you will see if you read the account in the story, she has the unmitigated gall to say that her crusade for consumer choice in education–whether charters, vouchers, homeschooling, cyberschooling, whatever–serves the “common good.” What an outrage! Providing a high-quality public school,in every zip code serves the common good. Tossing kids to the vagaries of the free market subverts the common good. Anyone who has been reading this blog for any period of time has learned about the entrepreneurs who open charter schools to make money, about the sham real estate deals, about the voucher schools that teach science from the Bible, about the heightened segregation that always accompanies school choice. Wherever George Wallace and his fellow defenders of racial segregation are, they are rooting for DeVos.
Furthermore, she is utterly ignorant of the large body of research showing that charters do not get better results than public schools, voucher schools get worse results, and cybercharters get abysmal results.
Then she makes a crack about how America’s scores on international couldn’t get worse. She is wrong, and Grover Whitehurst should have told her so. Our scores on the international tests have never been high. Over the past Hal century, we have usually scored in the middle of the pack. Yes, our scores could get much worse. We could follow the Swedish free-market model and see our scores tumble.
Grrr. It is frustrating to see this kind of ignorance expressed by the Secretary of Education, although Arne Duncan should have lowered our expectations.
Please read “Reign of Error” and learn that test scores are the highest ever for whites, blacks, Hispanics, and Asians (although they went flat from 2013-2015, probably in response to the disruptions caused by Common Core); graduation rates are the highest ever; dropout rates are the lowest ever. When our students took the first international test in 1964, we came in last in one grade, and next to last in the other. But in the years since, our economy has surpassed all the other nations with higher scores. The test scores of 15-year-olds do not predict the future of the nation.
The Senate, in a narrow vote, ditched John King’s last-ditch effort to preserve NCLB accountability by regulation.
The oddly-named Every Student Succeeds Act was intended to rein in Arne Duncan-style federal dictates. King’s prescriptive regulations about how to measure “progress,” were meant to keep Washington’s control over state accountability systems.
Despite 15 years of failed accountability policy, every Democrat voted to defend the Bush-Duncan-King regulations.
Democrats really need to understand that rating students and schools by test scores is not a civil rights issue. It is invalid and just plain dumb. It hurts the neediest students most.
The Good Old Days
Don’t you miss the good old days?
The days of school deforming ways?
When Arne ruled with iron hand
With Common Core and test and VAM?
And Cuomo plotted night and day
The way to make the schools obey?
And Rhee was riding on her broom
And closing schools and spreading doom?
And charter schools in neighborhoods
Were popping up like shrooms in woods
And billionaires were here and there
And all about and everywhere?
Don’t you miss reformy times
Immortalized by someDAM rhymes?
Well, good old days of yesteryear
Have never left, are still right here
The good old days were never gone
The school deform lives on and on
Peter Greene read Betsy DeVos’s speech to CPAC and realized that she totally misunderstood why Obama and Duncan’s reforms failed. It wasn’t because they spent money. It was because they spent money on bad ideas. Now she proposes to spend money on vouchers, which have failed miserably, and on charters, which Obama and Duncan promoted. What is new about her approach? She is candid: she wants to destroy public education. Obama and Duncan either believed or pretended that public education would get better because of high-stakes testing, punishments, and charter schools. They were wrong. DeVos is wrong too. The difference is that we already know she is wrong, but she doesn’t.
Greene writes:
“School improvement grants were like food stamps that could only be spent on baby formula, ostrich eggs, and venison—and it didn’t matter if the families receiving the stamps lived on a farm with fresh milk and chicken eggs, or if they were vegetarians, or if they lived where no store sells ostrich eggs, or if there were no babies in the family. The Department of Education used the grants to dictate strategy and buy compliance with their micro-managing notions about how schools had to be fixed.
“As with many classic reform moves, plenty of folks on the ground level could have told the reformers what was wrong with their plan. But as DeVos’s comments show, the damage of School Improvement Grants is not only in wasted money, it’s also in convicting the wrong suspect and discrediting a whole reform approach.
“DeVos and other conservative reformers are taking the real lesson of the grant program’s failure: “spending money on the wrong thing for schools doesn’t help,” and shortening it to a far more damaging assessment: “spending money on schools doesn’t help.”
“The Obama-Duncan-King program didn’t just fail, they say, but it also helped discredit the whole idea of funding schools at all. Thanks Obama.”
Given the miserable failure of school choice in Michigan and Detroit, you would think DeVos was open to reflecting on the error of her ideas. But don’t make that mistake. Her ideas of school “reform” are based on ideology and theology. They won’t change. They can’t be proved or disproved. They are set in stone. Evidence doesn’t matter.
If allowed to do her wishes, public schools will be defunded (they are “godless”), unions will disappear, for-profit entrepreneurs will cash in, and a million weeds will bloom.
“Betsy DeVos and the three bears”
“Someone’s sleeping in my bed”
That is what the teacher said
“Someone’s eaten all my food
This is rheely rather rude
Someone’s taken all my stuff
Arne Duncan’s bad enough!”
Thoughts on the recent events in education reform, by our blog Poet:
“The Maestro”
(A brief historical recap for those who have already forgotten — or perhaps never knew)
Chetty played the VAMdolin
At Nobel-chasing speed
Arne played the basket-rim
And Rhee, she played the rheed
Coleman played his Core-o-net
Eva played the lyre
Billy Gates played tete-a-tete
With Duncan and with higher
Sanders* beat his cattle drum
Devalue added model
Pseudo-science weighted sum
Mathturbated twaddle
John King played the slide VAMbone
But Maestro was Obama
Who hired the band and set the tone
For current grizzly drama
*William Sanders, who tweaked his algorithm for modeling cattle growth to model the intellectual growth of students and evaluate teachers.
A federally-funded evaluation concluded that the $3.5 Billion spent on School Improvement Grants made no difference. SIG grants were highly punitive, requiring the firing of the principal for starters as an “improvement” strategy and eventually culminating in giving the school to a charter operator or coding it down. It failed to help anyone.
This teacher from Utah wrote:
“I could have saved our country all of that money wasted, before it was even spent! But no one asked the teachers at my school.
“We are in our last year of the 3-year SIG money as a turnaround school. From the moment I knew what was going to happen under the grant, I told my colleagues that the whole thing is not going to make a difference, because it wasn’t created under any valid research or by teachers. But on the slim chance it made a difference, it would be because of the sole efforts of expert teachers at my school. We know how to take nothing and turn it into something brilliant.
“For years before we started our grant process, we had been asking, even begging, for help with our students. We have had an increasing population year to year, of immigrant and refugee students enrolled at our school. The affects of the violence they’ve been exposed to since they were born and the obstacles of poverty, has been our nemesis. We have over-crowded classrooms, pennies for a supply budget, and no resources to provide to our students who are in desperate need of interventions. The culture of our school is violent, very low English proficiency rates, and high behavior problems due to PTSD and gang influenced families. But teachers at my school persevered as our pleas fell on deaf ears and blind eyes. As the building representative for my district association (Union), I focused on advocating for our students and teachers. People can’t believe you when you share a snippet of how a normal day goes. The absenteeism rate surpasses what is considered as “chronic”, along with a 50% mobility rate. Over 40 different languages are spoken among our students, while the culture of poverty has control over everything about a student. But yes, the rewards could be great! And teachers were dedicated, stable, cohesive, and always collaborating.
“Year one of the grant timeline, we had a new principal, and about half of the faculty was new; mostly first year teachers. We all know the idea of new teachers coming into classrooms with minimal education and practical experience, would fail. Absolutely! Some of those newbies taught one year, then left the profession completely. The second year, even more of the veterans at my school decided to transfer, and another half of the teachers left as well. Now, in our last year, there are only 4 teachers left, who we consider the veterans of our school. The running joke for us is if you can teach here, you can teach anywhere! Assessment data that shows levels of mastery and benchmarks, shows that about 75% of our students rank in lower levels across the spectrum; we refer to this as our “many shades of red”, because low performing students are color-coded in red, on data spreadsheets.
But the most difficult pill to swallow in this situation, is that the majority of money is spent on the consultant groups. Really? Some expert with a Ph.D. can’t give us ideas or strategies to use with our very unique, and sometimes very volatile students and their disruptive behavior. We have an electronic program to use for documenting behavior, and it shows how much instruction time is lost due to disruptions. It’s shocking to see that the amount of time, in hours and days, is in the double digits. This is outrageous and unacceptable, but still…deaf ears and blind eyes. Despite our efforts inviting administration staff and consultants to come observe our students and see what we deal with, no individual has actually taken up our offer. I think that after they hear about it, they don’t want to see it in real time.
So as the school year is getting closer, we all know what could happen to our school if there wasn’t a high level of proficiency demonstrated among students – state takeover and turned into a charter, or simply closed down all together. Naturally, teachers are worried about what will happen, and at the point, even administration doesn’t really know what is going to happen. I also predicted that in this situation, nothing will happen. We’ll continue doing what we are doing, wondering every year if it’s the last year for our school, before being taken over. No way…no one can honestly say what will happen, but I can surely say that nothing will happen, and our school will stay open as a public K-6 school, for years to come. The building would end up being condemned before becoming a charter school. Whatever….
“One last thing…teaching social studies is not always acceptable in this situation, because only writing, math, and science are tested subjects. I had to convince my principal to allow me to teach social studies. I see what our newer generation lacks in understanding and skill levels. Haven’t we seen those late shows moments when the host asks random civic questions to people on the street, and they do not know a damn thing! That is scary for me!”
I posted the other day that Arne Duncan’s punitive, data-driven, high-stakes “School Improvement Grants” program did not have any impact on test scores, which was its goal. $3.5 Billion blown away, used to fire principals, fire teachers, turn schools over to charters, and close schools. I read on Twitter that the failure of SIG proves that money doesn’t matter. That’s nonsense. Money spent on the wrong things doesn’t matter. If children are misbehaving because they are sick and hungry, they need medical care and food, not belies of consultants and programs unrelated to their actual needs.
Peter Greene explains here what the failure of SIG shows, aside from a skewed understanding of how to improve schools.
“SIG was like food stamps that could only be spent on baby formula, ostrich eggs, and venison, and it didn’t matter if the families receiving the stamps lived on a farm with fresh milk and chicken eggs, or if they were vegetarians, or if they lived where no store sells ostrich eggs, or if there are no babies in the family. USED used SIG to dictate strategy and buy compliance with their micro-managing notions about how schools had to be fixed.
“The moral of the story is not that money doesn’t make a difference. The moral of the story is that when bureaucrats in DC dictate exactly how money must be spent– and they are wrong about their theory of action and wrong about the strategies that should be used by each school and wrong about how to measure the effectiveness of those strategies– then the money is probably wasted. We’ll see soon enough if anyone left at the Department of Education can identify that lesson.”
Diane Ravitch's blog 