Carol Burris, executive director of the Network for Public Education, has fun comparing the boasts of reformers and their response to flat scores on NAEP.
They were so sure that the Common Core and charters would promote dramatic gains in testcscores. But they didn’t.
Read how reformers explain their embarrassment.
That choking sound you hear is me writing the headline for this post.
Just when you thought the charter advocates could not sink any lower in seeking rationalizations for privatization, they go lower yet again.
Writing for the National Education Policy Center, Julian Vasquez Heilig critiqued a University of Arkansas study that purports to show that charter schools are more productive and profoppduce a higher return on investment than public schools. The study under review is called “Bigger Bang, Fewer Bucks.”
What would you care about when comparing two sectors, one of which is staffed by professional educators, the other staffed mainly by TFA temps? Would you care about test scores? Parent satisfaction? Teacher turnover? Student projects? Graduation rates? College acceptance rates? Would you consider how the creation of a second sector affects the health and vitality of the first sector? Would you Permit the Second sector to cripple the first sector?
How about return on investment?
This is a mode of thinking with which I am not compatible. I’m reminded of reading I did in the 1990s, when I learned about efficiency experts who studied the curriculum. I was writing a book called “Left Back,” published in 2000. These scientific curriculum experts worked out a way to compare the cost and value of different subjects. They concluded that Latin was not worth teaching because the unit cost was too high. They would understand this new Arkansas study.
Heilig writes the abstract of his critique:
“A report released by the University of Arkansas Department of Education Reform contends that charter schools produce more achievement per dollar invested, as compared to public schools. This newest report is focused on city-level analyses in eight US cities (Atlanta, Boston, Denver, Houston, Indianapolis, New York City, San Antonio, and Washington D.C.) and uses cost effectiveness and Return on Investment (ROI) ratios. It concludes that charter schools deliver a weighted average of an additional 4.34 NAEP reading points and 4.73 NAEP math points per $1000 invested. The report also argues that that charter schools offer an advantage of $1.77 in lifetime earnings for each dollar invested, representing a ROI benefit of 38%. However, there are a variety of methodological choices made by the authors that threaten the validity of the results. For example, the report uses revenues rather than actual expenditures – despite well-established critiques of this approach. The report also fails to account for the non-comparability of the student populations in charter and comparison public schools. Three other problems also undercut the report’s claims. First, even though the think tank’s earlier productivity report included a caveat saying that causal claims would not be appropriate, the new report omits that caution. Second, the report’s lack of specificity plagues the accuracy and validity of its calculations; e.g., using state-level data in city-level analyses and completely excluding race and gender. Finally, the authors again fail to reconcile their report with the extensive literature of contrary findings.“
William Mathis, managing director of the National Education Policy Center, wrote this post for the Blog.
“Pay no attention to that man behind the curtain!”
A Closer Look at the Changing School Privatization Claims
Flashed on a 1939 version of a jumbotron, the great and mighty Wizard of Oz appears, wreathed in great billows of green smoke, as a reverberating announcement commands Dorothy, the Tin man, the Scarecrow and the Cowardly Lion to “Pay no attention to that man behind the curtain!” Of course, as we all know, the mighty wizard was all pretense, magnification, and illusion flanked by great balls of fire.
And so it has been. The privatization wizards have issued countless press releases saying that charter schools In Boston, Florida, Chicago or almost anywhere else are a great success because of standardized test score increases.
For years this omnipresent claim is that turning schools over to outside contractors will result in grand progress as measured by great leaps – in standardized test scores. All we have to do is follow them down the yellow brick road.
Indeed, Chris Lubienski and Jameson Brewer note in a NEPC review, “a whole generation of school reforms has elevated test scores as the predominant metric by which to judge the worth of policies, as well as of schools, teachers, and even in some cases subjection of public schools to choice regimes through federal policies like No Child Left Behind (NCLB).” (1)
Yet, lately, things have not been so rosy in Oz or for the school privatization wizards. Several recent, large scale and well-designed studies have concluded that privatization has not produced the mighty test score gains promised.
Yet, Toto persisted in chewing on the curtain and ERIC, IES and a host of other scholarly and well-respected organizations concluded there really wasn’t much difference in test scores between public and non-public schools. In fact, in places such as Washington, DC, Indiana, and Louisiana, statewide evaluations have shown no advantage and, ominously, some have found actual test score losses as a result of privatization reforms. (2)
Since their primary argument doesn’t look so good, the reformers now say, “Don’t look behind the curtain! Instead, look over there at attainment.” Attainment is the new goal which is a potpourri of indicators such as graduation rates, higher education attendance, higher education graduation, absenteeism and the like. These are certainly worthy goals which would be embraced by most people. Now, the pro-privatization purposes and measures are being shifting away from testing. In a complete about face, they ask, “Do impacts on Test Scores Even Matter?” (3)
Lubienski and Brewer address this “Don’t look here, look over there” shift-the-goal phenomenon in a recent NEPC think-tank review of an American Enterprise Institute paper presented at the Association for Education Finance and Policy’s annual spring conference. While the study has not been peer reviewed, it was provided with booming publicity by charter advocates. (4)
Fordham’s Michael Petrilli, a prominent advocate for test-based reform, shows remarkable agility (perhaps realizing that the test score results were not very impressive), by concluding that “focusing on test scores may lead authorities to favor the wrong school choice programs. It’s a legitimate concern, and one I share…the experience of attending a private school in the nation’s capital could bring benefits that might not show up until years later: exposure to a new peer group that holds higher expectations in terms of college-going and the like; access to a network of families that opens up opportunities; a religious education that provides meaning, perhaps a stronger grounding in both purpose and character, and that leads to personal growth.”
Buttressing this maudlin appeal to national pride, religion and personal growth, Petrelli shuffles the studies to get a different result and says, “yes, impacts on test scores matter” and urges caution in making too much of research literature that comes to a contrary conclusion.
Robin Lake joins the shift saying, “We now believe effectiveness must be considered more broadly, as preparing children with the knowledge, skills, and analytical capacities necessary for them to navigate the new realities of an information economy and be able to prepare for rapid changes in workforce demand.” (6) The shift from mechanistic hard test scores has the reformees saying “look over there!’ (7)
What’s missing is that we’re more in Kansas than in Oz. This is not Dorothy waking from a bad dream proclaiming “there’s no place like home.” It is a bad reality as many children have no home and society provides Dorothy and her classmates with only ersatz opportunities and facile shifts of words, phrases and promises rather than the reality of good schools for all.
Endnotes:
[1] Lubienski, C. & Brewer, T. J. (2018). Review of “Do Impacts on Test Scores Even Matter? Lessons from Long-Run Outcomes in School Choice Research: Attainment Versus Achievement Impacts and Rethinking How to Evaluate School Choice Programs” Boulder, CO: National Education Policy Center.
[2] Barnum, M. (July 12, 2017). Do School vouchers “work.” As the debate heats up, here’s what research really says. Chalkbeat. Retrieved April 30, 2018 from https://www.chalkbeat.org/posts/us/2017/07/12/do-school-vouchers-work-as-the-debate-heats-up-heres-what-research-really-says/
Dynarski, M. (2016, May 26). On Negative Effects of Vouchers. Brookings: https://www.brookings.edu/research/on-negative-effects-of-vouchers/
Turner, C, & Kamenetz. (June 26, 2017) School Vouchers Get 2 New Report Cards. NPR https://www.npr.org/sections/ed/2017/06/26/533192616/school-vouchers-get-a-new-report-card
Spector, C. (February 28,2017). Vouchers do not improve student achievement, Stanford researcher finds. https://news.stanford.edu/2017/02/28/vouchers-not-improve-student-achievement-stanford-researcher-finds/
[3] Hitt, C., McShane, M., & Wolf, P. (2018) Do impacts on test scores even matter? Lessons from long-run outcomes in school choice research: Attainment versus achievement impacts and rethinking how to evaluate school choice programs. Washington, D.C.: American Enterprise Institute. http://www.aei.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/03/Do-Impacts-on-Test-Scores-Even-Matter.pdf
[4] Lubienski, C. & Brewer, T. J. (2018). Review of “Do Impacts on Test Scores Even Matter? Lessons from Long-Run Outcomes in School Choice Research: Attainment Versus Achievement Impacts and Rethinking How to Evaluate School Choice Programs” Boulder, CO: National Education Policy Center.
[5] Petrilli, M, (April 17, 2018). For the vast majority of school choice studies, short- and long-term impacts point in the same direction. Fordham Institute. https://edexcellence.net/articles/for-the-vast-majority-of-school-choice-studies-short-and-long-term-impacts-point-in-the
[6] Lake, R. (May 1, 2018). How Can We Get Serious About Successful Pathways for Every Student? Center on Reinventing Public Education.
[7] Saultz, A. et al.(April 2018).Charter School Deserts: High-Poverty Neighborhoods with Limited Educational Options. Fordham Institute. Retrieved May 1, 2018 from https://edexcellence.net/publications/charter-school-deserts-report
Aaron Ament wrote an article in the New York Times about the U.S. Department of Education’s abandonment of students who were defrauded by predatory for-profit colleges. Ament worked on these issues during the Obama administration.
“In 2016, after years of broken promises, deceptive recruiting practices and exponential growth in the for-profit college sector, things seemed to be changing for the better.
“Spurred by the creation of a unit in the Department of Education devoted to cracking down on predatory institutions, and the announcement of new protections for students, some of the biggest names in the industry voluntarily ended some of their most egregious practices or shut down, while others reached sweeping settlements with the government.
“Today, that investigative unit, which I helped create, is virtually dead. Its members have largely been assigned to other tasks by an Education Department that includes an alarming number of executives from those very same for-profit schools.
“The unit is the latest casualty of an administration that seems to think that big corporations need protection from consumers, rather than the other way around….
“In 2013, I took a job as a lawyer for the Education Department. Soon after, I started working with the California attorney general’s office to investigate fraud at Corinthian Colleges, based in Santa Ana.
“We learned the situation was worse than could be imagined at this publicly traded for-profit chain, which at the time was the beneficiary of more than $1 billion a year in federal student loans and grants.
“We heard of students recruited out of homeless shelters with false promises of jobs, and of others stashed in temporary jobs for less than a week so that the school could include them in the job placement rate it had to disclose to regulators and prospective students.
“These students would go on to amass student loan debt that their bleak job prospects would never help them repay….
“In 2013, I took a job as a lawyer for the Education Department. Soon after, I started working with the California attorney general’s office to investigate fraud at Corinthian Colleges, based in Santa Ana.
“We learned the situation was worse than could be imagined at this publicly traded for-profit chain, which at the time was the beneficiary of more than $1 billion a year in federal student loans and grants.
“We heard of students recruited out of homeless shelters with false promises of jobs, and of others stashed in temporary jobs for less than a week so that the school could include them in the job placement rate it had to disclose to regulators and prospective students.
“These students would go on to amass student loan debt that their bleak job prospects would never help them repay….
“Consider what happened at the for-profit DeVry University. Murray Hastie, an Iraq war veteran suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder, was aggressively recruited by DeVry. Mr. Hastie was told that his G.I. Bill benefits would cover all of his tuition, in addition to giving him a monthly living stipend.
“However, he later learned DeVry was saddling him with more than $50,000 in student loans. When his P.T.S.D. worsened, Mr. Hastie left the school and sought treatment at a V.A. hospital. After leaving the hospital, he recounted in a forthcoming documentary, “Fail State,” he tried to enroll at his local community college, but found that all of his G.I. benefits had been exhausted….
“After Ms. DeVos took over, she hired several executives from the same for-profit institutions that the department was investigating. Former employees of Bridgepoint Education and Career Education Corporation, which both run for-profit colleges that were reportedly under investigation, are now working for her. Investigations into those colleges seem to have been dropped. A former DeVry dean supervised the very unit that is now being dismantled.
“At the same time, Secretary DeVos is also trying to bar students and state attorneys general from suing for-profit student loan servicers. And at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, Mick Mulvaney has weakened the office assigned to protect students from financial abuse.
“Predatory colleges are being given a green light to return to their abusive ways. The message to millions of Americans lured by the false promises of predatory companies is clear: The Trump administration is not on your side.”
Louisiana has gone crazy for testing.
Mercedes Schneider reports that the state plans to spend at least $75 million for five years of in PARCC-like tests. Testing will begin in kindergarten.
Louisiana to Spend at Least $75M on Five Years of PARCC-ish LEAP 2025 Testing
The state’s scores were abysmal on the latest NAEP, and apparently State Superintendent John White and the state board believe that if they weigh the pig more often it will get fatter.
This is insane.
Martin Levine has become one of my favorite writers on education. He writes for NonProfit Quarterly (free online) and other publications. He really understands that privatization is about “me first, to hell with the rest of you.”
Here is his commentary on the recent Gordon Lafer study of the fiscal impact of charters on the public schools they leave behind.
Oakland is a textbook example of a district that is being systematically hollowed out by the proliferation of charter schools. Oakland has lurched from deficit to deficit, while controlled for years by Broadie superintendents, who encouraged the destruction of the district by charters.
He writes:
A recent look at public education in Oakland raises important questions about whether maximizing choice comes at the cost of equity.
Choice advocates have said all students would benefit from maximizing a parent’s ability to choose their child’s school. The introduction of independent charter schools, they believe, harnesses market forces to reward better schools and ultimately force poor schools to close. Following this logic, we will be left with better schools. But while charter schools can focus only on the students who choose their programs, traditional school districts remain responsible for all of the children in their districts. When funding follows each student to their school of choice, those choosing to remain in public schools are finding themselves resource-starved. Overall, educational equity and school choice may not be able to coexist.
Charter schools are about what is best for “me.” Public schools are about what is best for all.
In the age of Trump, individualism trumps the common good.
Bill Phillis of the Ohio Coalition for Equity and Adequacy is a steadfast critic of charter schools, which, he says, have absorbed $10 billion in funds that should have gone to Ohio public schools. Now that ECOT is in bankruptcy, the state is trying to claw a few million of the $1 billion that ECOT collected since 2000, when it was founded.
Phillis writes:
Auctions of charter school stuff-another manifestation of tax dollars squandered
The ECOT auction is just another going-out-of-business sale in the charter industry. About 250 charters have closed in Ohio and many have had auctions. These kinds of sales recover only pennies on the dollar.
The ECOT exposure has helped shed light on the waste, fraud and corruption in the industry. Previous charter closures and auctions usually had gone unnoticed by the general public.
Ohioans should assume that the ECOT auction ends the charter fiasco.
Of course, the charter fiasco will go on in Ohio even after ECOT is dead and buried and its stuff auctioned off.
The auction is today. You are not to late to pick something up if you bid online. Maybe a pencil engraved ECOT as a memento of a Teapot Dome type scandal in Ohio, a tribute to privatization and corporate reform. DeVos wants more of the same. Hold on to your wallet.
Goodbye ECOT: School auction begins today; key computers not included
Updated May 11, 2018
By Jeremy P. Kelley, Staff Writer Dayton Daily News
The Electronic Classroom of Tomorrow (ECOT) is auctioning its corporate headquarters building and most furnishings and business equipment beginning at 4 p.m. today, according to a news release from the auction firm Gryphon USA.
The auction includes everything from flat-screen TVs, tools and furniture to first-aid kits and pencils, according to Richard Kruse, president of Gryphon Auction Group and court-appointed deputy interim master for ECOT.
Kruse said the computer servers used by the school are not included in the auction. Auditors and prosecutors have suggested there could be evidence of criminal activity by ECOT on those servers.
“The media and government attention has been focused on the servers used by the school, but those are not included in the auction,” Kruse said in the news release. “Due to this, the auction is proceeding on schedule.”
ECOT was Ohio’s largest online school, at one point claiming more than 15,000 students, but the Ohio Department of Education said an enrollment review showed the school was not counting student participation correctly. The state began clawing back millions in funding that ODE said the school should not have received, eventually leading ECOT to close in January.
More than 2,000 students from southwest Ohio were listed as enrolled at ECOT in 2016-17, including 627 who lived in the Dayton school district, 168 in Hamilton, 94 in Springfield and dozens from suburbs ranging from Kettering to Troy.
ECOT’s headquarters building, a 138,000-square-foot facility originally built as Southland Mall, sits on 26.5 acres in south Columbus, near the intersection of U.S. 23 and Interstate 270.
The auction is viewable to the public online at http://www.ecotcre.com for the real estate, and http://www.ecotauction.com for the rest of the items. The online auction is open for bidding until June 12.
Tennessee has had three straight years of computer breakdowns and other problems with its testing vendor, Questar. (Questar is also the test provider for New York State, perhaps others.)
The state is so disgusted by Questar’s performance that Governor Haslam said he might switch the contract from Questar to ETS.
That’s a good one! As testing guru Fred Smith informed me, ETS owns Questar.
ETS is not problem free, either. “The changes highlight a possible strategic shift for ETS whose reputation came under fire last year when the nonprofit had to pay $20.7 million dollars in damages and upgrades after multiple testing problems in Texas.”
Would someone in Tennessee please let Governor Haslam and Commissioner McQueen know?
Questar is the for-profit face of nonprofit ETS. Tweedle Dum and Tweedle Dee.
A distinction without a difference.
Education Next, the pro-charter, Pro-Choice publication, reports that the growth of charter schools fell to an all-time low of only 1% between 2017 and 2018.
Despite the $200 Million the Waltons give annually for charters, despite the hundreds of millions of federal dollars for new charters, the rate of growth has slowed. How is this possible?
“Despite educating more than 3.2 million students, the annual rate of charter school growth has reached an all-time low: a 1 percent increase in charter schools during the 2017-18 school year. This represents the fourth consecutive year that charter growth has slowed. In an article in our Summer 2018 issue of Education Next, Robin J. Lake, Trey Cobb, Roohi Sharma and Alice Opalka discuss barriers to charter-school growth in the San Francisco Bay Area and explore what charter leaders, policymakers, and communities can do to regain momentum and keep pace with demand. Derrell Bradford also addresses the slowing growth-rate of charter schools in our Summer 2018 issue, asking: what is the future role of single-site schools, given that charter management organizations (CMOs) and for-profit education management organizations (EMOs) are increasingly crowding the field? Finally, Adam Peshek proposes a way to tackle some of the obstacles to charter-school growth through the Opportunity Zone program (part of the 2017 tax reform package)—and hopefully create more high-quality public school options for children along the way.
—Education Next”
The National Education Policy Center released its sixth annual report on full-time virtual and blended learning schools. The report was written by Gary Miron, Christopher Shank, and Caryn Davidson of Western Michigan University.
As in the past, these schools get worse results than traditional public schools. Nevertheless, their enrollments continue to grow.
“Compared to prior years, there has been a shift in source of growth, with more school dis- tricts opening their own virtual schools. However, these district-run schools have typically been small, with limited enrollment. Thus, while large virtual schools operated by for-profit education management organizations (EMOs) have lost considerable market share, they still dominate this sector.”
“This report provides a census of full-time virtual and blended schools. It also includes stu- dent demographics, state-specific school performance ratings, and—where possible—an analysis of school performance measures.
“• In 2016-17, 429 full-time virtual schools enrolled 295,518 students, and 296 blended schools enrolled 116,716. Enrollments in virtual schools increased by 17,000 students between 2015-16 and 2016-17 and enrollments in blended learn- ing schools increased by 80,000 during this same time period.
“• Thirty-four states had full-time virtual schools and 29 states had blended schools. Four states had blended but no full-time virtual schools (Connecticut, Hawaii, New Jersey and Rhode Island). Nine states had virtual schools but no full-time blended learning schools. The number of states with virtual schools in 2016-17 is the same as in 2015-16, although there was an increase of eight states with full- time blended learning schools over the past two years.
“• Virtual schools operated by for-profit EMOs were three times as large as other virtual schools. They enrolled an average of 1,288 students. In contrast, those op- erated by nonprofit EMOs enrolled an average of 407 students, and independent virtual schools (not affiliated with an EMO) enrolled an average of 411 students.
“• Although private (profit and nonprofit) EMOs operated only 35.9% of full-time virtual schools, those schools enrolled 61.8% of all virtual school students.
“• Just under half of all virtual schools in the inventory were charter schools, but to- gether they accounted for 75.7% of enrollment. While districts have been increas- ingly creating their own virtual schools, those tended to enroll far fewer students.
“• In the blended sector, nonprofit EMOs operated 30.4% and for-profit EMOs op- erated 22.6%. Nearly half (47%) of blended schools were independent. Blend- ed schools operated by nonprofits were most numerous and substantially larger than others in the sector. Rocketship Education remained the largest nonprofit operator, with 16 schools that enrolled just over 7,700 students—almost 7% of all students in blended schools.
“• Blended schools enrolled an average of 394 students, but blended schools man- aged by for-profit EMOs had a far larger average enrollment of 1,288. There were more charter blended schools (68.9%) than district blended schools (31.1%), and they had substantially larger average enrollments (456) than district blended schools (257).”
There is much more, covering student demographics, student-teacher ratios, and student performance.
