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Mercedes Schneider: Bay-Area Rocketship Charter, Where Vomit Stays on the Carpet

By dianeravitch
December 18, 2017 //
23

This is a stunning and shocking expose by Mercedes Schneider, who has corresponded with a teacher at one of the Bay Area Rocketship charters and fed her documents about standard practices and policies. This is a scary documentation of child abuse.

A small sample:

“In a description of the “charter school nightmares” blog, “rkshp employee” notes the following:

“More about my school. We have:

no cafeteria
no school nurse
no on-site custodian
no school library
school is 7:45 – 4 PM (8.25+ hours) daily
recess is 15 minutes
lunch is 15 minutes and kids are not allowed to talk during lunch
every student (from pre-K to 5th grade) has mandatory computer class for 90 minutes a day

“In another post, “rkshp employee” notes, “Our 3 principals are all TFA (Teach for America) alum.””

This is worse than Dickensian.

If we had a functioning Office for Civil Rights in the U.S. Department of Education, it would launch an immediate investigation.

This is child abuse. Why do parents put their children in these absive institutions?

Categories California, Charter Schools, Discipline, Education Industry, Privatization

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

Columbus Dispatch Editorial: Will the ECOT Saga Please End?

By dianeravitch
December 18, 2017 //
10

One of the most remarkable turnarounds in the nation happened in Ohio. There have been so many charter scandals that the major newspapers have become skeptical, as well they should be. They have noticed the scams, frauds, phantom schools, phantom students. They’ve noticed how many charters get scores lower than the public schools they were supposed to compete with.

They are no longer entranced by the marketing of the charter school industry.

In Ohio, the biggest scandal is the Electronic Classroom of Tomorrow, known as ECOT.

This editorial appeared in the Columbus Dispatch. The editorial board is no longer fooled by the charter industry.

It was founded in 2000. It developed some very bad habits that cheated the public of millions of dollars.

“Alas, the school’s owner, who had no background in education, began to realize that education is really hard. And keeping the attention of at-risk students is really, really hard. The owner began to realize that many students who signed up for his school almost never logged in. Didn’t show up. His virtual classroom was half-empty. But tracking down these students and hounding them to get online and learn something would be time-consuming, expensive and, in many cases, nearly impossible.

“The owner quickly realized something else. Keeping an honest account of how many students were logging in to meet state attendance requirements would reduce the amount he could charge the state — by millions of dollars. Every year. The owner made an unfortunate choice. He decided to charge the state for a full year of instruction for each student signed up, even if a student logged in for only a few minutes each month.

“This is the sad story of ECOT — the Electronic Classroom of Tomorrow, Ohio’s largest online charter school. Since its founding in 2000, the school consistently has billed the state for students whose participation it could not document.

“In November 2001, then-State Auditor Jim Petro determined ECOT received $1.7 million for students not enrolled. Despite these early warnings, ECOT continued to charge Ohio’s taxpayers for phantom students, in increasing numbers.

“State audits from 2000 to 2016 revealed how lucrative this pattern has been for ECOT owner Bill Lager. Although organized as a nonprofit, ECOT contracts with two Lager-owned, for-profit entities for management and software services. From 2000 to 2016, ECOT paid the two businesses a tidy $192.8 million.

“At long last, in 2016 the Department of Education had had enough. It began insisting on honest accounting. After reviewing log-in durations and offline documentation for the 2015-2016 school year, the department concluded ECOT had reported 15,322 full-time students, while only 6,313 could be verified. The State Board of Education required ECOT to repay about $60 million of the $108 million it had received.

“This upset the owner. So he sued the state and its taxpayers, claiming the education department has no right to look under the hood, no right to check whether students actually are logging in. Fortunately, this argument was rejected by both the Franklin County Common Pleas Court and Court of Appeals. The case now is before the Ohio Supreme Court.”

ECOT has the lowest graduation rate in the nation.

How much longer will the taxpayers of Ohio allow this “school” to collect millions for students who never participated in class?

Categories Charter Schools, Education Industry, Fake, For-Profit, Fraud, Ohio, Privatization, Virtual Charter Schools

Susan Ochshorn: A Battle for the Heart and Soul of American Education: Meier v. Moskowitz

By dianeravitch
December 17, 2017 //
30

[I am reposting since I just discovered that I put the wrong link in the original post. Sorry, Susan!]

Susan Ochshorn of ECE PolicyWorks and a new member of the board of the Network for Public educatio, writes here about two polar opposites: Deborah Meier and Eva Moskowitz.

Ochshorn compares the biographies, the lives, and the education philosophy of these two people.

She begins with Meier, an advovate, like Ochshorn, for children’s right to play:

“More than two decades ago, Deborah Meier warned that the idea of democracy was in peril. “Is it ever otherwise?” she asked in the preface to The Power of Their Ideas, her elegantly argued manifesto for public education. A self-described preacher on its behalf, she has spent half a century nurturing “everyone’s inalienable capacity to be an inventor, dreamer, and theorist—to count in the larger scheme of things.”

“I met Meier in the mid-aughts, when I joined a grassroots campaign she spearheaded in New York City to restore creative play and hands-on learning to preschools and kindergartens. This éminence grise of progressive early childhood education and the small-schools movement (for which she received a MacArthur fellowship in 1987) had begun her career as a kindergarten teacher at the Shoesmith School in Kenwood, a diverse neighborhood wedged between the University of Chicago’s Hyde Park and an impoverished black community.”

When she turns to Moskowitz, she sees a power-hungry woman who uses children for her own purposes.

“The Education of Eva Moskowitz” is a torturous read. After 359 pages of copious detail, an internal structure that defies chronology, zig-zagging across Moskowitz’s life, the evisceration of journalists, politicians and “union flacks,” as she refers to people and organizations fighting for social justice, and anyone else who has crossed her, my mind was numb. Not to mention her hubris, greed, narcissism, humorlessness and lack of self-awareness…

“His hypocrisy would have been comical if the fates of real children weren’t at stake,” Moskowitz writes of Mayor Bill de Blasio, her adversary in building an empire. Ah, yes, the children. “While it can be frustrating to teach them because they don’t know how to behave,” Moskowitz writes in a chapter called “Weevils” (an infestation she attributes to snacks from the Department of Education), “the upside is that they are virtually a blank slate…. if you take advantage of that fact to teach them to become good learners, that investment will pay dividends for years to come.”

“Apparently, Moskowitz isn’t aware that the tabula rasa theory of the English empiricist John Locke has been discredited by decades of neurological and developmental science. As Berkeley psychologist Alison Gopnik writes in The Philosophical Baby, “Their minds seem drastically limited; they know so much less than we do. And yet long before they can read and write, they have extraordinary powers of imagination and creativity, and long before they go to school, they have remarkable learning abilities.”

“Moskowitz and other charter network operators such as KIPP’s David Levin have cast their “No Excuses” schools in the mold of Harvard psychologist B.F. Skinner, whose radical behaviorism ignores internal processes—thoughts, feelings, and neurophysiological processes—emphasizing the relationship between observable stimuli and responses. Through a process called operant conditioning, behavior is modified by positive and negative reinforcement. (See Pavlov and his dogs.)

“With harsh discipline, and incentives offered for good behavior and high scores on practice tests, Moskowitz remains convinced she can close the achievement gap between her students, the vast majority of whom are black or Latino living in poverty, and their more affluent, white peers. Her methods are abusive. Students’ every movement is monitored. Daydreaming is prohibited. Children are shamed, their lackluster performances on weekly spelling and math quizzes posted in a red zone on charts in the hallway.”

As we view these two, we see a struggle for the heart and soul of American education, or for the hearts and souls of our children. Big money is betting on Moskowitz. She is the darling of Wall Street, DFER, and other corporate titans. The survival of our democracy and humane ideals is riding on Meier’s vision.

Categories Charter Schools, Childhood, Citizenship, Corporate Reform, Democracy, Discipline and Suspensions, Education Industry

Jersey Jazzman: What We Discovered About “Reform”in Newark: A Summary

By dianeravitch
December 17, 2017 //
4

Mark Weber, aka Jersey Jazzman, worked with Bruce Baker at Rutgers University to review the progress of the “reforms” (aka privatization and disruption) in Newark. This post is the first in a series that will summarize their findings.


The National Education Policy Center published a lengthy report written by Dr. Bruce Baker and myself that looks closely at school “reform” in Newark. I wrote a short piece about our report at NJ Spotlight that gives summarizes our findings. We’ve also got a deep dive into the data for our report at the NJ Education Policy website.

You might be wondering why anyone outside of New Jersey, let alone Newark, should care about what we found. Let me give you a little background before I try to answer that question…

In 2010, Mark Zuckerberg, the CEO and founder of Facebook, went on the The Oprah Winfrey Show and announced that he was giving $100 million in a challenge grant toward the improvement of Newark’s schools. Within the next couple of years, Newark had a new superintendent, Cami Anderson. Anderson attempted to implement a series of “reforms” that were supposed to improve student achievement within the city’s entire publicly-financed school system.

In the time following the Zuckerberg donation, Newark has often been cited by “reformers” as a proof point. It has a large and growing charter school sector, it implemented a teacher contract with merit pay, it has a universal enrollment system, it “renewed” public district schools by churning school leadership, it implemented Common Core early (allegedly), and so on.

So when research was released this fall that purported to show that students had made “educationally meaningful improvements” in student outcomes, “reformers” both in and out of New Jersey saw it as a vindication. Charter schools are not only good — they don’t harm public schools, because they “do more with less.” Disruption in urban schools is good, because the intractable bureaucracies in these districts needs to be shredded. Teachers unions are impeding student learning because we don’t reward the best teachers and get rid of the worst…

And so on. If Newark’s student outcomes have improved, it has to be because these and other received truths of the “reformers” must be true.

But what if the data — including the research recently cited by Newark’s “reformers” — doesn’t show Newark has improved? What if other factors account for charter school “successes”? What if the test score gains in the district, relative to other, similar districts, isn’t unique, or educationally meaningful? What if all the “reforms” supposedly implemented in Newark weren’t actually put into place? What if the chaos and strife that has dogged Newark’s schools during this “reform” period hasn’t been worth it?

What if Newark, NJ isn’t an example of “reform” leading to success, but is instead a cautionary tale?

These are the questions we set out to tackle. And in the next series of posts here, I am going to lay out, in great detail, exactly what we found, and explain what the Newark “reform” experiment is actually telling us about the future of American education.

Categories Corporate Reform, Education Industry, New Jersey, Newark, Privatization, Research

Michigan: Lies Don’t Help Schools

By dianeravitch
December 16, 2017 //
7

[I am reposting this because it was wrongly attributed to Richard Schwartz, when in fact, as I just learned, it was written by the brilliant educator and photographer Susan Lee Schwartz. She sent it to me using her husband’s email, which caused my confusion.]

As readers know, I wrote an article <a href="http://www.detroitnews.com/story/opinion/2017/12/13/charter-schools/108585724/“>about how to help Detroit public schools. After 25 years of charters, it should be obvious that they have failed and they are now the status quo.

In response, a Michigan blogger associated with the DeVos-funded Mackinac Center misleadingly summarized my article as a plea for “sports teams,” when in fact it made the straightforward proposal that poor kids need what rich kids expect to get every day. But my critic insisted—absurdly—that my big ask was for “sports teams.”

Then came a rebuttal by our friend Susan Schwartz:

“I have been saying for a long time now, that no society or civilization survives if the decisions they make are based on lies.

“In this post-truth society, where propaganda is permitted to compete with facts in the name of ‘free speech, genuine journalism is Not practiced. In this day of ‘balanced’ news, where every opinion gets to be aired as if it truthful, serious conversation is impossible.

“An example of this appeared before me today, regarding the subject of the truth about charter schools. You see, I read and write at the blog of Dr. Diane Ravitch, a brilliant, dedicated educator who was Ass’t Sec’y of State for Bush — who told him how his NCLB act would end public education.

“She is one of Politico’s MOST ‘IMPORTANT AMERICANS’ and is recognized as the top Academic in America; Thus, the Detroit News invited her to write a plan to revive education in Detroit — a city which has been a Petri dish for reformers for 25 years, and where Everything they tried has failed.,

“Diane wrote this proposal.

“Today, she writes about “the response ” that the paper published. “He or she ignored everything I said to focus on what I mentioned in passing… claiming that I believe what public schools need is sports teams. Sports teams? What about the arts, a full curriculum, experienced teachers, small classes, a nurse and social worker, well-tended facilities, robotics, dramatics? Nope. Just “sports teams.””What about “poor kids need what rich kids take for granted.” Nope.”The writer is defending a failed status quo.”DIane’s article was clearly hitting some nerves, otherwise the misrepresentations and defense of charters would not be so calculated to ridicule what she actually wrote.

“Diane, my dear friend, the Daily News ‘balanced’ your expert report with the propaganda from The Mackinac Center for Public Policy– a non-profit free market think tank headquartered in Midland, Michigan — a well-known critic of public institutions, unions, and anything that is not clearly captured for profits.

“No wonder American cannot figure out anything. No wonder so many Alabamans can be sold a predator as a senatorial candidate.

“And, at this moment, the GOP ‘s media is selling a tax plan that is GRAND THEFT from the pockets of the middle class.

“Sigh!”

Thank you, Susan.

Mackinac, stop lying.

MACKINAC, STOP LYING, EVEN THOUGH YOU ARE PAID TO DO SO.

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Detroit, Education Industry, Lies, Privatization

Christine Langhoff: Boston Parents Mobilize to Fight Stealth Charters and Vouchers

By dianeravitch
December 16, 2017 //
3

Retired teacher Christine Langhoff reports that Boston parents are organizing to fight the new assault on public schools.”Unified enrollment” and the Gates Compact are both intended to confuse parents and put charter schools on an equal footing.

She writes:


Parents called a meeting on Sunday afternoon, organized on FaceBook, and with a few hours’ notice, some 150 people were in attendance. A previously scheduled School Committee hearing strected to 7 hours on Wednesday, as an overfilled meeting room spilled out into adjacent corridors with parents and teachers (many who are also parents) giving voice to their anger. The various excuses coming from the mayor and the superintendent’s offices have pacified no one.

/var/folders/hn/j1xzh16976b90xg7frzr8wbr0000gp/T/com.apple.iChat/Messages/Transfers/Image 12-15-17 at 12.44 PM.jpg

Here’s a parent’s report: https://schoolyardnews.com/parents-say-no-to-new-start-times-at-marathon-school-committee-meeting-e9489b794c94

Behind all of this is the Gates-funded Boston Compact, which seeks Unified Enrollment that would put charter and Catholic schools on the form parents must use for enrollment in public schools, and seems to be a piece of the transportation issue given as a rationale for all these schedule changes.

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1ODfIL1gGu8DiHan87MPE2azE6IM3ynSN/view

Thomas Birmingham is credited in the lore of ed reform as the legislator who put Massachusetts on the shining path to glory with his 1993 legislation. It gave more state money to public schools, and grew out of a lawsuit about equity. It also allowed the first charters to open in the state. Now Birmingham is a Distinguished Senior Fellow at the Pioneer Institute, which is a proponent of directing public money to charters and religious schools. On Friday, Birmingham published an article in a Boston Catholic paper proposing that Catholic schools receive public money. He claims that because the Blaine Amendment was founded on anti-Catholic bigotry of the 1850’s, it should be overturned.

https://www.thebostonpilot.com/opinion/article.asp?ID=181036

Remember, the Catholic Church in Boston not only failed to protect children from sexual abuse at the hands of its pedophile priests, but in a conspiracy that led all the way to the Cardinal, they hid the truth, allowing rape and abuse to continue as they moved offenders from one parish to another. Perhaps in an era where Betsy DeVos seeks to destroy that wall between church and state in our public schools, it seems an opportune moment to push for public funding of Catholic education. The #MeToo movement ought to be a reminder that it is not.

Categories Boston, Charter Schools, Democracy, Education Industry, Gates Foundation, Bill Gates, School Choice, Separation of church and state, Vouchers

Laura Chapman: Reformers with Too Much Money and Time Making Trouble for Public Schools

By dianeravitch
December 16, 2017 //
11

What is laughingly called “Reform” is actually an interrelated group of education policies that have failed repeatedly. Reformers are never discouraged by failure. They ignore evidence. They like to fund any effort that will demoralize teachers and lead to privatization of public schools.

Laura Chapman reviews some of the current crop of reform efforts built on guess, conjecture, and ideology.

She writes:

“The Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation is trying to dominate policy in Kansas City. It has a parallel in Indianapolis called the Mind Trust.

“The Kauffman Foundation is part of the Education Cities network promoting “new” and “great” schools, but it is not just a member. It is a major contributor to that network, along with the Broad, Walton Family, Bill and Melinda Gates, Michael and Susan Dell foundations. Education Cities is part of a large network of “reform” organizations.

“Empower Schools.org, for example, is an adjunct to Education Cities. Empower Schools says: “We work with policymakers and education system leaders to adopt “Third Way” policies, structures, and strategies that allow for schools of all types, including both traditional district schools and schools led by proven and promising independent leaders. We capture and share the most promising Third Way practices to inform and shape the national conversation on education reform.”

“In other words, Empower Schools is far more than a starter of a “conversations.” The network connects 18 programs/organizations, among these the New Teacher Project, Relay Graduate School of Education, Teach for America, and others intent on de-professionalizing education.

Click to access An-introduction-to-the-Third-Way.pdf

“The Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation also funds the “Education Innovation Cluster” initiative, part of a USDE funded Digital Promise program (Obama era) and intended to bring together in one mega network people and groups identified as entrepreneurs, funders, researchers, educators, and other community stakeholders (families, local government, non-profits) to “design, launch, iterate on, and disseminate breakthrough learning practices and tools.”

“Breakthrough learning practices and tools” really refers the expanded use of on-line learning, competency-based awards such as badges and certificates for students and teacher education, learning enabled with mobile devices and so on. USDE appears to have outsourced this program http://nextgenlearning.org/blog/education-innovation-clusters-help-way

“The Kauffman Foundation has also been praised as a reason for Kansas City to be included in The U.S. Education Innovation Index: Prototype and Report, a rating system for cities released in September 2016 by Bellwether Education and the Digital Promise Innovation Clusters.

“This index measures “innovation activities “and conditions of urban schools along 42 indicators in nine categories: Innovation Culture (e.g., mayor control, Gates compact); Need for Academic Improvement ( e.g., scores of schools on state tests), Collaboration and Coordination Mechanisms (e.g., OneApp), Talent Supply and Quality (TFA a plus), Innovation-Supporting Institutions (e.g., the Kauffman Foundation in Kansas City, the Mind Trust in Indianapolis).
Innovation-Friendly Policies ( e.g., tax incentives) , Innovation Investment (venture capital flowing to education startups), District Deviation (a measure of how public schools budget money across eight categories compared to other similar school districts in the state), and Dynamism (a fancy word referring to the opening and closing of schools, market churn for schools). More detail on the rating system is outlined in Table A2: “Indicator Scoring Method.”

“This “innovation index” project from Bellwether was inspired by a similar effort on an international scale and funded by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) http://www.oecd.org/unitedstates/Measuring-Innovation-in-Education-USA.pdf.

“Bellwether’s index was also influenced by another index, published in 2013: Alive in the SwAmp 3. Assessing DigitAl innovAtions in eDucAtion.” That quirky typeface is in the title. The title is also prescient.

“Alive in the Swamp was published with support from Pearson, NewSchools (venture philanthropy), and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. It features colorful charts to show the potential influence of technology on learning and color-coded rating scheme for digital innovation in education.

“One of the authors of the digital index is Michael Fullan, a distinguished Canadian scholar in education whose ideas have been used to develop a “School Quality Improvement Index for California’s “CORE” distracts. The second author, Katelyn Donnelly, is an economist and director of Pearson’s venture fund for low-cost schools in the developing world. The examples of innovation cited in the report include Rocketship Education, School of One, Kahn Academy, and Learn Zillion, each of these rated for likelihood of producing “transformative outcomes.” These examples certainly tell us about inhabitants and supporters of the swamp-lands in education. See especially, page 13 and Appendix A.”

Click to access alive_in_the_swamp.pdf

Categories Charter Schools, Closing schools, Corporate Reformers, Education Industry, Education Reform, Privatization

John Thompson: The Sorry Record of the “Portfolio Model” of Closing Public Schools and Replacing Them with Charters

By dianeravitch
December 15, 2017 //
2

John Thompson is a teacher and historian in Oklahoma. He writes often about education policy. In this post, he recounts the recurring failure of “the portfolio model,” a reformer favorite.


Matt Barnum’s three-part series on the national corporate reform campaign to expand the “portfolio” corporate school reform model provides a balanced appraisal of the movement which is very different than the alt-facts presented by reformers seeking privatization and union-busting.

Barnum’s first post starts with Indiana’s Mind Trust which “has called for dramatic changes to schools; recruited outside advocacy, teacher training, and charter groups; and spent millions to help launch new charter and district schools.” He then warns, “A Mind Trust–style organization may be coming to a city near you.” Barnum further describes “their idealized vision,” known as the “portfolio model,” with an enrollment system which helps families choose schools, and where the local district’s role shrinks to holding schools accountable, often (mostly?) by closing ones that supposedly don’t measure up.
https://www.chalkbeat.org/posts/us/2017/12/06/a-portfolio-of-schools-how-a-nationwide-effort-to-disrupt-urban-school-districts-is-gaining-traction/

The Mind Trust and other portfolio advocates have assembled teams of “quarterbacks” to contribute money to initiate the portfolio approach and recruit the same privatization team players – Teach for America, Relay Graduate School of Education, TNTP, and Stand For Children.

Barnum writes that it is unclear how much money has been invested in promoting portfolios. He notes that 1/3rd of the $77 million raised by the Mind Trust since 2006 came from national groups, but it is clear that “prominent philanthropies, including some that have also spent millions in recent years funding charter schools nationwide, are investing heavily.” In particular, he cites the Walton, Arnold, and Broad foundations. He points out the role of David Osborne’s book tour, funded by Walton, Arnold, and Broad, where Osborne “recently compared teachers unions’ opposition to charter school expansion in Massachusetts to George Wallace’s promotion of mandated school segregation.”

The thing that jumps out to me with Barnum’s first two posts is that the record of these political campaigns is mixed. And organizing an attack on unions and school boards is much, much easier than actually improving schools. This ambiguity is an even more important theme of his third piece, as well as the sources he footnotes. National reformers may believe that they can come into localities that they know nothing about and push through their privatization schemes. They may have tons of money to gamble on risky social engineering experiments, but they have little or no evidence that the tumult that they instigate would benefit students, and remain oblivious to the damage down by failed experiments.
https://chalkbeat.org/posts/us/2017/12/08/advocates-of-the-portfolio-model-for-improving-schools-say-it-works-are-they-right/

Barnum cites conservative reformers and research from a range of scholars to puncture the public relations spin of big-bucks portfolio advocates. Even the cornerstone of the experiment, a common enrollment system, has prompted pushback by conservatives who note the way that it would promote more teach-to-the-test malpractice and by patrons who were confused by the systems. Even one of the most highly praised centralized enrollment system, in Denver, did not increase access of special education students to charters or have a statistically significant effect on the number of low-income students in charters.

Advice to the Arnold Foundation

Denver Study Shows Simplifying Enrollment Drove More Disadvantaged Students to Sign Up for Charter Schools

Something similar applies to school closures which is the silver bullet being promised by portfolio advocates. Those who trust the increase in test scores in New Orleans attribute much of the gains to closing schools that were low-performing. As Barnum acknowledges, that only works when there are better schools available, and I would say that it would take more than a portfolio of silver bullets to create them in our most challenging districts. Barnum also links to his compilation of research which showed gains for students in closed schools in only 1/4th of the studies. He showed no examples of closures where displaced students benefitted but the outcomes in receiving schools didn’t decline.

Research Shows Students Can Benefit When a School Closes — but Only If There Are Better Ones to Attend

And the question of costs versus benefits brings us to New Orleans, which is typically cited as the proof of the concept of portfolios. It is the only serious gripe that I have with Barnum’s wording. While he acknowledged that test score growth is a flawed metric, Barnum doesn’t mention why it is so much more problematic in evaluating NOLA and other experiments that focus unflinchingly on bubble-in accountability. Test score growth might or might not mean more learning, and as I hope any teacher would understand, it often means the learning of destructive habits. Personally, I can’t see any scenario where test score growth in a place that stressed such growth as much as the NOLA portfolio can stand by itself as evidence of meaningful learning that beneficial to students.

Regardless, Barnum cites a “national analysis [which] also found that New Orleans students made large academic gains between 2009 and 2015.” I wish he’d been more precise in noting that NOLA only had three years when the growth rate exceeded that of the old failing system. However, Barnum notes that the gains occurred when New Orleans was most generously funded, and was free to suspend or push out large numbers of students. He mentions the lack of clear evidence that gains can be sustained without those tactics, and that “more recent test scores in the city have suggested that schools are backsliding somewhat.” Corporate reformer Peter Cook called the decline “The Great NOLA Train Wreck.”
https://peterccook.com/2017/11/08/great-nola-train-wreck/

Barnum also notes “another concern: expansion of charters in New Orleans coincided with a decline in the number of schools offering prekindergarten.” And regarding NOLA, Newark, and elsewhere, he addresses the conflicts between outside reformers and communities.

Portfolio advocates should also explain the disappointing results of Memphis and Newark. Barnum writes, “A Vanderbilt analysis found that a state takeover effort known as the Achievement School District failed to raise test scores, even as it was dubbed a “national exemplar” in implementing the portfolio model.” I wish he’d also reported that Memphis became #1 as New Orleans became #3 in “disconnected youth,” or students out of school without a job.
http://www.speno2014.com/oydataguide/

Barnum notes a recent, revisionist (and I would say flawed) study which indicates the $200 million Zuckerberg reform investment in Newark was a “mixed success.” In a longer analysis he writes:

Journalist Dale Russakoff wrote a largely critical account of changes that focused on how a large share of the Zuckerberg money went to high-paid consultants. Since, media reports have largely suggested that the approach failed and that the money was wasted.

Given the thorough research by Russakoff, and the work of other excellent journalists, it’s hard for me to take seriously the special pleading by reformers who deny that Newark was a failure. It’s especially hard to fathom how social scientists would get away with spinning the conclusion that Newark portfolio might have worked because it might lead to future gains, but without offering evidence that the happy ending might occur, and “eventually alter system-wide productivity for future cohorts.”

Click to access newark_ed_reform_nber_w23922_suggested_changes.pdf

Finally, Barnum writes, “There is little or no rigorous research comparing gains in Denver, Indianapolis, and Washington D.C. to similar districts that have gone in a different direction.”

Denver was identified as having the largest achievement gap in the nation, indicating that like D.C. the gains may be due to economic growth and/or gentrification. And a recent scandal shows that D.C. still hasn’t shown the ability to curtail the cheating that portfolios would invariably encourage. And as far as Indianapolis, recent research can help estimate the gains that occurred when the Mind Trust and other corporate reformers invested in the city. Median income in Indianapolis is $10,000 or 1/3rd greater than that of the resource-starved Oklahoma City schools and 3rd grade scores are much higher. During the next five years, however, student performance grows at the same rate in both cities, 4.4 years.
https://www.chalkbeat.org/posts/co/2015/10/07/report-denver-ranks-last-among-50-cities-on-income-based-achievement-gaps/
https://www.chalkbeat.org/posts/co/2016/09/21/dps-students-of-color-not-making-as-much-progress-on-state-tests-as-white-peers/
https://www.chalkbeat.org/posts/in/2017/10/04/indianapolis-public-schools-sees-little-a-f-change-but-innovation-schools-got-top-grades/
https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/education/ballou-high-principal-reassigned-following-report-questioning-school-standards/2017/12/04/54bbcdfe-d947-11e7-b1a8-62589434a581_story.html?utm_term=.ce1c2339b34d

Now that the claims of gains for portfolios have been largely debunked in Newark, D.C., Tennessee, and Indianapolis, and the extreme exaggerations regarding Denver and New Orleans cut down to size, what are the prospects for the new portfolio public relations campaign? We educators have seen this dog and pony show repeatedly. We need to keep reminding political leaders of the Billionaires Boys Club’s sorry record in education policy.

Categories Accountability, Billionaires, Charter Schools, Closing schools, Corporate Reformers, Education Industry, Privatization

Watch Out, Boston: Here Comes School Choice, Whether You Want It or Not

By dianeravitch
December 15, 2017 //
14

Christine Langhoff, retired educator, wrote the following information about the corporate reform assault on Boston Public Schools. Voters overwhelmingly rejected expansion of charter school, but the privatization movement is never dissuaded by public opposition. They think democracy is the problem and have no qualms about ignoring the will of the people when it conflicts with their ambition.

Langhoff writes:

Last week, this rather odd Tweet appeared from the Boston Public Schools Twitter account:

The language about “choice” made me remember that NPR featured this article about how “coaches” are helping parents choose schools for their children.

https://www.npr.org/sections/ed/2017/11/27/551853951/confused-by-your-public-school-choices-hire-a-coach?utm_source=twitter.com&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=npr&utm_term=nprnews&utm_content=2055

Of course, most BPS parents don’t have money for this sort of help. No worries! There’s an edu-business non-profit for that: EdNavigator https://www.ednavigator.com

And they’re coming to Boston! After a successful run in – New Orleans?

So who is behind EdNavigator? The “leadership” page shows a bunch of folks from TNTP and some KIPPsters

https://www.ednavigator.com/who-we-are/leadership

And the Board of Directors is full of a bunch more charteristas, including Chris Stewart, aka @CitizenStewart, as Director of Outreach and External Affairs:

https://www.ednavigator.com/who-we-are/board-of-directors

Their partners page shows many hotels, i.e. low income workers. Remember that the Pritzker hedge fund family of Chicago own Hyatt Hotels :

https://www.ednavigator.com/who-we-are/our-partners

The plan is to offer school choice counseling as a “benefit” to low income workers and by developing this “trust” in their workers, the public school system is supplanted as the knowledgeable entity on education.

“Our Navigators combine expert knowledge of schools with a deep understanding of our communities. Most are accomplished former teachers, school leaders, or counselors, and all have passed a background check, received privacy training and adhere to a strict code of confidentiality.

They’re like pediatricians for your educational health, and they’re always ready to answer questions, troubleshoot problems, and get things done. In a recent survey, 95 percent of EdNavigator members said that their Navigator is “the person I trust most for information and advice about education issues.”

https://www.ednavigator.com/how-we-help

Here in Boston, EdNavigator goes by the name of Boston School Finder
https://www.bostonschoolfinder.org/about

About Boston School Finder
“Boston School Finder is being developed and distributed by a committed and diverse team of Parent Ambassadors supported by local non-profits. These parents and guardians represent nearly all the neighborhoods of Boston, and enroll their children in BPS, charter, Catholic, and private schools.
Funding for Boston School Finder was provided through the Boston Schools Fund and the Barr Foundation, two local non-profit organizations. Web design and development was provided by a team of volunteers who work at Wayfair, a Boston-based e-commerce company specializing in home goods.
Many other organizations, including the City of Boston, Boston Public Schools, the Boston Charter Alliance, the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Boston, and community organizations from all around the city are providing guidance and input on the site.”

They’ve hired “Parent Ambassadors”
https://www.bostonschoolfinder.org/about/contact

And have detailed information about enrollment for public, private, charter and religious schools
https://www.bostonschoolfinder.org/about/enrollment

Since November 29, some pages for the website have been removed, but here’s some of the information that has gone missing:

2017 Barrr Foundation grants:
Ed Navigator Inc.
To support the EdNavigator expansion to Boston.
• Year Awarded: 2017

• Amount: $500,000

• Term: 24 months

• Program: Education


Boston Schools Fund Inc. To support the development and implementation of the Boston School Finder Family Information Tool.
• Year Awarded: 2017
• Amount: $300,000
Term: 12 months

The Barr Foundation is also a champion of Unified Enrollment, which in turn is part of CRPE’s Gates Compact, all of which will have a detrimental effect on Boston’s public schools.

http://www.bostonschoolsfund.org/boston-compact/

Also in the missing link from November 29, was this list of Board members

PRESIDENT WILLIAM F. AUSTIN
TREASURER WILLIAM F. AUSTIN
CLERK JILL SHAH
DIRECTOR WILLIAM F. AUSTIN
DIRECTOR JILL SHAH
DIRECTOR KATHRYN EVERETT

Austin taught math at Roxbury Prep, which is the charter where John King was a founding teacher before he moved on to New York state and then to replace Arne Duncan. (It is also the school with the persistently highest suspension rate in the state of Massachusetts.) Austin has overseen its four-campus expansion. Shah and her husband own the on-line furniture store Wayfair; her husband is a director of the Federal Reserve Bank.

On Tuesday, Austin confirmed to a member of the Boston Teachers Union that the above is accurate.

So, charteristas and billionaires. Color me skeptical that these organizations are well suited to helping Boston parents choose public schools for their children. It seems, too, that the parents most likely to utilize the bostonschoolfinder.org website are the best educated and most advantaged to begin with.

The Boston City Council held a hearing on Tuesday evening, December 5, which I attended, with the purpose of getting this information on the record. The hearing was on the school assignment process, which has been a colossal boondoggle, featuring algorithms written by MIT students. The current plan was enacted in 2013, and there were supposed to be yearly reports about progress, or lack of and necessary improvements along the way. No reports have been issued over the past four years.

When Councilor Tito Jackson (who supported the “No” position on last year’s charter expansion ballot question) probed for a reason for the lack of reporting, the School Department’s answer was that we’ve had three different standardized state tests, so no judgments can be made about the quality of the schools, information parents need to choose a school. When Jackson asked about Unified Enrollment, the School Department claimed to know nothing about it, that there had been no meetings on the topic. But Mayor Marty Walsh has filed legislation to fast track Unified Enrollment, then later denied he did so after reports became public.

“Currently, students have a list of school options comprising only district schools and can apply also to as many charters as desired. Under unified enrollment, unless school list lengths are expanded, the presence of any charter school on the list necessarily will bump a district school off of it, reducing district school options, states QUEST in its report published on Sept. 18, 2017. Under bill H.2876 filed by Rep. Alice Peisch and co-sponsored by Walsh, Carvalho and Rep. Dan Hunt, charter schools could elect to give enrollment preference to students living near the school.”

http://baystatebanner.com/news/2017/oct/11/quiet-push-unified-enrollment/

(Rep. Alice Peisch, by the way, has been a staunch supporter of charter expansion and was one of their spokespeople during last year’s Question 2.)

On Friday, December 8, the School Department released another plan informed by an MIT algorithm for start times for our schools. Ostensibly, the goal was later start times for high schools, many of which begin now at 7:15. There are no school buses for high schools, which means kids often need to leave home by about 6:00 to arrive at school on public transportation. There has been an uprising among parents since new times were revealed because they have changed start times in 105 of 125 schools (84% of all BPS schools) ostensibly in order to change 21 high school start times.

Under the new plan, many elementary schools are scheduled to begin at 7:15, with afternoon dismissals as early as 1:15. Adding before and after school care to schedules for the littles could mean an 11 hour day away from home. When parents began to push back, asking how they could be expected to juggle work schedules with these new school hours, these pieces of advice were offered:

“My new bell time doesn’t work for me, what can I do?
• For students who are eligible for transportation and where we have capacity on our buses, BPS will provide transportation from off-site, before-school programs to school; and from school to off-site, after-school programs.
• Your school likely has before- or after- school programming. More than 90% of all BPS schools have after-school programing and 90% of BPS schools starting after 9:00 AM have a before-school program. Additionally, we will continue to work with programs and schools to expand available before- and after-school programming across BPS.
• BPS is happy to provide parents, guardians, and students with letters to employers notifying them of a school scheduling change and explaining why this may necessitate a change of working hours. For this, please email starttimes@bostonpublicschools.org.
• We realize that in some cases, the only option for families may be to change schools. For more information on this process, please visit a BPS Welcome Center, its website, bostonpublicschools.org/welcomeservices, or call 617-635-9010. Please also consider attending the BPS School Showcase on Saturday, December 9, at TD Garden; the event begins at 9:00 am and ends at 1:00 pm. For more information, visit bostonpublicschools.org/registrationevents.”

https://www.bostonpublicschools.org/Page/7016

The Boston Globe weighed in, essentially telling parents to suck it up:

http://www.bostonglobe.com/opinion/editorials/2017/12/09/new-school-schedules-are-worth-hassle/tjfhF0WLfE6O1Et90SW7vL/story.html?camp=bg%3Abrief%3Arss%3Afeedly&rss_id=feedly_rss_brief&s_campaign=bostonglobe%3Asocialflow%3Atwitter#comments

Parents have posted a petition which has garnered over 4,700 signatures since Saturday.

https://www.change.org/p/tommy-chang-and-mayor-walsh-stop-immediate-changes-on-school-start-times-in-boston

When I start to add up all this chaos, I come to one conclusion: it’s deliberate.

It makes enrollment in traditional schools more difficult.

It makes school schedules more onerous for parents and kids.

It will destabilize the entire school system.

It will drive families away.

It will make the privatizers gleeful.

It will subvert the voters’ emphatic NO to an expansion of the charter industry.

Right here in the cradle of public education.

Categories Boston, Charter Schools, Corporate Reformers, Education Industry, Privatization, School Choice
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