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Peter Greene: David Brooks Gets Everything Wrong (Again)

By dianeravitch
March 6, 2015 //
40

Peter Greene here reviews David Brooks’ latest effort to advise the nation about education issues. Brooks argues that it would be a mistake to try to reduce poverty by redistributionist policies (I assume he means such policies as higher taxes on billionaires or direct benefits to those who are poor or government programs for job creation); instead, we should count on education to reduce inequality and poverty.

 

In earlier columns, he concluded that Geoffrey Canada’s Harlem Children’s Zone charters were “miracle schools” that had closed the achievement gap between white and black students (however, the miracle has not been sustained, even though Canada kicked out the entire entering class whose scores were low, and his schools spend substantially more than public schools with which they are compared); and Brooks endorsed the idea that teachers would produce higher test scores through a trick called “loss aversion,” where they are given a bonus at the beginning of the year, but the bonus is taken away if the scores don’t go up. In 2011, after he heard me speak in Aspen, Colorado, he wrote a column criticizing me for questioning high-stakes testing and charter schools, and of course, he complained that I said that poverty is a leading cause of low test scores. He seems to believe that testing and charters are the answer to poverty, even though after some 13 years of high-stakes testing and 25 years of charters, there seems to be more child poverty, not less.

 

In today’s column, Brooks claims that the way to prosperity is not to reduce poverty by, for example, creating jobs for people who want to work or raising taxes on the super-rich (that would be redistributionist, which is a very bad thing in his eyes), but by making sure that everyone goes to college. If everyone goes to college, then everyone will get good jobs, and no one will be poor. But where will all those new jobs come from? According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the 20 occupations that will supply the most jobs between now and 2022 are mostly low-paying. Except for registered nurses and managers, 18 of the 20 occupations are not high-wage occupations. Do we need to improve our schools? Yes, of course. Will that be enough to reduce poverty? No.

 

Greene writes:

 

Mostly Brooks wants to argue for education as the miracle engine of economic justice. And to make his argument, he trots out the work of Raj Chetty, a piece of research that proves conclusively that even researchers at Harvard can become confused about the difference between correlation and causation. (Chetty, for those of you unfamiliar with the “research,” asserts that a good teacher will result in greater lifetime earnings for students. What he actually proves is that people who tend to do well on standardized tests tend to grow up to be wealthier, an unexciting demonstration of correlation best explained by things we already know– people who score well on standardized tests tend to be from a higher-income background, and people who grow up to be high-income tend to come from a high-income background.)

 

Brooks also cites magical researcher David Autor of MIT, who believes that if everyone graduated from college with a degree, everyone would make more money because, reasons. Because if everyone had a college degree, flipping burgers would pay more? Because if everyone had a college degree, corporations would suddenly want to hire more people? The continued belief in the astonishing notion that a more educated workforce causes higher-paying jobs to appear from somewhere is big news to a huge number of twenty-somethings who are busy trying to scrape together a living in areas other than the ones they prepared for these days.

 

Brooks isn’t done spouting nonsense:

 

[Brooks writes:] “Focusing on human capital is not whistling past the graveyard…No redistributionist measure will have the same effect as good early-childhood education and better community colleges, or increasing the share of men capable of joining the labor force.”

 

Because the vast number of high-paying jobs currently going unfilled is….. what?

 

Brooks says that redistributionists don’t get it, that they believe that modern capitalism is fundamentally broken, but that their view is biased by short-term effects of the recession. I have two responses for that pair of thoughtbubbbles.

 

First, it’s not clear whether capitalism is broken or not because we are currently tangled up in some sort of twisted fun-house mirror version of faux capitalism where the free market has been obliterated by a controlled money-sucking machine run by the government on behalf of the oligarchs. I’m actually a fan of capitalism, but what we currently have in this country is not capitalism at all.

 

Second, your argument about the “temporary evidence” of the recession is invalid because the recession was (and is) not the result of some mysterious serious of natural events. The economy went in the tank because the CEOs and Wall Street put it there. The economy broke because the “capitalists” broke it, and consequently the recession itself is Exhibit A in the case against modern faux capitalism and the greedheads who run it.

 

Throwing all this back at a magical belief in education is simply another way to blame poor people for being poor. So sorry you need food stamps and health care, but if you’d had the guts and character to go to college and get a degree, you wouldn’t be in such a mess. Your poverty is just the direct result of your lack of character and quality. Well, that and your terrible teachers. But it certainly has nothing to do with how the country is being run. It’s all on you, lousy poor person. And also your teachers.

Categories Charter Schools, Corporate Reformers, Education Industry, Jobs, Poverty, Testing

Jeff Bryant: Charter Frauds and Scams Multiply

By dianeravitch
March 6, 2015 //
22

At some point, the Wall Street money behind the charter movement will not be sufficient to cover up the escalating number of frauds and scams reported almost daily across the country. In this article in Salon, Jeff Bryant writes about some of the most recent financial abuses perpetrated by charter founders. Open his article to find links providing sources for all his statements.

 

Bryant writes:

 

What fun we had recently with North Carolina’s recently elected U.S. senator, Republican Thom Tillis, who insisted we didn’t need government regulations to compel restaurant employees to wash their hands in between using the toilet and preparing our food.

 

His solution to proper sanitation practices in restaurants – “the market will take care of that” – was roundly mocked by left-leaning commentators as an example of the way conservatives uphold the interests of businesses and moneymaking above all other concerns.

 

Fun, for sure, but it’s no laughing matter that the Tillis plan for public sanitation appears to increasingly be the philosophy for governing the nation’s schools.

 

Rather than directly address what ails struggling public schools, policy leaders increasingly claim that giving parents more choice about where they send their children to school – and letting that parent choice determine the funding of schools – will create a market mechanism that leaves the most competent schools remaining “in business” while incompetent schools eventually close.

 

Coupled with more “choice” are demands to increase the numbers of unregulated charter schools, especially those operated by private management firms that now have come to dominate roughly half the charter sector….

 

For instance, in Charlotte, at least three charter schools abruptly closed down this year alone, some after having been in operation for only a few months. The most recent shutdown was particularly noticeable.

 

That school, Entrepreneur High, focused on teaching students job skills, so they could be financially independent when they graduated. Turns out the school had its own financial problems with only $14 in the bank and $400,000 in debt. In fact, the school never even really had a financial plan at all.

 

In other news from the front of “school choice” in the Tarheel State, left-leaning group N.C. Policy Watch recently reported about a state auditor who checked the books of a Kinston charter school and found the school overstated attendance–thereby inflating its state funds by more than $300,000.

 

The school shorted its staff by more than $370,000 in payroll obligations, according to reports, while making “questionable payments of more than $11,000″ to the CEO and his wife. And the CEO’s daughter was being paid $40,000 to be the school’s academic officer even though she had zero experience in teaching or school administration.

 

When the reporter, Lindsay Wagner, tried to contact the school’s CEO to question him about the auditor’s findings, she discovered he had left his position and was working elsewhere in the state – running a different charter school.

 

Meanwhile, the state has rolled out another school choice venture: vouchers, called Opportunity Scholarships, that allow parents to pull their kids out of public schools and get taxpayer funding to enroll the kids in the schools of their choice. Wagner, again, wondered where the money was heading and found 90 percent of it goes to private religious institutions….

 

Also, Wagner reported, voucher funds come with “virtually no accountability measures attached … Private schools are also free to use any curriculum they see fit, employ untrained, unlicensed teachers and conduct criminal background checks only on the heads of schools. For the most part, they do not have to share their budgets or financial practices with the public, in spite of receiving public dollars.”

 

North Carolina is not unique in tolerating charter school corruption.

 

Bryant writes:

 

In Ohio, for instance, a recent investigation into charter schools by state auditors found evidence of fraud that made North Carolina’s pale in comparison. The privately operated schools get nearly $6,000 in taxpayer money for every student they enroll, but half the charter schools the auditor looked at had “significantly lower” attendance than what they claimed in state funding.

 

One charter school in Youngstown had no students at all, having sent the kids home for the day at 12:30 in the afternoon.

 

This form of charter school fraud is so widespread, according to an article in Education Week, many states now employ “‘mystery’ or ‘secret shopper’ services used in retail” that pose as inquiring parents to call charter schools to ensure they’re educating the students they say they are.

 

Enrollment inflation is not the only form of fraud charter schools practice. In Missouri, a federal judge recently fingered a nationwide chain of charter schools, Imagine, for “self-dealing” in a lease agreement that allowed it to fleece a local charter school of over a million dollars.

 

“The facts of the case mirror arrangements in Ohio and other states,” the reporter noted, “where Imagine schools pay exorbitant rent to an Imagine subsidiary, SchoolHouse Finance. The high lease payments leave little money for classroom instruction and help explain the poor academic records of Imagine schools in both states……”

 

In Washington, which was late to the game of charters and choice, the state’s first charter school is already under investigation for financial and academic issues.

 

Investigators in the District of Columbia, recently uncovered a charter school operator who “funneled $13 million of public money into a private company for personal gain.”

 

A recent report from the Center for Popular Democracy looked at charter school finances in Illinois and found “$13.1 million in fraud by charter school officials … Because of the lack of transparency and necessary oversight, total fraud is estimated at $27.7 million in 2014 alone.”

 

One example the CPD report cited was of a charter operator in Chicago who used charter school funds amounting to more than $250,000 to purchase personal items from luxury department stores, including $2,000 on hair care and cosmetic products and $5,800 for jewelry….

 

While charter school operations continue to waste public money on scandals and fraud – all in the name of “choice” – newly enacted school vouchers divert more public school dollars to private schools….

 

In Louisiana, over a third of students using voucher funds to attend private schools are enrolled schools “doing such a poor job of educating them that the schools have been barred from taking new voucher students.”

 

In parts of Wisconsin, “private schools accepting vouchers receive more money per student than public school districts do for students attending through open enrollment.”

 

Despite the obvious misdirection of taxpayer money, more states are eager to roll out new voucher plans or expand the ones they have. As the Economist recently reported, “After the Republicans’ success in state elections in November, several are pushing to increase the number and scope of school voucher schemes,” including Wisconsin, where probable presidential candidate Scott Walker has proposed to remove all limits on the number of schoolchildren who could attend private schools at taxpayer expense.

 

Of course, not all voucher-like schemes are called “vouchers.” According to a report from Politico, some states are considering voucher-like mechanisms called Education Savings Accounts that allow parents to pocket taxpayer money that would normally pay for public schools to be used for other education pursuits, including private school and home schooling. Two states – Florida and Arizona – already have them, but six more may soon follow….

 

Support for vouchers extends to Congress, as another Politico article reported, where Republican, and some Democratic, lawmakers are “proposing sweeping voucher bills and nudging school choice into conversations about the 2016 primaries.”

 

According to a report from Education Week, congressional Republicans leading the effort to rewrite the nation’s federal education policy, called No Child Left Behind, are “intent on drafting the most-conservative version of the federal K-12 law possible,” which would include a voucher-like scheme allowing federal money designated as Title I funds, the program for schools with low-income students, “to follow those students to the school of their choice, including private schools.”

 

In fact, working its way through the U.S. House of Representatives currently is a bill called the Student Success Act that would provide for this “Title I Portability.” In the U.S. Senate, according to Education Week, Title I Portability is also included in a draft bill to rewrite NCLB introduced by Sen. Lamar Alexander of Tennessee.

 

“Everyone should care and learn about Title I Portability,” warns public school advocate Jan Resseger on Public School Shakedown, a blog site operated by the Progressive magazine.

Resseger points to a statement by the National Coalition for Public Education stating, “This proposal would undermine Title I’s fundamental purpose of assisting public schools with high concentrations of poverty and high-need students.” Resseger also cites, from the Center on American Progress, a brief opposing Title I Portability. “According to CAP,” Resseger explains, Title I Portability would be “Robin Hood in Reverse … taking from the poor and giving to the rest,” ignoring the long-known fact that socioeconomic isolation has a devastating impact, as, on average, “school districts with highly concentrated family poverty would lose $85 per student while more affluent school districts would gain, on average, $290 per student.”

 

Despite the damage that Title I Portability could do to public schools serving our most high-needs students, charter school advocates appear to back the measure, according to a recent post at Education Week. “By and large, we feel that when the dollars follow children to the school that they select, you create a better marketplace for reform,” the president of the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools Nina Rees is quoted.

 

Nina Rees is a supporter of both charters and vouchers; she served as education advisor to Vice President Dick Cheney during the George W. Bush administration.

 

With today’s school choice crowd, children’s guaranteed access to high-quality public education appears to be no longer the goal – either by policy or practice.

 

Under the Tillis Rule, it’s assumed some schools will be allowed to remain lousy at least for some substantial period of time (how long is anyone’s guess), while “the money follows the child,” “people vote with their feet” and “the market works.”

 

Any negative consequences to those students and families unlucky or unfortunate enough to be stuck in the not-so-good schools – after all, it’s impossible for every family to get into the “best school” – seem to not matter one whit.

 

And that’s really sick.

 

 

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Education Industry, Scandals Fraud and Hoaxes

Las Vegas: What Happens When Reform Is Not Reform But Destruction?

By dianeravitch
March 6, 2015 //
8

In an article published in 2013, journalist Launce Rake comments on the departure from Nevada of two “reformers.” He takes the opportunity to explain why the word “reform” should never be used to describe events, individuals, or organizations.

 

He writes:

 

A GOOD EDITOR, YEARS AGO, told me to jettison the word “reform.” Calling a policy change “reform” is a way to dress it up and make it acceptable to the public, she explained.

 

If you want to award less money to people who sue after being horribly maimed by bad products or services, don’t call it “giving victims less money.” Call it “tort reform.”

 

Likewise, if you want to take apart the teachers unions and make it easier to fire teachers, don’t say “make it easier to fire teachers”. Call it “education reform.”

 

And they have. For a decade, education reform — that is, administrative and policy changes to public schools — has been a train barreling down the tracks, embraced by elected and appointed officials at all levels, across the political spectrum. Everybody loves reform!

 

That’s as true in Nevada as anywhere in the nation; schools in Nevada and the Clark County School District, the nation’s fifth largest, consistently rank among the worst-performing in the nation. While some wags also point out that they are also among the worst funded in the nation, political leaders, unable or unwilling to address the funding issue, have instead called for “reform.”

 

Isn’t it amazing that this writer gets it, but no one in the mainstream media does?

Categories Corporate Reformers, Education Industry, Education Reform, Privatization, Testing

Denisha Jones: Beware the Education “Reformers” Who Co-Opt the Language of the Civil Rights Movement

By dianeravitch
March 6, 2015 //
15

Denish Jones is a contributor to EmPower magazine. She holds a Ph.D. in Curriculum and Instruction from Indiana University. She has taught kindergarten, preschool, served as a campus based preschool director, and taught college for over 10 years. Currently she is a Visiting Assistant Professor of Early Childhood Education at Howard University.

 

In this article, Jones warns that so-called “reformers” have stolen the language of the civil rights movement to advance their goals of privatization and deprofessionalization. Their aims actually contradict the aims of the civil rights movement.

 

 

She writes:

 

1. Privatization is inherently unequal.

The corporate reform movement that is waging war against public education has one goal in mind: privatization. Free-market advocates do not believe in a system of public education and are on a mission to see every aspect of a public society privatized from our prisons to our schools. But with privatization comes the loss of public ownership. Public systems are open to inspection by the public. Records are made public and the process is transparent so that community members can understand what is happening and voice their concerns. Privatization removes the ability of the public to know what is happening with their tax dollars. Private companies can use proprietary laws to prevent them from disclosing documents and following laws pertaining to public records….

 

Without the transparency of how our tax dollars are spent how do we hold private corporations accountable? Some businesses do well but others fail to garner enough capital to stay afloat; that is the nature of capitalism. But when the business model of winners and losers is applied to public education, the losers tend to be children who struggle academically and families without the social capital needed to advocate for their children. The winners are CEO’s and stock holders who earn high salaries with public money but can use their private status to shield themselves from public accountability.

 

2. School choice is not about parents choosing good schools it’s about schools choosing good students.

 

School choice has been pushed by corporate reformers since the creation of charter schools and vouchers. Using the plight of underfunded poverty ridden urban schools reformers argued that low-income and minority families should be given a choice in where they send their child to school. Choice and competition would force low-performing schools to compete for students or be closed. Why should low-income and minority families have to settle for a failing neighborhood schools when parents with more money could choose better schools? This is how the argument for school choice is often framed as a benefit for certain groups. But the research paints a different picture….

The push for privatization distorts the picture of who really gets to choose under school choice schemes. Reformers would have us believe that parents are doing the choosing but in reality it is the charter schools, many which are for-profit corporations, who get to choose.

 

3. Underprepared teachers for other people’s children.

 

Privatization of public education cannot be fully implemented unless the system for educating teachers is also privatized. Typically teachers were prepared through colleges and universities were they took a variety of courses and completed a semester long student teaching internship before they could apply for a teaching license through their state. Today fast-track teacher preparation programs like Teach for America (TFA) are turning teacher preparation into a business. Recent college graduates are recruited to spend a few years teaching in inner-city schools with high needs students. Armed with five weeks of training and a desire to give back, these recruits are placed in classrooms and expected to outperform educators with teaching degrees and years of experience. TFA is touted as noble program that will change the teaching profession by removing the union thugs who only care about themselves and replacing them with young idealistic people who have the commitment to do what needs to be done and will not use poverty as an excuse.

 

Armed with language of from the Civil Rights movement, TFA claims to be champion of low-income and minority children. Statements like this, “Nearly 50 years after landmark civil rights marches throughout the region, deep, entrenched poverty still persists along racial lines” and “From Birmingham to Selma, corps members are helping to prove that all kids can achieve at high levels, even those living in poverty” can be found on their website and are clear examples of how TFA has co-opted the language of the Civil Rights movement. But hidden behind these nice quotes is the assumption that other people’s children deserve underprepared “saviors” as their teacher…..What the richest and most educated parent wants for their own child should be what we aspire to give all children.

 

Denisha Jones concludes:

 

There is much work to done as we continue to march towards Dr. King’s dream. Corporate education reform is not an ally in our fight for educational justice. We must not be fooled by those who seek to use the legacy of our struggle to turn a profit at the expense of our children’s education. A strong democratic republic needs high quality public schools that offer a free and appropriate public education to all.

 

 

Categories Charter Schools, Common Core, Corporate Reformers, Education Industry, Education Reform, For-Profit, Privatization, Testing

Wow!! 18 Million Page Views!

By dianeravitch
March 6, 2015 //
57

Overnight, the blog reached 18 million page views. The last time it hit the million mark was January 28, when it hit 17 million. I had no idea when I started blogging on April 26, 2012, that this would happen.

 

My goal since the blog started was to let others know that what was happening in their state and district was not an isolated phenomenon. I wanted you to know that if you don’t like the status quo in education today, you are not alone. If you don’t like the attacks on teachers, you are not alone. If you are alarmed by the way testing has become the main focus of schooling, you are not alone.

 

The movement to turn public education over to private management and entrepreneurs is national, not local. The movement to take away due process and collective bargaining rights for teachers is national, not local. The indifference to segregation and poverty is national, not local. I wanted to help build a movement against privatization and high-stakes testing by providing the information people need.

Over time, I realized I could magnify the audience for brilliant bloggers like Anthony Cody, Peter Greene, Mercedes Schneider, Paul Thomas, Paul Horton, Bruce Baker, and many others. When I saw how many insightful comments were posted by teachers, parents, principals, superintendents, and concerned citizens, I realized I could give them a platform to be heard. When new research appears that is relevant to our issues, I could share it. Most of what I post is written by others, not by me. I set the rules, I decide what to post, but it is your blog too.

 

I have posted more than 10,000 times; I have read more than 250,000 comments. I turned many of your comments into posts because I thought they were smart, provocative, informative. I love the conversation among the readers. Many are regulars. Others jump in when they feel the urge. All are welcome (so long as they don’t use certain four-letter words or spout conspiracy theories or insult me).

 

I have repeatedly tried not to overwhelm you with too many posts in a single day, but I usually fail. When I see something I really like or really don’t like, I feel a need to share it. So, despite my best intentions, you get too many emails from me. No one has to read them. No one has to sign on. So, I will go on doing what I love doing–being a disseminator of my thoughts, your thoughts, and the thoughts of others, in the service of “a better education for all.”

 

There is a movement against the status quo of privatization and high-states testing. It is growing by the day. It includes students, parents, educators, and others. It won’t succeed in a matter of months. But it will succeed. I don’t know if it will take a year, five years, or ten years. It will succeed. Everything the “reformers” have imposed has failed. Merit pay has failed. Charters are no better and are very often much worse than public schools, especially when they are run by non-educators or by people seeking to make a profit. Vouchers have failed. The usual punitive accountability schemes–like grading schools A-F or stack-ranking teachers–are a farce. The parent trigger has failed. The effort to measure teacher quality by test scores has failed. Despite all the money of the billionaires and the Wall Street hedge fund managers, despite their control of the U.S. Department of Education, their plan to privatize public education is a failure. They can make it happen here and there, but they can’t produce any real improvement that benefits all children. They can’t produce equality of educational opportunity. They produce more testing, but they can’t produce better education. They can cherry pick students and show off their Potemkin Village schools, but they dare not take responsibility for an entire district because they don’t know what to do with the children who won’t conform, the children with disabilities, and the children who can’t speak English.

 

Might there be common ground? Yes, I think so. But common ground must begin by ending the boasting, ending the false claims. Education in a large and diverse society is hard, not easy. There is no secret sauce. Common ground requires that charter promoters stop bragging that they are better than public schools. Teach for America must stop bragging that their idealistic and dedicated young recruits are better teachers than experienced teachers. And the funders of these institutions must stop the attacks on public education and on the teaching profession. Common ground begins when everyone recognizes that complex problems require collaboration and mutual respect. Common ground also requires that charter promoters stop using their students as political shock troops at school board meetings, City Council hearings, and state legislative meetings.

 

Every high-performing nation has a strong public school system with strong community support and equitable funding. They do not rely on competitive markets to provide education; competitive markets exacerbate segregation and inequality. A better education for all means a better education for all. It means equality of educational opportunity. It means well-educated, well-prepared teachers. It means a respected teaching profession. It means parent and community support for the mission of the schools.

 

These are my principles. And these are the principles of this blog. Thank you for reading. Thank you for commenting. Thank you for sending me articles and links. I rely on you and I thank you.

 

 

 

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Education Industry, Education Reform, Privatization, Testing

Jack Hassard: Governor Nathan Deal’s Very Bad Deal for Georgia’s Struggling Schools: Privatize Them

By dianeravitch
March 5, 2015 //
4

Jack Hassard, professor emeritus of science education at Georgia State University, writes here about the passage of a bill in the State Senate that would allow the state to takeover struggling public schools and turn them over to a statewide district as charter schools. This is an attempt to replicate Louisiana’s Recovery School District and Tennessee’s Achievement School District. Never mind that the Louisiana Recovery School District is one of the lowest-performing districts in the state or that the Tennessee ASD has not achieved any of its goals. The important thing is to hand these low-performing schools over to a private operator and give the appearance of “doing something.”

 

Wouldn’t it make more sense to reduce class sizes in these schools? Make sure these schools have adequate resources? Send in expert teachers to help the staff? Establish high-quaity preschool programs in each school district? Put a school nurse in every one of those schools? Make sure they have a library, after-school programs, and a school psychologist? What do you want to bet that every one of these “struggling schools” has high rates of poverty? The state should act responsibly to help the children now, not to fob them off to an entrepreneur.

Categories Charter Schools, Corporate Reformers, Education Industry, Privatization

12 Reasons to Refuse PARCC

By dianeravitch
March 5, 2015 //
22

Activist parents and educators who belong to SaveOurSchoolsNJ helpfully assembled a dozen reasons to refuse the Common Core PARCC test.

 

 

 

1. PARCC is poorly designed & confusing

 

“For many of the sample released questions, there is, arguably, no answer among the answer choices that is correct or more than one answer that is correct, or the question simply is not, arguably, actually answerable as written.”

 

Why?

 

“The tests consist largely of objective-format items (multiple-choice and EBSR). These item types are most appropriate for testing very low-level skills (e.g., recall of factual detail). However, on these tests, such item formats are pressed into a kind of service for which they are, generally, not appropriate. They are used to test “higher-order thinking.” The test questions therefore tend to be tricky and convoluted. The test makers insist on answer choices all being “reasonable.” So, the questions are supposed to deal with higher-order thinking, and the wrong answers are all supposed to be plausible, so the test questions end up being extraordinarily complex and confusing and tricky, all because the “experts” who designed these tests didn’t understand the most basic stuff about creating assessments–that objective question formats are generally not great for testing higher-order thinking, for example.” i

 

2. PARCC’s online testing format is very problematic, particularly for younger students
“In the early grades, the tests end up being as much a test of keyboarding skills as of attainment in [English Language Arts or Math]. The online testing format is entirely inappropriate for most third graders.” i

 

3. PARCC is diagnostically & instructionally useless
“Many kinds of assessment—diagnostic assessment, formative assessment, performative assessment, some classroom summative assessment—has instructional value. They can be used to inform instruction and/or are themselves instructive.

 

The results of [the PARCC] tests are not broken down in any way that is of diagnostic or instructional use.

 

Teachers and students cannot even see the tests to find out what students got wrong on them and why. So the tests are of no diagnostic or instructional value. None. None whatsoever.” i

 

4. Taking and preparing for PARCC & other high-stakes standardized tests is replacing learning
Administrators at many schools “report that they spend as much as a third of the school year preparing students to take these tests. That time includes the actual time spent taking the tests, the time spent taking pretests and benchmark tests and other practice tests, the time spent on test prep materials, the time spent doing exercises and activities in textbooks and online materials that have been modeled on the test questions in order to prepare kids to answer questions of those kinds, and the time spent on reporting, data analysis, data chats, proctoring, and other test housekeeping.” i

 

5. PARCC will further distort curricula and teaching
“The tests drive how and what people teach, and they drive much of what is created by curriculum developers…Those distortions are grave. In U.S. curriculum development today, the tail is wagging the dog.” i

 

6. PARCC & other high-stakes standardized tests undermine students’ creativity and desire to learn
The research on motivation and creativity is very clear: externally imposed punishment and reward systems, like those associated with high-stakes standardized testing, suppress our intrinsic motivation, dramatically undermining creativity and love of learning.

 

High-stakes standardized tests also suppress motivation and creativity because the endless test preparation narrows the curriculum and creates a boring learning environment, filled with anxiety and fear.

 

7. PARCC & other high-stakes standardized tests have an enormous financial cost
“In 2010-11, the US spent $1.7 billion on state standardized testing alone.” With the Common Core State Standards tests, this cost increases substantially.

 

The PARCC contract by itself is worth over a billion dollars to the Pearson [Corporation] in the first three years, and you have to add the cost of [the Smarter Balanced Common Core Assessment] and the other state tests (another billion and a half?), to that.

 

No one has accurately estimated the cost of the computer upgrades that will be necessary for online testing of every child, but those costs probably run to 50 or 60 billion.

 

This is money that could be spent on stuff that matters—on making sure that poor kids have eye exams and warm clothes and food in their bellies, on making sure that libraries are open and that schools have nurses on duty to keep kids from dying. How many dead kids is all this testing worth, given that it is, again, of no instructional value?

 

IF THE ANSWER TO THAT IS NOT OBVIOUS TO YOU, YOU SHOULD NOT BE ALLOWED ANYWHERE NEAR A SCHOOL OR AN EDUCATIONAL POLICY-MAKING DESK.” i

 

8. PARCC is completely experimental. It has not been validated as accurate & yet it will be used to evaluate students, schools and teachers
“Standardized test development practice requires that the testing instrument be validated. Such validation requires that the test maker show that the test correlates strongly with other accepted measures of what is being tested, both generally and specifically (that is, with regard to specific materials and/or skills being tested).

 

No such validation was done for [PARCC and Smarter Balanced common core] tests…So, the tests fail to meet a minimal standard for a high-stakes standardized assessment—that they have been independently validated.” i

 

9. PARCC & other high-stakes standardized tests are abusive to our children
Reports of students throwing up during high-stakes standardized tests or inflicting harm to themselves as a result of test stress are already common.

 

PARCC is an intentionally much more difficult test that will increase students’ anxiety and feelings of inadequacy.

 

PARCC is extra-frustrating to our children because it is entirely on-line, creating additional test-taking challenges not related to the test content.

 

The combination of the more brutal PARCC tests and the more stressful on-line PARCC testing experience will result in more of our children feeling abused, anxious and afraid.

 

10. PARCC will worsen the achievement and gender gaps
“Both the achievement and gender gaps in educational performance are largely due to motivational issues, and these tests and the curricula and pedagogical strategies tied to them are extremely demotivating. They create new expectations and new hurdles that will widen existing gaps, not close them.”

 

PARCC and other Common Core exams “drive more regimentation and standardization of curricula, which will further turn off kids already turned off by school, causing more to tune out and drop out.” i

 

11. High-stakes standardized tests fail to improve educational outcomes
“We have had more than a decade, now, of standards-and-testing-based accountability under [No Child Left Behind]. We have seen only miniscule increases in outcomes, and those are well within the margin of error of the calculations. Simply from the Hawthorne Effect, we should have seen SOME improvement!!! And that suggests that the testing has actually DECREASED OUTCOMES, which is consistent with what we know about the demotivational effects of extrinsic punishment and reward systems. It’s the height of stupidity to look at a clearly failed approach and to say, ‘Gee, we should do a lot more of them.’” i

 

12. PARCC and Smarter Balanced Common Core aligned tests are designed to brand the majority of our children as failures
The Smarter Balanced test consortium announced in November that it would use very high cut scores for the test, which would result in more than half of all students labeled as failures.

 

In third grade, for example, only 38% of students taking the Smarter Balanced test are expected to achieve a proficient score in English and only 39% in math. ii

 

As numerous testing experts have pointed out, a “cut score” is “NOT an objective measure. It is a judgment call, a matter of group opinion, shaped by assumptions, and it can be manipulated to make scores appear higher or lower, depending on what” those in control want. iii

 

The PARCC test will set its cut scores next summer, but it is very likely to follow the same pattern, creating a false narrative of failure and causing great harm to our children and our public schools.

 

 

 

i Source: https://dianeravitch.net/…/bob-shepherd-why-parcc-testing-i…/
ii Source: http://www.edweek.org/ew/articles/2014/11/17/13sbac.h34.html
iii Source: https://dianeravitch.net/…/how-pearsons-common-core-tests-a…/

Categories Common Core, Education Industry, Testing

What Happened to Mark Zuckerberg’s $100 Million to Transform Newark Schools?

By dianeravitch
March 4, 2015 //
14

This is not a new article. It was published last May in The New Yorker. For some reason, I did not post it at the time. It was an oversight, for sure. The article is an absorbing and disturbing look into the “reform” movement. Save it to read when you have about 30 minutes. It is a long and fascinating description by veteran journalist Dale Russakoff of what happened to Mark Zuckerberg’s $100 million gift to Newark. It seems to have evaporated over a four-year period into the pockets of consultants, advisors, and other reformy hotshots. I was going to use the word “leeches” but decided that was too strong. In fact, as you will see when you read the article, a horde of organizations and people flocked to get a piece of the action. Lots of people enjoyed Zuckerberg’s largesse, but they weren’t the children of Newark. And it wasn’t just Zuckerberg’s $100 million. He insisted that his $100 million be matched with another $100 million; other super-wealthy philanthropists and reform groups stepped up with big contributions. When a local philanthropist offered $1 million, he was turned away because the amount was too small.

 

Russakoff is not anti-charter. At one point, Russakoff notes parenthetically that a son teaches in a KIPP charter school. Russakoff worked for the Washington Post for 28 years, and is now completing a book about the Zuckerberg gift to Newark. If it is as good as the article, it should be a best-seller.

 

The first thing you will notice when you read the account of the alliance between Cory Booker, then Newark mayor now New Jersey Senator, and Governor Chris Christie is that they have no interest in democracy. Booker and Christie wanted Newark to become an all-charter district. Booker is a supporter of vouchers; maybe Christie is too but he can’t impose them on the state of New Jersey. They agree that top-down, fast reform is necessary, without consensus, without public discussion, or it won’t happen at all. They proceed, too slowly, it turns out, without public engagement (although a consultant is paid over $1 million to create public engagement). Eventually, they hired Cami Anderson to run the district, admiring her take-no-prisoners style of decision-making. How did that work out? She now can’t or won’t attend meetings of the advisory school board because of intense hostility to her. She moved out of Newark for the safety of her family. In fact, she was the focal issue in last year’s mayoral campaign; voter antagonism to her helped to elect Ras Baraka.

 

The most striking quote in the article comes from Vivian Cox Fraser, president of the Urban League of Essex County, who says “Everybody’s getting paid, but Raheem still can’t read.”

 

The next point that is striking is that the woeful condition of Newark schools has a history, which Russakoff recounts. The state has controlled the district since 1995, so no one can or should blame the people of Newark for dysfunctional schools and decrepit buildings. The people have had no control of the schools for 20 years. Before 1995, the Newark schools seems to have been a honey pot for corrupt politicians, most of them with ties to the political structure.

 

There are cautionary lessons here. Booker apparently still thinks that Newark may be a national model of school reform in two or three years (he said that almost a year ago, so we should expect Newark to be a national model in one or two years). Zuckerberg has gotten interested in school reform, along with his wife, Dr. Priscilla Chan, who grew up poor and credits her public school teachers with helping her find the right college (Harvard) and inspiring her to go to medical school. Last year, the Zuckerbergs gave $120 million to San Francisco area public schools, after consulting with administrators and teachers. Perhaps the fiasco in Newark, where his $100 million disappeared, will make him more cautious about investing in the very expensive school reform industry, as its results don’t match its promises. Its promises are very expensive.

 

 

 

Categories Charter Schools, Corporate Reformers, Education Industry, Newark, Privatization

Teacher: We Are Pawns in Someone Else’s Game

By dianeravitch
March 3, 2015 //
15

Teacher Philip Kaplan left the following comment on the blog:

 

The plight of Our Children, our schools and our nation

 

 

The ranks of special education students are swelling, and as the breakdown of society continues to impact the ability of public schools to deliver resources and services, the crisis deepens. Teaching today’s students is difficult by any definition, and as educators are blamed for the consequences of society’s collective abandonment and subsequent surrender of their young people to technological marvels, enter the government with their ridiculous plans to hold us, and only us, accountable. Enter the right wing politicians, desperate to discredit teachers to ensure funding for their political campaigns. They have blindsided us, stabbed us in the back, and have squarely pinned the blame for America’s problems on America’s teachers

 

 

There are dozens of variables in a child’s education, and to choose one variable, the teachers, and to choose two arbitrary points during the school year to measure that variable, is statistically speaking, unsupportable by any stretch of any imagination.

 

 

As I watched my ten and eleven year old children sit before their computer screens, as springtime weather called to them from outside the windows, as dozens of tests collected into one big massive distaste in their minds, I thought how absurd this whole picture looked. For two hours of silence, a highly unnatural condition for them to endure, I watched them struggle to do their best.

 

 

Two measuring points on a 180 day continuum was going to translate into my measurement as a teacher. Two arbitrarily chosen points on a wildly fluctuating line that changed as quickly as a child’s mood and their willingness and ability to focus and discipline their minds.

 

 

Now I fully understand the need to ensure effective educators. I fully understand that bad teachers exist and that the right wing agenda is to kill all the apples in the basket because of the one or two rotten ones. I fully understand that most teachers, most of the time, work hard to create a small oasis of hope and happiness if many of our most troubled areas. But most importantly, I understand, from the moment a child is born, that single event of lottery predicts and creates (perhaps a self-perpetuating lesson) an environment that leads one way or another. To believe otherwise is pure hypocrisy or self-delusion.

 

 

I even support the idea of accountability, but only when calibrated properly against the other variables that impact a child’s future just as deeply as we do. Start with the school’s ability or willingness to enforce a behavioral code, making the students accountable for their behavior. We will call that the Coefficient of School Effectiveness (COSE) Does the school itself create a calm and safe environment in which both students and staff feel that effective learning can take place. Then widen the circle and look at the school district’s willingness and ability to provide the necessary curriculum and resources that should lead to good learning outcomes (Assuming the district has the school’s “back” when it comes to behavioral accountability). Does the district provide enough adults in each school? We will call that the Coefficient of District Effectiveness (CODE)

 
Looking at the next layer of accountability, the school funding formulas that the states and districts use to purchase all the resource’s necessary to lead to good learning outcomes. Look at the average per student expenditure. Is that funding stream secure, or is it open to the vagaries of a whimsical legislature, intent on securing the necessary votes to remain in office? Is there flexibility built in to ensure that the five year old who enters school reading already at a first grade level is properly challenged? Is there flexibility built in to ensure that the five year old who barely recognizes letters and colors has the necessary interventions to quickly bring him or her up to an equal footing as their peers? Let’s call that the Coefficient of Funding (COF). Let’s not forget to mention the state’s scrutiny on a district’s suspension rates or dropout rates, and whether or not those numbers impact present or future funding. Oh, and the various organizations who sue districts for suspension rates or special ed rates for minorities that are out of line with what they believe they should be.

 

 

Of course, the home environment itself, out of fashion with the fantastic number crunchers and ivory tower academicians running education, has no impact on how well the young lady or man performs on those two arbitrarily chosen measuring points. Ask anyone making policy, and there will be a collective sigh and then the inevitable answer that goes something like this, “We have no control over the home environment and we can only control the school’s environment (Keep in mind the COSE, CODE and COF), so we have to have something to measure the success of our teachers.

 

 

Let’s take a collective pause in our discussion. Perhaps we need to clear our throats to rid ourselves of the collective crap collecting in our craws. The successful education of any community’s young people is the lynchpin for that community’s future success, but as anyone with more than a sliver of common sense can attest to, we are what we choose to immerse ourselves in. We are what we eat, and our most chronic sicknesses, obesity, diabetes, heart disease, have direct links to the choices individual people make on a daily basis. While the big companies that push GMO’s and sugar laced foods are doing what they are designed to do, create and market products, they are only as successful when we choose to buy their products.

 

 

Ok. back to education. Schools market a product. It’s called education. It’s called reading and writing and math and social studies and science. It is called college and career readiness. But most importantly, it’s called hope and dreams. It is the future we market. Or at least we used to. Nowadays, we’re forced to market high test scores and low suspension rates.

 
But if we are true to our convictions as educators (and not pyramid scheme salesmen) our product requires more than just a passive recipient mentality, the same mentality that laps up technology and sugar laced foods with impunity. Our product requires a mutuality of expectations and a relationship based on trust, responsibility and accountability. Successful schools mirror homes in which the people in that home are more involved with each other than they are with their own individual pursuits.

 

 

Let’s take another pause from education and examine oncology. Yes, oncology. An oncologist diagnoses, treats and hopefully rids the body of cancerous cells. If the oncologist is good, the average life span and quality of life of his or her clients improves, clearly a measurable outcome. Let’s take two randomly chosen days in the nine months that the patient is undergoing treatment and then create a test that measures that person’s quality of life. Should that person be throwing up or weak that day, that’s too bad, as the test was scheduled for that particular day, and to reschedule impacts other tests. Oh, and let’s make sure we only select patients for this test who follow all the doctors’ recommendations. That would make the numbers look really good, but in education, most caregivers do not follow our basic recommendations.

 

 

Returning to our nation’s classrooms, where education happens, relationships dictate outcomes. Good bad or indifferent, relationships build results, In a healthy environment, there are relationships with shared expectations between home and school adults within which a child benefits. It is that simple. In an unhealthy environment, the adults at home and at school have different expectations, little or no communication, and the child’s future suffers. It is that simple. If a child respects the adults in his personal environment, it is more likely they will respect the adults in the school environment. If a child is left to his or her own devices without adult supervision, it is more likely their behavior will challenge the structure within which a school must operate to be successful.

 

 

Let’s take another side trip, a corollary to this education essay, to look at the latest results from a test given every four years at the fourth, eight and tenth grade levels, a test that measures math and reading proficiency, as calibrated against the rest of the world’s industrialized nations. At all levels, across all demographics and grade levels, we are on the lower rungs, but digging more deeply, we are competitive at the elementary level, less so in middle school and by high school, are so far out in left field, that we are for all intent and purposes, not even part of the game any longer.

 

 

Again, the reason for this is simple. In elementary, children benefit from the village approach to education, where several people get to know and work with the students, where parent teacher conferences are more common, and where the home school connection is at its peak.

 

 

Suppose we all take a step into the kindergarten room, on the first day of school, where everyone is filled with excitement and where parents and guardians are the most involved. That enthusiasm and energy should be the norm as children move through the grades, so that by the time they reach middle and high school, home and school are irrevocably and positively committed to working together as a team. But something (or everything) runs amok of the goal and the goal of raising a child is bastardized until it resembles, of all things, a goddamn number. What’s the test score, what’s the numbers say, the numbers dictate everything but tell us nothing we do not already know.

 

 

But two things go wrong on the way to this ideal world. First of all, increasing numbers of our young people arrive at schools unprepared to learn in the school settings. So accustomed are they to the fleeting and momentary focus that screen time creates, their minds are literally wired contrary to what real world learning demands. So accustomed are they to a sense of behavioral entitlement that altering their behaviors to the currency of conversation and cooperation is difficult.

 

 

I recall a survey I gave students at my school several years ago, and of the 300 or so that replied, over 90% have a TV and computer in their bedroom. Over 80% have dinner with their good friend, Mr. Screen, a inanimate but strangely comforting friend who offers nothing but what the user desires.

 

 

What can we expect from a society that delivers their collective offspring to us with their minds already wired to expect instant gratification and immediate satisfaction and attention to their needs? Should there be any surprise that increasing numbers of our young people have no regard for behavioral norms.

 

 

The real surprise is that we, in public education, have managed to hold this crumbling infrastructure together for so long. As custodians for fifty million young people, we are the only institution with the ability to transform a nation and deliver it from its own nightmarish future. But there are some basic transformations that must take place, or we will become just another appendage to the unrelenting appetite of politicians, bureaucrats and business people whose credibility is dependent upon their ability to mislead, misdirect and otherwise confuse the vast majority of consumers that education’s maladies have nothing to do with them but everything to do with us.

 

 

Making a shift in education means a shift in checkbook policy. Take a look at a person’s checkbook and you understand more about that person than you can gather in conversations. It also means fundamentally altering the infrastructure that underlies most secondary scheduling. But most importantly, it means redefining and molding the home school partnership, so that as our young people move through the years, parents and caregivers are in constant communication with us, the educational experts.

 

 

At the end of the day, public schools can be the saviors of a nation. As the only institution in America that routinely sees 50 million young people a day, we have a chance to redefine our future. But instead of leading the way, we have lost our way and our mission, once clear as a bright sunny day, has become muddied and incoherent. Business and politics have so polluted our ranks that it has become increasingly difficult to distinguish among educational, political and business leaders.

 

 

Our leaders in education, at the district, state and national levels, have permitted the discussion to steer away from what is best for kids to what is best for funding, or what is best to avoid lawsuits, or what is best to hold onto jobs, or what is best to satisfy the incompetent meddlers. In other words, we have lost the voice of reason we once had, and we have lost the respect we once had and we have lost power to truly educate. Instead, we have become pawns in someone else’s game.

 

 

We give lip service to what is best for kids, but operationally, we don’t follow through. We are not allowed to. If we did what was best for kids, we would enforce behavioral codes uniformly, restructure our secondary schools to create a relationship rich culture, reform funding structures to ensure equality in opportunity, build strong home school partnerships and reestablish the teaching profession as the expert in all matters educational.

 

 

Until we regain our leadership role, public education will continue to be bullied and dragged into the mud. Teachers’ unions at all levels must reinvent themselves as leaders in best practices, and until that occurs, they will continue to loose footing with both the public and legal infrastructures of our country. Education leaders have embraced the conversation about single data point testing, instead of fighting against the flawed logic driving it. In backroom conversations, we all talk about the absurdity of it, but in public view, we refuse to take the lead, instead ignoring common sense and the legions of evidence that undermine its credibility.

 

 

Somehow, somewhere between common sense and now, yellow journalism in its most sinister form, has managed to shape our nation’s educational policy.

 

 

There over three million teachers in America, but somehow the shameful cases of a few scattered situations has been parlayed into a national image of incompetence, laziness and general indifference.

 

 

Real education requires an involved and active relationship between the teachers and students, and that active relationship in turn, requires ongoing conversations that mirror mutual respect and most importantly, a shared behavioral code. No one ever talks about the role students’ behaviors play in the education world, but that is the most important variable over which we pretend does not exist. Until behavioral codes are enforced across all demographics, in the busses that carry our students, in the cafeterias that feed our students, at the sports arenas that hold our students, in the hallways through which our students pass, and of course, in the classrooms in which learning must occur, nothing of lasting worth can occur. And until we, as public educators, take the lead in all things relating to a learning, and education, we will continue to lose those daily battles of attrition with which we are all familiar. And in the end, we will lose the war that profit hungry corporate America, aided and abetted by irresponsible members of the political establishment, is waging on all of us in public education. The children of America deserve better. They deserve our leadership, not our blind allegiance to an educational hierarchy intent on bartering with the enemy.

Categories Accountability, Corporate Reformers, Education Industry, Education Reform, Students, Teachers, Testing

Florida: Testing Suspended in Many Counties Due to Tech Glitches

By dianeravitch
March 2, 2015 //
13

Florida has a bigger problem than opt outs: early this morning many districts experienced major technological problems with the state exams.

 

Miami-Dade (the largest district in the state), Palm Beach County, Pasco County, and Okaloosa County have suspended testing due to computer failures.

 

Look for updates here on the Facebook page of Parents Across Florida.
https://www.facebook.com/ParentsAcrossFlorida?ref=hl

 

Jeb Bush, the father of Florida’s punitive testing and accountability system, was expecting to get a big boost for his campaign from the Common Core testing. He is the leading proponent of computer-driven everything; his Foundation for Educational Excellence (now headed by Condaleeza Rice) is funded by major tech corporations who are heavily invested in educational software and hardware.

 

Here is the first story about the breakdown of state testing in major school districts.

 

 

 

Categories Accountability, Common Core, Education Industry, Testing
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