Archives for category: Education Industry
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Greg Taranto: Be a Hero, Slay the Testing Beast

By dianeravitch
April 3, 2014 //
14

Greg Taranto, principal of Canonsburg Middle School, was named was named 2012 Middle Level Principal of the Year by the Pennsylvania Association of Elementary and Secondary School Principals.

He now joins our Honor Roll for his courage in speaking up for students and good education.

 

Taranto says that testing is out of control, it is absurdly expensive, draining resources from schools, and of course he is right. Everyone seems to know it except our legislators in the statehouses and Congress. Parents know it. Teachers and administrations like Taranto know it. Students know it.

 

We no longer have schools devoted to development of every child’s full human potential, but devoted instead to ever higher scores on standardized tests. How did the testing industry manage to capture the minds and hearts of our policymakers? Don’t they realize that tests are useful for diagnostic purposes, but they are not the goal of education. They are a measure, they are not a replacement for instruction.

 

Taranto writes:

 

Testing makes a lot of money for education companies. Here in Pennsylvania in 2013 we paid more than $200 million to the company responsible for the development of the Keystone exams — tests aligned with the Common Core curriculum (known as PA Core in Pennsylvania). Our state legislators just approved another five “optional” Keystones in the coming years. Can you imagine the cost to taxpayers?

Unfortunately, the many-headed hydra of standardized testing is not like the mythical creatures made by my seventh graders. It is real. And we need real heroes to slay the beast.

Parents and educators must start speaking out and talking to our school districts, school boards and state and federal legislators. State and federal legislators are especially important, because they are the ones mandating tests such as the PSSA and the Keystones and thus tying the hands of district officials and school boards.

Some groups already engaged in this fight include Education Voters PA, Yinzercation, PA Against the Common Core, the Network for Public Education and Fairtest.org.

Do you think testing has gotten out of control? Please become a hero in the fight against this many-headed hydra. We need more ordinary heroes — people like you and me — to wrest control of our kids’ education away from the testing beast and to restore educational agency to parents, teachers and principals.

 

Read more: http://www.post-gazette.com/opinion/2014/03/26/Slay-the-testing-beast/stories/201403260004#ixzz2xDdSQf55

 

Categories Education Industry, Honor Roll, Pennsylvania, Testing

Walton Family Foundation Puts $164 Million into Privatization Movement

By dianeravitch
April 2, 2014 //
71

The Walton Family Foundation released its list of grantees in the education world, and once again, the foundation put its huge resources into privatizing American public education.

The billions that hard-working families spend at Walmart are used to support privately managed charters and vouchers and to undermine democratic local control and traditional public schools.

Some of the biggest recipients of the Walton family’s largesse are Teach for America (nearly $20 million), which staffs non-union charters; KIPP charter schools ($8.8 million); the Charter Fund, Inc. ($14.5 million); The Children’s Scholarship Fund (which gives our school vouchers) $8.56 million; and the California Charter School Association, $5 million. Parent Revolution got almost $2 million, the Black Alliance for Educational Options got $1.3 million.

Read the list and see who favors the privatization of public schools. Aside from a few dollars tossed to the Bentonville, Arkansas, public schools, it is a rogues’ gallery of privatization and teacher-bashing.

The Walton Family Foundation helped to underwrite the attack ads against New York City’s progressive mayor, Bill de Blasio, because he dared to turn down three charter school proposals. Two of the three schools did not exist, so no child was evicted. The third rejection was meant to stop the expansion of Eva Moskowitz’s charter school inside PS 149 in Harlem, which required the eviction of severely disabled students to make room for her desired new middle school. Apparently the theory of the billionaires is that students with high test scores deserve public space more than profoundly disabled students, who have lesser rights.

As a result of pressure by the billionaires, the legislature passed a budget that gutted mayoral control by saying that the mayor was not allowed to reject any charter approved by Bloomberg’s school board; that the mayor was not allowed to charge rent to charters, even though they had just won a lawsuit declaring that they could not be audited by the State Comptroller because they are not “a unit of the state”; giving charters the right to expand in any public school where they are now co-located, without regard to the needs of the children already enrolled in that school; and requiring that the city pay the rent of any charter that rents private space. So, with the help of the Walton Family Foundation, the charter schools, which are not public schools and are not subject to public audit, get free space and may kick public school students out of their buildings.

This was a shameful law, purchased by people of vast wealth. They are intent on busting unions, crushing the teaching profession, and harming one of our democratic institutions. Their maleficent influence is unchecked. The money they spend each year is meant to transfer public funds to private hands. They use their power to hurt the very people who have made them wealthy, destroying their communities at the same time.

The age of the robber barons is back.

Categories Charter Schools, Corporate Reformers, Education Industry, For-Profit, KIPP Charter Schools, Privatization, Resistance, Teach for America, Vouchers, Walton Foundation

Florida’s Voucher Boondoggle Flounders, But Legislators Want More

By dianeravitch
April 2, 2014 //
4

Florida legislators king to expand vouchers, even though the voters turned down an effort in 2012 to change the state constitution to permit vouchers for religious schools. The
measure was defeated 58-42, despite Jeb Bush’s efforts to pass it.
An earlier voucher program was struck down as unconstitutional by
the state courts. The only current voucher program is for students
with disabilities, called the McKay Scholarship Program. A journalistic
exposé called it a “cottage industry” of fraud. the
writer won a major national award for this story from his
colleagues. Yet legislators want more.

The good news–for the moment–is that parents and teachers recently beat back the latest attempt to give away public money to religious schools. But be vigilant. Jeb & Co. will be back.

Categories Education Industry, Florida, For-Profit, Special Education, Vouchers

Are You Attending American Education Research Association Meeting in Philadelphia?

By dianeravitch
March 31, 2014 //
1

If the answer is yes, please come to one or both of the two
sessions where I am speaking on April 3. I will give the
John Dewey Society lecture at the
Convention Center, 100 Level, Room 114, from 4-7 pm. (Lots of time
for discussion). My topic: “Does Evidence
Matter?” Fair warning: The room holds only 600
people. Before the Dewey lecture, I will join Philadelphia parent
activist Helen Gym and Carl Grant of the University of Wisconsin
(chair) in a special Presidential session from 2:15 to 3:45,
on the same level in Room 121B The
title of the session is: Rising to the
Challenges of Quality and Equality:
The Promise of a Public
Pedagogy If you join me at the early session,
you will have to race with me to the lecture, and the room may be
full.

Categories Accountability, Data and Data Mining, Education Industry, Education Reform, Research, Teachers and Teaching

This Public School Principal Decides to Homeschool His Youngest

By dianeravitch
March 31, 2014 //
74

Tim Farley has had it. He knows what the state and federal government is mandating is wrong. He knows it hurts children. He will do his best to protect the children from these harmful and spirit-deadening demands. But he will home-school his youngest child. He explains why here:

Tim Farley writes:

My wife and I have finally hit the breaking point. We can no longer sit by and watch the educational system that has been co opted by Bill Gates and his corporate cronies in the name of “education reform”, harm our youngest child. Jessica and I are the parents of four wonderful children (7th, 5th, 3rd grade, and kindergarten). Although we would like to homeschool all of our children, due to several factors, we will only be homeschooling our youngest, John Paul.

John Paul is a bright and energetic boy. He was born with a heart defect, and at two years old had open heart surgery. As traumatic as that experience was for my wife and me, it didn’t seem to have any long lasting impact on him. He is a little spitfire. At least he was. He no longer likes going to school. In fact he hates going to school. It is not his teacher, as one of our older children had the same teacher and had a fantastic experience. It is the developmentally inappropriate standards and the “rigorous” demands placed on 5 year old children that has changed. Kindergarten is supposed to be a time of exploratory learning and developing social skills. Unfortunately, it has become an assembly line environment of “drill and kill”. The inane assignments that lack any sort of creativity have crushed his love of school.

Recently I stumbled upon this video (http://m.youtube.com/watch?v=FHetioUW4lI) which illustrates what many thousands of children and parents are experiencing on a daily basis due to the Common Core. My child could easily be one of those in the video.

At first, I felt that by choosing to homeschool, we were giving in to the “reformers”. It was our hope that the state legislators would have taken real steps to slow down the rushed implementation that has been widely described as an “unmitigated disaster”, a “train wreck”, and as “institutionalized educational abuse”. The legislators have failed. The Commissioner has failed. The Board of Regents has failed. The Governor has failed. We will not allow our children to be “collateral damage” while the politicians figure out how to fix the mess that they created.

My son will be provided individualized instruction by a loving mom and a former educator. He won’t be reduced to a number. We are truly blessed that this is even an option for us, as many parents lack the resources to make this choice. We only get one chance to get this right. There are no do-overs.

I will keep you posted as we embark on this new journey.

Sincerely,
Tim Farley
(Elementary and Middle School Principal of a school in the Hudson Valley)

Categories Education Industry, New York, Resistance, Testing

Opt Your Child Out of State Testing: Don’t Feed the Machine

By dianeravitch
March 31, 2014 //
86

This week begins the make-or-break, do-or-die standardized testing that will label your child a success or a failure. I urge you not to let your child take the state test.

 

Opt out.

 

The best test for students is the test made by their teacher. Teachers know what they taught; they test what the students were taught. They get instant feedback. They can find out immediately which students didn’t understand the lesson and need extra help. They can get instant feedback about their own success or lack of success if the students didn’t learn what they taught.

 

The standardized tests are useless for instant feedback. They have no diagnostic value. The test asks questions that may cover concepts that were never introduced in class. The test is multiple-choice, creating an unrealistic expectation that all questions have only one right answer. The tests may have errors, e.g., two right answers or no right answers or a confusing question. The test results are returned months after the test, meaning that the student now has a different teacher. The test scores give no breakdown of what the student did or did not understand, just a score.

 

These days, the purpose of the tests is to evaluate the teacher;  most researchers agree that using student scores to evaluate teachers gives inaccurate and unable results. This year’s “effective” teacher may be next year’s “ineffective” teacher. “Value-added-measurement” has not proven to work anywhere. Most teachers don’t teach tested subjects and they are assigned rating based on the results of the school as a whole. A music teacher may be found “ineffective” based on the school’s math scores. This is madness.

 

Because the tests have no diagnostic value for students, they are worthless. If they can’t be used to help students or to improve instruction, they shouldn’t be used at all. We can learn all we need to know about states or cities by sampling (like NAEP, which compares states to states, and cities to cities). We can learn all we need to know about individual students by relying on teacher judgment and testing in specific grades, like 4 and 8.

 

The reason we have so much testing is because our policymakers don’t trust teachers. If we trusted teachers, we would let them teach and trust them to do what is right for their students. The more we distrust teachers, the less appealing is teaching as a job or a profession.

 

Another reason we test so much is the power of the testing corporations, which pay lobbyists in Washington and the states to push for more testing. This is big business.

 

Elite private schools rarely use standardized tests. They trust their teachers to evaluate their students’ progress.

 

We are trapped in a machine that is profitable for the few, but demoralizing to teachers and students.

 

Testing is not teaching. It steals time from instruction. Making it so important leads schools to narrow the curriculum, cutting funding for the arts, eliminating social workers and counselors, cutting recess and physical education. Making testing so important leads to states and districts gaming the system, to schools shedding low-scoring students, to cheating, to teaching to the test, and to other anti-educational actions.

 

How to stop the machine?

 

Opt out.

 

Don’t let your children take the test.

 

Deny the machine the data on which it feeds. There are corporations ready to mine your child’s data. Don’t let them have it.

 

I am reminded of the famous speech by Mario Savio, leader of the Free Speech Movement, during a protest rally at the University of California at Berkeley in 1964. He said:

 

There’s a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious, makes you so sick at heart, that you can’t take part! You can’t even passively take part! And you’ve got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels…upon the levers, upon all the apparatus, and you’ve got to make it stop! And you’ve got to indicate to the people who run it, to the people who own it, that unless you’re free, the machine will be prevented from working at all!

 

Assert your independence. Protect your child. Stop the machine.

 

Opt out.

Categories Accountability, Corporate Reformers, Education Industry, Teachers and Teaching, Testing

Governor Cuomo: Listen to the Students of Middletown High School Sing “No Mo Cuomo”

By dianeravitch
March 30, 2014 //
22

This is a video made by students at Middletown High School in New York.

 

It is addressed to Governor Cuomo, who once called himself “the students’ lobbyist.”

The students know he is not their lobbyist.

He is the lobbyist for the 3% of children in New York state who attend charter schools.

He is not the lobbyist for the students in Middletown High School.

Contrary to what Governor Cuomo thinks, our students are smart.

They can tell what is real and what is fake.

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

You Are Invited to Join the Leaders of the Privatization Movement at a Special Event!

By dianeravitch
March 30, 2014 //
85

Wow! How cool is this? You, me, and all of us are invited to join today’s thought leaders of education “reform” (aka, privatization and segregation) at a philophers” retreat.

I wish I were a thought leader in education, but apparently my thoughts don’t lead in the right direction (e.g., handing public money over to privately managed schools with no transparency or accountability, smashing unions, demoralizing teachers, eliminating pensions, making test scores the goal of education, firing teachers who can’t raise test scores higher and higher every year, stuff like that, which these days makes you a thought leader).

The meeting is billed as a three-day retreat, “a philosopher’s camp on education reform.” I wonder if the philosophers there will talk about Horace Mann or John Dewey or William James or William Torrey Harris or Sidney Hook? Somehow, I doubt they will. I kind of doubt that they ever heard of any of our eminent philosophers of education.

You too can attend for only $1,000. If you want to be a VIP, it will cost you $2,500.

Two other things: the meeting will be held at the Whiteface Lodge in Lake Placid. Is there a coded message here?

And for the benefit of the assembled philosophers, they might want to be reminded that they have a spelling error on the invitation. It is James Russell Lowell that once attended a meeting at that lodge, not James Russell Lowes. Do they know the difference? But when you are a thought leader in education, why bother with details?

Categories Charter Schools, Common Core, Corporate Reformers, Cuomo, Andrew, Democrats for Education Reform, Education Industry, For-Profit, New York

CALL ALBANY NOW TO STOP CORPORATE TAKEOVER!

By dianeravitch
March 30, 2014 //
9

Leonie Haimson of Class Size Matters wrote the following call to action. In New York State, the legislature is providing generous subsidies to charter schools in New York City, which enroll 6% of students, at the expense of the 94% whose schools will lose funding to subsidize the rent of the charters. The charter cause is backed by billionaire hedge fund managers who spent $5 million on attack ads against Mayor de Blasio. They gave Governor Cuomo $800,000 to protect “their” schools. They care not a whit for the educational opportunities of the 94%. This is wrong. Raise your voice to help the kids who have no lobbyists, no billionaires, no hedge fund managers to protect them and their schools.

Leonie writes:

Dear folks:

PLEASE call your legislators in Albany today and urge them to vote NO on the state budget bill! On Monday, they will be voting on a budget that favors charter schools over public schools, provides them considerably more funds per student , bans charging charters rent or facility fees, and will provide any new or expanding charter free space in NYC public school buildings – or the city has to build or rent them facilities, out of taxpayer funds. NYC will be the ONLY place in the country where the district will be obligated to provide free space for ANY new or expanded charter in the future. The bill also contains very weak provisions on protecting student privacy.

1. On charters: this bill will encourage the forced corporate takeover of NYC public schools, where we already have the most overcrowded schools in the state. It will cause even more overcrowding in our already crammed schools, and make the city pay millions to house all new and expanded charters in the future. Our elementary and high schools are already 95% utilized – according to the DOE’s own figures, which even the Chancellor has admitted underestimates the actual level of overcrowding. More than half of our students are already in severely overcrowded buildings. Enrollment projections call for an increase of 70,000 more students over the next decade — and the only ones who will be guaranteed space going forward, to allow for smaller classes or to regain their art, music or science rooms, will be students enrolled in charters. This is the MOST onerous charter law in the nation and a huge unfunded mandate for NYC. For more on this see Diane Ravitch’s blog and the NYC public school parents blog.

2. On privacy: the bill is not much better. It appears to ban the state providing data to inBloom for the purposes of creating data dashboards, but not for any other purpose. And it has no mention of parental consent or opt out – except for requiring consent before vendors can give the information to other vendors, which they will still be allowed to do without consent via a huge loophole, if they call them their “authorized representatives.” It calls for a privacy officer, who will write a “parent bill of rights” under the direction of the Commissioner, who as far as we can tell, doesn’t believe that parents have any rights when it comes to protecting the privacy of their children. For a more detailed analysis, see our blog here.

The legislators are in Albany today, discussing this bill. Please call your Assemblymember (contact info here: http://assembly.state.ny.us/mem/?sh=search) and your Senator (http://www.nysenate.gov/) today in Albany, and urge them to tell their leadership NOT to allow this bill to go forward. If it does come to the floor, they should vote NO.

Thanks for your support for the rights of NY public schoolchildren,

Leonie Haimson
Executive Director
Class Size Matters
124 Waverly Pl.
New York, NY 10011
212-674-7320

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Education Industry, New York

Steve Nelson: How to Become a “Successful” School

By dianeravitch
March 29, 2014 //
12

Steve Nelson has written a brilliant commentary on the way we judge school “success.”

He begins by discussing the Moskowitz-de Blasio battle and notes that the $5 million attack ads were sponsored by “Families for Excellent Schools.”

He writes:

“This campaign is calculated propaganda. The only “family” materially involved in this organization is the Walton family which, through the Walton Family Foundation, is a major contributor to “Families for Excellence.” The Walton family, along with their billionaire peers the Broad family, the Koch family and the Gates family, are funding so-called school reform efforts like this around the country. The parents and children who appear in these ads may well be sincere, but they are pawns in a much larger game. Charter school operators, particularly Eva Moskowitz, head of the Success charter network, shamelessly use their students to promote their political agenda, as seen in the recent demonstrations in Albany.”

The point of the campaign is to persuade the public that charter schools are better than public schools, which is not true.

Nelson points out that the allegedly “better” schools have selection mechanisms–like Ivy League colleges or selective schools-that recruit selective populations.

He writes:

“All of these comparisons are based on the unquestioned assumption that the success of a school’s students — standardized test scores, SAT scores, college placement — is a direct reflection of the quality of the school. By this measure, Stuyvesant and Bronx Science are superb schools and PS 106 is abysmal; Scarsdale schools are wonderful, public schools in Harlem are awful; Columbia University is much better than City College. This is the way we have been conditioned to judge educational institutions… and it is absolutely meaningless.”

Categories Charter Schools, Education Industry, Harlem Success Academy, Testing
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