Archives for category: Education Reform
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Tennessee: Instead of Wasting Millions on Privatization, Invest in Community Schools

By dianeravitch
October 2, 2020 //
17

The leaders of Pastors for Tennessee Children wrote an excellent appeal to the state’s leaders, based on common sense, experience, and research. William Terry Ladd and Amy Frogge, a former member of the Metro Nashville school board, point out that the state has wasted hundreds of millions of dollars on privatization schemes that have failed. It’s time now to invest in community schools that address the genuine needs of children, they write.

None of these options has made a sustainable difference. In fact, vouchers and charter schools have made it worse, serving to exacerbate existing inequities in school systems by draining desperately needed funding from the neighborhood schools that serve around 90% of Tennessee’s students...

The reason these “solutions” haven’t made any real impact is simple: None address the root of the problem, namely the challenges faced by increasing numbers of Tennessee children who come to school without necessary resources and support at home.

The impact of poverty on learning coupled with the chronic lack of adequate funding for public education in Tennessee is a recipe for disaster.  Many of Tennessee’s children, most often those in poverty, have experienced trauma and adverse childhood experiences- some due to the opioid crisis that has ravaged rural communities and others due to the challenges of growing up in low-income urban environments...

First, we must agree to invest in Tennessee’s schools and children. Statewide, Tennessee schools are underfunded by about a billion dollars per year, and our state ranks 45th in the nation in school funding.

So many of our educational inequities are caused by lack of proper school funding, and principals and teachers continuously struggle with unfunded state mandates, often providing classroom funds from their own poorly-paid pockets.

Second, widening the reach of Tennessee’s community school model is a proven solution that truly helps children, because it addresses the root cause of low student achievement: the issues that students face outside of school on a daily basis that impact their ability to focus in the classroom...

Community schools are open to all students within a community and have been shown to improve student learning, strengthen families, and create healthier communities. Because community schools provide a wide range of activities for students and their families, such as community gardens, arts programs, and sometimes even evening meals for families in need, they often become the hub of the community.

Will anyone in Tennessee’s state government listen or will they insist on pouring hundreds of millions of dollars more into failed strategies?


Categories Education Reform

An Appeal to Romney to Reconsider

By dianeravitch
October 1, 2020 //
11

Robert Kagan, a contributing columnist for the Washington Post, calls on Mitt Romney to reconsider his decision to vote on Trump’s nominee for the Supreme Court. Two Republican senators—Connibs and Murkowski—have said that they would not do so. One more Republican vote is needed for a total of four. Kagan explains that Trump plans to use the Supreme Court to overturn the election. Democracy hangs in the balance.

Kagan writes:

In announcing on Tuesday he would support voting for a new Supreme Court justice during an election year, Sen. Mitt Romney (R-Utah) said he didn’t want “to look at all the hypotheticals that might occur.” But here’s the hypothetical Romney needs to think about: If the United States slides from democracy to authoritarianism next year, history will record that his vote, along with those of other Republicans, made it possible.

President Trump and his allies have now made it clear how they intend to hold on to power if Trump loses the election, as seems likely. Republicans will challenge the vote tabulation in several key states, charging fraud, miscounts, foreign influence and every other conceivable form of electoral malfeasance. The charges will be designed to create a contested election, taking the choice out of voters’ hands.

In this scenario, the ultimate decision will fall to the Supreme Court, as it did in the 2000 election. At eight justices, with five Republican and three Democratic appointees, the court might back Trump, but he can’t be certain. Neither he nor we can know the mind of Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. Perhaps Roberts would not want the court to go down in history as putting the final nail in the coffin of American democracy by upholding the Republicans’ specious challenges. The court might then split, 4 to 4, leaving in place a lower court’s ruling.

But if the Republicans can ram through their appointee before the election, a court with a 6-to-3 composition is all but certain to rule in Trump’s favor. Even if Roberts chose to side with American democracy, the vote would still be 5 to 4 for Trump.

Trump has been explicit that this is exactly what he is thinking. The “scam that the Democrats are pulling,” he said Wednesday, not specifying what the “scam” is, “will be before the United States Supreme Court.” And “I think having a 4-4 situation is not a good situation.” Why? Because if the decision is “more political than it should be, I think it’s very important to have a ninth judge.”

This is why congressional Republicans, unlike the president, have had no difficulty declaring that there will be a peaceful transfer of power, while insisting on pushing their nominee for the court through before the election: There will be no transfer of power, peaceful or otherwise, because the new court will certify the president’s power grab.

And let’s not kid ourselves about what will happen to the country if Trump pulls this off. It will not just be another four years of head-shaking at the president’s tweets. Trump will have taken us to a new place, one we know only from watching the course of authoritarian regimes elsewhere. He will control not only the power ministries — the Justice Department, the Defense Department and the intelligence services — as he does now, and, probably, the Senate, which will continue to back his every move. But he will also have eliminated the Supreme Court as a check against his actions. There will be nothing left to stand in his way.

What should we expect then? We have already seen abuses of power by the federal government: against protesters in the streets and against the president’s political opponents. Think about what the world will look like after mass protests against Trump’s court-blessed seizure of power.

The attorney general and other senior government officials already rail against the “radical left” and the “anarchists.” It is a short step to labeling protesters and other political opponents as “terrorists” and prosecuting them under laws meant for terrorists, using methods meant to stop terrorism. We will see government employees hounded out of careers or brought up on charges for “deep state” plots against the president, and on an ever-wider scale. We will see newspaper and other media owners increasingly harassed by federal agencies, or forced to self-censor.

What this means for Romney is that the decision that may well determine America’s fate is not somewhere down the road in a land of hypotheticals. It is before him, right now. No speeches in the coming authoritarian era, no matter how courageous, will make up for the failure to act when something could still be done. Romney’s vote alone cannot stop Trump, of course, but his announcement this week shut down all talk of getting more Republicans to join Sens. Susan Collins (Maine) and Lisa Murkowski (Alaska) in opposition to a pre-election confirmation. If Romney changes his mind, other senators, such as Ben Sasse (Neb.), might also discover some as-yet-hidden reservoir of courage.

We have learned, perhaps too late, that America’s system of government is not as strong as we once believed. It requires leaders not only to show courage, which is rare enough, but also to show courage at critical moments — and to be wise enough to know when those moments have arrived.

Sen. Romney’s moment has arrived, whether he chooses to see it or not. History will record where he stood when American democracy hung in the balance.

Categories Education Reform

Dr. Leslie Fenwick Explains Why the “Schemes” of Reformers Keep Failing

By dianeravitch
September 25, 2020 //
5

In this brief video, Dr. Leslie Fenwick, former dean of the College of Education at Howard University, explains why the “schemes” of corporate reformers always fail. She doesn’t hold back about charters, vouchers, Broad superintendents, and Teach for America.

The video is part of a series of hundreds of interviews of educators, conducted by former teacher Bob Greenberg. He calls his series the Brainwaves Video Anthology. After you watch Dr. Fenwick’s wonderful interview, you should browse his collection. It’s very impressive.

Categories Accountability, Broad Foundation, Charter Schools, Education Reform, Equity, For-Profit, Teach for America, Vouchers

Carl J. Petersen: Let the Charter School Lies Begin!

By dianeravitch
September 24, 2020 //
3

Parent advocate Carl J. Petersen writes that the election for the Los Angeles Unified School District school board is already flooded with charter school lies.

Scott Schmerelson, a veteran educator, is up for re-election. His challenger is supported by the charter school industry.

The wealthy charter industry is eager to win Schmerelson’s seat for one of their allies. Their first big mailer contained an egregious smear and lie.

As part of their antisemitic campaign against LAUSD Board Member Scott Schmerelson, the charter school industry pushed a narrative that he had “tripled his own pay.” As pointed out during the primary, this was a complete lie advanced by the California Charter School Association (CCSA). While school board members did receive a massive increase from $45,637 to $125,000 per year, they had nothing to do with the raise. These salaries are set by “the independent LAUSD Board of Education Compensation Review Committee, [which is] comprised of members appointed by local leaders.” None of the members of this committee are appointed by the members of the LAUSD School Board.

This repeated fact-checking did not stop the CCSA from repeating the lie in the first flyer mailed to voters as part of the general election. In big red letters, this mailing states that Schmerelson “TRIPLED HIS OWN PAY…” It is the lie that will not die.

No, Schmerelson did NOT “triple his own pay.” No, he did not vote to increase his own salary. It is a bald-faced lie. The charter industry knows it, but they are desperate to defeat a highly qualified board member.

Categories Education Reform

SomeDAM Poet on “Billyanthropy”

By dianeravitch
September 20, 2020 //
18

Our blog poet on the work of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation:

Gates never gives without getting a tax break and never gives without strings attached.

That’s how you know it is not real philanthropy, but Billyanthropy.

“The Billyanthropist”

Billyanthropist am I
I gave you Common Core
And testing to the sky
I’d like to give you more

Billyanthropist am I
I gave you teacher VAMs
A lovely Chetty pie
And lots of charter scams

Billyanthropist am I
I gave you pseudo-science
And sellebrate the lie
With test and VAM reliance

Billyanthropist am I
Billyanthropy I do
Democracy I buy
Impose my will on you

Categories Accountability, Billionaires, Education Reform, Gates Foundation, Bill Gates, Philanthropy

Mercedes Scheider: My Students Are Wearing Masks!

By dianeravitch
September 17, 2020 //
30

Mercedes Schneider is back to work teaching high school English in Louisiana. She is doing her best to keep her students socially distanced, though she hasn’t figured out how that will be possible when her class size reaches 24.

But the silver lining is that her students are wearing masks! They are not acting stupid and refusing to protect themselves and others! That’s good news for them and for her.

Categories Education Reform, Health, Louisiana, Safety, Students, Teaching

Texas: State Board Approves Five Charter Chains, Vetoes Three

By dianeravitch
September 13, 2020 //
11

The Texas State Board of Education approved applications from five charter chains, including the Gulen chain (Royal Public Schools) operated by Soner Tarim, who was compelled to leave Alabama because of community protests. It rejected three charter chains, including Rocketship, whose “pedagogy” puts children on computers for half the day, overseen by inexperienced and low-wage teachers.

Among those approved were the Florida-based Doral chain, operated by the for-profit Academica corporate giant. Learn4Life is a California-based chain of drop-in centers with high attrition rates and low graduation rates.

Heritage Classical Academy, CLEAR Public Charter School and Rocketship Public Schools will not be able to open schools in Texas, after traditional public school usleaders and advocates argued the state could not afford to fund new charters during a destabilizing pandemic. The board’s actions are just the latest in a longstanding political debate in Texas over the growth of charter schools, funded by the state but managed privately by nonprofits.

Texas Education Commissioner Mike Morath recommended the eight charter operators at the end of an in-depth process, including mandatory public meetings in target communities and interviews with state officials. The other five —Brillante Academy, Doral Academy of Texas, Learn4Life-Austin, Prelude Preparatory Charter School and Royal Public Schools — will be allowed to open schools next academic year, unless Morath or the board takes further action within the next 90 days…

Texas is one of the largest charter authorizers in the country, with 171 charter districts in operation as of June. Texas caps the number of charter operators, but doesn’t cap the number of schools each operator can open.

Charter opponents warned that the expansion of charter chains would drain badly needed funding from the state’s underfunded public schools, but the state commissioner of education Mike Morath (a software executive, not an educator) supported all the applications and promised that the charters would introduce much-needed innovation.

Never mind that charters in Texas and elsewhere are not noted for any innovations, other than “no-excuses” discipline. Never mind that the critics are right: the funding for the charters will decrease the money available to the state’s real public schools.

Texas seems to have a special affinity for Gulen charters, which are typically managed and staffed by Turkish men who are connected to the Turkish Imam Fethullah Gulen, who lives in seclusion in Pennsylvania.

Categories Charter Schools, Education Reform, Funding, Gulen Charter Schools, Texas

Richard Phelps Reviews Michelle Rhee’s Reforms, Part 2

By dianeravitch
September 13, 2020 //
11

Richard Phelps was in charge of assessment in the last year of the reign of Michelle Rhee as superintendent of the District of Columbia Public Schools. In this post, he describes how difficult and time-consuming it is to identify test cheating and how little the D.C. leadership cared about making the effort. Phelps was supposed to monitor test security and expand testing.

He writes:

The recurring test cheating scandals of the Rhee-Henderson years may seem extraordinary but, in fairness, DCPS was more likely than the average US school district to be caught because it received a much higher degree of scrutiny. Given how tests are typically administered in this country, the incidence of cheating is likely far greater than news accounts suggest, for several reasons:

· in most cases, those who administer tests—schoolteachers and administrators—have an interest in their results;
· test security protocols are numerous and complicated yet, nonetheless, the responsibility of non-expert ordinary school personnel, guaranteeing their inconsistent application across schools and over time;
· after-the-fact statistical analyses are not legal proof—the odds of a certain amount of wrong-to-right erasures in a single classroom on a paper-and-pencil test being coincidental may be a thousand to one, but one-in-a-thousand is still legally plausible; and
· after-the-fact investigations based on interviews are time-consuming, scattershot, and uneven.

Still, there were measures that the Rhee-Henderson administrations could have adopted to substantially reduce the incidence of cheating, but they chose none that might have been effective. Rather, they dug in their heels, insisted that only a few schools had issues, which they thoroughly resolved, and repeatedly denied any systematic problem.

He punctures Rhee’s claim that the test security agency Caveon never found evidence of “systematic cheating.”

He writes:

Caveon, however, had not looked for “systematic” cheating. All they did was interview a few people at several schools where the statistical anomalies were more extraordinary than at others. As none of those individuals would admit to knowingly cheating, Caveon branded all their excuses as “plausible” explanations. That’s it; that is all that Caveon did. But, Caveon’s statement that they found no evidence of “widespread” cheating—despite not having looked for it—would be frequently invoked by DCPS leaders over the next several years.

Categories Accountability, Cheating, District of Columbia, Education Reform, Rhee, Michelle, Standardized Testing

Richard Phelps Reviews Michelle Rhee’s “Reforms,” Ten Years Later, Part 1

By dianeravitch
September 13, 2020 //
11

A decade ago, Richard Phelps was assessment director of the District of Columbia Public Schools. His time in that position coincided with the last ten months of Michelle Rhee’s tenure in office. When her patron Adrian Fenty lost the election for Mayor, Rhee left and so did Phelps.

Phelps writes here about what he learned while trying to improve the assessment practices of the DC Public Schools. He posts his overview in two parts, and this is part 1. The second part will appear in the next post.

Rhee asked Phelps to expand the VAM program–the use of test scores to evaluate teachers and to terminate or reward them based on student scores.

Phelps described his visits to schools to meet with teachers. He gathered useful ideas about how to make the assessments more useful to teachers and students.

Soon enough, he learned that the Central Office staff, including Rhee, rejected all the ideas he collected from teachers and imposed their own ideas instead.

He writes:

In all, I had polled over 500 DCPS school staff. Not only were all of their suggestions reasonable, some were essential in order to comply with professional assessment standards and ethics.

Nonetheless, back at DCPS’ Central Office, each suggestion was rejected without, to my observation, any serious consideration. The rejecters included Chancellor Rhee, the head of the office of Data and Accountability—the self-titled “Data Lady,” Erin McGoldrick—and the head of the curriculum and instruction division, Carey Wright, and her chief deputy, Dan Gordon.

Four central office staff outvoted several-hundred school staff (and my recommendations as assessment director). In each case, the changes recommended would have meant some additional work on their parts, but in return for substantial improvements in the testing program. Their rhetoric was all about helping teachers and students; but the facts were that the testing program wasn’t structured to help them.

What was the purpose of my several weeks of school visits and staff polling? To solicit “buy in” from school level staff, not feedback.

Ultimately, the new testing program proposal would incorporate all the new features requested by senior Central Office staff, no matter how burdensome, and not a single feature requested by several hundred supportive school-level staff, no matter how helpful. Like many others, I had hoped that the education reform intention of the Rhee-Henderson years was genuine. DCPS could certainly have benefitted from some genuine reform.

Alas, much of the activity labelled “reform” was just for show, and for padding resumes. Numerous central office managers would later work for the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. Numerous others would work for entities supported by the Gates or aligned foundations, or in jurisdictions such as Louisiana, where ed reformers held political power. Most would be well paid.

Their genuine accomplishments, or lack thereof, while at DCPS seemed to matter little. What mattered was the appearance of accomplishment and, above all, loyalty to the group. That loyalty required going along to get along: complicity in maintaining the façade of success while withholding any public criticism of or disagreement with other in-group members.

The Central Office “reformers” boasted of their accomplishments and went on to lucrative careers.

It was all for show, financed by Bill Gates, Eli Broad, the Waltons, and other philanthropists who believed in the empty promises of “reform.” It was a giant hoax.

Categories Accountability, Broad Foundation, Corporate Reformers, District of Columbia, Education Industry, Education Reform, Gates Foundation, Bill Gates, Hoax, Philanthropy, Privatization, Rhee, Michelle, Teacher Evaluations, Teachers, VAM (value-added modeling)

Miami-Dade Schools Sever Ties with K12 Online Corp.

By dianeravitch
September 12, 2020 //
9

The Miami-Dade school board voted to sever ties with the notoriously awful for-profit K12 online corporation.

K12 has long been known as a huge money-maker that produces bad education and high attrition rates.


The Miami-Dade County School Board has voted unanimously to stop using My School Online, the district’s controversial new online learning platform many say is at the center of the failed start of school.

The board voted to sever ties just before 2 a.m. Thursday, 13 hours after the meeting began. Teachers can begin using other platforms immediately.

The early morning decision sent some elementary schools into a scramble. Some schools that never used Microsoft Teams, like Bob Graham Education Center, were caught off guard and quickly went to work to set up Zoom meetings to find a way to educate students.

The School Board debate and vote stretched into the middle of the night because members had to finish public comment on Vice Chair Steve Gallon’s catch-all proposal to get to the bottom of what went wrong. In the first board meeting since school began Aug. 31, nearly 400 teachers and parents submitted comments that were overwhelmingly negative about the online platform….

My School Online is run by the for-profit tech education company K12. Its investors included Michael Milken, the convicted junk-bond king whom President Donald Trump pardoned earlier this year, and current Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos. In 2016, former California Attorney General and current Democratic vice presidential candidate Kamala Harris oversaw a $168.5 million settlement with K12 over alleged violations of the state’s laws against false claims, false advertising and unfair competition.

Read more here: https://www.miamiherald.com/news/local/education/article245619095.html#storylink=cpy

Categories Education Reform
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