Archives for category: Education Reform
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New Orleans: VAM Proves that Best Teachers Stay in Best Charters

By dianeravitch
March 19, 2020 //
18

The National Center for Research on Education Access and Choice (REACH), formerly known as the Education Research Alliance, released its first report after having been funded by Betsy DeVos with $10 million to study the effects of choice in schools. REACH used value-added methodology (judging teachers by the test score gains of their students to determine that those who got the highest VAM scores were likeliest to stay. It is safe to assume that these teachers were in the highest-scoring charter schools. On the other hand, the teachers with the lowest scores (no doubt, in the lowest-performing schools) were turning over at a high rate. The study’s conclusion is that (some) charters are keeping their best teachers (those with the highest VAM ratings) but (some) charters are not, which since they don’t get high VAM scores, is not a big deal.

We are excited to announce the release of the first study from the National Center for Research on Education Access and Choice (REACH). Naturally, the subject of this study is one that’s considered the most important factor in school success: teachers.

New Orleans is the first all-charter school district in the country. This makes the city the first where schools are held strictly accountable for performance, where many employers in close proximity compete for teachers, and where schools have the ability to respond to these pressures with almost complete autonomy over school personnel. If school reform advocates are right, we would expect these policy changes to produce major change in the teacher labor market. Did this happen?

To answer this question, researchers Nathan Barrett, Deven Carlson, Douglas N. Harris, and Jane Arnold Lincove compared New Orleans to similar neighboring districts from 2010 to 2015, using student test score growth to measure teacher performance. They drew the following conclusions:

Teacher retention is more closely related to teacher performance in New Orleans than in traditional public school districts. Lower performing teachers in New Orleans are 2.5 times more likely to leave their school than high-performing teachers, compared with only 1.9 times in similar neighboring districts.
The stronger link between retention and performance might imply that teacher quality would improve faster in New Orleans than in similar districts. However, this is not the case. The difference in average teacher performance between New Orleans and comparison districts remained essentially unchanged between 2010 and 2015. This is apparently because of the larger share of new teachers in New Orleans, whose lower quality roughly offsets the city’s advantages in retaining higher performing teachers.
The stronger retention-performance link in New Orleans is somewhat related to financial rewards, though not in a way that is likely to increase the overall quality of teaching. We find that higher performing teachers only receive pay increases when they switch schools, which may increase teacher turnover. High-performing teachers do not receive raises for performance when they stay in the same school.
These findings highlight the complexities of policies intended to increase the quality of teaching. Future studies will build on this work by examining how performance-based school closures affect the teacher labor market.

Read the policy brief here or the full technical report here.

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Education Reform, New Orleans, Teacher Evaluations, VAM

Teresa Hanafin: What Trump Said About the Pandemic

By dianeravitch
March 18, 2020 //
48

Teresa Hanafin of Fast Forward of the Boston Globe:

The White House task force is holding another briefing at 11:30 a.m. ET, and we’ll see if Trump shows up again. It’s interesting how much he enjoys gaslighting Americans, claiming he said or did something he really didn’t as though there isn’t a written record to contradict him.

A good example is his claim yesterday that he was way ahead of the rest of the world, believing the coronavirus was a pandemic “long before it was called a pandemic.”

Nonsense. On Jan. 22, after the virus had spread from China to four other countries, China was starting to take drastic measures, including being on the verge of closing off the city of Wuhan. The US had its first confirmed case. And specialists were persistently sounding the alarm about the spread of the virus.

That day, Trump was asked if he worried about it becoming a pandemic. “No. Not at all. And we have it totally under control,” he said. “It’s one person coming in from China, and we have it under control. It’s going to be just fine.”

As the chorus of warnings grew louder throughout late January, and the World Health Organization proclaimed the coronavirus to be a “public-health emergency of international concern,” Trump continued to be more concerned about the virus’ effect on his reputation than its effect on Americans.
Jan. 24, in a tweet: “It will all work out well.”
Jan. 30, in a speech: “We have it very well under control.”

Finally, on Jan. 31, he took his first action, barring most, but not all, foreigners who had recently visited China from entering the US, but allowing Americans who had been traveling in China to return (and they weren’t tested). Hardly the “complete shutdown” he brags about now, again assuming most Americans can’t read to fact-check his claims.

He spent most of February downplaying the risk, trashing Democrats and the media, and telling everybody who would listen that the whole thing was going to just go away. But he forgot to tell the virus. By Feb. 23, it was in 30 countries with 78,811 confirmed cases, a more than fivefold increase in three weeks. By the end of February, there were 85,403 confirmed cases in 55 countries.

In early March, Trump continued to proclaim that the virus was very mild and would just go away. It was also around this time that everybody started to realize that the US was blowing it on testing. The US refused to use the WHO test, hundreds of thousands of which had already been sent to other countries, preferring to create our own. Which we did, and the test didn’t work. More delays.

You may have noticed that in the previous paragraphs there isn’t one mention of Trump referring to the spread of the virus as a pandemic. Maybe he just said it to himself in the mirror.

Categories Education Reform

Happy Birthday, Wilfred Owen

By dianeravitch
March 18, 2020 //
11

If you have never read the poetry of Wilfred Owen, do it now.

Today is his birthday.

This bio comes from Garrison Keillor’s “Writer’s Almanac.”

“It’s the birthday of poet Wilfred Owen (books by this author), born in Shropshire, England (1893). When he was young, his family was well-off, living in a house owned by his grandfather, a prominent citizen. But then his grandpa died, and it turned out that the old man was broke, and the family had to leave and move into working-class lodgings in an industrial town.

“He started writing poems as a boy, and he was good at literature and science, but he didn’t do well enough on his exams to get a scholarship at a university. He enlisted to fight in World War I, and he became a lieutenant. In 1917, he was wounded, diagnosed with shell shock, and sent to a hospital to recuperate. There he met another soldier diagnosed with shell shock, Siegfried Sassoon, who was an established poet and mentored Owen. At the hospital, Owen wrote many of his most famous poems, including “Dulce et Decorum Est” and “Anthem for Doomed Youth.” He was one of the first poets to depict the horrifying realities of war, instead of writing glorified, nationalistic poems.

“But the next year, he went back to fight, and he was killed in battle at the age of 25. Two years later, Poems of Wilfred Owen (1920) was published.”

Categories Education Reform, Literature

Russia Will Change Constitution for Putin

By dianeravitch
March 18, 2020 //
25

We live in a new age of authoritarianism. Russian sycophants have cleared the way for Putin to remain in power for at least 16 more years.

This from CNN:

Vladimir Putin’s path to an extended presidency is almost clear after lawmakers voted to change term limit rules in the Russian constitution. Under current Russian law, Putin would have to step down as president in 2024, but the proposed amendment would either scrap term limits altogether or just allow Putin to run again, extending his time in office all the way to 2036. Why? The legislator who put forth the measure said Putin’s continued rule would be a stabilizing factor in the country and alleviate people’s fears over Russia’s political future. Putin, of course, approves of the proposed changes. The amendments still face two more rounds of approval today in parliament.

Remember that Trump declared a national emergency because of the spread of COVID-19.

Scary thought: will he use this national emergency to postpone the 2020 elections? Who would stop him?

Categories Education Reform, International

Arizona: SOS Arizona Needs Your Help to Stop Growth of Vouchers Forever!

By dianeravitch
March 18, 2020 //
4

The parents and educators who created SOS Arizona blocked the last expansion plan for vouchers by getting a referendum on the state ballot in 2018. They had to fight the governor, the legislature, the Republican party, the Koch brothers, the DeVos family, and other monied interests, who wanted to keep expanding vouchers until every student in the state was eligible for a voucher.

The all-volunteer SOS Arizona group gathered over 100,000 signatures to put a referendum on the ballot, fought the efforts of the Koch brothers to kick them off the ballot, and the referendum went to the public, where voucher expansion was overwhelmingly defeated by a margin of 65-35%.

Now SOS Arizona needs your help to put another referendum on the state ballot, to end voucher expansion. Volunteers must collect 350,000 signatures to initiate this referendum. They need YOUR help!

Save Our Schools Arizona (SOSAZ), the grassroots group responsible for stopping universal voucher expansion in Arizona in 2018, has gone on offense. In spite of their overwhelming 2-to-1 defeat of Empowerment Scholarship Account (ESA) voucher expansion, the Arizona state legislature attempted to pass 6 different voucher bills in 2019–all killed by SOSAZ and in 2020 is working to allow ESA vouchers to expand vouchers across state lines. Save Our Schools, once again, said “Enough!”

On February 26, 2020, Save Our Schools Arizona filed a statewide citizens’ initiative (read it here). A critical next step in fighting the privatization movement, capping the program once and for all. The Save Our Schools Act:

Limits private school vouchers to 1% of the AZ student population, allowing current students to stay in the program while blocking ALL new voucher programs in AZ FOREVER

Prevents taxpayer dollars from going to out-of-state private schools

Prevents taxpayer dollars from being deposited into personal accounts to pay for college expenses (a recent public records request by the Arizona Republic uncovered $33 million sitting in unspent recipient accounts including 9 families with a balance of more than $100,000 and dozens of others with more than $50,000.

Prioritizes existing ESA vouchers for special needs students, for whom the program was originally designed

Creates a “Taxpayer Protection Fund” to sweep remaining ESA voucher funds at the end of the fiscal year to enforce the law and increase accountability; remaining funds will transfer to the Exceptional Special Needs public school fund

To successfully place the Save Our Schools Act on the November 2020 ballot, SOSAZ has launched a statewide effort to gather 350,000 signatures by July 2. Please help by donating to this critical cause at https://secure.everyaction.com/gTzwyTPPjU2EeS_rLATvZA2

Categories Arizona, Billionaires, Education Reform, Privatization, Resistance, Vouchers

Nancy Bailey: Online Learning Can Never Replace Human Teachers

By dianeravitch
March 18, 2020 //
20

Nancy Bailey wisely explains the lesson of the current emergency and boils it down to this fact:

Online learning can never replace human teachers and support staff.

Parents who are staying home with their children have taken to Twitter to express their admiration for teachers. “How do teachers do this all day with 30 children,” they wonder.

Be sure to open her post and check out the links as well as the stuff I did not include here.

Bailey worries that the Ed-tech industry is zooming in to search for profits.

“While Covid-19 is of utmost concern, parents and educators, who’ve worried about the replacement of brick-and-mortar schools and teachers with anytime, anyplace, online instruction, wonder what this pandemic will mean to public education long term. Will this disaster be used to end public schools, replacing instruction with online competency-based learning?

”We’re reminded of disaster capitalism, a concept highlighted by Naomi Klein in The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism, how Katrina was used in New Orleans to convert traditional public schools to charter schools. Within nineteen months, with most of the city’s poor residents still in exile, New Orleans’ public school system had been almost completely replaced by privately run charter schools. (p. 5-6). Who thought that could happen?

”The transitioning of technology into public schools, not simply as a supplemental tool for teachers to use at their discretion, but as a transformative means to remove teachers from the equation, has been highlighted with groups like Digital Promise and KnowledgeWorks. Both promote online learning and it’s difficult to find teachers in the mix.

”Combining this with the intentional defunding of public schools, shoddy treatment of teachers including the unwillingness to pay them appropriate salaries, inadequate resources and support staff, crumbling buildings, and the destruction of public schooling in America, should we not question what placing students online at this strange time will mean in the future to our schools?

The pandemic has demonstrated the importance of brick-and-mortar public schools, she writes.

“In “Coronavirus Has Shown Us the Vital Role Schools Play, But Will America Listen?” Glenda Cohen outlines how parents and the nation need public schools for survival. I have added some additional services and citations.

“Public schools are on the frontline fighting against childhood hunger. According to a CNBC report: Each day, the National School Lunch Program serves over 30 million children. The fact that many children will go hungry without their public school should give us pause.

“Students rely on school counseling. Students rely on school counselors for support.

“Parents need childcare so they can work. Working parents need schools to take care of their children so they can work. When schools close, parents are unable to do their jobs. This has a negative effect on the overall economy.

“Schools provide homeless children with stability. As Cohen points out, many homeless children rely on public schools. U.S. News and World Report claims 1.36 million students in the 2016-17 school year were homeless.

“Students with disabilities need accommodations and services. Most guidelines indicate that during the Covid-19 crisis, students with disabilities must have access to the same services as students without disabilities, but this leaves out accommodations that address the differences. Here are questions and answers from the Department of Education. How will students with autism, ADHD, and many other disabilities get the services they need?

“Shortcomings of Online Instruction

“Many children don’t have access to Broadband. Nearly 12 million children, many living in rural settings, lack access to an Internet connections. While ed-tech enthusiasts will claim it’s a matter of time before everyone has Broadband, looking for funding to do so indicates it will take time for this to occur.

“What happens with student privacy and information? Parents already worry about their child’s online personal identifiable information when they work online at school. How is a student’s online information protected when they work online at home during a public heath crisis? Here’s information about Covid-19 and FERPA.

“Socialization is missing. Speaking to someone on a screen is better than nothing, but it’s still isolating.

“Students work online alone. Many students need guidance and might not be able to focus on screens.
Children enjoy social gatherings that schools provide. The Covid-19 virus has left students agonizing over the field trips and school social events that they will miss, that cannot take place online.
How good is the instruction? There’s no research to show that working only online is better than teacher instruction.

“Parents have to supervise their children. Usually parents have to monitor their student’s work and make sure they stay on task.

“Teachers Are Loved and Respected.

“A college student whose classes were cancelled and switched to online stated they would miss their teacher who had provided extra help and whose class everyone enjoyed.

“Teachers have been the unsung heroes during this Covid-19 crisis. They have struggled the last few weeks to take care of their students, cleaning and disinfecting their classes due to an overwhelmed custodial staff, along with keeping students calm, comforting confused children and teens.

Now they struggle to go online to provide lessons from home. As blogger Nancy Flanagan notes in “Once Again Teachers are First Responders:”

“Keeping a functional learning community together is job #1. Meaning: every child, K-12, who is out of school involuntarily, knows for sure that the adults who have been his/her teachers, playground supervisors or joke-around buddies in the hallway, still care. Staying connected and checking in matter much more than reviewing fractions or watching a dissection video.

“Online learning can never adequately replace public schools and teachers. In such a desperate time, closing public schools due to this pandemic is showing Americans how reliant we are upon those schools to fulfill, not just an educational purpose, but the real social and emotional needs of children and families.

“We’re left with stark revelations about this country’s shortcomings, while at the same time we witness the heroism of teachers and staff who care for all children at this dark time. It is that caring and love that have always been the hallmark of what teaching and public schools have been all about. It is and will continue to be what saves public education and the teaching profession.

“This crisis will not throw students into a future of nothing but online learning. It will instead remind parents and students of how much their public schools and teachers mean to them.

“Or, as American television producer, television and film writer, and author @shondarhimes lamented on Twitter: been homeschooling a 6-year old and 8-year old for one hour and 11 minutes. Teachers deserve to make a billion dollars a year. Or a week.

“We must have hope for the future, hope for our democracy, and the great and enduring role of teachers and brick-and-mortar schools, which are temporarily closed.”

Categories Education Reform, Students, Supporting public schools, Teachers

California: Governor Says Schools Likely to Close for Rest of Year

By dianeravitch
March 17, 2020 //
6

Governor Gavin Newsom said that schools in California are likely to close for what remains of the school year.

https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2020-03-17/schools-closures-mobilize-meals

“California public schools are likely to be closed for the remainder of the school year in response to the escalating spread of coronavirus, Gov. Gavin Newsom said Thursday afternoon.

“I don’t want to mislead you,” he said to parents and educators during an afternoon press conference.

“Nearly all school districts in the state, 98.8%, are closed in response to the coronavirus pandemic, Newsom said. The state education department is assembling detailed guidelines on how schools can attempt to continue teaching 6.1 million students out of their classrooms in the weeks and months ahead.

“The announcement comes as the Los Angeles school district on Tuesday was ramping up “grab and go” food services to help feed more than half a million children displaced by the closing of schools due to the coronavirus outbreak.”

Categories California, Closing schools, Education Reform, Health

Happy, St. Patrick’s Day, Sort Of

By dianeravitch
March 17, 2020 //
19

Garrison Keillor writes in The Daily Writers’s Almanac about St. Patrick:

“Today is St. Patrick’s Day, the annual feast day celebrating a patron saint of Ireland.

“St. Patrick was born around the year 385, in a village in Wales. When he was 16, a group of Irish pirates raided his village and took many of the young men back to Ireland to work as slaves. Patrick worked for six years as a herdsman in the Irish countryside. In his sixth year, he escaped and made his way back to Wales. But, according to his autobiography, soon after he got back home he heard a voice telling him to go back to Ireland and convert the Irish to Christianity. That’s eventually what he did, but first he went to France to visit monasteries and study religious texts. After 12 years in France, he went back to Ireland, where he founded monasteries, schools, and churches and converted much of the island to Christianity.

“Parades are a large part of the day’s celebrations, and New York City’s is the largest in the world, with the 69th Infantry Regiment leading 150,000 marchers up Fifth Avenue, drawing approximately 2 million spectators. The first St. Patrick’s Day parade in New York was on March 17, 1762. Boston has been celebrating St. Patrick’s Day since 1737. And since 1961, Chicago has been dyeing its river green for the holiday.

“The city of Dublin is a relative newcomer to the huge parade festivities, but the celebration there has been taking off in recent years. Dublin’s first St. Patrick’s Day Festival was held in 1995 to boost tourism. Since then, the parade has grown into a weeklong event that includes a symposium with lectures on Ireland’s economic success, issues of Irish identity, and the future of the Irish state.“

Most St. Patrick’s Day parades have been canceled this year.

Categories Education Reform

Note to Ohio: Lincoln Did Not Cancel 1864 Election

By dianeravitch
March 17, 2020 //
39

James Hohmann writes today in Washington Post that Ohio Governor DeWine should pay attention to history: Abraham Lincoln did not cancel the elections of 1864.

https://s2.washingtonpost.com/23f6e3b/5e70db23fe1ff6038cdcb2ae/Z2FyZGVuZHJAZ21haWwuY29t/10/114/2160de31454b787c80a706dd1b1faf11

”Abraham Lincoln rejected calls to postpone the 1864 election amid the Civil War, even though his reelection remained very much in doubt until the capture of Atlanta that September. “If the rebellion could force us to forgo or postpone a national election, it might fairly claim to have already conquered and ruined us,” the 16th president reasoned.

”To be sure, Lincoln was not facing a global pandemic with a highly contagious novel coronavirus that epidemiologists fear could kill more than a million Americans if not quickly contained. Officials reported 18 new deaths across the United States on Monday, bringing the nationwide total to 85, with more than 4,450 cases now confirmed in the country and the real number thought to be far higher because of problems distributing the test.

”But Lincoln was fending off an existential threat to the country’s survival. And his principle that the elections must go on has guided generations of leaders facing crises. During the influenza pandemic a century ago, for instance, local election officials across the country chose not to postpone voting in primaries during the 1918 midterms.

”On Monday night in Ohio, Franklin County Court of Common Pleas Judge Richard Frye rejected a temporary restraining order supported by Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine (R) to postpone the state’s primary until June. He warned that rescheduling the election would “set a terrible precedent.” The judge explained during a court hearing that “there are too many factors to balance in this uncharted territory.”

“That didn’t deter DeWine. A few hours later, his director of public health ordered polls closed on account of a statewide emergency. “During this time when we face an unprecedented public health crisis, to conduct an election [Tuesday] would force poll workers and voters to place themselves at an unacceptable health risk of contracting coronavirus,” the governor tweeted. Overnight, without issuing an opinion, the Ohio Supreme Court denied a legal challenge to the order to postpone the primary. This means that there will not be in-person voting in the Buckeye State today.

“The only thing more important than a free and fair election is the health and safety of Ohioans,” DeWine said in a joint statement overnight with Ohio Secretary of State Frank LaRose (R). “Logistically, under these extraordinary circumstances, it simply isn’t possible to hold an election tomorrow that will be considered legitimate by Ohioans….”

“Even as President Trump showed a new seriousness about the outbreak, he told reporters that he didn’t think it was necessary for Ohio to delay its primary. “I think postponing elections is not a very good thing,” said Trump. “They have lots of room in a lot of the electoral places. … I think postponing is unnecessary.” He added that he defers to individual states.

“For the foreseeable future, debates over delaying primaries and elections are poised to become normal. “In Arizona, the Maricopa County Elections Department closed 78 polling locations, citing widespread shortages of cleaning supplies. Now, rather than being limited to their local precinct, voters may cast ballots at any of 151 geographically dispersed polling centers,” Amy Gardner, Elise Viebeck and Isaac Stanley-Becker report. “Poll-worker shortages in Florida prompted one election official in Pasco County, north of Tampa, to draft sheriff’s deputies, school district workers and county employees to fill in.”

Suspicion, fear, concern: Is Ohio setting a precedent for the national election of 2020?

Categories Democracy, Education Reform, Ohio

Fareed Zakaria: Why Is the U.S. Response to the Crisis Inept?

By dianeravitch
March 17, 2020 //
34

Fareed Zakaria is a regular commentator on world affairs for CNN. This article appeared in the Washington Post on March 12:

The outbreak of an epidemic is something like a natural disaster — a spontaneous, accidental eruption that is no one’s fault. But that does not mean we can do little about it and just wait for it to run its deadly course. The evidence is now clear: The spread of the virus can be greatly reduced if governments act early, aggressively and intelligently. Unfortunately, that does not describe the response of the U.S. government to the coronavirus pandemic.

We can track the speed of the outbreak since January, by which time the virus had spread from China to other countries. In South Korea, after an initial spike, the number of new cases has slowed. Hong Kong, Singapore and Taiwan — despite lots of travelers from China — have kept numbers low from the beginning. In the United States, however, we are seeing accelerating increases.

What did the successful countries do that seems to have worked? They began testing early and often. They coupled these tests with careful quarantines of those infected and tracking of where they had been, to better predict where the next outbreaks might occur. The public health systems had surge capacity because funding had been adequate. And authorities largely communicated simple, clear and consistent messages to the public.

One new study, which has not yet been peer-reviewed, argues that without enhanced detection and restrictions on movement, the number of cases in China could have been 67 times higher by the end of February. And had China started acting just one week earlier, there could have been 66 percent fewer cases.

“Who would have thought we would even be having [this crisis]?” President Trump said last week. In fact, the director for medical and biodefense preparedness policy of his own National Security Council gave a speech in Atlanta in 2018 saying, “The threat of pandemic flu is our number one health security concern. We know that it cannot be stopped at the border.” The day after she made this speech, the White House eliminated her unit. (Hat tip to “The Daily” podcast from the New York Times.)

Trump did make one very good decision — to ban most travelers from China from entering the United States, on Jan. 31. That bought the United States time. Alas, that time was wasted as testing turned into a fiasco.

If this were a war, the generals in charge of this operation would have been relieved of their command. Just one comparison: South Korea has tested more than 230,000 potential cases with a population of about 50 million. In the United States, this would be about 1.5 million. In fact, the United States has conducted about 10,000 tests in public health labs (and more in private labs). Per capita, the United States has tested far fewer people than most other advanced countries.

Trump’s most recent, dramatic move — the travel ban on most of Europe — is symbolic of the administration’s actions. The thousands of Americans currently in Europe are apparently exempt, as are a small number of others. More importantly, the disease is already in the United States and spreading. The policy was so poorly thought through that amendments, corrections and reversals were made to the president’s speech within minutes of his having delivered it.

This crisis seems to have been designed to bring out the worst in Trump. The president doesn’t like or trust experts, often explaining that he knows more than they do. He has bluffed and fibbed his way through much of his life and thinks nothing of doing so again — except this time we are not charmed or amused by the bluster but rather frightened.

In most global crises, the United States takes the lead and provides comfort and assurances to the world. In this one, Trump has been mostly AWOL. When he does appear, it is to blame the disease on foreigners and announce policies that are designed to reinforce that view. The broad collapse in global markets is surely in part a reaction to the vast vacuum of leadership in the White House.

Trump views everything from the narcissistic prism of his ego. He dismisses opposing views and insists that even the senior-most members of his administration repeatedly praise him and his leadership at all times. Watching the heads of America’s leading science agencies prefacing their statements with ritual praise for the “dear leader” has been depressing.

Come to think of it, the Trump administration has been copying the wrong Korea. Instead of the intelligence and expertise of South Korea, it is emulating the sycophancy, incompetence and propaganda of North Korea.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/some-countries-have-been-successful-in-combating-the-coronavirus-the-us-is-not-one-of-them/2020/03/12/63378f40-649f-11ea-b3fc-7841686c5c57_story.html

Categories Accountability, Education Reform
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