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Carol Burris: Federal Analysis Finds No Difference in Performance Between Charter Schools and Public Schools

By dianeravitch
September 28, 2019 //
31

 

Carol Burris, executive director of the Network for Public Education, reports on a new federal analysis comparing charter schools and public schools.

She writes:

A recent report on school choice commissioned by the US Department of Education’s National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) documented what we already know–the performance of students who attend charter schools is no better than the academic performance of those who attend true public schools.
 
The report based its findings on 4th and 8th grade NAEP scores. No school, public or charter, can test prep students for success on the NAEP, thus it is considered by many to be the most reliable measure of student achievement.
 
In addition to a simple comparison of results, the researchers who prepared the report used regression analysis to control for the influence of parental education level on student achievement on the NAEP. This is important because it contradicts those who claim that charters do a better job at educating disadvantaged students, and that the equal academic performance between the two sectors is because public schools educate a more privileged population.  Parental education level has been shown repeatedly to have a significant effect on student achievement, even when controlling for SES. 
 
The report also told us that the percentage of students in private schools has dropped to 9% and homeschool enrollment has risen to 3%. Of the remaining 88%, 94% of all students are enrolled in true public schools, while 6% are enrolled in charter schools. 
 
The charter school sector can produce as many biased studies not subject to peer review as they like, but studies from objective sources consistently produce the same results–charters, despite their creaming of students and “freedom” do no better than true public schools. Ironically, this one was commissioned by the US Department of Education led by Betsy DeVos. 
 

—

Carol Burris

Executive Director
Network for Public Education
Categories Accountability, Betsy DeVos, Charter Schools, Education Industry, Education Reform, NAEP, Privatization, School Choice, Testing, U.S. Department of Education

Personnel Is Policy

By dianeravitch
September 27, 2019 //
21

Trump selected inexperienced, hard-right Congressman John Ratcliffe’s to be the Director of National Intelligence, but the Republicans in the Senate sent word that they would not confirm Trumps’ unqualified lapdog.

This story from today’s Washington Post by James Hohmann shows what a difference this made. Had Ratcliffe been confirmed, the whistleblower complaint would never have seen the light of day..

 

THE BIG IDEA: The Ukraine donnybrook shows the degree to which institutions depend on the individuals inside of them to function as they were designed. The whistleblower who sounded an alarm while others bit their tongues showed that. So did the inspector general who alerted Congress to his complaint when President Trump’s loyalists were trying to keep it secret. And the public got a glimpse during a House committee hearing on Thursday of how differently this scandal might have played out if Trump’s previous pick to lead the nation’s intelligence community had been confirmed.

The temperamental contrast was stark between Rep. John Ratcliffe (R-Tex.), the hyper-partisan congressman who wanted the job, and Joe Maguire, the decorated military hero who got it instead and seemed eager to show he’s no one’s toady. Democrats faulted Maguire, as the acting director of national intelligence, for checking in with the very entities who a CIA whistleblower had accused of wrongdoing, including Bill Barr’s Justice Department and Trump’s White House counsel’s office, to see if they wanted to claim executive privilege to prevent the disclosure of his allegations.

Maguire noted earnestly that he was new in the role and wanted to do the right thing. The retired admiral had been running the National Counterterrorism Center after 36 years in the Navy, including as commander of Seal Team 6. He said he’s sworn an oath to protect and defend the Constitution 11 times. “No one can take an individual’s integrity away,” Maguire explained. “It can only be given away.”

Ratcliffe’s questioning of Maguire – which was more of a monologue, really – offered a window into how he might have handled both the complaint and the hearing if he’d found himself in the hot seat. The congressman made the case that Trump prodding his Ukrainian counterpart to investigate former vice president Joe Biden was “lawful conduct.” He claimed without evidence that the whistleblower was “wrong in numerous respects” and dubiously compared the complaint to the “Steele dossier” in the Russia investigation. “The United States is allowed to solicit help from a foreign government in an ongoing criminal investigation, which is exactly what President Trump did in that conversation,” Ratcliffe declared.

Ratcliffe’s hopes of getting formally nominated went down in flames on Aug. 2 after Senate Republicans expressed concern about his qualifications and evidence that he had padded his résumé. The three-term congressman had impressed Trump in July with his hostile questioning of former special counsel Bob Mueller. When the president pulled his supportjust a week after announcing his intention to nominate Ratcliffe, reporters asked Trump why he put someone with such limited national security experience up for such an important job without fully vetting him. “I think he would’ve picked it up very quickly,” Trump replied. “I give out a name to the press and they vet for me. We save a lot of money that way.” Trump gave the job instead to Maguire, who had no idea he’d immediately be thrust into the center of an epic fight between the White House and Congress.

During the hearing, Ratcliffe also falsely insisted that the legal opinion from the Justice Department, which claimed that intelligence community officials didn’t need to turn over the whistleblower complaint because it was outside of their jurisdiction, was written by nonpolitical lawyers. “That’s an opinion from the Department of Justice ethics lawyers – not political appointees, but career officials that serve Republicans and Democrats,” Ratcliffe said during the hearing.

In fact, that opinion – released publicly on Wednesday – was authored by Trump appointee Steven Engel. Engel earned a reputation as a highly partisan figure in George W. Bush’s Justice Department, which is why Democrats fought his confirmation to run the Office of Legal Counsel. He was confirmed by a vote of 51 to 47 in November 2017. As a former U.S. attorney, it seems inconceivable that Ratcliffe would not know the Office of Legal Counsel is led by a political appointee.

Audio: In private U.N. speech, Trump calls whistleblower ‘almost a spy’

— It’s also very revealing to contrast how Maguire and Trump talked about the whistleblower. The acting DNI testified that he does not know who wrote the document, but he said he doesn’t question the person’s motives. He added that he believes they “acted in good faith” and insisted that he is glad the information has finally come out. “I think the whistleblower did the right thing,” Maguire said. “I think he followed the law every step of the way.”

As Maguire was testifying, Trump declared that the whistleblower acted like “a spy” and suggested that the legally protected conduct was akin to “treason.” Speaking in New York at the U.S. Mission to the United Nations, the president made clear that he’d also like to ferret out anyone else who provided evidence of his misconduct. “I want to know who’s the person that gave the whistleblower … the information because that’s close to a spy,” he said. “You know what we used to do in the old days when we were smart? Right? With spies and treason, right? We used to handle them a little differently than we do now.”

The Los Angeles Times published an audio recording of the closed-door speech, and The Post later obtained a video. “We’re at war,” Trump said in his ad-libbed remarks, referring to the scandal. “These people are sick. They’re sick. And nobody’s called it out like I do.”

— Trump and his band of brothers have been leaning on the language of war this week. Rep. Devin Nunes (Calif.), the ranking Republican on the Intelligence Committee, congratulated Democrats at the Maguire hearing on the “rollout of their latest information warfare operation against the president.”

Steve Bannon, Trump’s former White House strategist, compared Nancy Pelosi’s speech on Tuesday night to the start of the Civil War in 1861. “Pelosi’s announcement to begin a formal process at 5 p.m. was the shot at Fort Sumter,” Bannon said. “Now you cannot freelance, you cannot go rogue. You have to be disciplined. You have to be high and tight.”

— Former DNI James Clapper likened the president’s comments about the whistleblower to “witness retaliation.” “What’s really bad about it is this is going to have a very chilling effect on any other potential whistleblowers,” the Trump critic said on CNN.

Categories Education Reform

Boston: New Superintendent Reduces Testing Overload!

By dianeravitch
September 27, 2019 //
20

Now here is good news!

The new superintendent of the Boston Public Schools Brenda Casellius announced a reduction of district tests.

This does not affect the state-mandated tests, but it is a welcome acknowledgement that students need more instruction, not more testing.

School Superintendent Brenda Cassellius has announced a moratorium on district-mandated standardized tests, according to a Sept. 19 memo to school leaders.

To read the memo, click here.

“For this school year, we will take a pause in requiring that schools administer specific assessments,” the memo says.

It also announces an end to “End-of-Year” district assessments in English Language Arts and math, and says BPS will stop giving the Terra Nova standardized test to students in grades four and five. That test has been used to decide which students should be invited to Advanced Work Class (AWC) for the following year. The Terra Nova will still be given in third grade as a gateway to AWC in grade four.

The memo does recommend continued use of certain reading tests and district assessments that are used to evaluate students’ academic progress during the year. “Administration of these assessments is highly recommended,” Cassellius wrote, “but completely optional.”

(MCAS tests are not affected by the new policy because they are mandated by the state, not BPS.)

Cassellius says one reason for the new policy is to “shift attention from executing the status quo to … reflecting upon our practice.”

This is a welcome contrast with New York City, where a spokesperson recently declared that there would be four additional off-the-shelf standardized tests each year, to prepare for the state tests.

 

Categories Accountability, Boston, Education Reform, New York City, Testing

Nashville School Board Rejects Rocketship Charter

By dianeravitch
September 27, 2019 //
5

 

The Metro Nashville School Board took the bold, brave step of rejecting a proposed Rocketship charter school.

The Nashville school board denied charter school network Rocketship Education a new school — despite receiving its first recommendation to approve an application in years.

The Metro Nashville Public Schools board bucked the district’s charter school review recommendation for the resubmitted application with seven votes to deny it. Only Gini Pupo-Walker did not vote to deny. Board member Sharon Gentry was not present on Tuesday night.

James Robinson, Rocketship’s Tennessee director, said the charter school network will appeal the decision to the Tennessee State Board of Education, which hears all charter school appeals…

Newly-appointed Board Vice Chair Amy Frogge criticized the school for its computer-based learning model and the way it uses investors to pay for its property.

The model, she said, “creates fertile ground for investors to reap millions.” Frogge also cited news reports, saying the school follows an “extreme militaristic” behavioral model.

“Assuming Rocketship is producing higher test scores, I must ask at what cost,” Frogge says. She said the school is a “drill and kill” instruction model.

Board member Christiane Buggs said her reasons for denying the school were purely financial. 

“We don’t have the funding right now to outsource,” she said.

Amy Frogge is a parent activist and lawyer. She is featured as a leader of the Resistance in my new book Slaying Goliath. It will be published in January.

 

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

Peter Goodman: Is New York City About to Double Down on High-Stakes Testing?

By dianeravitch
September 26, 2019 //
20

 

Peter Goodman writes about education policy in New York City and New York State.

In this post, he tries to figure out whether NYC is about to double down on a “test and punish” regime or to seek collaboration.

He covers the bizarre City Council hearing about over-testing, where a top official of the NYC Department of Education announced the city’s decision to add four new off-the-shelf standardized tests to the school year to track student progress and to create a data tracking program called EDUSTATS to monitor student scores citywide, class by class.

At the hearing, chaired by Mark Treyger, a high school teacher on leave, the city described its plan:

Laura Chin, the # 2 at the Department of Education testified at the hearing and mentioned Edustats, the new Department initiative; Treyger pressed her on the program. The Department will require periodic assessments, the Executive Superintendents will review the results with Superintendents, and Chin described the process as similar to the New York Police Department (NYPD) Comstat system. Borough commanders meet with precinct commanders and review data, detailed crime statistics, and grill the precinct commanders: what have they done to respond to statistical increases in the crime data? Why isn’t it working? The precinct commanders despise the process: public shaming with the threat of job removal. While the precinct commander can move patrol cops from one area to another schools can’t prevent evictions or provide food for families or more racially integrated schools.

The Police COMSTAT Program led to many complaints that officers were “juking the stats”—gaming the system— to improve ratings, for example, by classifying felonies as misdemeanors.

Categories Data, Education Reform, New York City, Testing

Peter Greene: What Betsy DeVos Got Wrong in Milwaukee

By dianeravitch
September 26, 2019 //
20

 

Peter Greene fact-checked Betsy DeVos’s “back to school” speech at a religious school in Milwaukee and discovered that all of her facts were wrong. But facts, in DeVos’s worldview, are tiresome and unnecessary.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/petergreene/2019/09/17/betsy-devos-polly-williams-vouchers-and-selective-facts/

Perhaps most egregious was her paean of praise to Polly Williams, an African American state legislator who supported school choice until she realized she had been duped. DeVos ignores Williams’ change of heart and pretends that she was a true believer until the end. The reality in Milwaukee was that the voucher program was bankrolled by the far-right Bradley Foundation, which used Polly Williams. She eventually became disillusioned.

Peter Greene writes:

DeVos…chose to invoke Annette “Polly” Williams, the mother of school choice in Wisconsin. The Democratic politician and activist wrote the first school choice legislation in the country (adopted in 1989) and became a popular speaker on the issue, particularly to conservative audiences.

But Williams became disenchanted with the school choice movement. Her original legislation did not include religious schools, but was expanded to do so five years later. Williams took to calling the voucher program a “Catholic movement.” She expressed displeasure with some of the folks, like Lamar Alexander and Bill Bennett, who swooped in to speak. She accused leaders of exploiting black and poor families, and of leaving poor families behind with the program expansion. 75% of voucher recipients were not escaping the public system, because they had never been in it. She was critical of education measures taken by Governor Scott Walker, whose supporters have included the DeVos family.

Williams told an interviewer, “Our intent was never to destroy the public schools.” When accused of drifting away from the movement, she would reply, “I haven’t changed. The people around me have changed.”

It’s an odd choice for DeVos to invoke Williams, who seems to have viewed folks like DeVos as having hijacked the charter movement. But DeVos seems determined to launch, or at least lay a foundation for,a national voucher program, and she’s going to paint a favorable picture with whatever brush she has handy.

 

Categories Betsy DeVos, Education Reform, Lies, Milwaukee, Privatization, Vouchers

Valerie Strauss: Betsy DeVos Expresses Her Contempt for Public Schools

By dianeravitch
September 26, 2019 //
30

 

Valerie Strauss is not surprised yet disappointed that Betsy DeVos kicked off her “back to school tour” at a religious school in Milwaukee, flaunting her contempt for the vast majority of students who attend public schools. By doing so, she showed her agenda: privatization of public schools and transfer of public money to religious schools.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/education/2019/09/16/where-betsy-devos-started-her-back-to-school-tour-says-it-all-about-her-agenda/

It is ironic that she chose Milwaukee to demonstrate the benefits of school choice. Milwaukee has had choice for three decades: charters, vouchers, and a shrinking public school sector.

All three sectors are faring poorly. On the National Assessment of Educational Progress, Milwaukee is one of the lowest performing cities in the nation.  Students in religious schools, charters, and public schools are doing poorly.

Competition raised no boats. Milwaukee demonstrates the failure of school choice.

Betsy DeVos either doesn’t know or doesn’t care.

 

 

Categories Accountability, Betsy DeVos, Charter Schools, Competition, Education Industry, Education Reform, Milwaukee, Privatization, School Choice, Vouchers

Cory Booker’s Long and Profitable Friendship with Betsy DeVos, and Why It Ended

By dianeravitch
September 26, 2019 //
27

 

Cory Booker was recently interviewed by the Washington Post, and he was asked about his past support for vouchers and his friendship with Betsy DeVos. 

He insisted that he turned against vouchers in 2006, and he barely remembered any connection to DeVos. When someone asked if he had flown to Michigan in 2000 at the request of Dick and Betsy DeVos to support their voucher referendum, he at first denied it, then when shown a tape, he said he didn’t remember it.

He opposed DeVos’ nomination to be Secretary of Education in 2017.

DeVos’s allies are stunned by what they call his turnabout. They view Booker’s effort to distance himself from her and her agenda as a betrayal. 

Now that it is politically inconvenient, he has distanced himself from the issue and those who helped launch his political career,” said William E. Oberndorf, who was chairman of the American Education Reform Council when DeVos and Booker were on the board. “Cory once told me that his father used to say to him, ‘Never forget the girl who brought you to the dance.’ I can only conclude that Cory not only forgot one of the girls who brought him to the dance, he missed his . . . moment to stand up for an issue he always said he believed in.” 

Booker’s advocacy for vouchers won him the financial support of conservative Republicans who were delighted to see a black Democratic Mayor supporting their cause.

Booker’s political career took off as a parade of wealthy philanthropists, hedge fund managers and others who supported DeVos’s “school choice” viewpoint poured money into his campaigns and pet projects. 

In 2000, with their voucher referendum on the ballot, the DeVos family invited Booker to debate the legislative director of the ACLU. She kept a tape of the debate and shared it with the Post. The voucher proposal went down to a crushing defeat by 3-1.

In September 2000, Booker delivered a blistering pro-voucher speech to the Manhattan Institute, a conservative policy group. 

Booker’s 2006 race for mayor of Newark won the support of many conservative Republicans. He proposed tuition tax credits (a form of voucher) and went all-in for charters.

When he ran for the Senate in 2014 in a special election, he was helped by Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump, who held a fundraiser for him.

As recently as May 2016, Booker appeared again before the group that DeVos chaired, the American Federation for Children. After DeVos delivered a speech defending herself against attacks from Democrats, Oberndorf warmly introduced Booker, praising his commitment to school choice.

Booker spoke proudly about the growing number of students in Newark’s charter schools, saying, “This mission of this organization is the mission of our nation. . . . I have been involved with this organization for 10 years and I have seen the sacred honor of those here.” 

As Booker finished his speech, the audience gave him a standing ovation. To DeVos and her allies, it seemed that Booker was still firmly in the fold, according to Oberndorf. 

But a year later, he opposed DeVos’ nomination.

Booker’s vote shattered his career-long alliance with DeVos and stunned her supporters. 

“Cory gained a great deal of political support thanks to his association with Betsy and other supporters,” said Mitchell, the president of the American Education Reform Council when Booker and DeVos were board members. “His abandonment of school choice and of Betsy makes it clear that his professed commitment to the issue and his friendship with her were fueled by political ambition, not principle.” 

Betsy helped to fund his political career. But it was no longer convenient to be her friend.

 

 

Categories Accountability, Betsy DeVos, Charter Schools, Corporate Reformers, Democrats, Education Industry, Education Reform, New Jersey, Newark, Privatization, Vouchers

Jan Resseger: School Grades Accurately Measure Poverty, Not School Quality

By dianeravitch
September 26, 2019 //
15

During the Clinton presidential campaign, Bill Clinton’s staff used this phrase: “It’s the economy, stupid.”

In current discussions about education, the phrase should be, “It’s poverty, stupid.”

Jan Resseger demonstrates how precisely Ohio’s school grades measure poverty, not school quality. 

She begins:

On Tuesday, the Cleveland Plain Dealer published a stunning analysis, by the newspaper’s data analyst Rich Exner, of the school district grades awarded by the state of Ohio on the state report cards released last week.  The new report cards are based on data from the 2018-2019 school year.  I encourage you to follow the link to look at Exner’s series of bar graphs, which, like this one, present a series of almost perfect downward staircases, with “A” grades for school districts in communities with high median income and “F” grades for the school districts in Ohio’s poorest communities.

The correlation of academic achievement with family income has been demonstrated now for half a century, but policymakers, like those in the Ohio legislature who are debating punitive school district takeovers, prefer to blame public school teachers and administrators instead of using the resources of government to assist struggling families who need better access to healthcare, quality childcare, better jobs, and food assistance.

Yet no matter how many times the pernicious effects of poverty are documented, politicians and policymakers prefer to ignore it and pretend that school choice can take the place of health care, nutrition, sound housing, good jobs, and other basic needs.

Ohio’s school district grades arrived this week. At the same time, and with less fanfare, arrived a series of reports on the level of federal spending on children, reports documenting that, as Education Week‘s Andrew Uifusa explains: “The share of the federal budget that goes toward children, including education spending, dipped to just below 2 percent of the nation’s gross domestic product in 2018—the lowest level in the decade.”….

A new report this month from the Center for Law and Social Policy (CLASP), Children and Families in Trouble, examines the persistence of child poverty and the federal government’s failure to address it: “Poverty in the United States continued a sluggish decline in 2018, falling to 11.8 percent, with children and young adults still experiencing the highest rates.  Child poverty (ages 0-18) and young adult poverty (ages 18-24) remained unacceptably high at 16.2 percent and 15 percent respectively with alarmingly large racial and ethnic disparities in poverty.  Young children, under age 5, remain the poorest of all, at 17.7 percent….”  “Racial disparities are persistent, stark, and caused by structural factors… Black and Hispanic children are more likely to be poor (29.5 and 23.7 percent respectively) compared to 8.9 percent of non-Hispanic white children, despite high levels of work among their families.”

Charters and vouchers address none of these issues.

Categories Accountability, Education Reform

George Conway III and Neal Catyal: Ukraine Seals the Case for Impeachment

By dianeravitch
September 25, 2019 //
74

 

George Conway III and Neal Catyal are lawyers. Conway is married to Kellyanne Conway; Catyal is a former Acting Solicitor General of the United States. This article appeared in the Washington Post. 

Among the most delicate choices the framers made in drafting the Constitution was how to deal with a president who puts himself above the law. To address that problem, they chose the mechanism of impeachment and removal from office. And they provided that this remedy could be used when a president commits “Treason, Bribery, or other high Crimes and Misdemeanors.”

That last phrase — “high Crimes and Misdemeanors” — was a historical term of art, derived from impeachments in the British Parliament. When the framers put it into the Constitution, they didn’t discuss it much, because no doubt they knew what it meant. It meant, as Alexander Hamilton later phrased it, “the abuse or violation of some public trust.” 

Simply put, the framers viewed the president as a fiduciary, the government of the United States as a sacred trust and the people of the United States as the beneficiaries of that trust. Through the Constitution, the framers imposed upon the president the duty and obligation to “take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed” and made him swear an oath that he would fulfill that duty of faithful execution. They believed that a president would break his oath if he engaged in self-dealing — if he used his powers to put his own interests above the nation’s. That would be the paradigmatic case for impeachment.

That’s exactly what appears to be at issue today. A whistleblower in U.S. intelligence lodged a complaint with the intelligence community’s inspector general so alarming that he labeled it of “urgent concern” and alerted the Office of the Director of National Intelligence. Though the details remain secret, apparently this much can be gleaned: The complaint is against the president. It concerns a “promise” that the president made, in at least one phone call, with a foreign leader. And it involves Ukraine and possible interference with the next presidential election. The complaint is being brazenly suppressed by the Justice Department — in defiance of a whistleblower law that says, without exception, the complaint “shall” be turned over to Congress. 

We also know this: As he admitted Thursday night on CNN, the president’s personal lawyer, Rudolph W. Giuliani, has been trying to persuade the Ukrainian government to investigate, among other things, one of Trump’s potential Democratic opponents, former vice president Joe Biden, and Biden’s son Hunter about the latter’s involvement with a Ukrainian gas company.

Trump held up the delivery of $250 million in military assistance to Ukraine, which is under constant threat from neighboring Russia. He had a phone conversation on July 25 with President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine. According to the Ukrainian government, the call included a discussion of Ukraine’s need to “complete investigation of corruption cases, which inhibited the interaction between Ukraine and the USA.”

So it appears that the president might have used his official powers — in particular, perhaps the threat of withholding a quarter-billion dollars in military aid — to leverage a foreign government into helping him defeat a potential political opponent in the United States.

If Trump did that, it would be the ultimate impeachable act….

It is high time for Congress to do its duty, in the manner the framers intended….

Categories Education Reform
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