Archives for category: Education Reform
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Global Groups Collaborate to Introduce Free Market Education Investments in Africa and Middle East

By dianeravitch
September 20, 2018 //
27

Education International, which represents teachers unions around the world, sent out notice of a disturbing new development. International groups have determined to introduce Marley forces and payment for test scores as their response to educational needs in Africa and the Middle East. The Business-School graduates discovered a “crisis” that has existed since time began: children in impoverished countries are not getting a decent education—or, in some cases, no education at all. Yes, it is outrageous. Why are these great minds not using their brainpower to promote economic development? Asia is booming. Why not transfer some lessons learned to reduce poverty and create good jobs, rather than bring in the hedge funds and social impact investors to monetize education?

Angelo Gavrielatos of Educational International writes:

A new financing facility, the Education Outcomes Fund (EOF) for Africa and the Middle East is in development – with plans to become operational in the coming year. The fund commercialises and commodifies education, using tax-payer aid budgets to support private actors and investors to profit from education provision. Similar funds are being developed targeting India and Latin America.

EI responds

EI has responded directly to the EOF and publicly.

Mobilisation of Member Organisations

Education International is mobilising our Member Organisations in potentially targeted countries, which include Burkina Faso, Chad, Cote d’Ivoire, Egypt, Ethiopia, Ghana, Jordan, Kenya, Lebanon, Liberia, Morocco, Nigeria, Palestine, Senegal, South Africa, Tanzania, Tunisia, Uganda, Zambia and Zimbabwe, recommending that they take action to pressure their governments not to engage with the EOF.

What is the EOF and how does it work?

EOF is an initiative of the International Commission on Financing Global Education Opportunity (the Education Commission) and the Global Steering Group for Impact Investment (GSG).

As a so-called innovation in education financing, the fund aims to raise $1 billion in development impact bonds (DIBs). DIBs work by employing investment capital to pay services, in this case education provision or education related services, offered by private actors in Africa and the Middle East. If ‘outcomes targets’ are met by the service providers, investors and providers receive a return, financed in part by bilateral donors through national aid budgets.

Putting private actors in the driving seat, disregarding democracy
EOF disregards democratic governance of education by choosing to directly fund private education providers rather than strengthening public systems through the elected national government. Giving investors control and influence over their investments is given precedent over governments’ sovereignty to define their own priorities.

What is more, as reporting systems for outcomes are geared to the needs of private funders, it becomes more difficult for educators, their unions and the broader community to hold their government to account to fulfil their obligation to provide quality education for all.

Funding outcomes narrows education
The EOF argues that its model’s strength lies in the fact that it will only pay for outcomes achieved. However, results-based financing actually negatively distorts quality teaching and learning processes by focusing on narrow outcomes rather than the development of the whole child.

With funding based on students’ test score outcomes, teachers are encouraged to teach to the test. Furthermore, results-based financing creates perverse incentives to invest in short-term gains rather than long term system strengthening. Outcomes in education are not immediate, but take time to manifest, such as its contribution to social, cultural, democratic and economic development.

Apart from the fact that the commodification of education by incentivising private providers and investors by profit-making is highly unethical and in disregard of the right to education, there is no substantial evidence of DIBs in the education sector.

Outcomes bonds leave the vulnerable behind
Importantly, a quest for outcomes and the involvement of profit-making organisations in the education sector leads to the further marginalisation of the most vulnerable groups in society. Evidence shows, when funding depends on test scores, private actors’ student selection processes can discriminate against less able students or alternatively encourage certain students not to participate in tests.

In clear contravention of the global commitment made through SDG4 to leave no-one behind, students from disadvantaged backgrounds, students from minority groups, refugees, students with disabilities or special needs and students living in remote areas lose out.

Proliferation of education privatisation and marketisation

To achieve SDG4, public systems must be strengthened and education must be universally embraced as a human right and a public good, not a market commodity.

Education financing must be sustainable and predictable, there are no shortcuts. It is only through well-funded public education that we will achieve quality education for all, not through attempting to establish new finance mechanisms that undermine the right to education.

Rather than strengthening public systems in regions where increased public financing for education is desperately needed, EOF will finance non-state actors, including for-profit companies and so-called ‘low-fee’ private schools that charge poor families for education of questionable quality.

‘Prime contractors’ will be commissioned by EOF to lead ‘whole-community based interventions’, suggesting that the fund will operate as a massive market creation scheme. Public-private partnerships will also be supported, with Partnership Schools for Liberia (PSL), Liberia’s disastrous experiment with outsourcing education to private providers, held up as a model.

Education is a public responsibility. The SDGs are about assuming those responsibilities. They are essential to the future and cannot be contracted out or sacrificed to the market. And, yes, they require political will to ensure a sufficient and sustainable source of public funding. We cannot rely on charity or the private sector.

If we believe that all children, regardless of their background or circumstances, regardless of the community, country or continent in which they live have a right to quality education, governments and the international community must invest in the expansion and strengthening of quality, free, universally accessible public education.
More information

Education Outcomes Fund (EOF) for Africa and the Middle East: Is it a Game Changer? by Keith M Lewin, Emeritus Professor of International Development and Education, University of Sussex, provides a detailed critique of the EOF.

Angelo Gavrielatos
Project Director – EI

Angelo Gavrielatos​
Project Director
Email: Angelo.Gavrielatos@ei-ie.org
Tel: +32 2 224 06 11
Fax: +32 2 224 06 06
5 bd du Roi Albert II | 1210 Brussels | BELGIUM
http://www.ei-ie.org

Categories Accountability, Economy, Education Reform, For-Profit, International

Julie Vassilatos: How Will Rahm Be Remembered? What Will His Legacy Be?

By dianeravitch
September 17, 2018 //
16

Julie Vassilatos baked a cake to celebrate the announced retirement of Rahm Emanuel as mayor of Chicago. But she is laughing and crying. He wants to be remembered as “the education mayor.” Really. Stop laughing.

Here is his real legacy. Open the link to see the whole post plus lots of links:

The closure of 50 schools. This chaotic, criminal mess was why I started this blog. Here are the open letters to Barbara Byrd Bennett and the Chicago Tribune following the first school closure hearings that kicked everything off. Later I realized all those hearings were a sham, just part of a process the Broad Center recommends when a district undertakes mass school closings in order to cut costs. Such meetings are for people to “feel heard,” although no one ever responds or answers any questions or resolves anything. We sat through many rounds of these. Years later, still they go on. I was recently at a similar hearing concerning NTA, the majority-black, successful elementary school Rahm decided to hand over to majority-non-black South Loopers for a high school. That foreordained, futile vibe you get from these events is impossible to avoid, as all major decisions actually have already been made and no comments actually impact the outcomes.

The closure process was every bit as terrible as you can imagine–actually, probably worse, and I wrote about it obsessively in every possible way I could think of until the hour board of ed voted to shutter the schools (which they managed to do without even naming the schools the vote was intended to close).

Research undertaken since the closures has shown they did not improve anyone’s educational experience, they only caused a great deal of “institutional mourning” in children, that is to say, grief. And the board who enacted this policy was summarily dismissed after CEO Byrd-Bennett was nailed for corruption and the optics of their unquestioning approval became a bad look for Rahm.

Add to that the “decimation of school libraries.”

And add to that:

The near-death of Walter H. Dyett High School and the near-death of the Dyett Hunger Strikers. Again, 100% on Rahm. I wrote too many posts on this to link (but here’s the first). Disinvesting a school in a black neighborhood was certainly not new in Chicago with this mayor. But he brought this conflict to new heights. Rahm’s refusal to meet with members of the community, as well as utter shenanigans around Requests for Proposals for the school, as well as a Rahm-beholden alderman and yet more absurd community hearings, created not just an unjust situation, not just a PR nightmare, but also almost irrecoverable health crises for the Hunger Strikers, who went to this extreme measure in order to get a meeting with their mayor. Over 34 days he never met with them. Though the cost was terrible, Dyett remained open. Whatever Rahm’s agenda was here was never made clear, but he lost that round, and the community has a whole bunch of actual, real life heroes.

And don’t forget “the traumatization of children.”

Quite a record for one Mayor. The Education Mayor.

Categories Chicago, Closing schools, Education Reform, Emanuel, Rahm

Ohio: English Teachers Protest Computer-Graded Tests

By dianeravitch
September 15, 2018 //
19

This is a beautiful statement. Computer-graded essays represent the ultimate dumbing down of education. Professor Les Perelman of MIT has has written many studies about the stupidity of machines. They are indifferent to factual accuracy. They don’t understand tone or irony or wit. They can be fooled by pretentious gibberish.

Keep fighting!

Open Letter to Ohio Department of Education from English teachers. Concerning: Computer-graded exams.

Open Letter to Ohio Department of Education from English teachers. Concerning: Computer-graded exams.
by inthevalleyofthedoanSeptember 8, 2018
OPEN LETTER

TO: Paolo DeMaria

Superintendent of Public Instruction

Ohio Department of Education

superintendent@education.ohio.gov

CC: Office of Curriculum and Assessment:

Brian.Roget@education.ohio.gov

Sarah.Wilson@education.ohio.gov

Shantelle.Hill@education.ohio.gov

Daniel.Badea@education.ohio.gov

Sarah.McClusky@education.ohio.gov

FROM: English teachers of Shaker Heights High School

September 7, 2018

Dear Superintendent DeMaria and the Office of Curriculum and Assessment,

We are English teachers at Shaker Heights High School, and we would like to voice our profound dismay over the direction that the Ohio Department of Education has taken with the End of Course exams.

In the nation’s unthinking rush to test, test, test, we have reached a new low: We are now expected to teach our students how to write for a machine to read.

We have been given a document called, “Machine-Scored Grading: Initial Suggestions for Preparing Students,” produced by the Westerville City Schools “in consultation with the ODE.” According to these guidelines, “When composing text to be read by a computer, the writer cannot assume that the machine will ‘know’ and be able to interpret communicative intent.”

Imagine for a moment how humiliating it is for students to hear that what they write will be read by a machine, not by a human. Can you think of anything as pointless? Would anybody be inspired to do their best work?

The message that we send students is this: Your inner self, the ground from which all writing springs, has no value, no relevance. We do not care about the content of your mind, only that you have the mental machinery to decipher and generate informational text.

Writing for a computer is antithetical to everything that led us to become educators. Our overseers in Columbus, however, have a very different attitude. In support of machine scoring, this is from an official statement from an Associate Director of the Office of Curriculum and Assessment:

“This is the only way to get to adaptive testing and to return results faster, with the goal to be eventual on demand results, which has been an extremely vocal issue by the field to legislators, ODE Leadership, etc.”

First of all, this is an appalling sentence. But once we get past the errors in syntax, grammar and capitalization, and the sloppy, confusing phrasing, we are still left with an absurdity. We teachers are supposed to set students before a computer and then wait breathlessly for the machine to tell us how well or poorly the student writes? That is the ultimate goal? And the person in charge doesn’t even know how to write? How much are Ohio taxpayers spending on this?

There are always the same three justifications for computer grading:

It’s fast.
It’s cheap.
It’s objective.
But we can point to a system that is faster, cheaper, and maybe even more objective. There just happens to be a group of trained professionals handy: people who are dedicated to the wellbeing and growth of Ohio’s schoolchildren, people who love writing and literature, people who are trained to the standards of the Ohio Department of Education, people who continually strive to improve their ability to provide meaningful evaluation of student writing:

Teachers.

We can do the job fast because we’re with the students every day. We can do it cheap, in fact at no extra cost to Ohio taxpayers, because it’s what we’re paid to do anyway.

You might assume that machines have us beat when it comes to objectivity. But computers are only as objective as the humans who program them. And we have good reason to distrust multinational corporations when they invoke proprietary trade secrets to hide the systems that determine the fates of millions of public school children.

But objectivity may be the wrong criterion. As English teachers, we love writing because it is one of the most subjective things taught in school. We love the teaching of writing because we love to see students develop their unique voices, their sense of themselves as the subjects of their own lives.

If we begin our thinking with the assumption that standardized tests are a sacred imperative, then, surely the fastest, cheapest, most objective thing is to grade them is with a machine. However, if we begin our thinking with the belief that students should learn how to write well, then we see that artificial intelligence is not just irrelevant, but counterproductive.

Superintendent DeMaria, what is truly being tested here is the ODE itself. Are you so captive to the testing-industrial complex that you throw millions of taxpayer dollars into an unnecessary technology? Or are you so committed to educating students that you are willing to use your available human capital to do it for free?

Yours sincerely,

English teachers at Shaker Heights High School

Categories Creativity, Education Industry, Education Reform, Testing

Jan Resseger: Who Allowed ECOT to Scam Ohio Taxpayers of $1 Billion Over 17 Years?

By dianeravitch
September 15, 2018 //
3

Jan Resseger nails the politicians who are responsible for ignoring the ECOT scam. The $1 billion that ECOT took to produce inferior education (or none at all) was purchased with campaign contributions, 92% of it to Republicans.

As it happens, the guilty politicians are running for state office this November. In only a few weeks, they will be judged by the voters.

Jon Husted, the Republican candidate for lieutenant governor; Keith Faber, the Republican candidate for state auditor; Mike DeWine, the Republican candidate for governor; and Dave Yost, the Republican candidate for attorney general.

Will the voters in Ohio remember in November who skimmed millions from their public schools to enrich the owner of ECOT?

Categories Education Reform, For-Profit, Fraud, Ohio, Virtual Charter Schools

Politico: Voucher Forces Conceding Defeat in Arizona Voucher Referendum Before the Vote

By dianeravitch
September 14, 2018 //
9

According to Politico Morning Education, the pro-voucher forces are throwing in the towel before the November referendum on Prop 305.

Prop 305 would overturn a law passed last year to offer unlimited vouchers.

Parents and educators gathered over 100,000 signatures to get it on the ballot. The Koch brothers sent in their legal team to try to knock it off the ballot but failed.

The voucher forces anticipate defeat so they are quitting ahead of the vote. They surely have polled and the numbers look bad for vouchers.

Vouchers have been overwhelmingly defeated in every state referendum.

Politico writes:

SCHOOL CHOICE GROUP TAKES SURPRISE STANCE IN ARIZONA: The prominent school choice group once chaired by DeVos is on the same side as public school advocates on a key ballot question in the state this fall.

— The American Federation for Children has decided it supports a “no” vote on a ballot question that lets voters decide if they want to keep a law passed last year that expands eligibility for a school choice-friendly program in the state.

— The decision places AFC in the unusual position of being aligned with public school supporters who had opposed the law. Previously, AFC was among the school choice-friendly groups that pushed for its passage.

— The AFC’s reasoning is complicated, but ultimately it argues that more children could be eligible for the program moving forward if an older law remains on the books.

Categories Arizona, Betsy DeVos, Education Reform

New York Times: Teachers and Their Second Jobs

By dianeravitch
September 14, 2018 //
11

Our society shows its disrespect for teachers by not paying them a salary they can live on without working a second job.

In state after state, the powers that be have cut taxes, cut education spending, and boasted that they are not “throwing money” at schools.

Meanwhile, as this feature in the New York Times shows, many teachers have to work extra jobs to meet their expenses.

This is shameful!

Legislators think it’s fine to “throw money” at those who are the 1%. The less they need money, the more they get it from the state, while teachers give up their days off to patch together a living.

Having paid as little as possible to hire teachers, legislators complain about them, demand more of them, strip away their collective bargaining rights, attack their pensions and healthcare.

We have a crisis in education: a crisis caused by greed. Pure, unadulterated greed, which enriches the richest and neglects those upon whom we depend to educate the next generation.

Into this crisis come the Reformers, with their cost-cutting ideas, their plans to replace teachers with technology or increase class sizes or import low-wage temps from TFA, but no proposals to guarantee that teachers are paid as professionals.

Categories Education Reform, Teacher Pay

“Three Thousand People Did Not Die”

By dianeravitch
September 13, 2018 //
27

Historians in the future will debate whether Trump was a liar, an incompetent, or senile. No, they are debating it now. Maybe his ego is so fragile that he can never acknowledge failure or fault.

He tweeted this morning that Democrats inflated the number of deaths in Puerto Rico to embarrass him. His administration’s work in Puerto Rico, he did, was “an unsung, tremendous success.”

Alexandra Petri wrote in the Washington Post:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/opinions/wp/2018/09/13/three-thousand-people-did-not-die/?utm_term=.7757786f644d&wpisrc=nl_popns&wpmm=1

“3000 people did not die in the two hurricanes that hit Puerto Rico. When I left the Island, AFTER the storm had hit, they had anywhere from 6 to 18 deaths. As time went by it did not go up by much. Then, a long time later, they started to report really large numbers, like 3000……..This was done by the Democrats in order to make me look as bad as possible when I was successfully raising Billions of Dollars to help rebuild Puerto Rico. If a person died for any reason, like old age, just add them onto the list. Bad politics. I love Puerto Rico!”
 -President Trump, in two tweets
“

Three thousand people did not die in Puerto Rico. This is a great relief.


The 70 year-old woman who could not get medical care or keep her insulin cold in an apartment without power — she did not die.


The old man in a hospital where there was no power to give him dialysis for four days after the storm hit — he did not die.


The mother whom the ambulance, facing spotty cell reception and congested roads, could not reach until far too late — she did not die.


Thousands did not die months after the hurricane hit, as the recovery stalled, as the island still struggled with contaminated water and unreliable power, with blocked roads and long doctors’ lines. These are just statistics, concocted for political reasons.

Three thousand people did not die.


The empty shoes that lined up in front of the capitol in San Juan belong to people who are still among us. They did not die; they will come and step back into their shoes. They will walk back up functional roads and sit in their houses where the electricity is working. They will laugh with relief that this was not a real disaster, nothing like Katrina. They will fill glasses with water that is safe to drink. They will live on an island where the recovery has been progressing with alacrity and competence.


They are all alive; you can see them, crowding around, cheering, demanding paper towels. They did not die; your work was sufficient; their lives are not on your conscience. It is an incredible unsung success.


Resources were not scant, volunteers were not underqualified and stretched too thin. Water that was dropped off for them did not languish first in storage and then on a runway for a year. The water system is not still questionable.


Three thousand people did not die. This is not human devastation of unthinkable proportions; it is just numbers, a list drawn up by Democrats, signifying nothing.


These disasters are much smaller than we are led to believe. They only appear tremendously big and tremendously wet from a distance.

Afterward, they leave no lasting devastation in their wake. They start and end as quickly as the news cycle. They require no continued focus, no sustained work. Perhaps there are no real tragedies; there are only periodic incidents to give crisis actors needed employment. People did not die. These are just trumped-up numbers. This tragedy is nothing that cannot be mopped up with a paper towel.


They did not die. It is a comforting thought. The alternative would be unthinkable.

Categories Education Reform

NPE Action Enthusiastically Endorses Andrew Gillum for Governor of Florida

By dianeravitch
September 13, 2018 //
7

At last, a gubernatorial candidate who wants to rebuild public education and throw out the profiteers, frauds, and grifters! Voters in Florida have a chance to clean the Augean stables and elect a great Governor for public education!

The Network for Public Educatuon Action Fund is thrilled to endorse Andrew Gillum for Governor of Florida!

The Network for Public Education Action is proud to announce its endorsement of Andrew Gillum for Governor of Florida.

Andrew Gillum is a strong supporter of public education and he calls Florida’s corporate school reforms “a failure.” He has proposed a $1 billion increase in funding for public schools, which would include a minimum starting salary of $50,000 for teachers and an expansion of Pre-K opportunities.
Mr. Gillum believes that high-stakes testing reforms have failed our students and schools.

When it comes to charter schools and vouchers, Andrew Gillum had the following to say:

“Charter schools have a record of waste and unaccountability that we would never tolerate from public schools. Yet, our state’s education budget continues rewarding charter schools at the expense of public schools; for example, the 2018-19 budget allocates $145 million to charter school maintenance — three times the amount allocated to public schools. As a product of Florida’s public schools, I believe we make a promise to our state’s children to provide high-quality, accessible, public schools. We weaken that promise every time we divert taxpayer funds into private and religious education that benefits some students, but not all.”

On November 6, please cast your vote for Andrew Gillum.

Categories Charter Schools, Corruption, Courage, Education Reform, Florida, Fraud, Networkfor Public Education Action Fund, School Choice, Support for public schools, Vouchers

Sacramento: Principal of Rhee-Johnson Charter School Quits in Protest

By dianeravitch
September 12, 2018 //
9

The principal of Sacramento Charter High School resigned in protest, siding with the students who were demonstrating against teacher turnover, a change in the dress code, and other arbitrary rules.

The school is part of the St. Hope Charter Chain, founded by former Sacramento Mayor (and basketball star) Kevin Johnson, and managed by him and his wife Michelle Rhee.

“Sacramento Charter High School’s top administrator has resigned just days after students left classes in protest and she blasted St. Hope administrators for what she said was the school’s “sustained history of neglect from above” and their “reactionary finger-pointing” in their handling of the student walkout.

“Christina Smith in a strongly worded one-page letter dated Monday and obtained Wednesday by The Sacramento Bee, threw her support behind the students, saying the demonstrations and the blame laid at Smith’s feet in its wake by leaders of St. Hope Public Schools, which runs the charter high school, were among the tipping points that led to her resignation as the school’s site lead…

“Some 100 students staged four days of walkouts frustrated that student-led changes to the campus’ handbook approved at the end of the 2017-2018 school year were set aside by St. Hope officials and that students were ordered by the officials to wear costly school-mandated uniforms.

“We feel like we’re being stripped of our voices,” said senior Keishay Swygert during Friday’s demonstration, part of four days of protest against St. Hope administrators. “We want our school back.”

“Other students on Wednesday bemoaned a high teacher turnover rate, a lack of textbooks, arbitrary rule-making by school leaders and an environment that does not properly prepare its students for college.”

Read more here: https://www.sacbee.com/news/local/education/article218292925.html#storylink=cpy

Categories Accountability, California, Charter Schools, Education Industry, Education Reform, Principals, Privatization, Students

Opioid Manufacturer Patents Drug to Treat Addiction His Company Created

By dianeravitch
September 12, 2018 //
19

This is true chutzpah.

Purdue Pharmaceuticals, manufacturer and marketer of opioids, has won a patent for treating opioid addiction.

The Sackler family became multibillionaires pushing opioids. They have their names on museums in many countries. Opioid addiction was responsible for 72,000 deaths last year. Altogether more than 300,000 people have died from opioid addiction.

Now they will make more millions or billions selling a treatment for the addiction they promoted.

Did you know that the Sackler family is one of the biggest donors to charter schools?

Jonathan Sackler founded CONNCan. Then 50CAN. His daughter Madeline Sackler made a fawning documentary about Eva Moskowitz called “The Lottery.”

The nefarious role of their company is described in a new book called DOPESICK: Dealers, Doctors, and the Drug Company That Addicted America. I am in the middle of reading it now. It’s shocking and maddening. Purdue encouraged doctors to prescribe Oxycontin as a painkiller with very little likelihood of addiction. They paid thousands of salesmen big bonuses to push the pills. The book tells the horrifying stories of the families destroyed by Purdue, seen the vantage point of from Appalachia.

Will families sue the Sacklers for their suffering and hold them accountable?

I wonder how it feels to know that your luxury, your homes and limousines and caviar, were purchased with so many deaths.

Do these people have no sense of shame. Do ghouls flit around their dinner tables and disturb their sleep?

Categories Accountability, Billionaires, Charter Schools, Corruption, Education Industry, Education Reform, Privatization
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