Archives for category: Education Reform
« Older Entries
Newer Entries »

New Mexico: A Pro-Public School Democrat Is Running for Governor

By dianeravitch
August 12, 2018 //
11

Democrats in New Mexico chose a strong candidate for Governor, Lujan Grisham, a member of Congress who supports teachers. She and her Republican opponent agree on two things: Dump PARCC and scrap the broken test-based teacher evaluation system.

The current Governor Susanna Martinez has been a disaster for public schools and teachers. She hired a non-educator, Hannah Skandera, who had previously worked for Jeb Bush, to impose the “Florida model” of high-stakes Testing for students and teachers and choice. The state remains at the very bottom of NAEP. Skandera’s successor has doubled down and a court injunction has blocked his efforts to penalize teachers for low scores. This in a state with staggeringly high levels of child poverty.

Politico reported on this race:

EDUCATION SPOTLIGHT ON NEW MEXICO GOVERNOR’S RACE: Poor education outcomes, low teacher pay, high unemployment rates and an active education funding lawsuit are just some of the problems facing the next governor in the Land of Enchantment.

— It’s not surprising, then, that education has become a key issue in the race for the governor’s mansion between two sitting members of Congress representing the state: Republican Rep. Steve Pearce and Democratic Rep. Michelle Lujan Grisham.

— Right off the bat, New Mexico’s next governor will become entangled in a legal battle over funding of the state’s public schools. A state district court judge ruled last month that New Mexico’s students are “caught in an inadequate system” in need of improvement — a ruling the state has appealed. As in Washington and Kansas, funding lawsuits often present yearslong challenges for state leaders, who must figure out how to boost funding for schools to the pleasure of the courts. When the parties become caught in appeals, a resolution can take even longer.

— Lujan Grisham has said that should she be become the state’s next governor, she would cut the fight short by “immediately” halting the state’s appeal of the ruling, according to local reports. “New Mexico’s public education system is broken and underfunded,” she said in a statement. Among Lujan Grisham’s campaign promises is a proposal to boost teachers’ starting salaries to $40,000 from the current $36,000.

— Pearce, meanwhile, stopped short of making such a commitment on the school funding case. “This ruling underscores the importance of my plan to reform education. The old way is broken,” Pearce said in statement to Morning Education through a spokesman.

— Among Pearce’s goals is to “diversify” the sources of education funding to make schools less reliable on the oil and gas industries. He also hopes to support an expansion of school choice, including “charter schools, magnet schools, e-schools and homeschooling,” according to his campaign website. He wants to return more “day to day management decisions to the local school districts and/or charter schools,” and institute per-pupil funding.

— Universal preschool and the funding stream for such a program have divided the candidates. Lujan Grisham has made preschool access one of her marquee issues and is proposing to fund its expansion through $285.5 million over five years from the state’s Land Grant Permanent Fund, she told the New Mexican . That fund culls fees from the extraction of natural resources from state lands. But Pearce isn’t keen on tapping into those funds and has not made preschool expansion a priority. “I’m very nervous about beginning to dip into that permanent fund until you have solutions,” Pearce told local station KRQE.

— Both candidates are in agreement on two things: teacher evaluations and PARCC. The Common-Core-aligned standardized test was created through a consortium of more than 20 states in 2010. New Mexico remains one in a handful of states to still administer it, but both Pearce and Lujan Grisham want to scrap it. “The PARCC test seems to be especially ineffective,” Pearce told KRQE. “My initial reaction is we should find a better way to measure our students.” Lujan Grisham’s education plan calls for “dropping the PARCC test in favor of less intrusive testing.”

— Both candidates have also said they would overhaul the state’s controversial teacher evaluation system. Lujan Grisham, who has the backing of teachers unions, would reform teacher evaluations “to focus on more holistic measures of progress.” Pearce said recently that after conversations with teachers, local school officials and others, it has become clear that “the current system has crushed the spirit of many talented educators and contributed to our state’s teacher shortage,” according to the AP.

Categories Accountability, Education Reform, Florida, New Mexico, Poverty, Privatization, Testing, VAM (value-added modeling)

Jan Resseger: How High-Stakes Testing is Ruining Education

By dianeravitch
August 12, 2018 //
20

In this post, Jan Resseger reminds us why Daniel Koretz’s book, The Testing Charade, is essential reading.

Read this book about the failure of NCLB and Race to the Top before you listen to Arne Duncan repeat his baseless claim that we need more testing and more of what already failed.

How has high stakes testing ruined our schools and how has this strategy, which was at the heart of No Child Left Behind, made it much more difficult to accomplish No Child Left Behind’s stated goal of reducing educational inequality and closing achievement gaps?

Here is how Daniel Koretz begins to answer that question in his 2017 book, The Testing Charade: Pretending to Make Schools Better: In 2002, No Child Left Behind “mandated that all states use the proficient standard as a target and that 100 percent of students reach that level. It imposed a short timeline for this: twelve years. It required that schools report the performance of several disadvantaged groups and it mandated that 100 percent of each of these groups had to reach the proficient standard. It required that almost all students be tested the same way and evaluated against the same performance standards. And it replaced the straight-line approach by uniform statewide targets for percent proficient, called Adequate Yearly Progress (AYP)…. The law mandated an escalating series of sanctions for schools that failed to make AYP for each reporting group.” Later, “Arne Duncan used his control over funding to increase even further the pressure to raise scores. The most important of Duncan’s changes was inducing states to tie the evaluation of individual teachers, rather than just schools, to test scores… The reforms caused much more harm than good. Ironically, in some ways they inflicted the most harm on precisely the disadvantaged students the policies were intended to help.”

Koretz poses the following question and his book sets out to answer it: “But why did the reforms fail so badly?”

I recommend Daniel Koretz’s book all the time as essential reading for anyone trying to figure out how we got to the deplorable morass that is today’s federal and state educational policy. I wish I thought more people were reading this book. Maybe people are intimidated that its author is a Harvard expert on the design and use of standardized tests. Maybe it’s the fact that the book was published by the University of Chicago Press. But I don’t see it in very many bookstores, and when I ask people if they have read it, most people tell me they intend to read it. To reassure myself that it is really worth reading, I set myself the task this past weekend of re-reading the entire book. And I found re-reading it to be extremely worthwhile.

Categories Accountability, Duncan, Arne, Education Industry, Education Reform, Failure, Fraud, NCLB (No Child Left Behind), Race to the Top, Testing

Trump and the Mob

By dianeravitch
August 11, 2018 //
39

David Drehle, a writer for the Washington Post, wrote today about Trump’s long Association with unsavory characters.

This won’t trouble Trump’s base. Nor will it trouble the Republican members of Congress who live in fear of The Don.

How did our society sink so low?

He writes:

Walter Isaacson and Evan Thomas titled their classic group portrait of Harry S. Truman’s foreign policy team, “The Wise Men.” A book about Donald Trump’s associations might be called “The Wise Guys.”

Mario Puzo would’ve been just the man to write it. Martin Scorsese could option the movie rights.

And if he’s not in prison when filming starts, former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort deserves a role. Though Manafort hasn’t been accused of Mafia membership, Smooth Paulie certainly acts the part, judging from testimony at his trial in federal court on charges of fraud and tax evasion. He has a closet full of suits worthy of John Gotti (though even the Dapper Don might have balked at an ostrich-skin windbreaker) and a maze of offshore bank accounts dense enough to addle Meyer Lansky.

When Manafort’s turncoat lieutenant Rick Gates took the stand to detail their alleged conspiracies, I was transported to the day back in 1992 when Gotti’s underboss Sammy Gravano began singing at the federal courthouse in Brooklyn. Gotti’s lawyers attacked Sammy the Bull by demanding to know how many people he’d whacked. Manafort’s team asked Gates how many affairs he’s had.

If it seems harsh to compare Manafort to a mobster, take it up with President Trump, who got the ball rolling with a tweet before the trial began. “Looking back at history, who was treated worse, [Al] Capone, legendary mob boss . . . or Paul Manafort?” Trump mused.

And the president ought to know: He has spent plenty of time in mobbed-up milieus. As many journalists have documented — the late Wayne Barrett and decorated investigator David Cay Johnston most deeply — Trump’s trail was blazed through one business after another notorious for corruption by organized crime.

Michael Cohen flipping? Opinion writer Jennifer Rubin says the Mueller investigation is looking more and more like a mafia case. (Gillian Brockell, Kate Woodsome/The Washington Post)
New York construction, for starters. In 1988, Vincent “the Fish” Cafaro of the Genovese crime family testified before a U.S. Senate committee concerning the Mafia’s control of building projects in New York. Construction unions and concrete contractors were deeply dirty, Cafaro confirmed, and four of the city’s five crime families worked cooperatively to keep it that way.

This would not have been news to Trump, whose early political mentor and personal lawyer was Roy Cohn, consigliere to such dons as Fat Tony Salerno and Carmine Galante. After Cohn guided the brash young developer through the gutters of city politics to win permits for Trump Plaza and Trump Tower, it happened that Trump elected to build primarily with concrete rather than steel. He bought the mud at inflated prices from S&A Concrete, co-owned by Cohn’s client Salerno and Paul Castellano, boss of the Gambino family.

Coincidence? Fuhgeddaboudit.

Trump moved next into the New Jersey casino business, which was every bit as clean as it sounds. State officials merely shrugged when Trump bought a piece of land from associates of Philadelphia mob boss “Little Nicky” Scarfo for roughly $500,000 more than it was worth. However, this and other ties persuaded police in Australia to block Trump’s bid to build a casino in Sydney in 1987, citing Trump’s “Mafia connections.”

His gambling interests led him into the world of boxing promotion, where Trump became chums with fight impresario Don King, a former Cleveland numbers runner. (Trump once told me that he owes his remarkable coiffure to King, who advised the future president, from personal experience, that outlandish hair is great PR) King hasn’t been convicted since the 1960s, when he did time for stomping a man to death. But investigators at the FBI and U.S. Senate concluded that his Mafia ties ran from Cleveland to New York, Las Vegas to Atlantic City. Mobsters “were looking to launder illicit cash,” wrote one sleuth. “Boxing, of all the sports, was perhaps the most accommodating laundromat, what with its international subculture of unsavory characters who play by their own rules.”

But an even more accommodating laundromat came along: luxury real estate — yet another mob-adjacent field in which the Trump name has loomed large. Because buyers of high-end properties often hide their identities, it’s impossible to say how many Russian Mafia oligarchs own Trump-branded condos. Donald Trump Jr. gave a hint in 2008: “Russians make up a pretty disproportionate cross-section of a lot of our assets.”

For instance: In 2013, federal prosecutors indicted Russian mob boss Alimzhan Tokhtakhounov and 33 others on charges related to a gambling ring operating from two Trump Tower condos that allegedly laundered more than $100 million. A few months later, the same Mr. Tokhtakhounov, a fugitive from U.S. justice, was seen on the red carpet at Trump’s Miss Universe pageant in Moscow.

Obviously, not everyone in these industries is corrupt, and if Donald Trump spent four decades rubbing elbows with wiseguys and never got dirty, he has nothing to worry about from special counsel Robert S. Mueller III. But does he look unworried to you?

Categories Education Reform

Mississippi: Southern Poverty Law Center Sues Mississippi for Diverting Funds from District Schools to Charter Schools

By dianeravitch
August 11, 2018 //
14

This is very good news.

The Southern Poverty Law Center is one of the most respected civil rights groups in the nation. It is suing the state of Mississippi for diverting funding from district schools to charter schools. SPLC argues that doing this violates the State Constitution, which explicitly says that the funding allocated to each district is to be used solely for its schools. The charter schools are not part of the district. They should not be funded in any way by taking money from the district. The public schools of Mississippi are already woefully underfunded, and the Governor and Legislature have fought efforts to increase funding.

This litigation could have national significance.

Here are a few excerpts.

“The question presented by this case is an issue of first impression. Its determination implicates constitutional issues of enormous importance: the Legislature’s power to interfere with local control of public education, and the Constitution’s restrictions on school funding. The local funding for Mississippi’s second- largest school district will be decided by this case. The Court would benefit from the thorough examination that oral argument provides….”

“Section 206 of the Mississippi Constitution allows a school district to levy an ad valorem tax, and it “clearly states that the purpose of the tax is to maintain the levying school district’s schools.” Pascagoula Sch. Dist. v. Tucker, 91 So. 3d 598, 605 (Miss. 2012). A charter school operates as its own school district. Miss. Code Ann. § 37-28-39. Yet Section 37-28-55(2) of the Mississippi Code requires a school district to transfer ad valorem revenue from its budget to charter schools that are not part of the tax-levying school district.

This case is not about whether charter schools are good or bad. This case is also not about whether the Legislature has the authority to allow charter schools in Mississippi. The Legislature indisputably has that authority.

This appeal presents a single constitutional question — the same question that the Supreme Court addressed in Tucker: “[w]hen Section 206 of the Mississippi Constitution says the purpose of the local school district tax is to maintain ‘its schools,’ can the Legislature force a district to divide its maintenance tax levy with other districts?” Tucker, 91 So. 3d at 602.

STATEMENT OF ASSIGNMENT

Rule 16(d) of the Mississippi Rules of Appellate Procedure provides three reasons why the Supreme Court should retain this case.

First, the constitutionality of Section 37-28-55(2) is “a major question of first impression,” as provided by Rule 16(d)(1).

Second, Section 37-28-55(2) has compelled the Jackson Public Schools District to transfer millions of local ad valorem tax dollars to charter schools that are not part of the district. The constitutionality of this statute is a “fundamental and urgent issue[ ] of
broad public importance requiring prompt or ultimate determination by the Supreme Court,” as provided by Rule 16(d)(2).

Third, this case presents “substantial constitutional questions as to the validity of a statute,” as provided by Rule 16(d)(3).

STATEMENT OF THE CASE I. Factual Background.

The Charter Schools Act was enacted in 2013. Miss. Code Ann. § 37-28-1, et seq. Charter schools are approved by the Mississippi Charter School Authorizer Board, and are exempt from rules, regulations, policies, and procedures established by the State Board of Education, the State Department of Education, and the school district in which the charter school is geographically located. Miss. Code Ann. § 37-28-7; Miss. Code Ann. § 37-28-45(3),(5). In 2015, two charter schools opened within the geographic boundaries of the Jackson Public School District (“JPS”). In 2016 and 2018, two more charter schools opened within JPS’s geographic boundaries. In 2018, a charter school also opened within the geographic boundaries of the Clarksdale Municipal School District.

The Parents in this case live with their children in Jackson. They own their homes, and they pay ad valorem taxes levied by JPS under Section 206 of the Constitution. They all have children enrolled in JPS. R. at 114-15, R.E. at 16-17 (First Amended Complaint at ¶¶11-15). And they want for their children what most parents want for their child: the best public education that the law allows.
Since 2015, these Parents’ children have attended chronically underfunded schools that have lost millions in ad valorem tax revenue to charter schools. In Mississippi, charter schools receive funding through two revenue streams: one from the State, and one from the school district within whose geographic boundaries the charter school is located. The State provides most of a charter school’s funding through the Mississippi Adequate Education Program. A smaller portion of a charter school’s funding comes from the school district where the charter school is located. When a student enrolls in a charter school, the school district where the student resides sends a pro rata portion of its ad valorem revenue to the charter school. Miss. Code Ann. § 37- 28-55(2) (hereinafter the “Local Tax Transfer Statute”).

This appeal does not concern charter school revenue from the State. The Parents expressly waive their challenge related to the state funding stream. This appeal is only about the ad valorem revenue levied by a school district under Section 206.

In Jackson, where the Parents’ children attend school, the school district’s losses of ad valorem revenue are accelerating. During the 2015-16 school year, the Local Tax Transfer Statute cost JPS schoolchildren approximately $561,000 in district ad valorem revenue. R. at 113, R.E. at 15 (First Amended Complaint at ¶5). Just two years later, during the 2017-18 school year, JPS schoolchildren lost more than $2.5 million through diverted ad valorem revenue. Exhibit A (JPS 2017-18 Charter School Payment).1 To date, in only three years, JPS schoolchildren have lost more than $4.5 million of the school district’s ad valorem funds….”

“SUMMARY OF THE ARGUMENT

“Section 206 of the Mississippi Constitution allows a school district to levy an ad valorem tax “to maintain its schools.” In 2012, this Court held that “Section 206 clearly states that the purpose of the tax is to maintain the levying school district’s schools.” Pascagoula Sch. Dist. v. Tucker, 91 So. 3d 598, 605 (Miss. 2012). Charter schools are not part of the school district where they are located. Miss. Code Ann. § 37-28-45(3) (“Although a charter school is geographically located within the boundaries of a particular school district and enrolls students who reside within the school district, the charter school may not be considered a school within that district under the purview of the school district’s school board.”). Because charter schools are not part of the school district levying the ad valorem tax, Section 206 forbids the school district from transferring ad valorem revenue to charter schools. Therefore, the statute requiring the transfer of district ad valorem revenue to charter schools violates Section 206 and is unconstitutional.”

Charter schools across the nation are diverting funds from local district schools, whose boards have no authority over the charters, which are independent of the district.

Why should 90% of children suffer budget cuts so that 10% of the children may attend a charter school?

That is why this case might have national implications and encourage activists to fight to keep their taxes devoted to their district schools.

Read the entire brief here.

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Education Reform, Funding, Mississippi

Jan Resseger: Did Students in Chicago Die Because of Arne Duncan’s School Closing Program?

By dianeravitch
August 11, 2018 //
20

In 2004,Arne Duncan, the new Superintendent of the Chicago public schools announced his radical plan to turn around the entire school system. He called it Renaissance 2010. The plan involved closing over 80 public schools with low test scores and replacing them with 100 shiny new charter schools. Most studies have found little or no impact on test scores.

Now, writes Jan Resseger, it is possible to see the damage done by Renaissance to families and communities.

Renaissance 2010 was a tragedy.

Resseger writes:

“On Tuesday evening’s PBS NewsHour, I was surprised as I listened to an interview about the tragic gun violence in Chicago last weekend to hear the speaker name public high school closures as among the causes. Certainly exploding economic inequality, poverty, lack of jobs, the presence of street gangs, and other structural factors are contributing to this long, hot summer in Chicago. But Lance Williams, a professor at Northeastern Illinois University, blamed Renaissance 2010, a now-20-year-old charter school expansion program, for today’s violence.

“Professor Williams expressed particular concern about the phase out of neighborhood high schools: “(Y)ou’re seeing the violence on the West Side and the South Sides of Chicago because, about 20 years ago, in the early 2000s, the city of Chicago implemented some very, very bad public policy. The most damaging of those policies was the policy of Renaissance 2010, when Chicago basically privatized, through charter schools, neighborhood public elementary and high schools. It became a serious problem, because many of the high schools and communities that had long traditions of street organizations caused young African-American males to be afraid to leave out of their communities, going to new schools throughout the city of Chicago. So, basically, from the early 2000s, too many young Afrcan-American males haven’t been going to school, meaning that they don’t have life prospects. They can’t get jobs. They’re self-medicated to deal with the stress in their community. And it’s driving a lot of the violence.”

“The other speaker in the NewsHour‘s interview, Tamar Manasseh, runs a volunteer organization providing community meals at the corner of Chicago’s 75th Street and South Stewart Avenue—meals that provide food, and meals that try to build community to compensate for the destruction of community institutions. Ms. Manasseh explained: “And it’s not just about the kids. It’s about the wellness of the entire community… There are 100 other organizations just like me who are out here every day in their own way making a contribution to making communities better… Englewood will not have any public schools in the fall. And these kids that Professor Williams spoke of, they will have no options of a public high school in Englewood.”

“The research literature has documented that in Chicago, Portfolio School Reform and the subsequent expansion of school choice has been undermining public schools, which have previously been central institutions binding communities together. This PBS NewsHour interview is the first I’ve seen in the mainstream press to connect the dots between the expansion of school choice and the shredding of the fabric of Chicago’s neighborhoods.”

In 2013, Mayor Rahm Emanuel compounded the harm done to Chicago’s black communities by closing 50 schools in one day.

“Here is how the University of Chicago’s Consortium on School Research describes the impact of the 2013 public school closures on Chicago’s South and West Sides: “When the closures took place at the end of the 2012-13 school year, nearly 12,000 students were attending the 47 elementary schools that closed that year, close to 17,000 students were attending the 48 designated welcoming schools, and around 1,100 staff were employed in the closed schools.” The report continues: “Our findings show that the reality of school closures was much more complex than policymakers anticipated…. Interviews with affected students and staff revealed major challenges with logistics, relationships and school culture… Closed school staff and students came into welcoming schools grieving and, in some cases, resentful that their schools closed while other schools stayed open. Welcoming school staff said they were not adequately supported to serve the new population and to address resulting divisions. Furthermore, leaders did not know what it took to be a successful welcoming school… Staff and students said that it took a long period of time to build new school cultures and feel like a cohesive community.”

“The Consortium on School Research continues: “When schools closed, it severed the longstanding social connections that families and staff had with their schools and with one another, resulting in a period of mourning… The intensity of the feelings of loss were amplified in cases where schools had been open for decades, with generations of families attending the same neighborhood school. Losing their closed schools was not easy and the majority of interviewees spoke about the difficulty they had integrating and socializing into the welcoming schools.” “Even though welcoming school staff and students did not lose their schools per se, many also expressed feelings of loss because incorporating a large number of new students required adjustments… Creating strong relationships and building trust in welcoming schools after schools closed was difficult.. Displaced staff and students, who had just lost their schools, had to go into unfamiliar school environments and start anew. Welcoming school communities also did not want to lose or change the way their schools were previously.”

Please read the post.

Nothing good came of Renaissance 2010, other than to boost Arne Duncan’s reputation as a “Reformer” who was unafraid to close schools, shred communities, and trample on the lives of black people.

Categories Charter Schools, Chicago, Closing schools, Disruption, Duncan, Arne, Education Reform

Phyllis Bush: A Fork in the Road

By dianeravitch
August 10, 2018 //
7

Phyllis Bush, our leading resistance fighter in Indiana, is battling cancer.

This is her latest update.

She’s a champion and an exemplar of courage.

Categories Education Reform

A Fast Track to Citizenship: Marry Donald Trump or Be Parents of His Wife

By dianeravitch
August 10, 2018 //
10

From today’s Washington Post:

THE BIG IDEA: Donald Trump is the do-as-I-say, not-as-I-do president. For years, he ripped Barack Obama for taking summer vacations to Martha’s Vineyard and told voters he’d be too busy governing to golf if he got elected. On Thursday, Trump hit the links again on his 11-day summer vacation in New Jersey.

As he did so, his Slovenian in-laws attended a naturalization ceremony in Manhattan. Viktor and Amalija Knavs were able to become U.S. citizens because their daughter, Melania, sponsored them. Trump decries this form of family reunification and has moved aggressively to block other parents from following their children to America.

It’s part of the president’s campaign to reduce the flow of illegal and legal immigrants, even though three of his son Barron’s four grandparents came to this country via what he denigrates as “chain migration.”

The White House declined to answer questions about whether this is hypocritical. “They are not part of the administration,” Stephanie Grisham, a spokeswoman for the first lady, said of the Knavses.

But the Trump team has also declined to answer specific questions about Melania’s pathway to citizenship. She got a green card in 2001, five years after arriving in the states to model and one year after she started dating the celebrity billionaire, through a program that was intended to help academic geniuses, corporate executives, Olympic athletes and Oscar-winning actors. “The year she got her legal residency, only five people from Slovenia received green cards under the EB-1 program,” David Nakamura notes.

In August 2016, The Donald announced to great fanfare that his wife would hold a news conference “over the next couple of weeks” to reply to accusations that she violated immigration laws when she first arrived. Melania, he promised, would offer proof that “she came in totally legally.”

Like the tax returns Trump also pledged to release, it never materialized.

There’s nothing wrong with golfing, vacationing or entering the U.S. through legal channels, but yesterday brought another blow to Trump’s credibility as a messenger on the immigration issue.

Categories Education Reform

Los Angeles: What Happened after The Los Angeles Times Published the Test-Based Ratings of Thousands of Teachers

By dianeravitch
August 10, 2018 //
66

Chalkbeat reports on what happened eight years after the Los Angeles Times paid to create a value-added, test-based rating system to evaluate teachers and then published their ratings online.

The bottom line: The rich got richer, and the poor got poorer. And some teachers left teaching.

New research suggests that’s what happened next — but only for certain families.

Publishing the scores meant already high-achieving students were assigned to the classrooms of higher-rated teachers the next year, the study found. That could be because affluent or well-connected parents were able to pull strings to get their kids assigned to those top teachers, or because those teachers pushed to teach the highest-scoring students.

In other words, the academically rich got even richer — an unintended consequence of what could be considered a journalistic experiment in school reform.

“You shine a light on people who are underperforming and the hope is they improve,” said Jonah Rockoff, a professor at Columbia University who has studied these “value-added” measures. “But when you increase transparency, you may actually exacerbate inequality.”

That analysis is one of a number of studies to examine the lasting effects of the L.A. Times’ decision to publish those ratings eight years ago. Together, the results offer a new way of understanding a significant moment in the national debate over how to improve education, when bad teachers were seen as a central problem and more rigorous evaluations as a key solution.

The latest study, by Peter Bergman and Matthew Hill and published last month in the peer-reviewed journal Economics of Education Review, found that the publication of the ratings caused a one-year spike in teacher turnover. That’s not entirely surprising, considering many teachers felt attacked by the public airing of their ratings.

“Guilty as charged,” wrote one teacher with a low rating. “I am proud to be ‘less effective’ than some of my peers because I chose to teach to the emotional and academic needs of my students. In the future it seems I am being asked to put my public image first.”

But a separate study, by Nolan Pope at the University of Maryland, finds the publication of the ratings may have had some positive effects on students, perhaps by encouraging schools to better support struggling teachers.

Pope’s research showed that Los Angeles teachers’ performance, as measured by their value-added scores, improved after their scores were published. The effects were biggest for the teachers whose initial scores were lowest, and there was no evidence that the improvement was due to “teaching to the test.”

“These results suggest the public release of teacher ratings could raise the performance of low-rated teachers,” Pope concluded.

The Los Angeles Times sued to get additional data so it could rank and rate even more teachers based on test scores, but a three-judge appellate court turned the newspaper down. The public did not have a right to know the ratings of individual teachers, the court said.

The distinguished mathematician John Ewing wrote an important paper in the journal of the American Mathematical Society called “Mathematical Intimidation,” in which he thoroughly debunked the Los Angeles Times ratings. He later debunked the “crisis in education” in a speech at Brown University.

The New York Post followed the lead of the Los Angeles Times and published the ratings for thousands of New York City teachers. The Rupert Murdoch-owned tabloid identified what it called “the worst teacher” in the city and hounded her, publishing her photo and banging on her apartment door in search of an interview with this terrible teacher.

But another look and it turned out that this teacher taught new immigrant students who cycled in and out of her class all year long. The ratings were meaningless.

Gary Rubinstein reviewed the city’s ratings and found them to be incomprehensible. A teacher might be highly effective in math and ineffective in reading, or vice versa, leaving the choice of which half of him/her should be fired.*

The review of the Los Angeles ratings omitted one consequence that mattered, at least to his family and friends: Roberto Riguelas, a teacher of fifth grade in a rough neighborhood, got a mediocre rating and jumped off a bridge, committing suicide.

Arne Duncan still praises the “courage” of the Los Angeles Times for publicizing the ratings of teachers, no matter how many of those ratings were erroneous and hurtful.

*Here are Gary Rubinstein’s posts about the absurdity of New York City’s value-added ratings. Blog #2 is the most important:

Part I
https://garyrubinstein.wordpress.com/2012/02/26/analyzing-released-nyc-value-added-data-part-1/

Part II
https://garyrubinstein.wordpress.com/2012/02/28/analyzing-released-nyc-value-added-data-part-2/

Part III
https://garyrubinstein.wordpress.com/2012/03/06/analyzing-released-nyc-value-added-data-part-iii/

Part IV
https://garyrubinstein.wordpress.com/2012/03/10/analyzing-released-nyc-value-added-data-part-4/

Part V
https://garyrubinstein.wordpress.com/2012/03/30/analyzing-released-nyc-value-added-data-part-5/

Part VI
https://garyrubinstein.wordpress.com/2012/09/15/analyzing-released-nyc-value-added-data-part-6/

Categories Duncan, Arne, Education Reform, Los Angeles, Teacher Evaluations

California: How a Charter School Will Harm One Small Public School

By dianeravitch
August 10, 2018 //
10

California is a state where charters have gone wild.

Rick Hennessy, the part time superintendent of the small Twain Harte School district responds to parents who want to secede to create their own charter school that their action will damage the education of those left behind.


if the charter school is approved, the district will lose $250,000 in the 2019-20 school year and would have to look at the following budget cuts:

Eliminate one full time teacher

Eliminate all art instruction

Eliminate all music instruction

Eliminate the librarian

Eliminate all class trips

Eliminate school counselor

Eliminate purchases of classroom library books

Eliminate Safe School Ambassador

Eliminate Treehouse Program (addresses social adjustment for grades K-3)

The proposed charter school would also have a segregative impact, he writes.

Furthermore, the charter’s petition does not include providing lunches or transportation for their students. Any charter school petition is supposed to recruit or attract the same socio-economic student group that is enrolled in the regular district. Over 60 percent of Twain Harte students ride the bus as well as receive a free or reduced lunch. It seems that the charter petition is targeting middle class or higher families that can provide transportation up the hill; which would seem to rule out most of our current students.

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

Host A Screening Of Backpack Full Of Cash

By dianeravitch
August 9, 2018 //
15

 

bp1bp2

bp3

Have you been thinking about hosting a screening of Backpack?

We’re making it easy for you by offering a substantial discount if you book by August 31st!

For this month only, a screening where you don’t charge admission is $550 (plus shipping) or, if you do charge for entry, it’s $400 (plus 50% of the profits that you earn from ticket sales.)

Backpack explores the impact of market-based education reforms (like charter schools, vouchers, and testing) on public schools and the most vulnerable students who rely on them.

This discounted rate is a fantastic opportunity to host a screening at the start of the school year — and to kickstart discussions about education in advance of the all-important November elections!

Click here to request info (or respond to this email) and we’ll get back to you right away.

bp3

Teachers parents, voters, and other attendees all had strong responses to Backpack, saying that the film’s message made them feel motivated and ready to fight for public education.

Thank you to our hosts in Texas this summer, and to everyone who came out to see the film!

Our new version of Backpack will include the same great movie, but now with Spanish subtitles — as well as English subtitles, closed captions, and Scene Selection (so you can jump right to a specific section of the film).

Our guides and marketing materials — such as the Discussion Guideand Screening Handbook — will also be coming out in Spanish.

If you’re interested, go to our website and add a note in “Tell Us More,” requesting the new DVD or BluRay with Spanish subtitles.
Are you ready to host a screening of Backpack Full of Cash and a community discussion?
SIGN UP TO HOST A SCREENING
DONATE NOW
Categories Education Reform
« Older Entries
Newer Entries »