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California: Report Finds Charters Neglect Local Control Obligations

By dianeravitch
August 2, 2018 //
11

For Immediate Release

August 1, 2018

Contact:
Duc Luu, Communications Manager, Public Advocates, 857-373-9118; dluu@publicadvocates.org
Rigel Spencer Massaro, Senior Staff Attorney, Public Advocates, 707-761-5672, rmassaro@publicadvocates.org

New Report Uncovers Systemic Failure by California Charter Schools
to Meet Local Control Obligations

SAN FRANCISCO—A new report by Public Advocates Inc. uncovers a massive failure on the part of California charter schools to be transparent about how they spend millions of taxpayer dollars to benefit high need students, as required by state law. The report also reveals disturbing trends about the availability of public documents and the ability of parents to exercise their legal rights to participate in charter school spending decisions as promised by California’s Local Control Funding Formula (LCFF) law. The report, which is the first systematic analysis of charter school Local Control Accountability Plans (LCAPs) found critical financial and engagement information missing, unavailable, or incomplete at a shocking number of charter schools.

For example, not a single school analyzed for this report properly documented how it was increasing or improving services for high need students, services for which those charter schools received $48.6 million this past year. Even more concerning, two-thirds of that amount was completely unaccounted for. Statewide, charters receive over $900 million annually to increase or improve services for high need students.

“Charter schools are part of California’s public education system. They receive $3.4 billion in public dollars every year and they need to be held accountable for how they spend those funds, just like every other school,” said Senior Staff Attorney Rigel Spencer Massaro.

Public Advocates looked for LCAPs at 70 schools and systematically examined 43 schools in Oakland, Sacramento, Richmond, Los Angeles, and San Jose which had published LCAPs for the 2017-2018 school year. The report found that:

One-third of all charter schools examined had no LCAP online. These public documents were still missing after email requests to the school, its authorizer, and the County Office of Education
More than two-thirds of the state funds generated by high need students—over $30 million—were unaccounted for; of the $48.6 million these schools received specifically for high need students in 2017-2018, there was only documentation for $15.8 million in planned spending
Only 21% clearly measured how they engaged parents in school decision-making, and only 37% described how community engagement impacted their planning process
91% of charter schools examined serving 15% or more English learners did not post their LCAPs in a language other than English
Of the 12 Charter Management Organizations examined in the report and that manage 123 charter schools in multiple cities, 100% adopt LCAPs at a single meeting in a single location, with minimal public comment

Assemblymember Patrick O’Donnell, chair of the Assembly Education Committee, commented, “Public Advocates’ newly released report, Keeping the Promise of LCFF in Charter Schools, raises concerns about transparency and accountability in charter schools. The fact that Public Advocates could not get copies of some charter schools’ LCAPs despite multiple requests is beyond troubling. Parents and local communities cannot ensure that student achievement and needs are addressed if the LCAPs are not easily available. The State Legislature should close a loophole requiring traditional public schools, but not charter schools, to post LCAPs on a school’s website.”

Community engagement and transparency are pillars of California’s groundbreaking Local Control Funding Formula law and every parent has a right to know and participate in how their school is spending money.

Abadesa Rolon, a charter school parent in Richmond commented, “We need our charter schools to complete their LCAPs so parents can understand the goals, actions, progress and funding that support student success. I understand how my school is spending S&C funds, but that’s because I’ve asked a lot of questions. Other parents don’t know, because this information isn’t in our school’s LCAP.”

The report calls for expert oversight and improved support over charter school LCAPs, especially when it comes to transparency for funds designated to improve services for high need students. The report also recommends legislation that would hold charter schools to similar standards of transparency and engagement as public schools.

Click here for a copy of the report
Click here for a list of the charter schools examined for this report

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Categories Accountability, California, Charter Schools, Education Reform

Minnesota: Charter Advocates Defend Racial Segregation

By dianeravitch
August 2, 2018 //
19

Recently, civil rights litigators persuaded the Minnesota Supreme Court to review school segregation in the state.

Charter advocates, however, are troubled by the legal review of segregation. They think it is worth preserving. Minneapolis has several distinctly segregated charter schools, catering to a single race or ethnic group. They could have made the same arguments in 1896, when Plessy v. Ferguson upheld the principle of “separate but equal” or in 1954, in defense of the 17 states that defended school segregation.

Little wonder that several of Trump’s nominees for federal judgeships have refused to say whether the Brown decision was rightly decided.

Categories Education Reform, Segregation

Valerie Strauss on Study Showing that Private Schools Are Not Better Than Public Schools

By dianeravitch
August 2, 2018 //
27

On July 13, I posted the abstract from the study referenced here, showing that private schools are not better than public schools when demographic variables are controlled. If you have a school composed of kids from rich and educated families, your school will get higher test scores than a school that is open to all students.

Valerie Strauss has an extended discussion of the study here.She interviewed one of the study’s authors.

University of Virginia researchers who looked at data from more than 1,000 students found that all of the advantages supposedly conferred by private education evaporate when socio-demographic characteristics are factored in. There was also no evidence found to suggest that low-income children or children enrolled in urban schools benefit more from private school enrollment.

The results confirm what earlier research found but are especially important amid a movement to privatize public education — encouraged by Education Secretary Betsy DeVos — based in part on the faulty assumption that public schools are inferior to private ones.

DeVos has called traditional public schools a “dead end” and long supported the expansion of voucher and similar programs that use public money for private and religious school education. According to the National Conference of State Legislatures, 27 states and the District of Columbia have policies allowing public money to be used for private education through school vouchers, scholarship tax credits and education savings grants.

Related: [There is a movement to privatize public education in America. Here’s how far it has gotten.]

The new study was conducted by Robert C. Pianta, dean of U-Va.’s Curry School of Education and a professor of education and psychology, and Arya Ansari, a postdoctoral research associate at U-Va.’s Center for Advanced Study for Teaching and Learning.

“You only need to control for family income and there’s no advantage,” Pianta said in an interview. “So when you first look, without controlling for anything, the kids who go to private schools are far and away outperforming the public school kids. And as soon as you control for family income and parents’ education level, that difference is eliminated completely.”

Kids who come from homes with higher incomes and parental education achievement offer young children — from birth through age 5 — educational resources and stimulation that other children don’t get. These conditions presumably carry on through the school years, Pianta said…

The Pianta-Ansari study examined not only academic achievement, “which has been the sole focus of all evaluations of private schooling reported to date, but also students’ social adjustment, attitudes and motivation, and even risky behavior, all of which one assumes might be associated with private school education, given studies demonstrating schooling effects on such factors.” It said:

“In short, despite the frequent and pronounced arguments in favor of the use of vouchers or other mechanisms to support enrollment in private schools as a solution for vulnerable children and families attending local or neighborhood schools, the present study found no evidence that private schools, net of family background (particularly income), are more effective for promoting student success.”

And it says this:

“In sum, we find no evidence for policies that would support widespread enrollment in private schools, as a group, as a solution for achievement gaps associated with income or race. In most discussions of such gaps and educational opportunities, it is assumed that poor children attend poor quality schools, and that their families, given resources and flexibility, could choose among the existing supply of private schools to select and then enroll their children in a school that is more effective and a better match for their student’s needs. It is not at all clear that this logic holds in the real world of a limited supply of effective schools (both private and public) and the indication that once one accounts for family background, the existing supply of heterogeneous private schools (from which parents select) does not result in a superior education (even for higher income students).”

Pianta and Ansari note in the study that previous research on the impact of school voucher programs “cast doubt on any clear conclusion that private schools are superior in producing student performance.”

Valerie goes on to refer to an important study by Christopher and Sarah Lubienski:

A 2013 book, “The Public School Advantage,” by Christopher A. Lubienski and Sarah Theule Lubienski, describes the results of a look at two huge data sets of student mathematics performance, that found public school students outperform private school ones when adjusted for demographics.

Categories Education Reform, Research, Supporting public schools

Strangest Story of All: Conspiracy Theories and Q

By dianeravitch
August 1, 2018 //
70

I hope this Washington Post story is not behind a pay wall. I will post chunks of opt, but some consists of photos and tweets. You should buy a subscription and read this portrait of madness.


The thread invited “requests to Q,” an anonymous user claiming to be a government agent with top security clearance, waging war against the so-called deep state in service to the 45th president. “Q” feeds disciples, or “bakers,” scraps of intelligence, or “bread crumbs,” that they scramble to bake into an understanding of the “storm” — the community’s term, drawn from Trump’s cryptic reference last year to “the calm before the storm” — for the president’s final conquest over elites, globalists and deep-state saboteurs.

What Tuesday’s rally in Tampa made apparent is that devotees of these falsehoods — some of which are specific to faith in the president, others garden-variety nonsense with racist and anti-Semitic undertones — don’t just exist in the far reaches of the Web.

Believers in “QAnon,” as the conspiracy theory is known, were front and center at the Florida State Fairgrounds Expo Hall, where Trump came to stump for Republican candidates. As the president spoke, a sign rose from the audience. “We are Q,” it read. Another poster displayed text arranged in a “Q” pattern: “Where we go one we go all.”

The symbol appeared on clothing, too. A man and a woman wore matching white T-shirts with the YouTube logo encircled in a blue “Q.” The video-sharing website came under criticism this week for unwittingly becoming a platform for baseless claims, first promoted on Twitter and Reddit by QAnon believers, that certain Hollywood celebrities are pedophiles. A search for the name of one of those celebrities on Monday returned videos purporting to show his victims sharing their stories.

Audience members at a Trump rally on July 31 in Tampa wear T-shirts referring to the “QAnon” conspiracy theory. (The Washington Post)
The prominence of the “Q” symbol turned parts of the audience into a tableau of delusion and paranoia — and offered evidence that QAnon, an outgrowth of the #Pizzagate conspiracy theory that led a gunman to open fire in a D.C. restaurant last year, has leaped from Internet message boards to the president’s “Make America Great Again” tour through America.

“Pray Trump mentions Q!” one user wrote on 8chan. He didn’t need to. As hazy corners of the Internet buzzed about the president’s speech, his appearance became a real-life show of force for the community that has mostly operated behind the veil of anonymity on subreddits.

Trump himself has at times been a purveyor of conspiracy theories, most notably in refusing for years to back down from his false claim that Barack Obama was not born in the United States. He also asserted without evidence that Obama had wiretapped Trump Tower, peddled the debunked idea that millions of illegal votes cost him the popular vote and associated the father of Republican Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas with the assassin who shot John F. Kennedy.

But viewing their message boards, it’s clear that QAnon crosses a new frontier. In the black hole of conspiracy in which “Q” has plunged its followers, Trump only feigned collusion to create a pretense for the hiring of special counsel Robert S. Mueller III, who is actually working as a “white hat,” or hero, to expose the Democrats. Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton and George Soros are planning a coup — and traffic children in their spare time. J.P. Morgan, the American financier, sank the Titanic.

In the world in which QAnon believers live, Trump’s detractors, such as Republican Sen. John McCain of Arizona and Hillary Clinton aide Huma Abedin, wear ankle monitors that track their whereabouts. Press reports are dismissed as “Operation Mockingbird,” the name given to the alleged midcentury infiltration of the American media by the CIA. The Illuminati looms large in QAnon, as do the Rothschilds, a wealthy Jewish family vilified by the conspiracy theorists as the leaders of a satanic cult. Among the world leaders wise to satanic influences, the theory holds, is Russian President Vladimir Putin.

QAnon flirts with eschatology, fascist philosophy and the filmmaking of Francis Ford Coppola. Adherents believe a “Great Awakening” will precede the final storm foretold by Trump. Once they make sense of the information drip-fed to them by “Q,” they will usher in a Christian revival presaging total victory.

The implication is that resolving the clues left by “Q” would not just explain Trump’s planned countercoup. It would also explain the whole universe.

When “Q” is absent for long stretches of time, followers take note.

“Please tell me where to go,” one wrote last month. “I feel lost without Q.”

Some big names have bought into the fantasy. Roseanne Barr, the disgraced star of the canceled ABC revival that bore her name, has posted messages on Twitter that appear to endorse the QAnon worldview, fixating on child sex abuse. She has sought to make contact with “Q” on social media and has retweeted messages summarizing the philosophy built around the online persona. Among QAnon’s promoters are also Curt Schilling, the former Boston Red Sox pitcher, and Cheryl Sullenger, the antiabortion activist.

Categories Education Reform

LeBron James Is Proud That He Opened a Public School, not a Charter School or a Private School

By dianeravitch
August 1, 2018 //
27

LeBron James could have followed the well-worn path of other celebrities by putting money into a charter school (e.g., Andre Agassi, whose Las Vegas charter school was so bad that it was handed off to a New York City charter operator).

But, no, he partnered with the Akron public schools to open a public school.

Good on LeBron!

Read here. Or here for the transcript.

View the video, where he says: “We literally have a school. It’s not a charter school, it’s not a private school, it’s a real-life school in my hometown. And this is pretty cool.”

The kids in his schools will have lots of wraparound services and, if they graduate, free college.

LeBron is giving back to the schools that made his success possible. He knows exactly what he is doing.

LeBron is creating a model of what a public school can be if it is well funded.

Categories Education Reform, Ohio, Supporting public schools

Douglas Harris: A Response to Critics of the 2015 New Orleans Study

By dianeravitch
August 1, 2018 //
16

Douglas Harris of the Education Research Alliance at Tulane University responds here to critics of the 2015 study of New Orleans in which he was the lead researcher. Its findings were the same as his 2018 study.

He summarizes and links to the divergent views about the New Orleans’ adoption of market-driven reforms.

The school system before Katrina was corrupt and dysfunctional. After the hurricane in 2005, the state stepped in to turn most schools into privately managed charters.

He writes:

“In a study I conducted with Matthew Larsen, we found that the city’s test scores rose dramatically because of the post-Katrina reforms. Even the most pessimistic estimates suggest that the reforms significantly increased scores (and probably high school graduation rates and college entry) and more than alternative policies and programs would have. These achievement gains also occurred across the board. In this respect, low-income students were not hurt. They benefited academically.

“That being said, some of the rhetoric of reform supporters has gone overboard. There are some real issues and questions, just not the ones that these critics have set their sights on.

“For example, though disadvantaged students benefited, they seem to have benefited less than other groups. Early on, as this entirely new type of system was being put in place, there were real horror stories about how special education students and others were suspended and expelled at high rates. Under pressure from community groups, state and local leaders took several steps to address the problem, yet it remains unclear whether the problems are solved.

“Critics are concerned that schools under the reforms are too focused on test scores. This is a national concern as well, but the intensity of test-based accountability in New Orleans is even stronger and may reduce focus on other important educational goals like creativity and local cultural knowledge. In the coming years, we’ll get a better sense of the real results by looking at college and beyond.

“One potential weakness of a system of autonomous schools like the New Orleans model is that disadvantaged students can more easily fall between the cracks. With neighborhood attendance zones, a specific school is responsible for each student. With school choice, tens of thousands of students are in the hands of one or two district staff people. And there are signs that high school dropouts are being under-reported.

“Finally, whatever lessons we might draw from New Orleans may be exclusive to New Orleans. Our student outcomes had nowhere to go but up. New Orleans also saw a massive influx of federal and philanthropic funding and skilled people from across the country that other cities are unlikely to experience. Other districts should look to New Orleans, but tread carefully.“

If only the professional Reformers heeded Harris’ words of caution. You can be sure they will use his New Orleans study to tout the advantages of privatization.

For example, David Leonhardt did not write two columns in the New York Times to report the findings and cautions that Harris here reports, but to tout the wonders of charters.

Now that Harris has won $10 million from the DeVos’ Department of Education to establish a National Center for Research on School Choice, perhaps he can help shine a light on how School Choice has worked in Detroit and Milwaukee. Perhaps he can persuade the professional Reformers that the neediest kids are the ones least likely to benefit and most likely, as he put it, to “fall between the cracks.” Then, they might drop their false narrative about “saving poor kids from failing schools.” But that may be too much to hope for.

Categories Charter Schools, Corporate Reformers, Education Industry, Education Reform, New Orleans, Privatization

New York Times Editorial Board: Trump Plans to Give Another $100 Billion in Tax Cuts to Richest

By dianeravitch
July 31, 2018 //
42

This editorial is in the “New York Times.”

Somehow I have a mental image of pigs feeding at a trough. Maybe it’s an old Thomas Nast cartoon.


It seems that last year’s $1.5 trillion tax-cut package, despite heavily favoring affluent investors and corporate titans over workers of modest means, was insufficiently generous to the wealthy to satisfy certain members of the Trump administration. So now Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin offers an exciting plan to award an additional $100 billion tax cut to the richest Americans.

Specifically, Mr. Mnuchin has directed his department to explore allowing investors to take inflation into account when calculating their capital gains tax bill. (Instead of determining how much value a stock had gained by subtracting its selling price from its original purchase price, investors would first adjust the purchase price to reflect what it would be in inflation-adjusted dollars.) Fans of the move argue that it would benefit the wide swath of middle-class Americans who own stocks, along with all those older Americans whose homes have appreciated in value over the decades. And, indeed, many middle-class Americans could wind up with a sliver of savings. But not all investors are equal. Independent analyses say that a whopping 97 percent of the savings from Mr. Mnuchin’s plan would go to the highest 10 percent of income earners. (For the severely math challenged, that would leave a paltry 3 percent to be divvied up by the remaining 90 percent of the country.) Two-thirds of all savings would go to the top 0.1 percent of income earners.

So in rough dollar terms, the administration is looking to hand $66 billion-plus to the ultrarich like — just to name a few — Mr. Mnuchin, who did very, very well during his years at Goldman Sachs (and already has a net worth estimated at $252 million); Wilbur Ross, the loaded secretary of commerce (estimated net worth: $506.5 million); Betsy DeVos, the even richer secretary of education (about $1.1 billion); and, of course, the extended Trump-Kushner clan. (To be sure, Ivanka Trump could use a financial pick-me-up to help take the sting out of having to close down her clothing brand.)

Thus die the final vestiges of this president’s pretty little narrative about being a populist hero.

Hard-core economic conservatives and anti-tax activists have long pushed to index capital gains taxes for inflation under the dubious argument that it would bolster the overall economy. Unsurprisingly, this crusade has failed to catch fire in Congress, where even anti-tax lawmakers can be skittish about so blatantly playing to the plutocrats.

But here’s where Mr. Mnuchin’s plan is so politically inspired. He hopes to cut Congress out of this deal altogether by declaring it a regulatory matter and allowing Treasury to unilaterally redefine the term “cost.” No need to subject this process to the messiness of the legislative process when it is so much more efficient to claim jurisdiction for oneself and change the meaning of words to suit one’s purpose. Behold Trumpian logic at its purest.

One potential sticking point is that Mr. Mnuchin’s proposal may not be, strictly speaking, legal. Congress has never authorized the Treasury Department to interpret tax law in the bizarre way the secretary is advocating. And the last time such a possibility was floated, in 1992, President George Bush’s Justice Department shot it down with extreme prejudice. The department’s Office of Legal Counsel went so far as to issue a 23-page opinion laying out in excruciating detail why the Treasury Department does not have the legal authority to index capital gains for inflation by means of regulation.

So there’s that.

But the Trump administration isn’t one to fret about legal niceties when pursuing its pet projects. It much prefers to plow forward and let the court challenges shake out as they will. You win some. (Think travel ban, eventually, after multiple revisions.) You lose some. (Snatching migrant kids from their families at the border.) But as the adage goes, it’s easier to ask for forgiveness than permission.

Mr. Mnuchin may well figure that the risk is worth the potential gain for himself, his wealthy friends and, more broadly, members of the Republican Party’s donor class who might very well show their gratitude by channeling some of their tax savings into party coffers. Besides, a case like this could take a while to wend its way through the courts, and who knows how many millions could be saved in the meantime.

Beyond pure greed and a desire to suck up to the 0.1 percent, it’s hard to see any real-world logic behind this move. As political messaging goes, it seems flat-out bonkers to position Republicans as the party of the superrich — especially during a critical midterm election campaign with control of both houses of Congress on the line.

But at this point, President Trump may have decided that it doesn’t much matter what economic policies he pursues so long as he can keep the base distracted and fired up with his relentless culture warring. (Build the wall! Lock her up! Gorsuch! Kavanaugh! Stand for the anthem or be fired!) In early 2016, candidate Trump famously boasted that he “could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody” and not lose any voters. Since becoming president, he has been given little cause by his base — or by Republicans in Congress — to doubt his political infallibility. As such, with Mr. Mnuchin’s proposal, as with so many other moves undertaken by this administration, Mr. Trump’s thinking may boil down to little more than, “Why the heck not?”

This may strike some as a depressingly cynical reading of what is being proposed. What, you thought their motives were pure?

Categories Education Reform

Peter Greene: Arne Duncan Has Learned Nothing: He’s Taking a Victory Lap After Failing

By dianeravitch
July 31, 2018 //
34

Arne Duncan wrote a book about his seven years as Secretary of Education and is now promoting it and touting his record. You know, the record where teachers were demonized as lying to kids, kids were belittled as dummies, and parents were belittled for not embracing the Common Core.

Peter Greene read an interview with Arne and realized that he learned nothing from his experience.

He begins:

“Never mind a Secretary of Education who has never taught anything; I’m beginning to think it would be a step forward if we had a Secretary of Education who has ever learned anything.

“Arne Duncan was interviewed for the pages of US News, and the resulting piece reminds us, first, that there’s not nearly as much difference between Duncan and DeVos as some Democrats would like to believe, and second, that Duncan remain unrepentant and unenlightened about anything that happened under his watch. So join me in yelling fruitlessly at the computer screen as we walk through this trip down Delusion Lane.

“Chicken Little’s History of School

“Count Duncan as a member of the Century Club– that special group of reformsters that is certain schools haven’t changed in 100 years. Arne would also like to beat the expired equine about how “other nations out-educating, out-investing, out-innovating us.” Because, you know, we’re competing with India and China and Singapore for jobs. That’s certainly true, but at no point is it going to occur to Duncan that those countries compete by offering little or no regulation and workers who will do the job for pennies. In all the times I’ve heard the “we must change education to compete with China” refrain, not once have I heard an explanation of how education will help American workers better compete with people working under conditions we wouldn’t accept for wages we couldn’t live on. Arne wants us to now that our kids– his kids– are going to grow up in that world. And if you think Arne’s kids, raised in privilege and comfort, are going to be competing with some Chinese smartphone assembler for work, well– I have a bridge over a swamp to sell you.

“This guy. This frickin’ guy.

“Oh, and we are not in the top 10 internationally. Which– first, what does that even mean? Top 10 ranked by what? Because if, as I would guess, he means test scores, let me repeat for the gazzillionth time that we have never, ever been in the Top 10 for international test scores. Nor has Duncan ever offered a shred of evidence that being in the Top 10 of test scores translates into any sort of national achievement like higher GDP or higher standard of living or happier citizens or military might or best frozen desserts!

“Duncan’s Diagnosis and That Damned Status Quo

“Having failed to effectively define the problem, Duncan now goes on to offer his idea about the cause.

“This is not a cure for cancer, this is not rocket science. It’s total lack of political will. And I think the politics of the left and the right stand in the way of what’s best for kids.

“Well, actually, it is too rocket science. Duncan’s thesis is that fixing schools is actually quite easy; we’re just not willing to do it, because after all this time, he still doesn’t realize how complex and complicated it is to run an entire educational system. And Duncan doesn’t seem to know what he’s trying to change because he also notes “There’s a small number of political leaders willing to challenge the status quo.”

“Dammit, Arne.

“First, the status quo in education right now is the status quo you help make. Common Core, in its various bastardized forms and under its various assumed names, is the status freakin’ quo, and an ugly obnoxious one it is, too. Schools and teachers being evaluated based on bad uses of bad data generated by bad tests– that’s status quo, too. As is the draining of resources from public schools by private charterized schools. These are all problems, these are all status quo, and these are all a legacy in part of your administration.

“Second, the idea that you need political leaders to change the educational system shows a fundamental misunderstanding of how the education system (and, for that matter, the political system) works. You need teachers and education leaders and actual trained professional educators to change an educational system, yet another fact we can put on the list of Things You Don’t Understand. All these years, and you still treat teachers like the hired help, certain that your amateur insights are more important than anything they might have to say.

“Duncan also thinks we need Republicans to challenge their base, and I’m not sure where he’s coming from here, because other than a deadly aversion to the words “common core,” the GOP base is in tune with most of the Duncan program. Duncan offers Obama’s championing of merit pay as a profil;e in courage because “that’s very hard to do” and well, yes, it’s hard to do because we have lots of evidence that merit pay doesn’t work. There’s nothing courageous about standing up for a bad idea.”

I don’t think anyone told Arne that his own Department evaluated Race to the Top and concluded it was a flop.

Categories Accountability, Duncan, Arne, Education Reform, Failure, U.S. Department of Education

Larry Cuban: Today’s Reformers and the Revival of Taylorism and the Cult of Efficiency

By dianeravitch
July 31, 2018 //
8

Larry Cuban wrote an insightful post about the Reformers’ revival of the ideology of social efficiency that was popular a century ago.

He writes:

“The current incarnation of “Taylorism” and focus on student outcomes can be seen in the standards, testing, and accountability movement launched over three decades ago in the wake of A Nation at Risk report. The application of business practices and lingo under the umbrella of scientifically acquired evidence reappeared anew albeit with different labels.

“Since the 1980s, reforms that called for uniform curriculum standards and increased testing while holding districts and schools responsible for student outcomes aimed to harness education to a stronger economy. With the increased power of computers to gather and analyze data, new techniques to prod schools to teach more, better, faster, and cheaper appeared (see here, here, and here) *

“The frequent gathering and parsing of test data, school-by-school, district-by-district, state-by-state, and nationally became a major enterprise. The lure of increased productivity and efficiency through evidence-based decision-making in light of huge (and available) data-sets has led to increasing use of algorithms to grade performance of individual schools, evaluating teacher performance, and customizing online lessons for each student (see here and here).

“States and districts now evaluate the performance of schools based on test scores, growth in achievement, graduation rates, and other measures and then assign rankings by issuing a grade to each school ranging from an A to a F, awarding one to five stars, or similar systems. Such grades signal parents which schools are high-performing and attractive to enroll their children and which schools are to be avoided—an efficient way of sorting out schools especially since parental choice in public schools has expanded.

“Determining which teachers are productive, i.e., “effective,” using students’ test scores has occurred in many states and big city districts. Such outcome measures should not shock anyone familiar with the spreading influence of the business model (e.g., earning profits, market share, and return on investment) upon schooling.

“Policymakers’ concerns over inefficiency in sorting effective from ineffective teachers (most districts graded 90-plus percent of teachers satisfactory) led to an embrace of an economic model of providing incentives to increase organizational productivity and efficiency.

“Within classrooms, both effectiveness and efficiency have come to the fore in customizing lessons for individual students. Earlier efforts to introduce “teaching machines” in the 1920s and later in the 1950s testify to the history of educators seeking ways to tailor teaching and learning to fit individual students. With the spread of faster and cheaper technologies since the 1990s, new classroom models of integrating devices and online programs took hold in many schools. The growth of huge data-sets of information on student performance in math, reading, and other school subjects also segued into a Niagara of software spilling over schools in the past two decades. The rationale for extensive buying and distributing of new devices and software has been to make teaching and student learning faster, better, and individualized.”

This mode of thinking, mandated and imposed as federal policy, threatens to extinguish childhood and the joy of learning.

What works in an automated warehouse is not what should be applied to a schoolroom.

Categories Accountability, Corporate Reformers, Data, Education Reform, Testing

Ohio Taxpayers Charged $7.7 Million to Renovate Charter-School Building Valued at $2.4 Million

By dianeravitch
July 31, 2018 //
22

The Columbus Dispatch reports on the continuing financial misadventures of the Imagine charter chain.

Imagine Schools, a for-profit Charter chain, bought an appliance store in a building valued last year at $2.4 Million. It renovated and passed the bill to Ohio taxpayers for $7.7 Million, triple the buolding’s value.

The charter, Great Westerm Academy, will have 700 students.

“Under its finance deal, Great Western Academy had to come up with added lease payments totaling $7.7 million over the past decade to cover the renovations — $3.3 million above their actual cost — at times paying nearly $1 million a year in total rent.

“According to the Franklin County auditor, the property was valued at $2.4 million in 2017. In other words, the $7.7 million the school paid for renovations was more than three times the building’s value.

“The deal has raised questions about Great Western’s lease agreement with SchoolHouse Finance, a subsidiary of Imagine Schools. SchoolHouse rents the space and sub-leases to Great Western. SchoolHouse also financed the renovations.”

This is the sweet part of the deal. Imagine rents the space, then subleases it to an Imagine school.

Do Ohio taxpayers care what happens to their money?

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