Archives for category: Education Reform
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Fake News about the Saudi Arms Deal

By dianeravitch
June 6, 2017 //
20

Bill Moyers’ website reports:

Showmanship –> On returning from his first foreign trip, Donald Trump touted the $110 billion weapons deal he’d cut with the Saudi government. But Bruce Riedel, director of the Brookings Intelligence Project, writes that “there is no deal. It’s fake news.” According to Riedel, “there are a bunch of letters of interest or intent, but not contracts. Many are offers that the defense industry thinks the Saudis will be interested in someday. So far nothing has been notified to the Senate for review.” And in keeping with Trump’s penchant for taking credit where it isn’t due, “none of the deals identified so far are new, all began in the Obama administration.”

Categories Education Reform

NY Times: The Tech Billionaires Who Are Remaking America’s Schools

By dianeravitch
June 6, 2017 //
37

This is an important article about the Silicon Valley billionaires who want to remake America’s schools, although none has any deep knowledge of children or cognition or the multiple social issues that affect children and families. Being tech entrepreneurs, most of them think there is a technological fix for every problem.

The article focuses on several billionaires and what they aim to achieve.

The writer, Natasha Singer, is careful to add red flags where necessary and seek out evaluations. She also is alert to the possibility that the tech entrepreneurs are building their portfolios and enriching themselves. And she points out that much of what they are doing challenges democracy itself in the absence of public debate and understanding.

She writes:

“In the space of just a few years, technology giants have begun remaking the very nature of schooling on a vast scale, using some of the same techniques that have made their companies linchpins of the American economy. Through their philanthropy, they are influencing the subjects that schools teach, the classroom tools that teachers choose and fundamental approaches to learning….

“The involvement by some of the wealthiest and most influential titans of the 21st century amounts to a singular experiment in education, with millions of students serving as de facto beta testers for their ideas. Some tech leaders believe that applying an engineering mind-set can improve just about any system, and that their business acumen qualifies them to rethink American education…

“Tech companies and their founders have been rolling out programs in America’s public schools with relatively few checks and balances, The New York Times found in interviews with more than 100 company executives, government officials, school administrators, researchers, teachers, parents and students.

“They have the power to change policy, but no corresponding check on that power,” said Megan Tompkins-Stange, an assistant professor of public policy at the University of Michigan. “It does subvert the democratic process.”

Furthermore, there is only limited research into whether the tech giants’ programs have actually improved students’ educational results….

“Mr. Hastings of Netflix and other tech executives rejected the idea that they wielded significant influence in education. The mere fact that classroom internet access has improved, Mr. Hastings said, has had a much greater impact in schools than anything tech philanthropists have done.”

Hastings’ Dreambox software depends on constant data-mining:

“DreamBox Learning tracks a student’s every click, correct answer, hesitation and error — collecting about 50,000 data points per student per hour — and uses those details to adjust the math lessons it shows. And it uses data to help teachers pinpoint which math concepts students may be struggling with.”

This is the same Reed Hastings who just spent $5 million helping charter entrepreneurs gain control of the Los Angeles school board.

“Another difference: Some tech moguls are taking a hands-on role in nearly every step of the education supply chain by financing campaigns to alter policy, building learning apps to advance their aims and subsidizing teacher training. This end-to-end influence represents an “almost monopolistic approach to education reform,” said Larry Cuban, an emeritus professor of education at Stanford University. “That is starkly different to earlier generations of philanthropists.”

“These efforts coincide with a larger Silicon Valley push to sell computers and software to American schools, a lucrative market projected to reach $21 billion by 2020. Already, more than half of the primary- and secondary-school students in the United States use Google services like Gmail in school.”

Singer goes through each of the entrepreneurs’ programs. The only one that impressed me was the program in San Francisco that created a Pricipals’ Innovation Fund, “which awards annual unrestricted grants of $100,000 to the principal at each of the district’s 21 middle and K-8 schools.” The key word here is unrestricted.

Mark Zuckerberg’s dream is to sell his digitized approach to enable children to learn via computer and use teachers as moderators. He calls this “personalized learning,” since the computer algorithm adjusts for each student. Singer’s subtitle for Zuckerberg’s dream is: “Student, Teach Thyself.”

““Our hope over the next decade is to help upgrade a majority of these schools to personalized learning and then start working globally as well,” Mr. Zuckerberg told the audience. “Giving a billion students a personalized education is a great thing to do.”

Please, Natasha Singer, do a follow-up that explains that learning from a machine is depersonalized learning.

Categories Accountability, Billionaires, Data and Data Mining, Democracy, Education Reform, For-Profit, Online Learning, Privacy and Privacy Rights, Technology

The Broadway Version of Covfefe

By dianeravitch
June 5, 2017 //
20

Randy Rainbow is a delightful humorist.

In this post, he performs a Broadway medley about “Covfefe,” the word Trump introduced on Twitter a few days ago. “Despite constant negative press Covfefe,” the full tweet.

Some think he fell asleep mid-tweet.

Categories Education Reform

Harold Meyerson: Why Do Billionaires Care So Much About Charter Schools?

By dianeravitch
June 4, 2017 //
26

Harold Meyerson, editor of The American Prospect, raised a question that I have heard dozens of times: Why do billionaires care so much about charter schools? Why have so many of the 1% decided that charter schools will provide a better education than public schools?

Are we to believe that the Walton Family, Eli Broad, Michael Dell, Doris Fischer, Reed Hastings, and many lesser-known billionaires are consumed by a passion for equity?

Inevitably, one must also wonder why billionaires are indifferent to evidence that charter schools are typically no better, and often much worse, than public schools?

Why are they so intent on weakening America’s public schools, a bedrock of our democracy?

Meyerson writes:

“Living in separate eras when the middle class was—and is—embattled and the gap between rich and poor was—and is—immense, billionaires have largely shunned the fights that might truly narrow that gap: raising the minimum wage, making public colleges and universities free, funding sufficient public investment to create genuine full employment, reviving collective bargaining, and raising progressive taxes to pay for all of that.”

To put it bluntly, the great crusade for charters is a diversion from the true economic issues of our day.

We can only dream about a government willing to tax the billionaires, intent on raising the minimum wage, and determined to provide economic security for all. That would address the sources of inequality.

But Billionaire would rather talk about charter schools.

Categories Billionaires, Education Reform

Marc Tucker Debates Checker Finn on Teacher Quality

By dianeravitch
June 3, 2017 //
56

I know the headline is off-putting to teachers. The teachers who read here do not like being condescended to by “experts” who can’t do what they do everyday: teach 25-40 students.

Nonetheless, I am interested in hearing your reaction to this discussion.

Mark Tucker specializes in studying what top-performing nations do. He and Linda Darling-Hammond have prepared a report called “Empowered Educators,” which maintained that raising teacher preparation would transform the profession. Checker Finn criticized the report.

This article is Marc Tucker’s response to Checker Finn.

He begins like this:

On June 6, NCEE and the Stanford Center for Opportunity Policy in Education will jointly release a new international comparative study of teacher quality, Empowered Educators, conducted over three years on four continents by a team of researchers headed by Linda Darling- Hammond. On May 24, Checker Finn published a blog critiquing Empowered Educators. In this blog, I respond to the points Finn made in his critique.

Finn begins by saying that he has no quarrel with the quality of the research: “There’s no reason to doubt the accuracy of their accounts and explanations.” Nor does he quarrel with the crux of the findings: “…teaching in those places is more professional, more respected, better compensated, more highly trained, more sensibly structured as a career, and overall more effective than in the United States.” He admires, he says, “…what Finland, Ontario, and Singapore have pulled off.”

So what’s not to like? In a nutshell, Finn thinks there is no chance that these ideas, policies or practices can be implemented in the United States. Why? He gives us five reasons. I’ll tell you what they are and respond to each in turn.

First, teaching is a mass occupation, the single largest occupation in the American workforce. So it is obvious to Finn that there is no prayer of getting our teachers from the upper reaches of the distribution of high school graduates, as the top performers do. He says the reason we have this vast workforce is that schooling is provided by great bureaucracies, school principals are middle managers rather than full-fledged institutional leaders and teacher’s unions insist on treating all teachers in the same way.

But schooling in the top-performing countries is provided by much more centralized bureaucracies than you will find anywhere in the United States, typically with a reporting line that runs from the top civil service professional in the ministry through that person’s direct reports, through their direct reports in the regions and provinces, to their direct reports in the districts to the principals to the teachers. Now that is a bureaucracy!

We have nothing like it. We do have much more bureaucracy at the district level in our larger suburbs and big city districts than the top-performing countries do, but we would not need anything like that number of people in the central office if we had the kind of highly educated and very well-trained teaching force the top performers have. Finn is right in saying that managing first-class professionals requires people with different skills than the typical school principal. It’s a different job. But countless American firms have helped their front-line managers transition from techniques appropriate to the management of blue-collar workers to managing professionals. Peter Drucker wrote a whole book about that transition. Why can’t our school system managers go through a similar transition? As a matter of fact, NCEE is deeply engaged in helping districts do that right now and it is going very well. ce
The clincher for Finn is that teacher’s unions insist on treating all teachers the same way. But Lily Eskelsen García, the NEA’s President, is on record as being deeply committed to the idea of teacher career ladders of the kind that Darling-Hammond and her team found in Singapore. As far as we know, the AFT is also open to the idea.

I am reminded of Pasi Sahlberg’s provocative article in The Washington Post, where he asked the question:

“What If Finland’s Great Teachers Taught in U.S. Schools?”

He reviews what makes Finnish schools excellent, then answers his own question:

I argue that if there were any gains in student achievement they would be marginal. Why? Education policies in Indiana and many other states in the United States create a context for teaching that limits (Finnish) teachers to use their skills, wisdom and shared knowledge for the good of their students’ learning. Actually, I have met some experienced Finnish-trained teachers in the United States who confirm this hypothesis. Based on what I have heard from them, it is also probable that many of those transported Finnish teachers would be already doing something else than teach by the end of their fifth year – quite like their American peers.

Conversely, the teachers from Indiana working in Finland—assuming they showed up fluent in Finnish—stand to flourish on account of the freedom to teach without the constraints of standardized curricula and the pressure of standardized testing; strong leadership from principals who know the classroom from years of experience as teachers; a professional culture of collaboration; and support from homes unchallenged by poverty.

Categories Education Reform, Teachers

North Carolina: Why Are Low-Income Students Overlooked for Gifted Classes?

By dianeravitch
June 3, 2017 //
15

Three reporters at the Charlotte, North Carolina, “New Observer” obtained seven years of student data and began to analyze it. Joseph Neff, Ann Doss Helms, and David Raynor will be using this database to ask more questions, but they began with a straightforward inquiry about why so many low-income students were not encouraged to enroll in challenging courses.

They write:

“About this time every year, roughly 5,000 North Carolina 8-year-olds show they’re ready to shine. Despite the obstacles of poverty that hobble so many of their classmates, these third graders from low-income families take their first state exams and score at the top level in math.

“With a proper push and support at school, these children could become scientists, engineers and innovators. They offer hope for lifting families out of poverty and making the state more competitive in a high-tech world.

“But many of them aren’t getting that opportunity, an investigation by The News & Observer and The Charlotte Observer reveals. Thousands of low-income children who get “superior” marks on end-of-grade tests aren’t getting an equal shot at advanced classes designed to challenge gifted students.

“As they start fourth grade, bright children from low-income families are much more likely to be excluded from the more rigorous classes than their peers from families with higher incomes, the analysis shows. The unequal treatment during the six years ending in 2015 resulted in 9,000 low-income children in North Carolina being counted out of classes that could have opened a new academic world to them.”

Students whose families are low-income are far less likely to gain entry to gifted classes than upper-income students with the same scores.

“Every year across North Carolina, thousands of low-income students who have superior math scores are left out of programs that could help them get to college, an investigation by The News & Observer and The Charlotte Observer reveals. They are excluded from advanced classes at a far higher rate than their more affluent classmates who don’t qualify for free or reduced-price lunches.”

North Carolina doesn’t have the money to pay for counselors.

“In North Carolina, public schools average almost 400 students per counselor, and the load is much higher at many schools.

“The state pays for counselors based on a district’s enrollment. When the American School Counselor Association tracked state ratios in 2013-14, North Carolina’s level of 391 students per counselor was below the national average of 491 and comparable to the neighboring states of South Carolina, Virginia and Tennessee. Only three states fell below the recommended 250, and 11 averaged more than 500 students per counselor.

“Wake County has one counselor for every 393 high-school students, one counselor for every 372 middle-schoolers and one for every 630 in elementary school.”

The changes that North Carolina should make to identify the talents and needs of all students requires funding for smaller classes and more counselors.

The state legislature in recent years has been unwilling to fund education adequately. The legislators need to know that they are wasting the talents of the young people who will be voters, leaders, scientists, and professionals.

Hopefully this series will make them think about how shorty-sighted they have been in refusing to pay the cost of good schools, which all children needs.

Read more here: http://www.newsobserver.com/news/local/education/article149942987.html#storylink=cpy

Categories Education Reform, North Carolina

Stuart Egan: A Letter of Outrage to the N.C. State Superintendent: Whom Do You Serve?

By dianeravitch
June 3, 2017 //
5

High school teacher Stuart Egan wrote an open letter to the North Caro,Ina Superintendent of Public Instruction. Mark Johnson.

Egan thanked Johnson for his kind words on Teacher Appreciation Week, but wonders why Johnson has failed to advocate for public schools or teachers. Instead, he sits in silence as the legislature cuts programs, privatizes schools, and allows the state to fall to one of the worst funded. In the nation.

A word about Johnson. He taught for two years as a Teach for America teacher. Then he earned a law degree. Then he won a seat on his local school board. That brief resume enables Johnson to refer the himself as an “educational leader,” worthy of overseeing the entire state system.

TFA likes to say that its recruits become lifelong advocates for public schools as a result of two years of teaching.

But Mark Johnson is not advocating for public schools or for students. His only goal seems to be to enhanc his own power.

Egan writes:

“First, it is quite disconcerting to not have heard you speak about the proposed cuts to the Department of Public Instruction. Actually, they aren’t really cuts. It’s more of a severing of limbs.

“As suggested in the budget proposal, http://www.ncleg.net/Sessions/2017/Bills/Senate/PDF/S257v2.pdf, there would be a 25 percent cut in operation funds for DPI.

“NC Policy Watch’s Billy Ball reported on May 12th, 2017 in “Senate slashes DPI; state Superintendent silent,”

“North Carolina’s chief public school administrator may be silent on Senate budget cuts to North Carolina’s Department of Public Instruction, but the leader of the state’s top school board says the proposal has the potential to deal major harm to poor and low-performing school districts.

“There’s no question about that,” State Board of Education Chairman Bill Cobey told Policy Watch Thursday. “A 25 percent cut, which I can’t believe will be the result of this process, would cut into very essential services for particularly the rural and poor counties.”

Cobey is referring to the Senate budget’s 25 percent cut in operations funds for the Department of Public Instruction (DPI), a loss of more than $26 million over two years that, strangely, has produced no public reaction from the leader of the department (http://www.ncpolicywatch.com/2017/05/12/senate-slashes-dpi-state-superintendent-silent/).”

Why the silence? Fear? Timidity? Collusion with the Tea Party Republicans who believe that cutting taxes matters more than children’s lives?

Mark Johnson, whom do you serve?

Categories Education Reform, North Carolina, Teach for America

Chicago: The Devil is in the Details

By dianeravitch
June 2, 2017 //
9

Overwhelming majorities of both houses of the Illinois legislature passed bills to restore an elected board to Chicago.

Chicago is the only district in the state that does not elect its board.

The different bills must be reconciled.

However, there’s a trick clause in the Senate bill.

The Senate bill says that the first election would be held in 2023, at the end of Rahm Emanuel’s third term (which he has not yet won.) He is in the middle of his second term.

Categories Chicago, Education Reform, Emanuel, Rahm

The Network for Public Education: Our View on Charter Schools

By dianeravitch
June 1, 2017 //
30

NPE Statement on Charter Schools

https://wp.me/p3bR9v-2st

The Network for Public Education believes that public education is the pillar of our democracy. We believe in the common school envisioned by Horace Mann. A common school is a public institution, which nurtures and teaches all who live within its boundaries, regardless of race, ethnicity, creed, sexual preference or learning ability. All may enroll–regardless of when they seek to enter the school or where they were educated before.

We believe that taxpayers bear the responsibility for funding those schools and that funding should be ample and equitable to address the needs of the served community. We also believe that taxpayers have the right to examine how schools use tax dollars to educate children.

Most importantly, we believe that such schools should be accountable to the community they serve, and that community residents have the right and responsibility to elect those who govern the school. Citizens also have the right to insist that schooling be done in a manner that best serves the needs of all children.

By definition, a charter school is not a public school. Charter schools are formed when a private organization contracts with a government authorizer to open and run a school. Charters are managed by private boards, often with no connection to the community they serve. The boards of many leading charter chains are populated by billionaires who often live far away from the schools they govern.

Through lotteries, recruitment and restrictive entrance policies, charters do not serve all children. The public cannot review income and expenditures in detail. Many are for profit entities or non-profits that farm out management to for-profit corporations that operate behind a wall of secrecy. This results in scandal, fraud, and abuse of taxpayer funds. The news is replete with stories of self-dealing, conflicts of interest, and theft occurring in charter schools [1].

We have learned during the 25 years in which charters have been in existence that the overall academic performance of students in charter schools is no better, and often worse, than the performance of students in public schools. And yet charter schools are seen as the remedy when public schools are closed based on unfair letter-based grading schemes.

By means of school closures and failed takeover practices like the Achievement School District, disadvantaged communities lose their public schools to charter schools. Not only do such communities lose the school, but they also lose their voice in school governance.

There is little that is innovative or new that charter schools offer. Because of their “freedom” from regulations, allegedly to promote innovation, scandals involving the finances and governance of charter schools occur on a weekly basis. Charter schools can and have closed at will, leaving families stranded. Profiteers with no educational expertise have seized the opportunity to open charter schools and use those schools for self-enrichment. States with weak charter laws encourage nepotism, profiteering by politicians, and worse.

For all of the reasons above and more, the Network for Public Education regard charter schools as a failed experiment that our organization cannot support. If the strength of charter schools is the freedom to innovate, then that same freedom can be offered to public schools by the district of the state.

At the same time, we recognize that many families have come to depend on charter schools and that many charter school teachers are dedicated professionals who serve their students well. It is also true that some charter schools are successful. We do not, therefore, call for the immediate closure of all charter schools, but rather we advocate for their eventual absorption into the public school system. We look forward to the day when charter schools are governed not by private boards, but by those elected by the community, at the district, city or county level.

Until that time, we support all legislation and regulation that will make charters better learning environments for students and more accountable to the taxpayers who fund them. Such legislation would include the following:

• An immediate moratorium on the creation of new charter schools, including no replication or expansion of existing charter schools

• The transformation of for-profit charters to non-profit charters

• The transformation of for-profit management organizations to non-profit management organizations

• All due process rights for charter students that are afforded public school students, in all matters of discipline

• Required certification of all school teaching and administrative staff

• Complete transparency in all expenditures and income

• Requirements that student bodies reflect the demographics of the served community

• Open meetings of the board of directors, posted at least 2 weeks prior on the charter’s website

• Annual audits available to the public

• Requirements to following bidding laws and regulations

• Requirements that all properties owned by the charter school become the property of the local public school if the charter closes

• Requirements that all charter facilities meet building codes

• Requirements that charters offer free or reduced priced lunch programs for students

• Full compensation from the state for all expenditures incurred when a student leaves the public school to attend a charter

• Authorization, oversight and renewal of charters transferred to the local district in which they are located

• A rejection of all ALEC legislation regarding charter schools that advocates for less transparency, less accountability, and the removal of requirements for teacher certification.

Until charter schools become true public schools, the Network for Public Education will continue to consider them to be private schools that take public funding.

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Corporate Reformers, Democracy, Education Industry, Education Reform, Network for Public Education, Privatization

Jeff Bryant: What Is the Point of School Choice?

By dianeravitch
May 31, 2017 //
44

Jeff Bryant is trying to figure out what the purpose of school choice is.

“Another week, another round of evidence that providing parents with more “school choice,” especially the kind that lets them opt out of public schools, is not a very effective vehicle for ensuring students improve academically or that taxpayer dollars are spent more wisely.

“The latest evidence comes from a study of the voucher program in Washington, DC that allows parents to transfer their children from public to private schools at taxpayer expense.

“The study found that students “who attended a private school through the program performed worse on standardized tests than their public school counterparts who did not use the vouchers,” reports the New York Times.

“This study adds to others – from Ohio, Indiana, and Louisiana – finding that school vouchers have negative impacts on students.

“Despite these results, many proponents of school choice contend the purpose of school choice was never about generating better results. It’s about choice.

“The latest evidence comes from a study of the voucher program in Washington, DC that allows parents to transfer their children from public to private schools at taxpayer expense.

“The study found that students “who attended a private school through the program performed worse on standardized tests than their public school counterparts who did not use the vouchers,” reports the New York Times.

“This study adds to others – from Ohio, Indiana, and Louisiana – finding that school vouchers have negative impacts on students.

“Despite these results, many proponents of school choice contend the purpose of school choice was never about generating better results. It’s about choice for choice’s sake.

“Results Don’t Matter?

“That seems to be what US Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos argues in her reaction to the news about the apparent failure of the DC voucher program. As the Washington Post reports, the report prompted her to say, “When school choice policies are fully implemented, there should not be differences in achievement among the various types of schools.”

So if choice doesn’t raise scores, what’s the point?

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Education Industry, Education Reform, Privatization, School Choice, Vouchers
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