Archives for category: Education Reform
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Michigan Plans to Close More Schools with Low Test Scores to Improve “Opportunities”

By dianeravitch
August 18, 2016 //
20

School reform officials in Michigan announced that more public schools would be closed based on their test scores over the past three years.

Blogger Bill Boyle called the “The Politics of Cruelty.” It implies that the adults in the building are not trying, don’t care, or are incompetent.

He wrote:


I could write how many of the so-called “failing” schools are under the auspices of the Educational Achievement Authority (EAA), a state-run school district that was created to turn around so-called “failing schools.” We know how that has worked.

Boyle notes a strange coincidence:

Under the state’s emergency control, authorities decided to cut off the water to people who didn’t pay the water bill.


As most know, the city of Detroit was under the control of a state appointed Emergency Manager beginning in March, 2013, before it began the process of bankruptcy. This is important history. In May of 2014, while under the control of the state of Michigan, it was determined that those unwilling or unable to pay their water bills would have their water shut off.

Boyle wrote in an earlier blog:


“In May of this year, the Detroit Water and Sewage Department began a crusade to collect unpaid fees by residents of Detroit. They are currently shutting off water access to any Detroit resident who is either $150 or two months behind in payment. This will affect over 120,00 account holders over a 3 month period at a rate of 3,000 shut offs per week. (The suspicion of many is that the shut offs are occurring in the midst of Detroit’s bankruptcy in order to make DWSD more attractive for privatization.)

Mind you, this is occurring in a major US city, the richest country in the world, that has a poverty rate of 44%, is over 80% black, whose residents have already have their democratic vote similarly cut off, in a state that is surrounded by 4 of the largest fresh water lakes in the world.”

Boyle says that Pershing High School, which was moved into the EAA, is likely to be on the closure list.


It is not surprising to find that this high school exists in one of the neighborhoods most affected by water shut offs and home foreclosures. It’s a neighborhood, in other words, whose existence is in peril. Students show up to school hungry, thirsty and homeless. This is undeniable, but it is obscured by the talk of “failing schools.” And to deny it, to allow it to be obscured, is cruel. To close a school in a community such as this, to take one more piece of property out of a neighborhood that has had its water stolen, its homes stolen, and now its school threatened, is simply, callously cruel.

A Democratic legislator said the school closing plan was “irresponsible.”

The state official referred to schools with low scores as “failing schools.” Here’s a prediction: the vast majority of schools identified as “failing” will have large enrollments of children who are poor, children of color, children who don’t read English, and children with disabilities. In addition, they will be highly segregated.

Do you think the state will offer the displaced students the opportunity to enroll in excellent suburban schools?

Neither do I.

Categories Accountability, Corporate Reformers, Education Industry, Education Reform, Michigan, Poverty, Race, Testing

Success Academy: Statisticians Explain How Schools That Obsess About Test Scores Ruin the Validity of Tests as a Measure

By dianeravitch
August 17, 2016 //
20

Statisticians Mark Palko and Andrew Gelman explain why a relentless obsession with test scores ruins the value of the scores. As their prime example, they refer to Eva Moskowitz’s Success Academies, where children and teachers live for higher scores. Not only are the children’s names and ranking posted, so are the teachers’.

You remember Campbell’s Law? That’s the axiom that says when you attach consequences to a measure, the measure loses its validity.

They write:

“When a school uses selection and attrition policies that effectively filter out many of the extremely poor, students speaking English as a second language, and the learning disabled, that clearly calls into question test score advantages that such a school might have over an ordinary public school.

“But the problems run even deeper than most critics realize: A look at the data combined with some basic principles of social science suggests that the practices of no-excuses charters are undermining the very foundation of data-based education reform.

“As statisticians with experience teaching at the high school and college level, we recognize a familiar problem: A test that overshadows the ultimate outcomes it is intended to measure turns into an invalid test.

“Back in the old Soviet Union, factories would produce masses of unusable products as a result of competition to meet unrealistic production quotas. Analogously, many charter schools, under pressure to deliver unrealistic gains in test scores, are contorting themselves to get the numbers they’ve promised. They’re being rewarded for doing so. But that monomaniacal focus on test scores undermines the correlation between test scores and academic accomplishment that originally existed.”

They note that Success Academy has astonishingly high test scores, yet for two years in a row, not a single one of their eighth grade students won admission to one of the city’s elite high schools. In the third year, some did (11% of those who took the test from SA).

In a comment on this post, Gary Rubinstein (a blogger who teaches at Stuyvesant High School, an exam school) writes:

“One thing to note, the 11% specialized HS acceptance rate–6 out of 54–is inflated since there were 200 kids who feasibly could have sat for that test but only 54 did.” Of 200 students at Success Academy who were eligible to take the test, 54 did, and 6 gained admission.

It is better to have high scores than low scores, but they should never be the measure of teacher quality or school quality. Making them too important ruins their value.

Categories Accountability, Campbell's Law, Education Reform, Harlem Success Academy, Testing

Leonie Haimson: Will CAP Convince New Yorkers to Love Testing? Will a Scandal-Plagued Computer Company Rehab Its Image?

By dianeravitch
August 15, 2016 //
8

Leonie Haimson can always be counted on to look beneath the surface of the news. In this post, she describes a forum that will be held tomorrow in New York City, where the Center for American Progress will unveil its latest attempt to persuade New Yorkers that standardized tests and the Common Core are swell. CAP is Gates-funded, of course, and so are most of the other participants in the forum. No opt out representatives were invited to participate. So the forum will not learn why 250,000 children did not take the state tests this past spring. And we learn too that New York City will soon have its very own outpost of Education Trust, the Gates-funded advocacy group for standards and testing. If you open the blog, you will get to see a short pro-Common Core video that was ridiculed by many for its condescension towards parents and quickly withdrawn.

The afternoon session of the day’s event features a discussion of technology, and one of the participants comes from a company that contracts with the Department of Education and has been at the center of various scandals.

Leonie writes:

Emerging Trends in Education: City and State moderates a panel of officials, experts and academics on improving tech access in and out of classrooms, STEM learning in NY schools, and how to make NY more competitive across the globe! The session will connect educators, administrators, and other staff to new ideas, best practices, and each other.

The panel includes Josh Wallack of DOE, CM Danny Dromm, chair of the NYC Council Education Committee, a dean from Berkeley College, and two corporate reps, one of them named Vlada Lotkina, Co-founder and CEO of a company called Class Tag, which has a particularly awful privacy policy. The other member of the panel is Cynthia Getz, descried as the NYC Account Team Senior Manager at Custom Computer Specialists.

Custom Computer Specialists is infamous for having participated in a multi-million dollar kick-back scheme with a DOE consultant named Ross Lanham, who was indicted by Preet Bharara in 2011 and sent to jail in 2012. CCS had not only gotten inflated payments through the scheme, but the President, Greg Galdi (who is still the CEO) had started a Long Island real estate company with Lanham called “G & R Scuttlehole.”

In February 2015, I noted in the PEP contract listing that CCS was due to get a huge $1.1 billion contract from DOE for internet wiring Reporters for the Daily News , NYPost and Chalkbeat wrote about this egregious deal, and overnight the DOE cut back the contract to $635 million, without changing any of the terms, showing how egregiously inflated it was in the first place. The Panel for Education Policy rubber-stamped it anyway. Later, City Hall decided to reject the contract, probably because of all the bad publicity, and it was rebid at a savings of between $125M and $627M – the latter compared to the original contract price of $1.1 billion.

I think the cancellation of the CCS contract actually saved the city up to $727 million, because if the DOE had signed up with CCS, they would have lost any chance to get $100 million in E-rate reimbursement funds from the feds, since the FCC had cut NYC off from all E-rate funds because of the Lanham scandal since 2011.

Subsequently, we discovered that DOE signed a consent decree with the FCC on December 31, 2015 in which the city was ordered to pay $3 million in fines, and relinquish claims to all E-rate funding requests between 2011-2013, which were frozen after the Lanham indictment in June 2011. The DOE also had to withdraw claims to any E-rate funding from 2002-2010. Juan Gonzalez speculated that this meant the potential loss of $123 million, based on a letter sent to the DOE by the Comptroller office in 2014.

Categories Accountability, Common Core, Corporate Reformers, Education Industry, Education Reform, Gates Foundation, Bill Gates, Testing

Alabama: Larry Lee Wonders Why the State Board Chose a Chief with No Administrative Experience

By dianeravitch
August 15, 2016 //
6

Larry Lee of Alabama writes in bewilderment about the state board of education’s decision to choose a new state superintendent who was never a teacher or an administrator. Michael Sentance is a lawyer; he was an educational consultant and did some work in Massachusetts about 25 years ago. He just beat out three veteran superintendents from Alabama districts. Larry wonders why. The state board seems to act on the premise that their decisions must not include the views of anyone who has ever taught or worked in the state’s public schools.

He tried to make sense of the vote but couldn’t do it.

Larry Lee started a petition calling on the state board to rescind its decision. If you live in Alabama and think the state superintendent should be an educator, preferably one who knows the state, please consider signing.

Categories Education Reform

Shavar Jeffries of DFER Cancels Debate with Julian Vasquez Heilig

By dianeravitch
August 14, 2016 //
14

Julian Vasquez Heilig is a noted scholar of subjects such as democratic governance, social justice, inequity, and Teach for America. He has recently debated leading figures in the corporate reform movement, including Howard Fuller and Steve Perry. (Both debates will be posted here.)

He thought that Shavar Jeffries, the president of Democrats for Education Reform, agreed to debate him. But suddenly, Jeffries tweeted that he would not debate Heilig because Heilig is “not serious.”

Shavar Jeffries said that Heilig’s blog “Cloaking Inequity” could have been written by a sixth-grader.

You can follow their tweets:

@ProfessorJVH for Heilig

and

@shavarjeffries for Jeffries, who ran unsuccessfully for Mayor of Newark and now leads the hedge fund managers’ group DFER.

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

John Ewing: How to Attract and Retain the Teachers We Need

By dianeravitch
August 14, 2016 //
10

John Ewing, mathematician, is CEO of Math for America, an organization that supports teachers of mathematics.

In this post, he reviews some of the recent ill-considered efforts to “respect” teachers and offers advice about the minimum conditions necessary to assure that teachers have the respect, autonomy, and trust that professionals deserve.

You will also enjoy reading John Ewing’s brilliant takedown of teacher evaluation by test scores, which he called “Mathematical Intimidation.”

Categories Education Reform, Teacher Evaluations, Teachers and Teaching, VAM (value-added modeling)

Report from the Rio Olympics: “Personalized Learning” Will Make Every Student a Winner!

By dianeravitch
August 13, 2016 //
60

Former Governor Bob Wise and the Alliance for Excellent Education released a video touting “personalized learning” as the key to academic success. He speaks in the foreground of what he says is the Rio Olympics (actually the footage is from 2012, according to the credits). A short video shows students engaged in “personalized learning,” some of which appears to be centered on a computer.

Let’s say this much for the ad: at least it is not insulting like the one created by Michelle Rhee and StudentsFirst in 2012, which showed a flabby American man falling on his face while competing in a women’s event and said he represented American students. It was shown on national television during the Olympics and was highly demeaning to our nation and our students.

Bob Wise partnered with Jeb Bush in creating a document called “Digital Learning Now,” which claimed that learning online was the secret to high achievement for everyone. None of its assertions had any evidence behind them, and the report was financed by the tech industry.

“Personalized learning” is a very problematic concept these days. Most people think it means that the teacher and the student work closely together, and the teacher understands the student’s needs.

But in the education industry, “personalized learning” means computer-based instruction. In theory, the computer knows the student well. The student and the computer interact and collaborate, so they are close friends.

The paid journalistic touting of computer-based learning is intensifying. I can’t keep up with all the articles that promote machine learning and mislabel it “personalized” learning.

There is nothing “personal” about learning from a machine. The machine doesn’t know you. It stores your data, but it has no feelings, no emotions, no empathy. It doesn’t like you. It doesn’t love you, it doesn’t dislike you. It is indifferent. If your mother dies, it won’t feel any sympathy for you. It is a machine. Whatever you call it, please don’t say it is “personalized” to you. It’s not.

Categories Corporate Reformers, Education Industry, Education Reform, Technology, Computers

A Graphic Explanation: Why Corporations Want Our Public Schools

By dianeravitch
August 13, 2016 //
13

This is a brilliant yet simple infographic that explains the logic of what is deceitfully called “reform.”

Reform begins with a narrative about “failing schools.”

Students take tests whose passing mark is so high that the failure rate is high, thus proving the narrative.

The government closes the schools with the lowest scores, which are almost all in poor black and Hispanic communities.

The empty school is turned over to a private corporation, which has no relationship to the local community.

The privately managed school calls itself “a public school” because it gets public money.

When an employee or a family sues because their rights were violated, the charter corporation says it is a private contractor, not a state actor.

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Corporate Reformers, Education Industry, Education Reform, Privatization, Testing

Melinda Gates: We Won’t Back Down in Face of Opposition to Our Education Reforms

By dianeravitch
August 12, 2016 //
81

Melinda Gates told the National Conference of State Legislatures that the Gates Foundation has no intention of backing away from their agenda of Common Core, teacher evaluations that include test scores, charter schools, and digital learning.

No matter how controversial, no matter how much public pushback, they are determined to stay the course. For some reason, she thinks that the foundation is a “neutral broker,” when in fact it is an advocate for policies that many teachers and parents reject. She also assumes that the Gates Foundation has “the real facts,” when in fact it has a strong point of view reflecting the will of Bill & Melinda. There was no reference to evidence or research in this account of her position. Her point was that, no matter what the public or teachers may say, no matter how they damage the profession and public education, the multi-billion dollar foundation will not back down from its priorities. The only things that can stop them are informed voters and courts, such as the vote against charter schools in Nashville and the court decision in Washington State declaring that charter schools are not public schools.

The question that will be resolved over the next decade is whether the public will fight for democratic control of public schools or whether the world’s richest man can buy public education.

Melinda Gates said she and her husband, Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates, learned an important lesson from the fierce pushback against the Common Core State Standards in recent years. Not that they made the wrong bet when they poured hundreds of millions of dollars into supporting the education standards, but that such a massive initiative will not be successful unless teachers and parents believe in it.

“Community buy-in is huge,” Melinda Gates said in an interview here on Wednesday, adding that cultivating such support for big cultural shifts in education takes time. “It means that in some ways, you have to go more slowly.”

That does not mean the foundation has any plans to back off the Common Core or its other priorities, including its long-held belief that improving teacher quality is the key to transforming public education. “I would say stay the course. We’re not even close to finished,” Gates said.

The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation has helped shape the nation’s education policies during the past decade with philanthropic donations that have supported digital learning and charter schools and helped accelerate shifts not only to the new, common academic standards, but to new teacher evaluations that incorporate student test scores.

The Obama administration shared and promoted many of the foundation’s priorities, arguing that they were necessary to push the nation’s schools forward and close yawning achievement gaps. Now that a new federal education law has returned authority over public education to the states, the foundation is following suit, seeking to become involved in the debates about the direction of public schools that are heating up in state capitals across the country.

Speaking here at a meeting of the National Conference of State Legislatures, Melinda Gates told lawmakers on Wednesday that the new federal education law, the Every Student Succeeds Act, gives them a chance to grapple with whether “we are doing everything in our power to ensure that students are truly graduating ready to go on to meaningful work or to college.”

“I want the foundation to be the neutral broker that’s able to bring up the real data of what is working and what’s not working,” Gates said in an interview afterward.

She went on to say that the foundation would continue to pursue its priorities.

“I think we know what the big elements are in education reform. It’s how do you support the things that you know work and how do you get the whole system aligned behind it,” Gates said. “I’m not telling you it’s going to be easy. There are now 50 states that have to do it, and there isn’t this federal carrot or the stick, the push or pull, to help them along.”

The agenda she described is not one that everyone considers neutral. It includes supporting the Common Core standards and developing lesson-planning materials to help teachers teach to those standards; promoting personalized learning, or digital programs meant to target students’ individual needs; and, above all, improving the quality of teachers in the nation’s classrooms, from boosting teacher preparation to rethinking on-the-job professional development.

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Common Core, Corporate Reformers, Education Industry, Education Reform, Gates Foundation, Bill Gates, Privatization, Resistance, Teacher Evaluations, Testing, U.S. Department of Education, VAM (value-added modeling)

The Baffler Lambastes the “Liberal” Think Tank Center for American Progress

By dianeravitch
August 12, 2016 //
12

Ken Silverstein slices and dices the “liberal” think tank called the Center for American Progress, in The Baffler.

Silverstein documents the ties between corporations and CAP. He also shows that its policies reflect those of the Obama administration.


To understand just how Thomas Friedman, Anne-Marie Slaughter, and Gail Collins have been repurposed as purveyors of bold new ideas, it helps to see how the world of liberal think tanks has been upended, ever so gently, by a steady onrush of corporate funding—and corporate-friendly policy agendas. Think tanks have always reflected relatively narrow elite opinion and were never entirely impartial, but the earliest were modeled on academic institutions. Brookings, the first, began in 1916 (as the Institute for Government Research) and subsequently billed its mission as “the fact-based study of national public policy issues.” During the Great Depression, its scholars took sides both for and against the New Deal. The Council on Foreign Relations began in New York five years after Brookings and, as author Peter Grose later wrote, sought to “guide the statecraft of policymakers” with in-depth reports prepared by “groups of knowledgeable specialists of differing ideological inclinations.”

An emerging, more aggressive perspective was prompted by the specter of economic stagflation and the twin political crises of the early 1970s, Vietnam and Watergate. In 1974 and 1975, top corporate officials convened annually under the auspices of still another ideas consortium called the Conference Board—but this time out, they didn’t feel quite so dispassionate about the policy-debate scene. Feeling pressured by then-powerful labor unions and the demands of what they saw as an ungrateful citizenry, the assembled CEOs feared a popular revolt might be imminent. “We have been hoist with our own petard,” one executive said at one conclave. “We have raised expectations that we can’t deliver on.” Another executive complained, “One man, one vote has undermined the power of business in all capitalist countries since World War II.”

In order to recapture politicians, intellectuals, and the media, corporations increased their Washington lobbying efforts and jacked up campaign contributions as well. Just as important, corporations shoveled cash into existing think tanks and established dozens of new ones. The Heritage Foundation began in 1973, and within a decade its annual budget topped $12 million. The American Enterprise Institute, which began life as a fairly nondescript business advocacy group, became more politically emboldened and saw its budget triple between 1975 and 1985. New conservative think tanks founded in the post-Watergate period included the Cato Institute, the Manhattan Institute, and the Ethics and Public Policy Center.

Over time, corporations also provided major support for think tanks aligned with Democrats, especially moderate ones. The Progressive Policy Institute (PPI) began in 1989 and received millions of dollars from sources such as the Tobacco Institute, Occidental Petroleum, and various Wall Street firms.

The article doesn’t say much about CAP’s education initiatives. Too bad, because it has been a reliable mouthpiece for corporate reform. Peter Greene roasted CAP in “The Progressive” for supporting charter schools, high-stakes testing, and every other right wing idea.

Before readers point it out, please note that the founder of CAP was John Podesta, now managing Hillary Clinton’s campaign.

I think there is only one genuine liberal think tank in D.C., at least where education is concerned, and that is the Economic Policy Institute.

Categories Accountability, Education Reform, Obama
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