The Ohio Department of Education under John Kasich has not been known for vigilance when it comes to the virtual charter school industry. However, increased media attention to Ohio’s pockmarked charter sector has caused the state to look into its underperforming and highly profitable virtual charters.
What they discovered was ugly. Inflated enrollments. Lack of evidence that students participate in instruction for the required 5 hours a day. An industry that profits while students fail.
The investigation focused on the Electronic Classroom of Tomorrow (ECOT), owned by one of the state’s major contributors to Republican campaigns. William Lager has received nearly $1 billion in public funds since 2002. The money to pay for a failing online school was taken from Ohio’s public schools.
The New York Times wrote about ECOT a few days ago and pointed out that the online school has the largest proportion of students who fail to graduate of any high school in the nation. Only 20% finish on time.
The state may revise a regulation or two. Don’t expect anything dramatic, like shutting down the state’s lowest performing school, or basing pay on performance. That’s for public schools, not Ponzi schemes that contribute to Kasich and friends.
Anthony Cody here reviews the annual report of the CEO of the Gates Foundation, Sue Desmond-Hellman, and finds it wanting, specifically its lack of humility and its absence of reflection.
Of course, Gates will “double down” on Common Core, no matter how many educators call for revisions.
But that’s not all. How about some reflection by Gates on the failure of test-based teacher accountability, whether based on “value added” or “student growth”?
How about explaining the debacle in Hillsborough County, Florida, which gave up on the Gates initiative after wasting more than $100 million?
Why no mention of the foundation’s push for charter schools, which replace public schools and divide communities?
Why no candid reflection on the disappointing results of the marketing of more and more technology for the classroom?
All in all, a report that shows a megafoundation incapable or unwilling to review its programs with honesty and integrity.
Motoko Rich writes in the New York Times about the terrible results obtained by online charter schools. She focuses on the Electronic Classroom of Tomorrow, whose founder has become very wealthy thanks to taxpayer money and the friendship of reformers such as Governor JohnKasich and the GOP legislators in Ohio. Founder William Lager has been very generous to his friends who hold elected office.
A terrific business. A lousy education.
Five years ago, the New York Times ran a superb expose of online charters, pointing out that they are very profitable but basically scams that rip off taxpayers.
In 2011, the Washington Post published an excellent expose of Michael Milken’s K12 Inc, which is listed on the New York Stock Exchange.
For-profit virtual charter corporations are a cynical business that exploits children and does not have educate them. It demands full state tuition to provide home schooling plus a “teacher” on a monitor.
I wrote about the online charter fraud in my 2013 book “Reign of Error.”
Numerous studies have concluded that these schools have startlingly high attrition rates, large “class” sizes, low wages, high teacher turnover, and their students very little.
The latest study, by CREDO, found that students lost 180 days of instruction in math for every year of 180 days in a virtual charter.
Bill Phillis of the Ohio Coalition for Equity and Adequacy wrote about today’s article in the Times and pointed out that ECOT has received nearly $1 billion in public funding since 2002.
Frankly, these fake schools should be investigated by authorities, monitored, and limited to students who are unable to attend school. They should exist only as public institutions, not profit-making corporations.
The San Antonio Express-News published a blistering editorial calling for a halt to state testing until all the errors and computer glitches were resolved. This may mean forever, given the track record of testing companies that produce online assessments.
Fifty superintendents from the Houston area wrote a letter to the new state superintendent Mike Morath outlining the problems their students and teachers had encountered.
As the editorial states:
There are inherent problems in any massive project, but this is no simple undertaking. The STAAR test — the State of Texas Assessment of Academic Readiness — is high stakes. The scores impact schools, teachers and students. Failing grades can cause students in the fifth and eighth grades to be held back, and high school students who don’t pass three of the five end-of-course exams will not get a diploma. Teachers’ evaluations will be based in part on how well students perform on the STAAR test.
Until all the problems are resolved, school administrators are asking the Texas Education Agency to delay use of scores for the alternative test for students needing special accommodations due to a learning disability. They make a valid point.
It appears that the state’s new testing vendor, New Jersey-based Educational Testing Services, commonly referred to as ETS, was ill-equipped to take on the four-year $280-million contract. There is no excuse for the company to ask test takers not to answer a question because there was no correct answer or having to scramble at the last minute to certify personnel to grade the test.
School districts can ask that tests be re-evaluated, but that action comes at their own expense. Lewisville ISD appropriated $50,000 to have thousands of English tests retaken by their high school students after many high performers scored a zero on that portion of the test. School districts should not be forced to pay that expense because the state made a bad call when it awarded the testing contract.
There is something terribly amiss here, and it needs to be fully resolved before the test scores can be given much weight. Morath has said ETS will be held financially liable for the problems and could lose the state’s business if the issues are not adequately resolved. That is good news for Texas taxpayers but does not adequately resolve all the issues.
Too much is at stake to merely assure everyone it will be done better next time. The state should not go forward with a testing system few have confidence is working properly. There is no do-over for students who get held back, the high school seniors who won’t walk the graduation stage or teachers whose careers are damaged.
Joseph Batory, former superintendent of public schools in Upper Darby, Pennsylvania, says it is time to abolish the School Reform Commission that has governed Philadelphia’s public schools since 2001. It has presided over the destruction of public education. Having failed, it is time to replace it with an elected board. At least, it will be accountable to the public. It can’t be worse than the SRC!
Batory writes:
“It is clearly time for Philadelphia to rid itself of the State-imposed School Reform Commission (SRC) overseeing the city’s public schools. This politically appointed board, with three members appointed by the Governor and two by the Mayor, has been a colossal failure. The SRC has presided over an educational disaster in Philadelphia.
“Given the priority goal of establishing better fiscal oversight for the schools in 2001, the SRC’s legacy has been perpetual budget deficits in spite of the fact that Philadelphia’s public schools have been stripped of many teachers, nurses, librarians, counselors as well as basic supplies. Incredibly, a 12-year-old child died because she dared to have an asthma attack on a day when the school did not have a nurse. In terms of services to and opportunities for students, Philadelphia schools are running far behind their suburban counterparts. What sort of formula for public school success is this?
“The SRC has regularly has demonized the teachers union, limited parent, student and community voices, and promoted the expansion of the charter school sector, despite the fact that these actions have only worsened the District’s fiscal problems.
“On top of all of this, the Boston Consulting Group was paid more than $2 million by the William Penn Foundation via an incestuous relationship with the SRC to create a biased “Blueprint for Reform.” This plan laid out a five year course of privatization which would close one-fourth of Philadelphia’s schools, placing 40% of students into charters, and dividing up the remaining schools into NYC-inspired “achievement networks” run by third party operators (editor’s note: they were unsuccessful in NYC).
“The SRC’s two most famous CEO/Superintendent appointments were little more than “top down” dictators rather than “enablers” who demeaned principals and teachers, robotized teaching, and produced minimal school improvements at best. Yet each of them was well rewarded with generous salaries, including a $65,000.00 bonus in just one year to one of them on top of her annual salary.
“The SRC’s policies have provoked broad and sustained opposition from the public over the last two years. On numerous occasions, parents, students, and educators have taken to the streets and to City Council and SRC meetings to register their dissent.
“Thankfully, at least one State Senator is trying to do something. Senator Mike Stack (D-Northeast), is now calling for Philadelphians to elect school-board members. His proposed Senate Bill would return a locally elected school board to Philadelphia.
“Stack told the Philadelphia City Council Committee on Education recently. “The SRC fails the accountability and transparency test because it is not elected by the taxpayers. Therefore, it is not accountable to parents, students, and certainly not the taxpayers. It is only accountable to the Governor or Mayor who have appointed them.”
“Helen Gym, co-founder of Parents United for Public Education agrees. The SRC is “a body that has refused to commit to transparency,” she said. “SRC policy denies people an adequate opportunity to speak to the issues. It is a serious imposition on the public.”
“Make no mistake about it. An elected school board is no panacea. However, the School Reform Commission has had its opportunity to create positive change for Philadelphia’s schools and failed miserably. Tragically, Philadelphia’s public school children have been and continue to be victims of this political abuse and neglect. The School Reform Commission needs to be abolished.”
Throughout the entire period of “reform” that started with No Child Left Behind, scores of high school students have been stagnant. Brown writes:
The results of the National Assessment of Educational Progress, or NAEP, also show a longer-term stagnation in 12th-grade performance in U.S. public and private schools: Scores on the 2015 reading test have dropped five points since 1992, the earliest year with comparable scores, and are unchanged in math during the past decade.
In comparison to the first year of the current trendline, 2005, the average mathematics score in 2015 did not significantly differ. In comparison to the initial reading assessment year, 1992, the 2015 average reading score was lower.
In short, NCLB (signed into law in 2002) and Race to the Top (launched in 2009) have been failures. They have been disastrous failures. How many billions of dollars were wasted no testing and test prep? How many teachers and principals were fired? How many schools were closed? How many public schools were turned over to entrepreneurs?
As a nation, we have endured fourteen years of failed federal policies. Will we ever learn that testing doesn’t produce higher achievement? Will we ever learn that intrinsic motivation is more powerful than threats and rewards?
Heckuva job, President Obama and former Secretary Arne Duncan!
Andy Goldstein, a superstar teacher in Palm Beach County, Florida, recently addressed the school board and urged them not to impose a merit pay plan mandated by the legislature. The Florida legislature is dedicated to the belief that schools should be run like a business and should focus on competition, incentives, and punishments. It never passes up a chance to pass laws that foster bad practices and that promote privatization.
In the most careful study of merit pay, researchers at Vanderbilt University recorded the results of a three-year experiment in which one group of fifth-grade teachers was offered a bonus of $15,000 to raise test scores while the other group was offered nothing. The bonus had no effect. (See here and here.)
Here is Andy Goldstein’s statement to the PBC board:
From Palm Beach County, FL:
The Failure of Merit Pay – why it will fail our students most in need – a school board talk by Andy Goldstein. April 20, 2016.
Transcript:
Good evening. My name is Andy Goldstein. I’m a teacher at Omni Middle School and the proud parent of an 8-year-old daughter who attends second grade at one of our public elementary schools.
I wish to talk about the proposed salary agreement for teachers.
This proposed salary agreement, if approved by our teachers, will be the first year that so-called merit pay will be put into effect in Palm Beach County as mandated by Senate Bill 736.
It divides those teachers who will earn a raise into categories of “effective” and “highly effective.” The highly effective category pays teachers 25 percent more.
I’m looking at this merit pay plan through the lense of our District’s 5-Year Strategic Plan, which our School Board approved.
Our District’s Mission Statement states that:
The School District of Palm Beach County is committed to providing a world-class education with excellence and equity to empower each student to reach his or her highest potential with the most effective staff to foster the knowledge, skills, and ethics required for responsible citizenship and productive careers.
Beautiful!
This proposed pay plan actively works against this mission, and vital elements of our Strategic Plan in the following ways.
• Instead of promoting a high performance culture in which teachers are respected and allowed to collaborate to help our students, it promotes divisiveness, bitterness and competition between teachers. Merit pay historically has not been supported by teachers because the pay has been based on subjective and arbitrary systems of evaluation, and teachers know there is no fair way for it to be done.
• If merit pay is a good idea, then why is it a highly kept secret in each school which teachers are found to be highly effective? Don’t we want to share best practices?
• It promotes those teachers who have a certain set of students that respond to a certain growth pattern needed for a narrow set of test scores – called VAM—the Value Added Model of teacher evaluation.
• In our District’s 90-Day Entry Plan findings, you ask the big questions: Is it good for children? Is it research based?
• Merit pay is not good for children. It punishes those teachers working with the most challenging populations, the very populations you state you most want to lift up.
• Merit pay based on test scores is not research based. In fact, research shows the opposite. It shows no affect in student outcomes because basically, the teachers studied were doing the best they knew how, no matter what population of students they were teaching. The American Statistical Association cautions that VAM scores, while they may be useful in noting large trends in big systems, are not effective when they are used in high-stakes decision making related to individuals.
• Our District’s strategic plan cites the need for a high performance culture. Yet merit pay goes against this. It’s an extrinsic form of reward, making use of carrots and sticks, as if our teachers were pet monkeys. W. Edwards Deming, the management consultant who turned Japanese auto makers into world class manufacturers, said that the intrinsic motivation –the love of the work itself—is what motivates people to do a good job. He said it’s important to pay people well, develop their capacities for excellence and let them do their job.
• Merit pay works against this. It will make the District actively work against having all teachers be highly effective, since our School District is not going to want to pay the top salary for all its employees. We already see this at work in Florida’s Lake County School District.
As education historian Diane Ravitch states: Merit pay has over 100 years of research and has never been found to be effective.
As teachers, we have been branded with a Scarlet Letter, called VAM, a projection of the collective sins of our society for our grotesque inequity.
I will not, as a teacher, vote to approve merit pay, which will widen this inequity for our most underserved students most in need, and I ask the District to fix this botched idea and work at having it reversed by our state legislature.
Chris Savage, who blogs at Eclectablog in Michigan, reports that multimillionaire Dick DeVos has threatened to run opponents to Republicans who fail to support expansion of the disastrous Education Achievement Authority. DeVos funds vouchers and privatization. He just plain doesn’t like public schools.
Chris Savage writes:
“I have confirmation from two independent sources in the Michigan legislature that multi-millionaire Dick DeVos is using the threat of massive financial support for Republican primary opponents of vulnerable Senate Republicans to force them to vote for the bill that would expand the Education Achievement Authority statewide. The same approach was used to peel off recalcitrant House Republicans before they passed the EAA expansion bill last month. If Democrats John Olumba and Harvey Santana had not voted for it, however, they would not have had enough.
“According to my sources, DeVos has pledged to fund Republican primary opponents to the tune of $100,000 each. In addition, he would provide the Republican victims of their effort with a list of other wealthy donors who would also support their primary challengers.
“This is the same approach that DeVos was reported to have used to force passage of legislation that made Michigan a Right to Work state in during the lame duck session in December of 2012:
“…….In public, Snyder insisted that right-to-work was still not on his agenda. Privately, his aides met with labor and suggested that concessions on other issues would keep the bill off the table. All the while, though, DeVos and his team were furiously whipping the vote. In the weeks before the start of the lame-duck session, DeVos personally called dozens of state lawmakers, pledging his support if the unions threatened recalls or primary challenges…..”
“If there was any doubt in your mind that wealthy corporatists are attempting to subvert our democracy and our government, this should dispel that idea. What the Koch brothers are doing nationally, the DeVos family is doing in Michigan to promote their anti-labor, anti-public education corporatist agenda.
“They are literally buying our government, one legislator at a time.
“It is my hope that Republicans in the Senate will be as offended as the rest of us by this blatant attempt to extort their votes. Anyone who values our American democracy and who values the principals of a representative, one-person/one-vote republic should be outraged at this.”
Dr. John Thompson, historian and teacher in Oklahoma City, anticipates the collapse of corporate reform in this outstanding post. He gives much of the credit to the opt out movement, which stood up to political and corporate power to protect their children. Who ever thought it was a great idea to subject 9-year-old children to 8 hours of testing? Who thought it would be a good idea to fire teachers if test scores didn’t go up every year? Who thought it was a good idea to drain resources from public schools and give them to privately managed charter schools?
Parents certainly didn’t. They refused to be bullied by school officials and politicians.
Thompson writes:
“Three cheers for the Opt Out movement! When the history of the collapse of data-driven, competition-driven school improvement is written, the parents and students of the grassroots Opt Out uprising will get much – or most – of the credit for driving a stake through the heart of the testing vampire.”
Thompson thanks Tom Loveless for pointing out that all of these alleged reforms have not produced the promised miracles. But he faults all those who continue to believe that testing, punishments, rewards, and competition improves education.
But he gives Loveless a demerit for continuing to accept the premises of corporate reform.
“One cheer for the Brookings Institute’s Tom Loveless, and his discussion of Common Core State Standards (CCSS) and for noting the failure of CCSS to raise student performance. Okay, maybe he deserves 1-1/2 or 1-3/4ths cheers for his resisting changes to the reliable NAEP tests in order to please Common Core advocates, and for concluding, “Watch the Opt Out movement.”
Loveless notes that “states that adopted CCSS and have been implementing the standards have registered about the same gains and losses on NAEP as states that either adopted and rescinded CCSS or never adopted CCSS in the first place.” He then gets to the key point, “The big story is that NAEP scores have been flat for six years, an unprecedented stagnation in national achievement that states have experienced regardless of their stance on CCSS.“ Now, Loveless says, “CCSS is paying a political price for those disappointing NAEP scores.”
“The big story, however, is the failure of the entire standards-driven, test-driven, competition-driven model of school improvement. Loveless is free to adopt his own methodology for his latest research paper on education reform but he deserves a “boo” for continuing to reduce complex and inter-related processes to a bunch of single, simple, distinct, quantifiable categories….
“Loveless, Brookings, and other reformers deserve a loud round of boos for pretending that the failure of Common Core standards is unfair and/or regrettable. On the contrary, the political and educational battle over national standards is a part of the inter-connected debacle produced by a simplistic faith in standards and curriculum; bubble-in accountability; and the federal government’s funding of teacher-bashing, mass charterization, and the top-down reforms of the last 1-1/2 decades.
“While I appreciate Loveless’s candor in acknowledging that the stagnation of NAEP scores in the last six years is unprecedented, his focus on standards misses the other big points. These realities have not been lost on the grassroots Opt Out movement….
“Perhaps we’re seeing the last days of the education blame game. Maybe Loveless and other pro-reform analysts will give up on trying to pin the rejection of their policies on parents and teachers. As parents refuse to allow their children to take the tests, it will become even more impossible to set cut scores, meaning that it will become even more impossible to claim that systems can identify the children and adults who supposedly should be punished for their scores. Once the punitive parts of school reform are repudiated, little or nothing will be left of this unfortunate period of education history. And, the Opt Out movement will deserve the credit it is granted in closing that chapter.”
Peter Greene made a discovery. He unraveled a secret that puzzled those who watch the career trajectories of Broad superintendents. Why did Briadie Superintendent John Covington leave the Kansas City school district that he promised to “save” before it was saved? He abruptly left, surprising many in Kansas City who thought he had made a commitment to stay.
Was it the higher salary for the leader of Michigan’s new Educational Achievement Authority? No.
Peter found the answer: Covington left Kansas City for the EAA because Eli Broad told him to.
When Eli calls, his disciples listen.
The EAA was supposed to be the proof point for Broad’s educational theories. No school board. Total control. It failed. Covington bailed out, amidst complaints about his expense account.
After more than a dozen years of “training” urban superintendents in his unaccredited program, Eli has no successes. Yet he is pushing to take control of half the children in the Los Angeles Unified School District. Maybe he will put John Deasy in charge. No, wait, he tried that already.
Caveat emptor.
Let educators educate, not billionaires who think they know everything just because they are rich.
Diane Ravitch's blog 