Archives for category: For-Profit
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A Remarkable Investigative Reporter

By dianeravitch
October 1, 2012 //
10

Stephanie Simon of Reuters has written one blockbuster story after another. She has done the digging and investigation that make her stories genuinely valuable. In education, as more newspapers cut back their in-depth education reporting, this kind of investigative journalism is becoming increasingly rare.

She wrote stunning articles about the privatization momentum in Louisiana, about TFA, about profiteers jumping into education, about the parent trigger, and about testing in kindergarten.

She is truly fair and balanced, never taking sides, but clearly explaining the issues in context, with attention to their consequences.

Categories Charter Schools, Childhood, Pre-K, K, Corporate Reformers, Education Industry, For-Profit, Jindal, Bobby, Louisiana, Parent trigger, Privatization, Teach for America TFA

The Big Tradeoff: Common Core and the Budget

By dianeravitch
September 29, 2012 //
12

Mike Fair, a Republican legislator in South Carolina, worries about the cost and complexity of the new standards and tests.

When you read about the heavy spending that lies ahead, in a time when school budgets are being slashed and teachers laid off, you can see why the Common Core national standards/national tests movement is warmly endorsed by the technology industry.

This is an excerpt:

School districts will need enough computers to allow almost every student to take multiple annual exams. These computers must be suitable for the “innovative” test items and must be maintained and upgraded. Add to this the cost of increased IT staffing, and you begin to realize the problems of buying a Porsche test on a Ford budget.

A recent study projects that states will collectively spend $2.8 billion and $6.9 billion over seven years on technology alone for Common Core. And the authors cautioned that they were accepting the consortiums’ cost estimates at face value; analyst Ze’ev Wurman has predicted that South Carolina’s annual testing costs may skyrocket to $100 per student, compared with $12 per student today.

School districts that can’t afford substantial new technology will have to rotate students through the computer labs; Smarter Balanced recommends a 12-week testing window. But that creates significant security problems — how to keep the earlier-tested students from talking to the later-tested ones? — as well as inequity in results. The students tested late in the window will have almost three more months of instruction than those first out of the gate. Might this give an unfair advantage? And might teachers, whose evaluations depend on these test scores, resent having their students put at the front of the testing window?

These problems will have to be worked out, assuming the whole concept of nationalized standards, tests and curricula doesn’t collapse under its own weight. When that collapse or implosion happens, I hope it is before too much damage is done to our budgets, our schools and our children.

Categories Accountability, Budget Cuts, Common Core, Corporate Reformers, Education Industry, Education Reform, For-Profit, Technology, Computers, Testing

Mr. Barnz, Please Read the New York Times Review

By dianeravitch
September 28, 2012 //
14

Daniel Barnz, the director of “Won’t Back Down,” continues to insist in various forums, most recently in an article he wrote for Huffington Post, that the movie is not anti-union. It’s just a good story. It has no political agenda. It has nothing to do with the rightwing sponsored “parent trigger” law that it celebrates. It is not a vehicle for union-bashing and privatization of public education. It is nothing like the anti-union documentary (“Waiting for ‘Superman'”) that his producer sponsored two years ago.

The review of the film in the New York Times, written by a regular movie reviewer, not a union shill or an angry parent, calls the movie for what it is:

…“Won’t Back Down” ultimately has no use for nuance, and its third act is a mighty cataract of speechifying and breathless plot turns that strip the narrative down to its Manichaean core. Once teachers give up job security and guaranteed benefits, learning disabilities will be cured, pencils will stop breaking and the gray skies of Pittsburgh will glow with sunshine.

A.O. Scott, the reviewer, says that this movie is evidence that Hollywood is not a “liberal propaganda factory.” The odd thing about the movie is that everyone in it belongs to a union, even as they portray the teachers’ union as the villain.

Did you read that, Mr. Barnz?

Categories For-Profit, Parent trigger, Privatization

How a Smart Tech Guy Got Duped

By dianeravitch
September 28, 2012 //
2

Gary Stager knows more about educational technology than almost anyone I can think of. He is one smart guy. Read this and learn how he got taken in by Amplify, the company run by Joel Klein and owned by Rupert Murdoch.

This is how he begins his article on Huffington Post:

Anyone the least bit familiar with my work over the past 30 years knows that I oppose standardized testing, Teach-for-America, school privatization, merit pay, Common Core Content Standards, mayoral control and get-rich-quick schemes promising to increase teacher accountability or raise achievement with the signing of a purchase order. (read here or here)I have dedicated my life to improving teacher quality by empowering educators to create productive learning environments that amplify the potential of each child. A large part of my work has involved the use of computers as intellectual laboratories and vehicles for self-expression that free learning from the top-down traditions of assembly line schooling.

Categories Corporate Reformers, Education Industry, For-Profit, Klein, Joel, On-Line Education, Technology, Computers

Waiver Madness

By dianeravitch
September 28, 2012 //
8

Washington, D.C., has announced that it will set different testing targets for children of different racial groups. According to a story in the Washington Post, this is now common practice among the states that have obtained waivers from No Child Left Behind.

The District and the states are acknowledging that children of color are so far behind their white and Asian peers that they will need more time to catch up. Actually, in D.C., black students will be expected to make more progress than white students so they can catch up with white students.

The story says:

Officials say the new targets account for differences in current performance and demand the fastest progress from students who are furthest behind. The goals vary across much of the country by race, family income and disability, and in Washington, they also vary by school.

At Anacostia High, which draws almost exclusively African Americans from one of the District’s most impoverished areas, officials aim to quadruple the proportion of students who are proficient in reading by 2017, but that would still mean that fewer than six out of 10 pass standardized reading tests. Across town at the School Without Walls in Northwest Washington, a diverse and high-performing magnet that enrolls students from across the city, the aim is higher: 99.6 percent.

Meanwhile, at Wilson Senior High, 67 percent of black students — and 88 percent of Asians and 95 percent of whites — are expected to pass standardized math tests five years from now.

Setting different aspirations for different groups of children represents a sea change in national education policy, which for years has prescribed blanket goals for all students. Some education experts see the new approach as a way to speed achievement for black, Latino and low-income students, but some parents can’t help but feel that less is being expected of their children.

The absurdity of this scenario is that D.C. and the states expect that all children will reach proficiency on normed tests. Normed tests have a bell curve. On a normed test, half will always be above and half below the mean. No matter how hard you try, a bell curve is still a bell curve. There is no district in the nation where 100% of the children are proficient. The children who are most advantaged cluster in the top half; those who are least advantaged cluster in the bottom half. This is true of the SAT, the ACT, state tests, federal tests, and international tests.

And, if you step back, you must wonder why the standardized tests–whose flaws, inaccuracies, and statistical vagaries are well known–have become the measure of all education.

No private school in the nation is subjecting its children to this mad scramble to live up to the demands of Pearson and McGraw Hill’s psychometricians.

Maybe all this seeming madness is just part of the larger scenario to declare US education a failure and find more schools ripe for privatization.

Categories Accountability, Education Industry, Education Reform, Federal Waiver, For-Profit, Privatization, Race to the Top, Testing, US Education

How to Destroy Public Education: Lessons from Pennsylvania

By dianeravitch
September 27, 2012 //
17

In a brilliant column, Bill White of the Lehigh Valley News compares Governor Tom Corbett’s education policies to carpet-bombing of Vietnam. The goal nearly half a century ago was to “bomb Vietnam back into the stone age.” White says that Corbett is doing the same with public education with his program of budget cuts, charter schools, and voucher proposals, which have thus far produced layoffs, program cuts, falling test scores, and soaring class sizes.

It seems that the Governor’s goal is to drive parents out of public education and into charters or to demand vouchers to escape the mess the Governor is creating.

Charter advocates always say that charters are truly accountable because if they fail, they are closed. That is not the case in Pennsylvania. Once charters are opened, it is expensive and difficult to close them:

The state law is a nightmare. To revoke the charter of a troubled school, the home district must potentially engage in a lengthy legal battle in which local taxpayers must pay for lawyers on both sides. Once a charter school is approved and operational, the law allows it to continue receiving tax dollars even if it loses its school building, lays off its teaching staff or is in the midst of revocation hearings.

I’m not blaming Corbett for the shortcomings of this law, which passed in 1997. I do fault him for policies and priorities that are dragging down public schools, ultimately stacking the deck for more parents to pursue charter schools and other forms of non-public education, which, if his proposals for education “reform” are enacted, will divert even more money from public schools.

Categories Accountability, Budget Cuts, Charter Schools, Corporate Reformers, Education Industry, Education Reform, For-Profit, Pennsylvania, Privatization

Ohio Charters: About the Same as Public Schools

By dianeravitch
September 27, 2012 //
2

To no one’s surprise, the latest Ohio report card shows that charter schools perform about the same as public schools. They actually show less value-added growth than the state’s traditional public schools, but are about the same as the Big 8, the urban districts. Remember that charters are touted as a silver bullet. The evidence accumulates that they are not. They extract money from public schools, perform no better, and are leading to what: a dual school system, with both systems publicly funded, one regulated, the other deregulated. In Ohio, charters are especially obnoxious because many operate for-profit, not for better education, not for kids.

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Corporate Reformers, Education Industry, Education Reform, For-Profit, Ohio

The Georgia Federation of Teachers Denounces Charter Legislation

By dianeravitch
September 25, 2012 //
9

Governor Nathan Deal of Georgia is supporting a constitutional amendment to create a commission to approve charter schools despite the objection of local school boards. This proposal was drafted by the rightwing ALEC organization, which is heavily funded by big corporations and counts 2,000 state legislators among its members.

This is the statement issued by the Georgia Federation of Teachers about the constitutional amendment that would curtail the powers of local school boards:

Children, Not Profits, Are Our Priority
Georgia Federation of Teachers President Verdaillia Turner
on the Charter School Amendment

The Charter School Amendment is not about supporting parents or student achievement. It is about granting the governor, lieutenant governor and speaker unprecedented power over billions of local and state tax dollars via creating a new state agency which will control billions of tax dollars for private interests. This agency would be appointed by the governor and accountable only to the governor. This agency would siphon precious tax dollars away from 1.7 million Georgia school children. It would support and fatten special schools for select people by exacerbating class and racial segregation. The Charter School Amendment is about “who chooses and who loses.”

Children, not profits, are our priority. We agree with Georgia’s State School Superintendent, Dr. John Barge. Until all of Georgia’s schools are financed appropriately, and students and teachers are no longer furloughed, it is unconscionable to fund a new state agency or support the objectives of the Charter School Amendment. The money for these special “for profit” schools will create a dual state school system and will cost Georgia’s taxpayers billions of dollars.

While the powers at the state capitol deceive the public by pushing for less government, they are creating more government via another state agency to add to the 128 state agencies that already exist. And while the powers at the state capitol deceive the public and claim that they support local control, they are attempting to take local control away from locally elected school boards, the men and women most accountable to the public, by pushing this amendment. And while the powers at the state capitol claim that this amendment is about expanding parental choice and helping students achieve, they deceive the public by taking over 6 billion dollars from public schools and setting up Georgia’s citizens for an educational Enron encounter. Over 70 school districts are operating with a deficit. At least 4 school districts are broke, and over 20 school districts are still furloughing teachers and students. Parents already have a choice. Local boards of education may and do grant charters. And if a board denies a charter petition, the Georgia Department of Education has an appeal process. The only “choice” as per this amendment is the choice to finance private schools at the public’s expense!

If we can’t trust the state with Medicare, transportation, or to use dollars earmarked for the foreclosed homes our families and students need, why would we trust the state with our children?

This amendment is not about charters, achievement, or parental choice. It is about giving five people who will only be accountable to the governor, free range unprecedented control and power over our billions of tax dollars. And it is about big profits for private interests on the backs of our children and at the expense of Georgia’s taxpayers.

###

Georgia Federation of Teachers
(404) 315-0222

Categories ALEC, Charter Schools, Corporate Reformers, For-Profit, Privatization

Is This What School Reform Looks Like?

By dianeravitch
September 24, 2012 //
17

A reader writes, referring to Muskegon Heights, Michigan:

The for-profit company that is operating the entire school system near me fired all the teachers and hired new ones back at half price.  I can’t wait to see how this is going to work.  I have heard that teachers are walking off the job at the end of the day.  Cheaper is just not always better.

Categories Education Industry, Education Reform, For-Profit, Privatization

The Pattern on the Rug

By dianeravitch
September 23, 2012 //
6

A reader sees how the pieces of the reform movement fit together:

I think that all the double-speak is just to divert attention away from the major process of dismantling education that has been taking place across the country, and the smoke and mirrors is to conceal the intention to ultimately declare brick and mortar schools obsolete and teachers expendable and unnecessary. Effectively, the goal is to not have teachers anymore.

One online teacher I work with put it this way recently, “We’re just glorified graders now.” Honestly, for a teacher, there is no glory when your job boils down to just grading. But politicians, corporate reformers and companies like Pearson and K-12 seem to think that education can be reduced to presenting material on a screen and testing, and that they can train virtually anyone to be graders.

Actually, online, you can set it up so that tests are self-administered and automatically generate grades, so currently instructors are grading papers, class discussions, group projects, participation, etc. and I can see how that might one day be considered superfluous to the powers that be.

Categories Corporate Reformers, Education Industry, For-Profit, On-Line Education, Parent trigger, Privatization, Race to the Top, Stand for Children, Teach for America TFA, Teacher Evaluations, Teachers and Teaching, Technology, Computers, Unions, US Education
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