Archives for category: Hoax

 

The rightwing, anti-union Walton Family Foundation has funded a group called Innovate to push charter schools as the solution to achievement gaps in San Francisco.

Innovate targets Black and Latino families and peddles the hoax that charters have the secret formula for closing achievement gaps that are rooted in poverty.

“Innovate is a South Bay-based group founded in 2013 and describing itself as a “nonprofit organization whose mission is to build the parent and community demand for world-class public schools, and to accelerate the growth of these schools, particularly for low-income students and students of color.”

“Fair enough. But achieving this end has, reliably, taken the form of agitation for charter schools. The organization is generously funded by pro-charter outfits such as the Walton Family Foundation, which has put hundreds of millions of dollars into bankrolling taxpayer-funded, privately operated schools nationwide. Innovate’s own founding documents state that its raison d’être is to “focus on education reform that will support the creation of new charter schools and innovative district schools, parent choice, and strong systems of accountability.”

“Prior to turning its eyes to the north, Innovate won contentious battles in the San Jose area, besting opponents claiming that charter schools are cannibalizing the public system. They began quietly cultivating black and Latino parents in the Bayview and Mission two years ago, but it’s only in the last several months that this has garnered much attention. The organization began saturating area residents’ social media feeds with links to its report claiming San Francisco schools are the very worst in all of California for poor students of color.

“(The district disputes Innovate’s use of the data — but there’s no way to make the stats look good; generations of minority parents have complained that San Francisco’s schools have failed them, and the gaping achievement gap shows no indications of narrowing in the short term.)

“Innovate’s report is titled, “A Dream Deferred,” a Langston Hughes reference lost on few. Also lost on few is the exquisite quality of this document’s online form, which allows readers ample opportunity to share it with elected officials — and share their personal data with Innovate — at the push of a button.

“Innovate’s most recent tax forms indicate it grossed more than $4 million in 2015 alone, and its slick materials, excellent website, and a communications staff dwarfing the San Francisco Unified School District’s are indicative of that.”

Innovate implied that it has the support of the NAACP, but failed to mention that the state and national NAACP have called for a moratorium on new charters. They used the words of Amos Brown, the head of the local NAACP, and he was unhappy.

““You can tell everybody you see, whether in hell or heaven, that it is not my position to support Innovate and their move for charter schools,” Brown told us. “I want to make it crystal clear to those people: They are not to use my name in support of no charter school! I don’t appreciate this one bit.”

”Mission Local has heard many such stories: Innovate staff packing public meetings and clapping and shouting at the right times; Innovate employees crashing seminars intended for parents, participating in them, and scouting for recruits; Innovate staff trying to gain entry into community organizations.

“These are tactics more befitting campus Marxists or Lyndon LaRouche acolytes than a multi-million-dollar nonprofit with dozens of employees and a coterie of extremely wealthy backers. But the strategies employed by scrappy ideological groups do work — and can be even more effective when you have big bucks on-hand to pay professional organizers.”

Innovate is preying on parents’ hopes and fears. You can be sure that parents will never hear about the many failed charters that litter California, Tennessee, Nevada, Michigan, and other states.

 

 

 

 

One of our regular readers and occasional commentators, Doug Garnett, happens to have expertise about media.

After he read Jill Lepore’s article, he reacted to it and added several other commentaries. He also links to Clayton Christensen’s rebuttal to Lepore.

This link is an amazing article which I urge you to read. It links together “creative disruption” with the complacency of our nation’s elites about the deindustrialization of the nation and the human toll it created.

Here is a small excerpt from a fascinating article:

A little backstory may help here. Prof. Christensen is now the most prominent heir of Joseph A. Schumpeter’s twin definition of capitalism as the source of all meaningful innovation in life, and of innovation as “creative destruction.” For both of these thinkers, the entrepreneur is the fountainhead of new value, and capital must be pulled out of less productive uses and allocated to the entrepreneur, who is the privileged source of all future of wealth-creation. In Schumpeter’s view, governments, publics, regulations, communities, traditions, habits, faculty senates, teacher’s unions, zoning boards, homeowner’s groups, professional organizations, and, last but not least, business corporations, do not create value but interfere with its creation. All that is solid must be melted into air for the entrepreneur to be free to innovate and thus transform. The resulting wreckage and waste is part of progress, and must not be reduced through regulation. This is true for shuttered factories, and also for high levels of inequality: both are part of liberating the entrepreneur to create the greater wealth of the future.

Although years of reading Prof. Christensen makes me think he’s personally humane, his theory is the business world’s single most powerful rationalization for disrupting every type of humane condition, such as job security, tax-funded public infrastructure, or carefully nurtured, high-quality product lines. Prof. Lepore was right to state, “Disruptive innovation is competitive strategy for an age seized by terror.” Disruption feeds on major and also minor terrors, like being left behind by a change deemed unavoidable, or being excluded from debate about the costs and benefits of undermining entire regional economies by offering tax breaks to companies that offshore production.

One outcome of the theory of disruptive innovation has been the shocking complacency of the U.S. political class about the national devastation wrought by deindustrialization. We have a “rust belt,” and ruined cities like Newark and Detroit, and wide areas of social and economic decline amidst enormous wealth, because business and political leaders were taught by consultants like Prof. Christensen that capitalism must destroy in order to advance. Journalists might come along and chronicle the horrible human costs of the decline of the steel industry in, say, Youngstown, Ohio (see the Tammy Thomas sections in George Packer’s The Unwinding (2013). But by the time someone like Mr. Packer arrived, decline has been baked into the regional cake.

The theory of disruptive innovation was arguably head baker, for it taught politicians in Youngstown and elsewhere that industries like steel and their unionized employees had been judged by an impartial market to be uncompetitive. Consultants would routinely opine that the only logical response to falling profits was the mass layoff and/or factory closure. In The Disposable American (2007), Louis Uchitelle pointed out that layoffs were not wars of necessity but wars of choice, and yet to say that deindustrialization expressed a cultural entitlement rather than an economic law was to stick one’s finger in the dike. Slowly but surely, Youngstown and everyplace like it no longer had economies that supported a broad, stable middle class. In addition, like Beckett’s Godot, the renewal to which this disruption was to lead never actually showed up.

Thus Prof. Lepore’s critique of disruptive innovation tapped into a pervasive, long-term anger about ruin in America and an anger at the corporate and political classes that deemed ruin necessary.

This Report was written by Kris Nordstrom, who works for the North Carolina Justice Center. He previously was a research analyst for the North Carolina General Assembly. The report tells the story of a state that was once the envy of the South for its education policies, but is now in rapid decline, copying failed policies from other states,

Home

PRESS RELEASE and SUMMARY

By Kris Nordstrom
Contracting Analyst, Education & Law Project

North Carolina was once viewed as the shining light for progressive education policy in the South. State leaders—often with the support of the business community—were able to develop bipartisan support for public schools, and implement popular, effective programs. North Carolina was among the first states to explicitly monitor the performance of student subgroups in an effort to address racial achievement gaps. The state made great strides to professionalizing the teaching force, bringing the state’s average teacher salary nearly up to the national average even as the state was forced to hire many novice teachers to keep pace with enrollment increases. In addition, North Carolina focused on developing and retaining its teaching force by investing in teacher scholarship programs and mentoring programs for beginning teachers.

North Carolina innovated at all ends of the education spectrum. The state was one of the first in the nation to create a statewide pre-kindergarten program with rigorous quality standards. At the secondary level, North Carolina was at the forefront of dual credit programs for high school students, and the Learn & Earn model (now known as Cooperative Innovative High Schools) became a national model, allowing students to graduate with both a high school diploma and an associate’s degree in five years. Students graduating from North Carolina public schools could enroll in the state’s admired, low-cost community college system or its strong university system, most notably UNC Chapel Hill. For much of the 1990s through early 2000s, policymakers in other states often looked to North Carolina’s public schools as an example of sound, thoughtful policy aiming to broadly uplift student performance.

Unfortunately, over the past seven years, North Carolina has lost its reputation for educational excellence. Since the Republican takeover of the General Assembly following the 2010 election, the state has become more infamous for bitter partisanship and divisiveness, as reflected in education policies. Lawmakers have passed a number of controversial, partisan measures, rapidly expanding school choice, cutting school resources, and eliminating job protections for teachers.

Less discussed, however, has been degradation in the quality of North Carolina’s education policies. General Assembly leadership has focused on replicating a number of education initiatives from other states, most lacking any research-based evidence of delivering successful results to students. The General Assembly has compounded the problems though by consistently delivering exceptionally poorly-crafted versions of these initiatives.

Sadly, these controversial, poorly-executed efforts have failed to deliver positive results for North Carolina’s students. Performance in our schools has suffered, particularly for the state’s low-income and minority children.

So how did we get here? How is it affecting our students?

Lack of transparency leads to poor legislation

The past seven years of education policy have been dominated by a series of not just bad policies, but bad policies that are incredibly poorly crafted. This report provides a review of the major education initiatives of this seven-year period. In every case, the major initiatives are both:

Based on very questionable evidence; and
Crafted haphazardly, ignoring best practices or lessons learned from other states.
These problems almost certainly stem from the General Assembly’s approach to policymaking. Over the past seven years, almost all major education initiatives were moved through the legislature in a way to avoid debate and outside input. At the same time, the General Assembly has abandoned its oversight responsibilities and avoided public input from education stakeholders. The net result has been stagnant student performance, and increased achievement gaps for minority and low-income students.

One commonality of nearly all of the initiatives highlighted in this report is that they were folded into omnibus budget bills, rather than moved through a deliberative committee process. Including major initiatives in the budget, rather than as stand-alone bills, is problematic for three reasons:

Stand-alone bills are required to be debated in at least one committee prior to being heard on the floor. Committee hearings allow public debate and bill modifications from General Assembly members with subject-area knowledge, and can permit public input from stakeholders and other outside experts.
Stand-alone bills require majority of support to become law. While the budget bill also requires majority support to become law, there is great pressure on members to vote for a budget bill, particularly one crafted by their own party. Budget bills are filled with hundreds of policy provisions. As a result, members might vote for controversial programs that are incorporated into the budget that they would not support if presented as a standalone vote.

Budget bills are very large, and members are often provided limited time to review the lengthy documents. For example, the 2017 budget bill was made public just before midnight on June 19 and presented on the Senate floor for debate and vote by 4 PM on June 20. As a result, members are unable to adequately review programs and craft amendments that could improve program delivery.
Compounding matters, the General Assembly has effectively dismantled the Joint Legislative Education Oversight Committee (Ed Oversight), while joint meetings of the House and Senate Education Appropriation subcommittees (Ed Appropriations) are becoming increasingly rare. In the past, these two committees were integral to the creation and oversight of new initiatives.

From its formation in 1990 through 2015, Ed Oversight regularly met during the legislative interim to recommend ways to improve education in the state. However, the committee met just once in the 2015-16 interim, and not at all during the 2016-17 interim.

Similarly, Ed Appropriations—which is responsible for crafting the state budget for public schools, the community college system, and state universities—is meeting less often. Historically, Ed Appropriations meetings during long sessions have been the venue through which General Assembly members undertake detailed, line-item reviews of each state agency’s budget.

2017 marked the first time in known history that Ed Appropriations meetings featured zero in-depth presentations of K-12 funding issues. The General Assembly’s education leaders stood out for their lack of effort. Every other budget subcommittee received detailed presentations covering all, or nearly all, agency budgets.

North Carolina’s teachers, Department of Public Instruction employees, and the academic community are an incredibly valuable resource that should be drawn upon to strengthen our state educational policy. Instead, these voices have increasingly been ignored. As shown below, the net result has been a series of poorly-crafted policies that are harming North Carolina’s children.​

 

Supporters of Eva Moskowitz would have us believe that she has created a national model for the education of poor black students. Her proof: Her schools have very high test scores.

But, as Gary Rubinstein points out in this post, very few of the students who start in Eva’s charter chain actually persist. The attrition rate is high. Since Eva adds and subtracts students until the third grade, the actual attrition rate may be even higher than what is reported.

He writes:

“Something that I think has not been reported widely enough is the attrition rate for Success Academy students. Success Academy opened in 2006 with 83 Kindergarteners and 73 first graders. Eleven years later there are now 17 twelfth graders set to be the first graduating class. So we know for sure that at least 56 out of the initial 73 students, which is 77%, have left Success Academy before graduating. But it is likely more than 77% attrition because Success Academy allows ‘backfilling’ in the early grades. We don’t know how many of those 17 students currently in twelfth grade were among the 73 original first graders in 2006 and likely we will never know. But even assuming that all 17 were among the original students, that is still 80% attrition. Even over an 11 year period, that amounts to about 10% attrition per year for that cohort.”

For a chain that claims to be “public,” Success Academy is very secretive about its data.

 

 

In 2010, the Tea Party and assorted rightwing zealots took control of the North Carolina General Assembly. They gerrymandered districts to assure their continued domination. They passed legislation for charters, vouchers, and cyber charters. They approved for-profit schools. They damaged every functioning part of the government.

Recently, they passed a mandate to reduce class sizes in the early grades but did not increase funding. Educators warned of massive layoffs, loss of the arts and physical education, and other consequences. Now a key legislator claims he has heard their complaints and plans to fix the mess. Educators fear that the chaos is intended to promote privatization.

On another front, the North Carolina General Assembly decided to replicate Tennessee’s failed Achievement School District. In Tennessee, the ASD took over low-performing schools, turned them over to charter operators, and promised miraculous results. There were no results. It flopped.

North Carolina  was impressed nonetheless. Nothing like copying failure. It created an “Innovative School District.” It hired a superintendent, Eric Hall, who is paid $150,000 a year. The plan was to take control of five schools and give them to charter operators. However, almost all the schools that were supposed to be placed in the ISD backed out. Only one school is now about to be taken over. The state has received applications from two firms to operate the one-school district. 

So the one school in the Innovative School District will have a principal, a superintendent, and will be operated by a reform organization.

How do you spell B-O-O-N-D-O-G-G-L-E?

 

 

The General Assembly in North Carolina has devoted its efforts since 2010 to destroying the public education system and undermining the teaching profession. The Tea Party took control of the legislature in 2010 and proceeded to enact as many unjust laws as fast as they could while gerrymandering election districts to retain control. A Democrat won the governorship by a narrow margin in 2026, but the Far-right legislature has frustrated him repeatedly and stripped him of power and appointments to the greatest extent possible.

High school teacher Stuart Egan has chronicled the war against public schools and teachers on his Blog, Caffeinated Rage.  In this post, Egan describes the current state of that war. 

In this post, he writes about the new state superintendent, whose only previous experience was two years of TFA, and who now acts as a lackey for the Tea Party. (Curious how many TFA alums end up aiding governors who want to destroy public schools.) The legislators passed a class size reduction mandate without funding it. Reducing class size is a very good thing, but without funding, it means cuts in every area and elimination of courses and electives. It means chaos by design.

State superintendent Mark Johnson is avid for “personalized learning” (aka depersonalized learning).

Egan explains the hoax of personalized learning, and he calls out Johnson for his failure to provide leadership:

“Time, resources, classroom space, and opportunities to give each student personalized instruction are not items being afforded to North Carolina’s public school teachers. In fact, as state superintendent, Mark Johnson has never really advocated for those things in schools. Actually, he has passively allowed for the class size mandate to proceed without a fight, has never fought against the massive cuts to the Department of Public Instruction, and devotes more time hiring only loyalists and spending taxpayer money to fight against the state board.”

There will be a rally in Raleigh on January 6 in opposition to #ClassSizeChaos. If you are in the state, be there.

 

 

The New Hampshire House took a first step towards adopting vouchers, despite the absence of evidence that vouchers are good for children or education.

“The bill, which is supported by Republican Gov. Chris Sununu, would provide parents with the state’s basic per-pupil grant of roughly $3,000 to be used for private school tuition or home schooling. The House voted 184-162 Wednesday to send it on to its Finance Committee.

“Opponents raised numerous objections, including arguing that public money shouldn’t go to private schools that can discriminate against children with disabilities. Supporters argued it would allow parents to send children, including those with disabilities, to schools that better meet their special needs.”

Students with disabilities are protected by federal law in public schools. They abandon their federal protection when they enroll in private schools.

Recent studies, even those funded by conservatives and the U.S. Department of Education, find that students who use vouchers fall behind their peers in public schools. After a few years, the scores are the same, but that’s because the weakest students have returned to public schools. Vouchers do not provide access to better education; the private schools that accept vouchers are not as good as public schools. The best private schools don’t accept vouchers.

 

This is incredible but true. Tricked by aggressive marketing, some parents in Philadelphia are putting their five- and six-year-old children on a two hours plus bus ride to a low- performing charter school. The Chester Community Charter School is owned by a major Republican donor.

“Imagine waking your 5-year-old kindergarten student before 5 a.m., walking him to a street corner in the city’s Far Northeast, then watching him board a bus for a 2½-hour ride to a school more than 30 miles away.

“Then, imagine he endures the same trip in reverse each afternoon. Five days a week.

“For some parents, it’s not just a bad dream. Such a routine is customary for an increasing number of Philadelphia students enrolled at Chester Community Charter School…

”As enrollment grows, so do the profits of CSMI LLC, a for-profit education management company that operates Chester Community, and was founded and is run by Vahan H. Gureghian, a lawyer, entrepreneur, and major Republican donor.

“CSMI’s books are not public – the for-profit firm has never disclosed its profits and won’t discuss its management fee. State records show that Gureghian’s company collected nearly $17 million in taxpayer funds just in 2014-15. At that time, the school had 2,911 students, and CSMI was paid $5,787 for each. At that rate, more than 1,000 additional students from Philadelphia might mean nearly $6 million in new revenue…

”Results from the Pennsylvania System of School Assessment (PSSA) exams released in September showed that Chester Community had some of the lowest scores among charter schools in the region: 15.6 percent of Chester Community students passed the PSSA reading test in the last school year; 6 percent passed math. Those scores are similar to those of Khepera Charter School in North Philadelphia, which the School Reform Commission has voted to close in June because of poor academics and financial woes. At Khepera, 15.8 percent of students passed reading; 2 percent passed math.”

Marketing pays off handsomely.

 

All sorts of bad things are buried in the new tax law. Here’s one: a huge payday for the student loan industry, as described in an Alternet post by Mary Ann Schlegel Ruegger.

“The GOP tax bill’s inclusion of 529 plans for K-12 private tuition has been widely criticized as yet one more provision that aids the wealthy. That’s because only wealthy families have enough money on hand to sock away $10,000 a year toward each child’s K-12 private school tuition. There’s been little mention of what these plans could mean for middle and lower-income families. By discouraging them from using 529 accounts for long-term college savings, these families are being set up for a future of indebtedness.

“Here’s the problem. These savings accounts were meant to offer tax advantages to families in order to help them to put money away for college. Expanding the use of 529 accounts to cover K-12 expenses encourages families to spend money on private schools now. When it’s time for those families to pay for college, their 529s or other college savings will be less— or nonexistent. Worse, GOP policy makers are providing just the “nudge” to convince these families to enroll in or justify staying in private schools they really can’t afford (even with vouchers), and make up the gap with private loans. The 529 provision in the tax bill is more than anything else a boon to the growing K-12 private school loan industry.

“Unlike higher education, where a student borrower’s financial relationship with colleges and lenders is well defined by federal and state laws, K-12 private education is a largely unprotected landscape.

“Take Indiana, for instance, home of the largest private school voucher program in the nation. Despite paying out $146 million last year in publicly funded tuition vouchers for private schools, the Indiana Department of Education doesn’t even have the right to see the enrollment contracts or student handbooks that govern the payment policies on that money, let alone provide any consumer protections to students who attend those schools. Unlike colleges, private schools at the K-12 level are almost completely free to impose whatever enrollment and financial policies they please. Lenders for K-12 also face far fewer restrictions than lenders for higher education.”

Read on, there is more, and you will learn who benefits.

I reviewed Daniel Koretz’s book, “The Testing Charade” in the current issue of The New Republic.

The review is behind a paywall, but you can get a free 30-day pass or a one-year digital subscription for $10 for the year. When it comes out from the paywall in a couple of weeks, I will post it in full.

The review starts like this:

“In 1979, the psychologist Donald Campbell proposed an axiom. “The more any quantitative social indicator is used for social decision-making,” he wrote, “the more subject it will be to corruption pressures and the more apt it will be to distort and corrupt the social processes it is intended to monitor.” He also wrote: “Achievement tests may well be valuable indicators of general school achievement under conditions of normal teaching aimed at general competence. But when test scores become the goal of the teaching process, they both lose their value as indicators of educational status and distort the educational process in undesirable ways.”

“Put simply, when the measure becomes the goal, and when people are punished or rewarded for meeting or not meeting the goal, the measure is corrupted. As Richard Rothstein has shown in his superb monograph, “Holding Accountability to Account,” tying high stakes to measurable goals affects behavior in negative ways in every field, not just education. Judge heart surgeons by the mortality rate of their patients, and they will turn away risky patients. The classic (and probably apocryphal) illustrations of Campbell’s law come from the Soviet Union. When workers were told that they must produce as many nails as possible, they produced vast quantities of tiny and useless nails. When told they would be evaluated by the weight of the nails, they produced enormous and useless nails. The lesson of Campbell’s law: Do not attach high stakes to evaluations, or both the measure and the outcome will become fraudulent.

“For the last 16 years, American education has been trapped, stifled, strangled by standardized testing. Or, to be more precise, by federal and state legislators’ obsession with standardized testing. The pressure to raise test scores has produced predictable corruption: Test scores were inflated by test preparation focused on what was likely to be on the test. Some administrators gamed the system by excluding low-scoring students from the tested population; some teachers and administrators cheated; some schools dropped other subjects so that more time could be devoted to the tested subjects.

“In his new book, Daniel Koretz, an eminent testing expert at Harvard University, has skillfully dissected the multiple negative consequences of the education reforms of the 2000s, most of them unintended. His title, The Testing Charade: Pretending to Make Schools Better, sums up his conclusion that the reform movement failed badly because of its devotion to high-stakes testing as the infallible measure of educational quality.

“Koretz says the results of the testing inflated scores and were not valid. But reformers did not withdraw their support for testing even when the harm it inflicted on children and public schools became evident. Some were ignorant of the evidence of failure; others believed tests provided valuable information, despite the corruption of the data by high stakes. Since federal law required states to label schools with low scores as failing, and since those schools were often turned into charter schools, a whole industry benefited from this system—even though the same measures labeled many charters as failing, too. The Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA), passed in 2015, still requires that every child be tested every year—a practice unknown in any high-performing nation.

“Legislators’ and policymakers’ obsession with testing has been locked into place since January 8, 2002, when President George W. Bush signed into law his signature domestic legislation, the No Child Left Behind Act. Before NCLB, every state had its own tests and its own accountability measures, but none was as harsh, punitive, and unrealistic as NCLB. None required every school to reach 100 percent proficiency or face mass firings or closure or both.”