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Gary Sasso: Why Don’t the Billionaires Support Public Schools?

By dianeravitch
January 11, 2016 //
42

In an article in Salon, Gary Sasso asks why the billionaires are so intent on funding privately-managed alternatives to public schools. Sasso is the Dean of the College of Education at Lehigh University in Pennsylvania. After all, if they want to improve education, the vast majority of students in this nation attend public schools. Why aren’t they helping public schools? The reality is that charter schools drain funding from public schools, and they usually don’t get better results (if one considers only test scores). Many of them have a stern disciplinary regime that may raise test scores but does not improve education or the spirit of learning.

 

Sasso says that the huge disparities in income today and the erosion of the middle class explain more about educational outcomes than anything that happens in schools. Why are the 1% focused solely on the schools?

 

Sasso speculates:

 

Charter schools will never be the answer to improving education for all. It is simply not scaleable. And yet titans of industry such as Bill Gates, Eli Broad and the Walton family, and billionaires such as John Paulson who earlier this year gave $8.5 million to New York’s Success Academy charter school system, are pouring their millions into support for charter schools—millions that will not, incidentally, be invested in improving the schools that the vast majority of U.S. students attend: traditional public schools.

 

Can it be a coincidence that those who have benefited most from the last 50 years of steadily increasing income inequality—the top 10 percent–support an education solution that hinges on denigrating public school teachers, dismantling unions and denying that income inequality is the underlying condition at the root of the problem?

 

The most generous explanation for this phenomenon says that the wealthiest among us are motivated to support charter schools purely out of ideology. They are operating under deeply held beliefs that a school system run by the government smothers innovation and that teachers unions inhibit a free market system that, if allowed to operate, would result in better teachers and child outcomes. In addition, these philanthropists believe that public education has become so hidebound that meaningful change within the system is no longer possible, and that fresh ideas and programs not beholden to a system that resists change will provide programs and ideas that are more effective.

 

Another explanation that has been posited is that good, old-fashioned greed is at the root. After all, the wealthy did not achieve their wealth through an indifference to achieving a return on their investments—and our public school system is a $621 billion per year endeavor. For example, a recent investigation by the Arizona Republic found that the state’s charter schools purchased a variety of goods and services from the companies of its own board members or administrators. In fact, the paper found at least 17 such contracts or arrangements totaling more than $70 million over five years.

 

In addition, there are specific tax loopholes that make it especially attractive to donate to charter schools. Banks and equity and hedge funds that invest in charter schools in underserved areas can take advantage of a tax credit. They are permitted to combine this tax credit with other tax breaks while they also collect interest on any money they lend out. According to analysts, the credit allows them to double the money they invested in seven years.

 

However, applying the principle of Occam’s Razor (the simplest explanation is usually the best), the super-rich may support charter schools to weaken unions. That strategy increases inequality of wealth and income, especially for the poorest kids whom the charter promoters claim to be “saving.”

 

Sasso suggests that the best path forward for the 1% would be to focus on rebuilding the middle class, which is currently being squashed.

 

Rebuilding the middle class—not expanding charter schools—is the most effective path to increasing access to quality education and to giving more students the opportunity to achieve their dreams.

 

 

Categories Charter Schools, Education Industry, Jobs, Privatization

The Youngstown Story: An All Too Familiar Story of Urban Distress

By dianeravitch
October 7, 2015 //
16

Vince Guerrieri is a Youngstown native and a writer. He tells the history of Youngstown, Ohio, in this post. Governor John Kasich has targeted Youngstown as a school system that will be taken over by the state, with the assumption that its public schools will eventually be turned over to privately managed charters.

But as Guerrieri shows, the problems of Youngstown do not come from the schools. They are the problems of what was once a thriving city that lost industries, jobs, and population. As industries moved elsewhere, as jobs were outsourced, the population shrank and grew poorer.

He writes:

But the district – and the city – kept hemorrhaging people. The city population, which once peaked around 160,000 and was 100,000 as recently as 1980, is now down to 65,000. With a median household income around $25,000, the city is the poorest in the state and one of the poorest in the country. There are actually a higher percentage of adults in the city without a high school diploma (20 percent) than there are with at least a bachelor’s degree (16 percent). The problems in the city schools go deeper than the board and administration – although they don’t help.

The Youngstown story is a variation of the Detroit story, and a variation of the experience of many other American cities that experienced deindustrialization, loss of population, and a steady deterioration in the economy and in the quality of life.

Politicians think they can cure these deep social and economic problems by privatizing the schools. This is like putting a band-aid on cancer. It makes non sense but they will do it anyway. They will do it because they know how to open charter schools, but they don’t know how to revive cities that lack the resources to provide decent jobs. They will do it because it shows they are doing something. They will do it even though Ohio’s charter schools are among the worst in the nation. They will do it because they lack vision.

Categories Jobs, Ohio, Poverty

Gene V. Glass: Education Reformers and the “Shoe Button Complex”

By dianeravitch
June 8, 2015 //
36

Gene V. Glass, emeritus professor at Arizona State University and an associate of the National Education Policy Center, ponders the ubiquity of the “Shoe Button Complex” among leading “reformers” of education.

In this essay, he recalls a story of a man who became the nation’s leading vendor of “shoe buttons” a century ago. He cornered the market on shoe buttons. He knew everything there was to know about shoe buttons, and he became a very rich man. His great success persuaded him that he was an expert on everything. The essay then refers to the “reformers” who think that their fabulous wealth entitles them to opine on how to re-engineer schools. They don’t listen to people who work in schools or people who are researchers and scholars of education, because those people are not fabulously wealthy; in the eyes of those who have cornered the market on shoe buttons or computers, the opinion of mere educators counts for nothing. Educators, in the eyes of “reformers,” are the status quo because they are educators. Better to trust someone who has never taught or studied the subject in depth.

Glass suggests that Bill Gates and his wife Melinda may be prime examples of the Shoe Button Complex. And then there is Arizona, where he finds this scenario:

Jan Brewer, Republican governor of Arizona and famous for issuing a tongue wagging to President Obama, appointed Intel ex-CEO Craig Barrett to chair a council—Ready Arizona–to study and recommend public education reform for the state. It is unclear what Barrett knows about education. One suspects that we are encountering another case of the Shoe Button Complex. Barrett is urging businesses to push school reform. His public utterances strike familiar chords: the future of the entire state rests on the test scores of little kids; more science and math majors will attract businesses to the state; it’s a global economy. After all, the public schools are “suppliers” of labor for businesses. And at Intel, “if a supplier didn’t meet our specifications, we would call the supplier and say, ‘Meet our specifications or we will fire you.’” Apparently, Barrett shares his fellow Republican Mitt Romney’s pleasure in firing people.

Of course, what Barrett is actually and unknowingly talking about is crony capitalism: Linking government and business in relationships that favor the economy. Whether the intellectual, moral, physical, and aesthetic well-being of young people is benefited by their education probably never occurs to Barrett and his ilk. Or perhaps “well-being” to Barrett means having acquired a taste for consumerism and a job to support it. In fact, most industry leaders would like to see specialized training pushed down as early in the curriculum as possible so that high school graduates appear in their HR departments job-ready, trained at public expense. And if training kids for Intel just happens to involve piping a bunch of online courses into Arizona public schools, well so much the better since Barrett also serves on the board of K-12 Inc., the nation’s #1 supplier of cyber-courses. Whether the former CEO of Intel knows everything there is to know about selling microprocessors AND education, or whether this is merely another manifestation of the Shoe Button Complex remains to be seen.

Categories Arizona, Economy, Education Industry, Education Reform, Gates Foundation, Bill Gates, Jobs

Note to Reformers: Poverty Matters: Poverty Hurts Children

By dianeravitch
April 7, 2015 //
28

One of the central narratives of the faux “reform” movement is that poverty is just an excuse for bad teachers. In my book “Reign of Error,” I documented many reformers claiming that poverty can be overcome by high expectations and great teachers. The fact that test scores reflect family income, they say, demonstrates that poor kids are not getting great teachers.

But social science research has demonstrated for decades that poverty hurts children and families. It means less access to medical care, good nutrition, and good housing. It means that families lack economic security, a decent home, and the many advantages that middle-income and upper-income families take for granted.

Now, new studies of brain development are showing that poverty has even deeper effects on children’s health and well-being than previously suspected. The effects of living without the basic necessities of life can damage children’s life prospects. In this age of affluence and austerity, it seems wildly radical to say it, but I will: education will improve if we reduce poverty. Poverty will decrease if the federal government creates real jobs. Real jobs will be created if the federal government invests in rebuilding our nation’s crumbling infrastructure.

The problems of our society should be addressed by action. Demonizing teachers does not help children or improve education.

To learn more, read Bob Herbert’s powerful book, Losing Our Way.

Categories Economy, Jobs, Poverty

MUST-READ: Thomas Picketty Slams Jeb Bush and Other Republicans Who Think School Choice Will Cure Inequality

By dianeravitch
March 11, 2015 //
21

Thomas Picketty, the French economist whose book “Capitalism in the 21st Century” was a huge bestseller last year, told MSNBC’s Krystal Ball that Republicans–most especially Jeb Bush–were decidedly on the wrong track in responding to inequality.

 

In a post on Salon.com, Picketty told the interviewer that:

 

“there’s a lot of hypocrisy” in the rhetoric of conservatives who condemn inequality while failing to support policies like an increased minimum wage and ramped-up infrastructure spending.

 

“You’re saying let’s tax the top and invest that money into education for all. [Jeb Bush] is a proponent of school choice, of giving schools vouchers so they can attend public school or private school, whatever they want. Is this a good solution in terms of dealing with what he calls the opportunity gap?” Ball asks Piketty.

 

“From what I can see, he doesn’t want to invest more resources into education. He just wants more competition… there’s limited evidence that this is working. And I think most of all what we need is to put more public resources in the education system. Again, if you look at the kind of school, high school, community college that middle social groups in America have access to, this has nothing to do with the very top schools and universities that some other groups have access to,” Piketty replies.

 

“[I]f we want to have more growth in the future and more equitable growth in the future, we need to put more resources in the education available to the bottom 50% or 80% of America. So it’s not enough just say it, as Jeb Bush seems to be saying, but you need to act on it, and for this you need to invest resources,” he says.

 

Asked about claims by Bush and other conservatives that a so-called “skills gap” is responsible for the growth in inequality, Piketty dings that narrative as simplistic.

 

“The minimum wage today is lower than it was 50 years ago, unions are very weak, so you need to increase the minimum wage in this country today. The views that $7 and hour is the most you can pay low-skilled worker in America today… I think is just wrong — it was more 50 years ago and there was no more unemployment 50 years ago than there is today. So I think we could increase the minimum wage,” Piketty says, adding that the U.S. should also invest in “high-productivity jobs that produce more than the minimum wage.”

 

Education is important, Piketty acknowledges, but education alone is not enough to ameliorate inequality.

 

“You need wage policy and you need education policy,” he says. “And in order to have adequate education policy, you also need a proper tax policy so that you have the proper public resources to invest in these public services. Also you need infrastructure. Many of the public infrastructure in this country are not at the level of what the very developed should have. You cannot say, like many of the Republicans are saying, we can keep cutting tax on these top income groups who have already benefitted a lot from growth and globalization over the past 30 years.”

Categories Charter Schools, Corporate Reformers, Education Industry, Education Reform, Jobs, Privatization

Economists Predict 47% of All Jobs Will Disappear

By dianeravitch
March 7, 2015 //
40

While policymakers tell the public that the Common Core standards will prepare all students for “college and careers,” while journalists like David Brooks assert that education will reduce poverty and inequality, economists predict that 47% of jobs will disappear in the U.S. due to robots and other new technology. Not all jobs will disappear: as one of the papers below says, there will still be a need for maids to make beds in hotels.

“At The WorldPost’s Future of Work Conference, a partnership of The Huffington Post and Berggruen Institute taking place in London this week, a similar anxiety has begun to emerge — if not with workers, then with the economists who study them.

“According to our research, 47 percent of jobs in the U.S. are at risk from technology over the next 20 years,” Michael Osborne, a co-director of the Oxford Martin Programme on Technology and Employment, told me. The group’s research combined U.S. Bureau of Statistics data with a complex machine-learning algorithm of its own to draw its conclusions….”

“There are some recent trends experts are sharing which show how this new world might look like, when the small percentage of individuals or corporations that own machines (the means of production) are the only ones able to make money, and as the rest of us (the middle class) lose our jobs for the simple fact that #RobotsDoItBetter.

“Take the most-talked-about slide of the day (seen below), courtesy of Anthony McAfee, associate director of the Center for Digital Business at the MIT Sloan School of Management. The line that has been going up since about 2002 represents total gross domestic product in the U.S. The line that is going down represents wages paid as a percentage of that GDP…”

“Open the link to see the graph. It shows a large increase in productivity coupled with a declining share of income going to wages.

Here is more about the conference in London:

Weekend Roundup: Preparing to Be Disrupted

By: Nathan Gardels, Editor-in-chief

This week, The WorldPost conference on “The Future of Work” took place at Lancaster House in London. Discussion around the theme “prepare to be disrupted” ranged from how the emergent sharing economy, along with 3D desktop manufacturing, would take work back into the home to worries that automation could eliminate as much as 47 percent of current jobs in the United States.

Participants included Google’s Eric Schmidt, LinkedIn’s Reid Hoffman, economists Laura Tyson, Nouriel Roubini and Mohamed El-Erian, Steve Jobs’ biographer Walter Isaacson, Japanese robot creator Tomotaka Takahashi and Arianna Huffington among others. Jordan’s Queen Rania spoke about how social media is fostering small business startups in the Arab world and offering a different narrative than that of the fanatics. She also called for dropping the “I” from ISIS since “there’s nothing Islamic about them.”

In The WorldPost, Ian Goldin of the Oxford Martin School writes that technological advance can lead to greater inequality or inclusive prosperity depending on how we govern ourselves. In an interview, futurist Jeremy Rifkin outlines the zero-marginal cost economy he sees coming. XPrize founder Peter Diamandis discusses his new book “Bold: How to Go Big, Create Wealth and Impact the World” and how exponential technologies such as 3D manufacturing and synthetic biology are transforming all of our lives for the better. This week’s series from Singularity University looks at Germany’s advanced robotic metal sculpting machines. WorldPost Associate Editor Peter Mellgard reports that, “artificial intelligence is breaking out of the box,” according to a panel of experts who recently gathered in New York at the Council on Foreign Relations.

Amy Rosen writes that the skill most needed in the future is an entrepreneurial mindset to navigate the ever-changing innovation economy. Virgin Unite’s Jean Oelwang writes that businesses of the future are looking beyond the bottom line and are becoming people and purpose oriented. Reflecting from Tokyo on a recent visit by Thomas Piketty, Yuriko Koike explains “why Japan does not have America’s super-rich problem.”

Speaking at the London conference, MIT’s Andrew McAfee argues that digital technology is “the best economic news in human history” but says that it poses many challenges to job creation in the future. David Gergen, the long-time presidential adviser now at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard, proposes that the best way to adapt to tech disruption is “from the bottom up” instead of waiting for government policy. Other topics reported on from the conference included: how jobs are at risk because of advancing technologies, why women are winners when it comes to successful petitions, how the myths around meditation and business have been busted and why, according to Martha Lane Fox, co-founder of Lastminute.com, none of her peers in the House of Lords understands the Internet.

As the National People’s Congress got underway in China this week, legal scholar He Jiahong writes from Beijing that establishing the rule of law in China must challenge “guanxi,” or personal connections, in business and politics. WorldPost China Correspondent Matt Sheehan gives us an inside look at dissident artist Ai Weiwei’s exhibit on Alcatraz island in San Francisco Bay. He also writes about an anti-pollution documentary that went viral in China.

Writing from Moscow, Georgy Bovt says Russia is headed down a “dark path” after the murder of Boris Nemtsov. French philosopher Bernard-Henri Lévy says Nemtsov’s example will live long after his murder at the doorstep of the Kremlin. Writing from Athens, Kyriakos Mitskotakis looks at how European realities have deeply constrained the radical plans of the new Greek government.

In this week’s “Forgotten Fact,” The WorldPost looks at Russia’s investigation of opposition leaders and why it does not bode well for the Nemtsov case.

Mia Bloom discusses “how ISIS is using marriage as a trap” to lure young women from the West and elsewhere to join with its fighters in Syria and Iraq. WorldPost Middle East Correspondent Sophia Jones reports from Istanbul this week on the merciless humor of Middle East comics directed at ISIS. She also writes about NFL stars who have traveled to Turkey to teach women football. Writing from Berlin following Bibi’s visit to Washington, German parliamentarian Philipp Missfelderargues that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is right about Iran and that “no deal is better than a bad deal.”

Finally, in light of the death of Turkey’s famed novelist Yasar Kemal, an ethnic Kurd, Behlül Özkan writes that, “in this time of great darkness in the Middle East, the Kurdish movement has reason to be hopeful about the future.”

WHO WE ARE

EDITORS: Nathan Gardels, Senior Advisor to the Berggruen Institute and the long-time editor of NPQ and the Global Viewpoint Network of the Los Angeles Times Syndicate/Tribune Media, is the Editor-in-Chief of The WorldPost. Farah Mohamed is the Managing Editor of The WorldPost. Kathleen Miles is the Senior Editor of the WorldPost. Alex Gardels is the Associate Editor of The WorldPost. Katie Nelson is the National Editor at the Huffington Post, overseeing The WorldPost and HuffPost’s editorial coverage. Eline Gordts is HuffPost’s Senior World Editor. Charlotte Alfred and Nick Robins-Early are Associate World Editors.

CORRESPONDENTS: Sophia Jones in Istanbul; Matt Sheehan in Beijing.

EDITORIAL BOARD: Nicolas Berggruen, Nathan Gardels, Arianna Huffington, Eric Schmidt (Google Inc.), Pierre Omidyar (First Look Media) Juan Luis Cebrian (El Pais/PRISA), Walter Isaacson (Aspen Institute/TIME-CNN), John Elkann (Corriere della Sera, La Stampa), Wadah Khanfar (Al Jazeera), Dileep Padgaonkar (Times of India) and Yoichi Funabashi (Asahi Shimbun).

CONTRIBUTING EDITORS: Moises Naim (former editor of Foreign Policy) and Nayan Chanda (Yale/Global; Far Eastern Economic Review). Katherine Keating (One-On-One), Sergio Munoz Bata and Parag Khanna are contributing editors.

The Asia Society and its ChinaFile, edited by Orville Schell, is our primary partner on Asia coverage. Eric X. Li and the Chunqiu Institute/Fudan University in Shanghai and Guancha.cn also provide first person voices from China. We also draw on the content of China Digital Times. Seung-yoon Lee is The WorldPost link in South Korea.

Jared Cohen of Google Ideas provides regular commentary from young thinkers, leaders and activists around the globe. Bruce Mau provides regular columns from
MassiveChangeNetwork.com on the “whole mind” way of thinking. Patrick Soon-Shiong is Contributing Editor for Health and Medicine.

ADVISORY COUNCIL: Members of the Berggruen Institute’s 21st Century Council and Council for the Future of Europe serve as the Advisory Council — as well as regular contributors — to the site. These include, Jacques Attali, Shaukat Aziz, Gordon Brown, Fernando Henrique Cardoso, Juan Luis Cebrian, Jack Dorsey, Mohamed El-Erian, Francis Fukuyama, Felipe Gonzalez, John Gray, Reid Hoffman, Fred Hu, Mo Ibrahim, Alexei Kudrin, Pascal Lamy, Kishore Mahbubani, Alain Minc, Dambisa Moyo,Laura Tyson, Elon Musk, Pierre Omidyar, Raghuram Rajan, Nouriel Roubini, Nicolas Sarkozy, Eric Schmidt, Gerhard Schroeder, Peter Schwartz, Amartya Sen, Jeff Skoll, Michael Spence, Joe Stiglitz, Larry Summers, Wu Jianmin, George Yeo, Fareed Zakaria, Ernesto Zedillo, Ahmed Zewail, and Zheng Bijian.

From the Europe group, these include: Marek Belka, Tony Blair, Jacques Delors, Niall Ferguson, Anthony Giddens, Otmar Issing, Mario Monti, Robert Mundell, Peter Sutherland and Guy Verhofstadt.

MISSION STATEMENT

The WorldPost is a global media bridge that seeks to connect the world and connect the dots. Gathering together top editors and first person contributors from all corners of the planet, we aspire to be the one publication where the whole world meets.

We not only deliver breaking news from the best sources with original reportage on the ground and user-generated content; we bring the best minds and most authoritative as well as fresh and new voices together to make sense of events from a global perspective looking around, not a national perspective looking out.

Berggruen Institute | 100 Wilshire Boulevard | Santa Monica | CA | 90401

Categories Economy, Jobs

Peter Greene: David Brooks Gets Everything Wrong (Again)

By dianeravitch
March 6, 2015 //
40

Peter Greene here reviews David Brooks’ latest effort to advise the nation about education issues. Brooks argues that it would be a mistake to try to reduce poverty by redistributionist policies (I assume he means such policies as higher taxes on billionaires or direct benefits to those who are poor or government programs for job creation); instead, we should count on education to reduce inequality and poverty.

 

In earlier columns, he concluded that Geoffrey Canada’s Harlem Children’s Zone charters were “miracle schools” that had closed the achievement gap between white and black students (however, the miracle has not been sustained, even though Canada kicked out the entire entering class whose scores were low, and his schools spend substantially more than public schools with which they are compared); and Brooks endorsed the idea that teachers would produce higher test scores through a trick called “loss aversion,” where they are given a bonus at the beginning of the year, but the bonus is taken away if the scores don’t go up. In 2011, after he heard me speak in Aspen, Colorado, he wrote a column criticizing me for questioning high-stakes testing and charter schools, and of course, he complained that I said that poverty is a leading cause of low test scores. He seems to believe that testing and charters are the answer to poverty, even though after some 13 years of high-stakes testing and 25 years of charters, there seems to be more child poverty, not less.

 

In today’s column, Brooks claims that the way to prosperity is not to reduce poverty by, for example, creating jobs for people who want to work or raising taxes on the super-rich (that would be redistributionist, which is a very bad thing in his eyes), but by making sure that everyone goes to college. If everyone goes to college, then everyone will get good jobs, and no one will be poor. But where will all those new jobs come from? According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the 20 occupations that will supply the most jobs between now and 2022 are mostly low-paying. Except for registered nurses and managers, 18 of the 20 occupations are not high-wage occupations. Do we need to improve our schools? Yes, of course. Will that be enough to reduce poverty? No.

 

Greene writes:

 

Mostly Brooks wants to argue for education as the miracle engine of economic justice. And to make his argument, he trots out the work of Raj Chetty, a piece of research that proves conclusively that even researchers at Harvard can become confused about the difference between correlation and causation. (Chetty, for those of you unfamiliar with the “research,” asserts that a good teacher will result in greater lifetime earnings for students. What he actually proves is that people who tend to do well on standardized tests tend to grow up to be wealthier, an unexciting demonstration of correlation best explained by things we already know– people who score well on standardized tests tend to be from a higher-income background, and people who grow up to be high-income tend to come from a high-income background.)

 

Brooks also cites magical researcher David Autor of MIT, who believes that if everyone graduated from college with a degree, everyone would make more money because, reasons. Because if everyone had a college degree, flipping burgers would pay more? Because if everyone had a college degree, corporations would suddenly want to hire more people? The continued belief in the astonishing notion that a more educated workforce causes higher-paying jobs to appear from somewhere is big news to a huge number of twenty-somethings who are busy trying to scrape together a living in areas other than the ones they prepared for these days.

 

Brooks isn’t done spouting nonsense:

 

[Brooks writes:] “Focusing on human capital is not whistling past the graveyard…No redistributionist measure will have the same effect as good early-childhood education and better community colleges, or increasing the share of men capable of joining the labor force.”

 

Because the vast number of high-paying jobs currently going unfilled is….. what?

 

Brooks says that redistributionists don’t get it, that they believe that modern capitalism is fundamentally broken, but that their view is biased by short-term effects of the recession. I have two responses for that pair of thoughtbubbbles.

 

First, it’s not clear whether capitalism is broken or not because we are currently tangled up in some sort of twisted fun-house mirror version of faux capitalism where the free market has been obliterated by a controlled money-sucking machine run by the government on behalf of the oligarchs. I’m actually a fan of capitalism, but what we currently have in this country is not capitalism at all.

 

Second, your argument about the “temporary evidence” of the recession is invalid because the recession was (and is) not the result of some mysterious serious of natural events. The economy went in the tank because the CEOs and Wall Street put it there. The economy broke because the “capitalists” broke it, and consequently the recession itself is Exhibit A in the case against modern faux capitalism and the greedheads who run it.

 

Throwing all this back at a magical belief in education is simply another way to blame poor people for being poor. So sorry you need food stamps and health care, but if you’d had the guts and character to go to college and get a degree, you wouldn’t be in such a mess. Your poverty is just the direct result of your lack of character and quality. Well, that and your terrible teachers. But it certainly has nothing to do with how the country is being run. It’s all on you, lousy poor person. And also your teachers.

Categories Charter Schools, Corporate Reformers, Education Industry, Jobs, Poverty, Testing

Economic Policy Institute: Income Inequality in U.S. Approaches Historic High Point

By dianeravitch
February 23, 2015 //
32

The Economic Policy Institute is sometimes referred to in the press as a “left-leaning organization,” which means that their research may be sound (it is) but their sympathies are on the side of equality and fairness for all people. I have often turned to their website for nonpartisan data, always carefully sourced, about economic trends.

 

In this post, EPI documents growing income inequality in the United States. The graphs show the enormous income growth of the top 1% since 1979, as compared to the income growth of the bottom 99%. In the period since the Great Recession of 2008, the top 1% have seen significant income growth, while the bottom 99% have seen stagnant income.

 

The average income of the top 1% is 30 times the average income for the other 99%.

 

Income inequality is near its historic high, which occurred right before the Great Depression.

 

The period when the gap narrowed most was in the 1960s and 1970s. Since 1980, inequality has increased significantly.

Categories Jobs

CraigsList: Seeking Test Scorers at $11.05 per Hour

By dianeravitch
February 19, 2015 //
53

Did you know that big testing corporations hire low-wage temps to score students’ written answers to their tests? The scorers need to have a bachelor’s degree in any subject but no teaching eexperience is necessary. On their snap judgment hang the test scores that will determine the future of students and the jobs of their teachers and the fate of their schools.

 

I first learned about this shocking arrangement when I read Todd Farley’ “Making the Grades: My Misadventures in the Standardized Testing Industry,” which is the most important insider exposé of the industry that sorts, ranks, and labels our nation’s children. And if you want to read another stunning insight into the industry, read this brilliant article by Dan DiMaggio in 2010.

 

The beat goes on.

 

Just a few days ago, someone tweeted this ad he found on Craig’sList in Indianapolis:

 

“Test Evaluators Needed (to score K-12 standardized tests) (Indianapolis, IN)

 

“Compensation: $11.05/hr contract job

 

“If you have a Bachelor’s degree or higher, we need your help to evaluate student assessment tests. Come apply!

 

“For more information and to schedule an appointment visit our website http://www.kellyservices.us/ctb or call us at 1-877-535-5981

 

“Please be prepared to spend two hours going to through the application / orientation process. Please bring two forms of identification to complete and I-9 and bring proof of your degree.

 

“These are project based positions. Monday – Friday, 8:30am – 4:30pm

 

“Position Requirements:

 

-Must hold a completed Bachelor’s degree or higher

 

-Ability to sit and at a computer station for full work day

 

-Basic computer knowledge

 

-Knowledge of standard writing conventions and mechanics

 

-Availability to work Monday through Friday for the entire duration of a project

 

-Demonstrate flexibility while working on various projects”

 

Nothing new. Just remember. These crucial tests–make or break for students and teachers–are being scored by hourly temps.

Categories Jobs, Testing

Teacher to Economist: Why My School Can’t Eliminate Poverty

By dianeravitch
February 5, 2015 //
32

An economist recently predicted trillions of dollars of increased productivity if schools raised test scores and thus eliminated poverty.

This teacher has a different view, grounded in reality, not speculation.

“As a teacher in a high poverty urban school, I would like to weigh in here. My school is not set up to eliminate poverty. That argument is rubbish. Would any of these economists like to put a price on the psychological toll of poverty? My kids are worried about getting shot. It is a common occurrence in the neighborhood. They eat the school breakfast totally lacking in nutrition as if it were mana from heaven. Some wear the same clothes day after day. The vast majority are not focused on their studies due to shouldering the unrelenting burdens of poverty.”

Categories Economy, Jobs, Poverty
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