Archives for category: Klein, Joel

Tom Ultican, retired teacher in California, smells a scam in the making. The science behind “the Science of Reading” movement is not very scientific, he writes. Publishers and vendors are preparing to cash in on legislative mandates that force reading teachers to use only one method to teach reading despite the lack of evidence for its efficacy. Ultican zeroes in on the role of billionaire Laurene Powell Jobs as one of the key players in promoting SofR.

He writes:

Laurene Powell Jobs controls Amplify, a kids-at-screens education enterprise. In 2011, she became one of the wealthiest women in the world when her husband, Steve, died. This former Silicon Valley housewife displays the arrogance of wealth, infecting all billionaires. She is now a “philanthropist”, in pursuit of both her concerns and biases. Her care for the environment and climate change are admiral but her anti-public school thinking is a threat to America. Her company, Amplify, sells the antithesis of good education.

I am on Amplify’s mailing list. April third’s new message said,

“What if I told you there’s a way for 95% of your students to read at or near grade level? Maybe you’ve heard the term Science of Reading before, and have wondered what it is and why it matters.”

Spokesperson, Susan Lambert, goes on to disingenuously explain how the Science of Reading (SoR) “refers to the abundance of research illustrating the best way students learn to read.”

This whopper is followed by a bigger one, stating:

“A shift to a Science of Reading-based curriculum can help give every teacher and student what they need and guarantee literacy success in your school. Tennessee school districts did just that and they are seeing an abundant amount of success from their efforts.”

A shift to SoR-based curriculum is as likely to cause harm as it is to bring literacy success. This was just a used-car salesman style claim. On the other hand, the “abundance of success” in Tennessee is an unadulterated lie. National Assessment of Education Progress (NAEP) tracks testing over time and is respected for education testing integrity. Tennessee’s NAEP data shows no success “from their efforts.” Their reading scores since 2013 have been down, not a lot but do not demonstrate an “abundance of success”.

NAEP Data Plot 2005 to 2022

Amplify’s Genesis

Larry Berger and Greg Dunn founded Wireless Generation in 2000 to create the software for lessons presented on screens. Ten years later, they sold it to Rupert Murdoch and his News Corporation for $360 million. Berger pocketed $40 million and agreed to stay on as head of curriculum. Wireless Generation was rebranded Amplify and Joel Klein was hired to run it.

Murdoch proposed buying a million I-pads to deliver classroom instruction. However, the Apple operating system was not flexible enough to run the software. The android system developed at Google met their needs. They purchased the Taiwanese-made Asus Tablets, well regarded in the market place but not designed for the rigors of school use. Another issue was that Wireless Generation had not developed curriculum but Murdoch wanted to beat Pearson and Houghton Mifflin to the digital education market place … so they forged ahead.

In 2012, the corporate plan was rolling along until the wheels came off. In Guilford County, North Carolina, the school district won a Race to the Top grant of $30 million dollars which it used to experiment with digital learning. The district’s plancalled for nearly 17,000 students in 20 middle schools to receive Amplify tablets. When a charger for one of the tablets overheated, the plan was halted. Only two months into the experiment, they found not only had a charger malfunctioned but another 175 chargers had issues and 1500 screens were kid-damaged.

This was the beginning of the end.

By August of 2015, News Corporation announced it was exiting the education business. The corporation took a $371 million dollar write-off. The next month, they announced selling Amplify to members of its staff. In the deal orchestrated by Joel Klein, who remained a board member, Larry Berger assumed leadership of the company.

Three months later, Reuters reported that the real buyer was Laurene Powell Jobs. She purchased Amplify through her LLC, the Emerson Collective. In typical Powell Jobs style, no information was available for how much of the company she would personally control.

Because Emerson Collective is an LLC, it can purchase private companies and is not required to make money details public. However, the Waverley Street Foundation, also known as the Emerson Collective Foundation, is a 501 C3 (EIN: 81-3242506) that must make money transactions public. Waverly Street received their tax exempt status November 9, 2016.

SoR A Sales Scam

The Amplify email gave me a link to two documents that were supposed to explain SoR: (Navigating the shift to evidence-based literacy instruction 6 takeaways from Amplify’s Science of Reading: The Symposium) and (Change Management Playbook Navigating and sustaining change when implementing a Science of Reading curriculum). Let’s call them Symposium and Navigating.

Navigating tells readers that it helps teachers move away from ineffective legacy practices and start making shifts to evidence-based practices. The claim that “legacy practices” are “ineffective” is not evidence-based. The other assertion that SoR is evidence-based has no peer-reviewed research backing it.

Sally Riordan is a Senior Research Fellow at the University College London. In Britain, they have many of the same issues with reading instruction. In her recent research, she noted:

“In 2023, however, researchers at the University of Warwick pointed out something that should have been obvious for some time but has been very much overlooked – that following the evidence is not resulting in the progress we might expect.

“A series of randomised controlled trials, including one looking at how to improve literacy through evidence, have suggested that schools that use methods based on research are not performing better than schools that do not.”

In Symposium, we see quotes from Kareem Weaver who co-founded Fulcrum in Oakland, California and is its executive director. Weaver also was managing director of the New School Venture Fund, where Powell Jobs served on the board. He works for mostly white billionaires to the detriment of his community. (Page 15)

Both Symposium and Navigating have the same quote, “Our friends at the Reading League say that instruction based on the Science of Reading ‘will elevate and transform every community, every nation, through the power of literacy.”’

Who is the Reading League and where did they come from?

Dr. Maria Murray is the founder and CEO of The Reading League. It seems to have been hatched at the University of Syracuse and State University of New York at Oswego by Murray and Professor Jorene Finn in 2017. That year, they took in $11,044 in contributions (EIN: 81-0820021) and in 2018, another $109,652. Then in 2019, their revenues jumped 20 times to $2,240,707!

Jorene Finn worked for Cambria Learning Group and was a LETRS facilitator at Lexia. That means the group had serious connections to the corporate SoR initiative before they began.

With Amplify’s multiple citations of The Reading League, I speculated that the source of that big money in 2019 might have been Powell Jobs. Her Waverly Street Foundation (AKA Emerson Collective Foundation) only shows one large donation of $95,000,000 in 2019. It went to the Silicon Valley Community Foundation (EIN: 20-5205488), a donor-directed dark money fund.

There is no way of following that $95 million.

The Reading League Brain Scan Proving What?

Professor Paul Thomas of Furman University noted the League’s over-reliance on brain scans and shared:

“Many researchers in neurobiology (e.g., Elliott et al., 2020; Hickok, 2014; Lyon, 2017) have voiced alarming concerns about the validity and preciseness of brain imaging techniques such as functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to detect reliable biomarkers in processes such as reading and in the diagnosis of other mental activity….

“And Mark Seidenberg, a key neuroscientist cited by the “science of reading” movement, offers a serious wcaution about the value of brain research: “Our concern is that although reading science is highly relevant to learning in the classroom setting, it does not yet speak to what to teach, when, how, and for whom at a level that is useful for teachers.”

“Beware The Reading League because it is an advocacy movement that is too often little more than cherry-picking, oversimplification, and a thin veneer for commercial interests in the teaching of reading.”

The push to implement SoR is a new way to sell what Amplify originally called “personalized learning.”This corporate movement conned legislators, many are co-conspirators, into passing laws forcing schools and teachers to use the SoR-related programs, equipment and testing.

SoR is about economic gain for its purveyors and not science based.

When politicians and corporations control education, children and America lose.

To read an earlier post by Tom Ultican on this topic, see this.

Categories Accountability, Billionaires, Corporate Reform, Education Industry, Failure, For-Profit, Klein, Joel, Literacy, Online Learning, Research, Technology

Leonie Haimson: The Myth of Accountability Under Mayoral Control

By dianeravitch

January 21, 2024 //

Leonie Haimson is a tireless advocate for better public schools and reduced class sizes. She leads a small but powerful organization called Class Size Matters. I am a member of her board (unpaid, of course, as she is).

CSM is powerful because Leonie is tireless. She attends meetings of the City Council, the Panel on Education Policy (I.e., the Board of Education); she testifies at City Council hearings and goes to Albany to testify when the education committees meet. She finds lawyers to work pro bono and files lawsuit to seek more funding for the schools. She works with parent groups to support or oppose the latest decision by the mayor. She meets with elected representatives. She writes op-Ed’s for the local press. She almost single-handedly collapsed Bill Gates’ inBloom, which hoped to collect personally identifiable information about every student in every state. She scrutizes the budget of the NYC public schools, even more intensely than those who are paid to do it. She once blocked a bad deal that saved the city $600 million, by exposing the sordid record of the contractor.

The elected officials in Albany are now considering whether to renew mayoral control of the public schools. Michael Bloomberg persuaded the Legislature to give him control soon after he was elected in 2001. He promised all sorts of miraculous improvements. He would be accountable, he said.

Leonie testified recently at a hearing on mayoral control and explained that mayoral control did not increase accountability. In fact, it decreased accountability. No one listened to parents. One of Bloomberg’s chancellors (his second, who lasted only 90 days) mocked parents who expressed their grievances at a public hearing.

The mayor hired a lawyer with no experience in education to be the schools’ chancellor. He did not trust educators and surrounded himself with people from the corporate sector.

The mayor had a majority of appointments on the city’s “Panel on Education Policy,” a toothless replacement for its Board of Education. When the members of the Panel threatened to reverse one of his decisions, he fired the disobedient appointees on the spot and replaced them with others who served his wishes.

The mayor could do whatever he wanted, regardless of the views of teachers, parents, students, communities. Beloved public schools that served the neediest of students were closed and replaced with small schools that did not accept the neediest of students. He opened scores of charter schools that were free to reject or exclude students they did not want, then crowed about their test scores. (Now a private citizen, Bloomberg continues to give hundreds of millions to charter schools; no big deal for him, as his assets exceed $60 billion).

Leonie stands on a solid foundation of knowledge, experience, and persistence. Sometimes I think she wins battles because the electeds don’t want her to pester them anymore.

She is the undisputed champion of reduced class sizes.

More power to her!

Categories Accountability, Billionaires, Bloomberg, Michael, Charter Schools, Class size, Class Size Matters Org, Corporate Reform, Courage, Democracy, Education Industry, Elections, History, Klein, Joel, New York City

Who Demoralized the Nation’s Teachers? Readers Respond

By dianeravitch

January 3, 2022 //

Last week, I posted my thoughts on “Who Demoralized the Nation’s Teachers?” I sought to identify the people and organizations that spread the lie that America’s public schools were “broken” and that public school teachers were the cause. The critics slandered teachers repeatedly, claiming that teachers were dragging down student test scores. They said that today’s teachers were not bright enough; they said teachers had low SAT scores; and they were no longer “the best and the brightest.”

The “corporate reform” movement (the disruption movement) was driven in large part by the “reformers'” belief that public schools were obsolete and their teachers were the bottom of the barrel. So the “reformers” promoted school choice, especially charter schools, and Teach for America, to provide the labor supply for charter schools. TFA promised to bring smart college graduates for at least two years to staff public schools and charter schools, replacing the public school teachers whom TFA believed had low expectations. TFA would have high expectations, and these newcomers with their high SAT scores would turn around the nation’s schools. The “reformers” also promoted the spurious, ineffective and harmful idea that teachers could be evaluated by the test scores of their students, although this method repeatedly, consistently showed that those who taught affluent children were excellent, while those who taught children with special needs or limited-English proficiency or high poverty were unsatisfactory. “Value-added” methodology ranked teachers by the income and background of their students’ families, not by the teachers’ effectiveness.

All of these claims were propaganda that was skillfully utilized by people who wanted to privatize the funding of public education, eliminate unions, and crush the teaching profession.

The response to the post was immediate and sizable. Some thought the list of names and groups I posted was dated, others thought it needed additions. The comments of readers were so interesting that I present them here as a supplement to my original post. My list identified No Child Left Behind, Race to the Top, and Common Core as causes of demoralization that tied teachers to a standards-and-testing regime that reduced their autonomy as professionals. One reader said that the real beginning of the war on teachers was the Reagan-era report called “A Nation at Risk,” which asserted that American public schools were mired in mediocrity and needed dramatic changes. I agree that the “Nation at Risk” report launched the era of public-school bashing. But it was NCLB and the other “solutions” that launched teacher-bashing, blaming teachers for low test scores and judging teachers by their test scores. It should be noted that the crest of “reform” was 2010, when “Waiting for Superman” was released, Common Core was put into place, value-added test scores for teachers were published, and “reformers” like Arne Duncan, Bill Gates, Michelle Rhee, Joel Klein, and other became media stars, with their constant teacher-bashing. For what it’s worth, the National Assessment of Educational Progress flatlined from 2010 onwards. Test score gains, which were supposedly the point of all this “reform” activity, were non-existent on the nation’s most consequential test (no stakes attached).

Readers also blamed demoralization on teachers’ loss of autonomy, caused by federal laws and the testing imposed by them, and by the weakness of principals and administrators who did not protect teachers from the anti-education climate caused by NCLB, RTTT, ESSA, and the test-and-punish mindset that gripped the minds of the nation’s legislators and school leaders.

Readers said that my list left off important names of those responsible for demoralizing the nation’s teachers.

Here are readers’ additions, paraphrased by me:

Michelle Rhee, who was pictured on the cover of TIME magazine as the person who knew “How to Fix American Education” and lionized in a story by Amanda Ripley. Rhee was shown holding a broom, preparing to sweep “bad teachers” and “bad principals” out of the schools. During her brief tenure as Chancellor of D.C., she fired scores of teachers and added to her ruthless reputation by firing a principal on national television. For doing so, she was the Queen of “education reform” in the eyes of the national media until USA Today broke a major cheating scandal in the D.C. schools.

Joel Klein, antitrust lawyer who was chosen by Mayor Bloomberg to become the Chancellor of the New York City public schools, where he closed scores of schools because of their low test scores, embraced test-based evaluation of schools and teachers, and opened hundreds of small specialized schools and charter schools. He frequently derided teachers and blamed them for lagging test scores. He frequently reorganized the entire, vast school system, surrounding himself with aides with Business School graduates and Wall Street credentials. Under his leadership, NYC was the epitome of corporate reform, which inherently disrespected career educators.

Michael Bloomberg, former Mayor of New York City, billionaire funder of charter schools and of candidates running for state or local offices who supported privatization of public schools. He claimed that under his leadership, the test-score gap between different racial gaps had been cut in half or even closed, but it wasn’t true. He stated his desire to fire teachers who couldn’t “produce” high test scores, while doubling the size of the classes of teachers who could. His huge public relations staff circulated the story of a “New York City Miracle,” but it didn’t exist and evaporated as soon as he left office.

Reed Hastings, billionaire funder of charter schools and founder of Netflix. He expressed the wish that all school boards would be eliminated. The charter school was his ideal, managed privately without public oversight.

John King, charter school leader who was appointed New York Commissioner of Education. He was a cheerleader for the Common Core and high-stakes testing. He made parents so angry by his policies that he stopped appearing at public events. He was named U.S. Secretary of Education, following Arne Duncan, in the last year of the Obama administration and continued to advocate for the same ill-fated policies as Duncan.

Betsy DeVos, Trump’s Secretary of Education despised public schools, unions, and teachers. She never had a good word to say about public schools. She wanted every student to attend religious schools at public expense.

Eli Broad and the “academy” he created to train superintendents with his ideas about top-down management and the alleged value of closing schools with low test scores

ALEC (the American Legislative Exchange Council), which writes model legislation for privatizing public schools by opening charters and vouchers and lowering standards for teachers and crushing unions. More than 2,000 rightwing state legislators belong to ALEC and get their ideas directly from ALEC about privatization and other ways to crush public schools and their teachers.

Rupert Murdoch, the media, Time, Newsweek, NY Times, Washington Post for their hostility towards public schools and their warm, breathless reporting about charter schools and Teach for America. The Washington Post editorialist is a devotee of charter schools and loved Michelle Rhee’s cut-throat style. TIME ran two cover stories endorsing the “reform” movement; the one featuring Michelle Rhee, and the other referring to one of every four public school teachers as a “rotten apple.” The second cover lauded the idea that teachers were the cause of low test scores, and one of every four should be weeded out. Newsweek also had a Rhee cover, and another that declared in a sentence repeated on a chalkboard, “We Must Fire Bad Teachers,” as though the public schools were overrun with miscreant teachers.

David Coleman, the architect of the Common Core, which undermined the autonomy of teachers and ironically removed teachers’ focus on content and replaced it with empty skills. The Common Core valued “informational text” over literature and urged teachers to reduce time spent teaching literature.

Margaret Raymond, of the Walton-funded CREDO, which evaluates charter schools.

Hanna Skandera, who was Secretary of Education in New Mexico and tried to import the Florida model of testing, accountability, and choice to New Mexico. That state has one of the highest rates of child poverty in the nation, and the Florida model didn’t make any difference.

Governors who bashed teachers and public schools, like Chris Christie of New Jersey, Andrew Cuomo of New York, and Gregg Abbott of Texas

“Researchers” like those from the Fordham Institute, who saw nothing good in public schools or their teaching

Senator Michael Bennet of Colorado, who turned Denver into a model of “reform,” with everything DFER wanted: charter schools and high-stakes testing.

Poorly behaving students and parents who won’t hold kids accountable for bad behavior

Campbell Brown and the 74

The U.S. Department of Education, for foisting terrible ideas on the nation’s schools and teachers, and state education departments and state superintendents for going along with these bad ideas. Not one state chief stood up and said, “We won’t do what is clearly wrong for our students and their teachers.”

The two big national unions, for going along with these bad ideas instead of fighting them tooth and nail.

And now I will quote readers’ comments exactly as they wrote them, without identifying their authors (they know who they are):

*Rightwing organizations like the American Enterprise Institute, (AEI), the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, the Heritage Foundation, even the allegedly Democratic-leaning Center for American Progress (CAP) for publishing white papers masquerading as education research that promotes privatization.

*Wall St moguls who invented Social Impact Bonds (SIBs) to gamble on & profit from preK student test scores.

*Rogues Gallery. One body blow after another. A systematic 💦 water boarding with no respite. And then we add the Broad Foundation who sent Broad-trained “leadership” so drunk on arrogance and ignorance that the term “School Yard Bully” just doesn’t capture it.
Operating with the Imprimatur and thin veneer of venture capital, plutocratic philanthropy, these haughty thugs devastated every good program they laid eyes on. Sinking their claws instinctively into the intelligent, effective and cultured faculty FIRST.A well orchestrated, heavily scripted Saturday Night Massacre.

*Congress and the Presidents set the stage, but the US Department of Education was instrumental in making it all happen. They effectively implemented a coherent program to attack, smear and otherwise demoralize teachers. And make no mistake, it was quite purposeful

*This list is incomplete without members of Democrats for Education Reform. Add in Senator Ted Kennedy, whose role in the passage of No Child Left Behind was critical. Same for then Congressman and future Speaker of the House, John Boehner, who noted (bragged!) in his recent autobiography that he was essential in keeping President George W. Bush on track with NCLB.

*Let’s not forget Senate Chair Patty Murray. She has been an important player in keeping the worse of Ed Reform legislation alive.

*You have presented a rogue’s gallery of failed “reformers” that have worked against the common good. In addition to those mentioned, there has also been an ancillary group of promoters and enablers that have undermined public education including billionaire think tanks, foundations and members of both political parties. These people continue to spread lies and misinformation, and no amount of facts or research is able to diminish the drive to privatize. While so called reformers often hide behind an ideological shield, they are mostly about the greedy pursuit of appropriating the education that belongs to the people and transferring its billions in value into the pockets of the already wealthy. So called education reform is class warfare.

*The Clintons, whose 1994 reauthorization of ESEA set the stage for NCLB

*Don’t forget the so called ‘liberal’ media, publications such as the New York Times and the Boston Globe who have published pro charter piece after pro charter piece, while simultaneously dumping all over public schools

*I’d like to include a cast of editorialists like George Will, Bill Rhoden, and many others, who have parroted the plutocratic-backed Ed Reform line. Armstrong Williams would certainly be part of this.

*Going back even further into the origins of this madness, I would add to Diane’s excellent rogues gallery those unknown bureaucrats in state departments of education who replaced broad, general frameworks/overall strategic objectives with bullet lists of almost entirely content-free “standards” that served as the archetype of the Common [sic] Core [sic] based on the absurd theory that we should “teach skills” independent of content, all of which led, ironically, to trivialization of and aimlessnessness in ELA pedagogy and curricula and to a whole generation of young English teachers who themselves NOW KNOW NEXT TO NOTHING OF THE CONTENT OF THEIR SUBJECT, typified by the English teacher who told one of the parents who regularly contributes comments to this blog, “I’m an English teacher, so I don’t teach content.” So, today, instead of teaching, say, Robert Frost’s “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening” as part of a coherent and cumulative unit on common structures and techniques and genres of poetry, one gets idiotic test-practice exercises on “inferencing” and “finding the main idea,” with any random piece of writing as the “text.”

*It’s driven by how teachers have been treated the past 4-5 years, especially during the pandemic. Teachers are first responders. We should have been on the list of first-to-be-vaccinated. Schools should have strict mask and vaccine mandates. Teachers are professional educators. We should not be told what and how to teach by ignorant, conspiracy-driven MAGA parents. Public education is a cornerstone of democracy, and we teachers are motivated by a sense of civic duty. We are demoralized by attempts to destroy public education, led by anti-education bible-thumping “leaders” like Betsy DeVos and (in my home state) Frank Edelblut. Public education is being dismantled by gleeful right-wingers, while naive, well-intentioned moderates wring their hands and do little to defend it. It’s tiring to be under constant attack on the front lines, with no support. That’s why teachers are leaving today.

*One tiny example of a routine phenomenon. Teachers got the message pretty clearly: They were at the bottom of the pecking order. The absolute bottom. Micromanaged and undercut at every turn.Excellent points. The heavy handed top-down, bureaucratic demands for “data,” basically serve one goal, to justify the existence of administration.Don’t forget the voracious appetite of publishing companies…We had a district administrator prance around in our “professional; development days” tell use could not read novels or other picture books to the students…ONLY USE PEARSON.”And then 7 or so years later, the district made us THROW OUT every book from Pearson, and they bought new crap curriculum…that program was written by testing industry, not educators, I think it was “Benchmark,” real junk.

*I’d like to mention how I often lose my student teachers when they see the edTPA requirement. They switch majors, and the teaching pool gets even smaller.

*After Skamdera in NM came the TFA VAM sweetheart Christopher Ruszkowski. At least he had 3 years in a classroom, Skammy had none, but the Florida model, you know?

*Children’s behavior is in large part in response to the drill and kill curriculum and endless testing and teaching to the test that has been driving public education since NCLB and the back-to-basics movement that ushered it in. No room for creativity, no room for self expression, no room for innovation. Highly scripted Curriculum like Open Court turned children into little automatons, barking their answers like well trained dogs and turned teachers into task masters. It was a drive to dummy down the curriculum for fear of teaching too much free thinking. And a drive to turn teachers into testing machines and teacher technicians, easily replaced by anyone who can walk in a classroom and pick up the manual. Only it doesn’t work. It was and is developmentally inappropriate and the resulting rebellion in the classrooms if proof of that. No wonder teachers are leaving in droves!

*Under threat of closure of the MA school board in the mid 1800s, Horace Mann turned to the cheapest labor he could find, literate northern females, and deployed the Protestant ethic “teacher as a calling” trope to institute state free-riding on teachers (as opposed to the free-riding of which teachers are accused). Everything in this piece is correct except for the “almost” in the final paragraph. There’s no “almost” about it … free-riding on teachers is an operational feature of a system imported from Prussia, designed to produce cheap, obedient labor by underpaying women. As of 2012, teachers would need to make around 1/3 higher salaries to be paid on the same level as their professional peers. Everyone mentioned in the article is simply this generation’s enactment of the long-standing, systemic class war that preys on gender and race to continue and exacerbate inequity. While naming the current situation is very important, we also need to discuss, address, and shift these deep issues.

*It’s the boiled frog effect over the last 50 years that began as a response to mini-courses, sixties curriculum, obsession over college attendance, professors and teachers walking out to protest with their students, Viet Nam… and the Civil Rights Act. Since 1964, Intentional segregation influenced Local, state, and federal decision making on transportation, health care, insurance, zoning, housing, education funding, hiring, and more. When whites fled the cities and insured two sides of the tracks in towns and two systems evolved, quick fixes became that accumulation of bad decisions and leadership – and slowly, slowly, deterioration became acceptable.

*The list is not dated. It’s illustrative of the accumulation of negativity, quick-fix seeking, acronym-filled, snake-oil salesmen, desperate mayors and governors, obsession with rankings, publisher fixation on common core, NCLB votes hidden under the shadow of 9/11, and keep-everyone-happy state and national professional organizations.

*At the end of 2021 it is far right and left of politics and their rhetoric like CRT and homophobic slurs. So much for especially the “Christian Right.” In their god’s (yes lower case since not The Lord Jesus Christ’s New Testament words of love) name they exclude instead of include to share the good news/word.

*Data, data, data. Yesterday, I commented that I feel sympathetic toward the anti-CRT petitioners. I do. They’re not bad people. They’re just afraid of changing social rules. Their actions are demoralizing, but not dehumanizing. Wealthy corporations and individuals on the other hand , through their untaxed foundations, gave carrots to governments the world over to give the stick to education so that greater profits could be made through privatization and data monetizing. I was once called a 2. I was once labeled the color grey. I was numbered, dehumanized by test score data in an attempt to make education like Uber or Yelp. Not just demoralized, dehumanized. It’s not just who but what dehumanized teachers. It was the wrongheaded idea that education can be measured and sold by the unit. That idea was insidious. The marketing ploy to make my students into consumers who consider their efforts junk unless they are labeled with the right number or dashboard color was insidious. I have no sympathy for the investor class. They are not people with whom I disagree about social issues; they are hostile, corporate takeover wolves out to tear the flesh of the formerly middle and deeply impoverished classes for profit. Not one of the investors in education “reform” or any of their revolving door bureaucrats is any friend of mine. The list of who is long. The list of what is short.

*Jonah Edelman (Founder, Stand on Children); brother Josh Edelman (Gates Foundation: Empowering-?!–Effective Teaching; SEED Charter Schools); Charles & David Koch. Pear$on Publishing monopoly&, of course, ALEC (interfering in our business for FIFTY long years!)

Categories ALEC, Betsy DeVos, Billionaires, Bloomberg, Michael, Broad Foundation, Charter Schools, Class size, Coleman, David, Common Core, Corporate Reform, Cuomo, Andrew, Democrats, Democrats for Education Reform, Duncan, Arne, Education Industry, Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA), Failure, For-Profit, Fraud, Gates Foundation, Bill Gates, John King, Klein, Joel, Michelle Rhee, NCLB (No Child Left Behind), Philanthropy, Privatization, Propaganda, Race to the Top, Republicans, Rhee, Michelle, Segregation, Stand for Children, Standardized Testing, Teach for America, Teachers, U.S. education, VAM (value-added modeling), Vouchers, Walton Foundation

Shocker: NYC Education Board Rejects Mayor’s Plan to Test 4-Year-Olds for Gifted Program

By dianeravitch

January 28, 2021 //

New York City has a form of education governance called mayoral control, initiated by billionaire Mayor Michael Bloomberg in 2002, in which the mayor appoints most of the school board members and selects the chancellor of the system. Bloomberg claimed at the time that he knew how to solve all the problems of education, and he appointed an attorney with no education experience (Joel Klein) as his chancellor. Klein brought in McKinsey and a host of business consultants to reorganize the school system repeatedly. On the one occasion in 2004 when the city’s school board voted to oppose a decision by the mayor (who wanted to end social promotion for third graders, an idea championed by Jeb Bush), he (and the borough president of Staten Island) fired three dissenting members of the panel on the spot.

‘‘This is what mayoral control is all about,” Mr. Bloomberg said last night. ”In the olden days, we had a board that was answerable to nobody. And the Legislature said it was just not working, and they gave the mayor control. Mayoral control means mayoral control, thank you very much. They are my representatives, and they are going to vote for things that I believe in.”

In light of the mayor’s control of education, it came as a shock when the city’s “Panel on Educational Policy” voted 8-7 to oppose the mayor’s plan to continue testing 4-year-olds for admission to the highly coveted “gifted and talented program.” Both the mayor and the chancellor admitted that the testing program was a terrible idea, but insisted that it should be given just one year more. A majority of the panel thought that it made no sense to do the wrong thing “just one more time.” Children in the gifted program get extra enrichment that should be available to all students.

Chalkbeat reports:

In an extraordinary rebuke to Mayor Bill de Blasio, a New York City education panel early Thursday morning rejected a testing contract — halting, for now, the controversial practice of testing incoming kindergartners for admission to gifted programs.

With testing originally scheduled for this spring, it’s unclear how admissions to the city’s gifted and talented programs will move ahead.

The rejection was an unusual flex for a panel that has little formal authority, is mostly appointed by the mayor, and has acted largely as a rubber stamp for his education policies. Approval seemed like a forgone conclusion when Mayor Bill de Blasio announced earlier this month that the entrance test would continue for one more year. But that required the Panel for Educational Policy to approve an extension of the city’s contract with the company that provides the entrance exams, at a cost of $1.7 million.

Instead, the vote failed 8-7, despite City Hall’s intense lobbying behind the scenes and the appointment of a new panel member just a day earlier. The rejection came even after Deputy Mayor Dean Fuleihan appeared at the virtual meeting, promising future significant reforms to the gifted program. In the meantime, the city proposed several admissions tweaks aimed at creating more diversity for the incoming kindergarten class.

New York City is one of the only school districts in the nation that uses a test given to preschoolers to determine admission to elementary school gifted programs. Mayor de Blasio and Schools Chancellor Richard Carranza have both criticized the exam, but intended to use it this year while pursuing long-term changes.

“This is a very challenging topic. As a pedagogue, as a principal, as a parent, I can say with certainty that there is a better way to serve our learners than a test given to 4-year-olds,” Carranza said at Wednesday’s meeting. “That’s why we want this to be the last year this test is administered.”

Categories Accountability, Bill de Blasio, Bloomberg, Michael, Education Reform, Klein, Joel, New York City, Standardized Testing

In Honor of Eric Chasanoff, New York City Public School Teacher

By dianeravitch

May 12, 2020 //

Eric (Chaz) Chasanoff died of COVID-19 at the age of 69. He was a greatly admired high school teacher and blogger. He started his blog “Chaz’s School Daze” in 2006 in response to the oppressive policies of the Bloomberg-Klein regime. He was an inspiration to other teachers and bloggers, including me.

The UFT honored him as a teacher and a fearless activist.

This was his assessment of the legacy of Joel Klein.

Here are his prescient thoughts on the failure of de Blasio’s chancellor to clean house and get rid of the Klein hires.

Here he is on Bloomberg’s failed policies.

He wrote this post a few weeks before he died.

I urge you to browse his blog. His was a strong, fearless, independent voice. He will be missed.

Sadly, with condolences to his family, friends and former colleagues, I add Chaz Chasanoff to this blog’s honor roll. A teacher who loved teaching, a fearless and relentless advocate for students and teachers. A teacher who spoke truth to power. A man of principle.

Categories Bloomberg, Michael, Courage, Education Reform, Honor Roll, Klein, Joel, New York City, Teachers

Fred Smith: How Michael Bloomberg and Joel Klein Nudged Test Scores to Get Bragging Rights

By dianeravitch

February 13, 2020 //

Fred Smith was the testing expert at the New York City Board of Education for many years. After he retired, he became a relentless truth-teller about the flaws of standardized testing and the clever means of distorting the stats to produce the desired results. He currently acts as an unpaid advisor to opt-out parents.

Smith sent this article from 2007 that shows how Mayor Bloomberg and Chancellor Klein played games with the data, in this case blaming “immigrant kids” for a drop in test scores.

Mayor Bloomberg and his schools chancellor, Joel Klein, have reaffirmed that old Mark Twain saying about the three kinds of lies: lies, damn lies and statistics.

Using a PowerPoint presentation filled with glitzy graphs and color charts, Klein reached a new low yesterday by attempting to blame a sharp drop in this year’s third-, fourth- and fifth-grade reading scores on thousands of immigrant pupils.

According to the chancellor, the drop in the lower grade scores was solely because of the federal government’s new requirement that all children classified as English-language learners, or ELLs, must take the regular state tests after being in the country just one year.

Because of that requirement, some 30,000 more ELLs took the state test this year than in 2006, Klein said, and their lower scores dragged down overall city results.

Fred Smith was outraged when he heard Klein’s explanation. Smith, you see, spent three decades analyzing tests for our city’s school system, so he knows a thing or two about how chancellors paint the prettiest picture for the public.

“They never told you that back in 2005, during the mayoral race, the school district quietly increased the number of exemptions for ELL kids and then claimed a record boost in scores,” Smith said.

In 2009, with Bloomberg’s fellow billionaire Meryl Tisch, in charge of the New York Board of Regents, test scores in the city went through the roof. After the mayoral primary election was safely past, the Regents commissioned a report by professors Daniel Koretz and Jennifer Jennings showing that the test questions had become familiar, leading to score inflation, and that the dramatic rise was not real.

Also, in an amusing turn of events, New York City won the Broad award in 2007 as the most improved urban district, right before the NAEP gains were released, showing that the city had made no gains on NAEP.

In 2010, Jennifer Medina of the New York Times wrote about the perils of over reliance on standardized tests and how it affected New York City in particular.

She wrote:

When New York State made its standardized English and math tests tougher to pass this year, causing proficiency rates to plummet, it said it was relying on a new analysis showing that the tests had become too easy and that score inflation was rampant.

But evidence had been mounting for some time that the state’s tests, which have formed the basis of almost every school reform effort of the past decade, had serious flaws.

The fast rise and even faster fall of New York’s passing rates resulted from the effect of policies, decisions and missed red flags that stretched back more than 10 years and were laid out in correspondence and in interviews with city and state education officials, administrators and testing experts.

The process involved direct warnings from experts that went unheeded by the state, and a city administration that trumpeted gains in student performance despite its own reservations about how reliably the test gauged future student success.

It involved the state’s decision to create short, predictable exams and to release them publicly soon after they were given, making coaching easy and depriving test creators of a key tool: the ability to insert in each test questions for future exams. Next year, for the first time, the tests will not be released publicly.

It involved a national push for numbers-based accountability, begun under President George W. Bush and reinforced by President Obama. And it involved a mayor’s full embrace of testing as he sought to make his mark on the city, and then to get re-elected.

“They just kept upping the stakes with the scores, putting more pressure on the schools but not really looking at what it all means,” said Pedro Noguera, an education professor at New York University who has worked with the city’s Department of Education to help improve struggling schools.

New York has been a national model for how to carry out education reform, so its sudden decline in passing rates may be seen as a cautionary tale. The turnaround has also been a blow to Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg and his chancellor, Joel I. Klein, who despite warnings that a laserlike focus on raising scores could make them less and less reliable, lashed almost every aspect of its school system to them. Schools were graded on how much their scores rose and threatened with being closed if they did not. The scores dictated which students were promoted or left back, and which teachers and principals would receive bonuses.

Even now, the city believes that the way it uses the tests is valid. The mayor and the chancellor have forcefully defended their students’ performance, noting that even after the changes this year, student scores are still better than they were in 2002. They have argued that their students’ progress is more important than the change in the passing rate, and that years of gains cannot be washed away because of a decision in Albany to require more correct answers from every student this year.

The test scores were even used for a new purpose this year: to help determine which teachers should receive tenure.

“This mayor uses data and metrics to determine whether policies are failing or succeeding,” said Howard Wolfson, the deputy mayor for government affairs and communications. He also helped run Mr. Bloomberg’s re-election campaign in 2009, using the city’s historic rise in test scores to make the case for a third term. “We believe that testing is a key factor for determining the success of schools and teachers.”

“Under any standard you look at,” he added, “we have improved the schools.”

But given all the flaws of the test, said Prof. Howard T. Everson of the City University of New York’s Center for Advanced Study in Education, it is hard to tell what those rising scores really meant.

“Teachers began to know what was going to be on the tests,” said Professor Everson, who was a member of a state testing advisory panel and who warned the state in 2008 that it might have a problem with score inflation. “Then you have to wonder, and folks like me wonder, is that real learning or not?”

New Generation of Tests

The problems that plagued New York’s standardized tests can be traced to the origin of the exams.

In 1996, New York set about creating tests for fourth and eighth graders as a way to measure whether schools were doing their jobs. A precursor to the widespread testing brought about by Mr. Bush’s No Child Left Behind law, the tests replaced more basic exams that had been given in the same grades, which simply determined whether students needed remedial instruction. (The city had also given its own tests for many years.)

Teachers pushed back, saying they could gauge their students’ performance better than any mass-produced tests could. “There was a lot of resistance from throughout the education community to having the tests,” said Alan Ray, who was the chief spokesman for the State Education Department in the 1990s and in 2000, and retired this year after overseeing data for the office.

But education officials in New York, and many other states, were coming to the conclusion that some measurement system, no matter how limited, was necessary.

The officials sought advice from dozens of educators across New York to figure out what the tests should encompass, Mr. Ray said. Teachers and principals asked that the standards be specific, to make it clear what they were expected to teach at each grade level, and superintendents pleaded to keep the tests relatively short so that students would not spend days filling in bubbles. The state obliged both requests.

The decision to keep the tests narrow and short the fifth-grade math test, for example, had 34 questions this year would have a lasting impact, said Daniel Koretz, a professor at Harvard’s Graduate School of Education who specializes in assessment systems. The same types of questions would be trotted out every year, he said.

“In many cases you could not write an unpredictable question no matter how hard you tried,” Professor Koretz said. He oversaw the study of New York’s tests that led to the state’s conclusion that they had become too easy to pass.

The state also continued making tests public after they were administered. Coupled with the questions’ predictability, the public release of the tests, which started long before the nationwide accountability movement, provided teachers with ready-made practice exams….

A Mayor Chases Results

The state tests’ flaws would not become evident for years. But by 2001, the tests had a champion.

During his first campaign, Mr. Bloomberg said that education was his top priority. He pledged to take control of the city’s public schools, then under the supervision of the Board of Education, which had been ridiculed for budget troubles and stagnant academic performance.

Projecting the image of a bottom-line-oriented, pragmatic businessman, Mr. Bloomberg latched on to test scores as a clear way of seeing just how well students were doing.

“If four years from now reading scores and math scores aren’t significantly better,” Mr. Bloomberg said in a radio interview in 2001, “then I will look in the mirror and say that I have been a failure. I’ve never failed at anything yet, and I don’t plan to fail at that.”

After Mr. Bloomberg persuaded the Legislature to give him control of the schools, he appointed Mr. Klein, a former Justice Department lawyer and media executive, as his chancellor. Mr. Klein was seen as a technocrat who was eager and able to produce tangible results, the kind that could be measured.

Scores in the city and state were on their way up. In 2004, for example, the proportion of fourth graders in the city meeting math standards increased to 68 percent, up 16 percentage points since 2001. Only 42 percent of eighth graders met that mark, but that was still a significant improvement from just a few years earlier. By 2009, that rate would jump nearly 30 points.

“What is encouraging is that for two or three years in a row now, the tests have gone in the same direction up,” the mayor said on a radio show in October 2004. “So there’s reason to believe we’re headed to the correct place.”

In 2003, Mr. Bloomberg ended the practice of “social promotion” in certain grades, requiring students performing at the lowest levels on the tests be held back unless they attended summer school and showed progress on a retest. That year, Mr. Klein released a list of 200 successful schools, the only places where teachers would not have to follow the citywide math and English curriculums. The list was primarily based on test scores.

More and more of the mayor’s educational initiatives were linked to the scores. They were used to help decide which schools should be closed and replaced with new, smaller schools. The new A-through-F grading system for schools was based primarily on how their students improved on the tests. Teachers and principals earned bonuses of up to $25,000 if their schools’ scores rose. Teachers’ annual evaluations and tenure decisions are partially dependent on test results.

Each new policy was met with denunciations from the teachers’ union or from education experts like Diane Ravitch. Ms. Ravitch, a supporter of standardized testing when she was an adviser to the Clinton and Bush administrations, became one of the biggest critics, arguing that schools were devoting too much time to the pursuit of high scores.

“If they are not learning social studies but their reading scores are going up, they are not getting an education,” Ms. Ravitch said in 2005, as the mayor coasted to re-election.

The mayor and chancellor dismissed these criticisms as the hidebound defenses of an old, failed system devoid of meaningful standards. But some questions were also being raised by people close to the administration.

In the Education Department headquarters on Chambers Street, some officials argued that the A-through-F system of grading schools should incorporate not only the English and math tests, but also the science and social studies exams given by the state. “We wanted to draw this as broadly as possible,” said a former school official who spoke on the condition of anonymity to avoid publicly disagreeing with Mr. Klein.

But after months of running models and tweaking formulas, Mr. Klein decided to stick with the two core subjects. After all, he often argued, if students could not master essential math and English skills, it would be impossible for them to grasp other concepts.

Dr. Noguera, the N.Y.U. education professor and adviser to the city, applauded Mr. Klein for creating a grading system that rewarded improvement from year to year so that schools in poor neighborhoods had the same chance of achieving a good grade as those in wealthier areas.

But it also was risky, Dr. Noguera said. “That got schools fixated on how to raise scores, not looking for more authentic learning,” he said.

Dr. Noguera expressed his views publicly and to some of Mr. Klein’s deputies, but never directly told the chancellor, he said.

Mr. Klein said in recent interviews that while the tests were imperfect, they were still the best measurements available for a school system that previously had no yardsticks. They also were not the only signs proving the city had been making progress, he said: On more difficult federal tests given to a sample of fourth and eighth graders, the city had steadily improved.

And the city’s main goal, he said, was not simply giving out laurels for students’ scoring 3s (“proficient”) and 4s (“advanced”) on the state tests.

Instead, its system of school grades and teacher incentives gave considerable weight to scores that showed improvement from year to year at all levels.

“Nobody else was doing this,” Mr. Klein said. “We never said it was good enough to get to passing and just stay there.”

In 2006, the state added tests for the third, fifth, sixth and seventh grades, in order to align with the requirements of No Child Left Behind. Scores jumped in 2007.

There were improvements at every grade level across the state and in New York City, where 65 percent of all students met state standards in math, an improvement of eight percentage points in one year.

“I’m happy, thrilled ecstatic, I think, is a better word,” Mr. Bloomberg said at the time. “The hard work going on in our schools is really paying off.”

After Mr. Bloomberg’s first full term as mayor, the new scores seemed to ratify his claims of success. They also raised more alarms.

As a superintendent in the Brownsville section of Brooklyn, Kathleen Cashin had seen several schools improve throughout the early part of the decade. But when she saw the sudden jump, she said, she was shocked.

“I said to my intimate circle of staff, this cannot be possible,” Ms. Cashin recalled. “I knew how much effort and how much planning any little improvement would take, and not all of these schools had done any of it.”

But Ms. Cashin, who retired in February, held her tongue at the time. Asked why she did not take up her concerns with Mr. Klein or his deputies, she said, “I didn’t have their ear.”

A Proposal for a Fix

The following winter, Professor Koretz, of Harvard, and Professor Everson, of CUNY, who was a member of a state testing advisory group, sent a memo to state education officials.

“Research has shown that when educators are pressured to raise scores on conventional achievement tests, some improve instruction, while others turn to inappropriate methods of test preparation that inflate scores,” they wrote in the Feb. 5, 2008, memo. “In some cases, the inflation of scores has been extreme.”

The researchers proposed to devise a kind of audit. While tests tended to be similar from year to year, they would add to each exam some questions that did not resemble those from previous years. If a class performed well on the main section of the test but poorly on the added questions, that would be evidence that scores were inflated by test preparation. If a class performed well on both, the researchers wrote, that teacher might have methods worth emulating.

In addition, they wrote, such a system would give teachers “less incentive to engage in inappropriate test preparation and more incentive to undertake the much harder task of improving instruction.”

State education officials, the professors said, did not give them a hearing.

The 2008 results showed even more large gains 74 percent of city students were deemed proficient in math, an increase of nine points in one year; and the city’s passing rate in reading was now 58 percent, up from 51 percent two years earlier. Statewide, the passing rates jumped to 81 percent in math and 69 percent in reading.

Professor Koretz and Professor Everson wrote another memo in September 2008, again proposing to create a way to make test results more reliable. But the idea went nowhere….

The city’s Department of Education constantly mines test score data for patterns to show where improvement is happening and where it is needed. In 2008, it noticed an incongruity: Eighth graders who scored at least a 3 on the state math exam had only a 50 percent chance of graduating from high school four years later with a Regents diploma, which requires a student to pass a certain number of tests in various subjects and is considered the minimum qualification for college readiness.

The city realized that the test results were not as reliable as the state was leading people to believe.

Mr. Klein and several of his deputies spoke by phone with Merryl H. Tisch, the vice chancellor of the Board of Regents, and Mr. Mills, trying to persuade them to create a statewide accountability system similar to the city’s, one that gave improvement at least as much weight as the score itself.

The state said it would consider moving to such a system, but would need more time.

Neither the city nor state publicly disclosed the concerns about the scores. By then, students across the state were preparing for the 2009 tests, filling in bubbles on mock answer sheets, using at least three years of previous state tests as guides.

The scores arrived in May, and with them, the bluntest warning yet.

Just before the results were released, a member of the Regents named Betty Rosa called Ms. Tisch, who had recently become chancellor.

Ms. Rosa, who had been a teacher, principal and superintendent in the Bronx for nearly three decades, said the unprecedented high scores simply seemed too good to be true. She suggested the unthinkable: the scores were so unbelievable, she said, that the state should not publicly release them.

“The question was really are we telling the public the truth,” Ms. Rosa said in a recent interview. Ms. Tisch, she said, relayed that she, too, found the scores suspicious, but that it would be impossible to withhold them. “It was like a train that was already in motion and no way to stop it,” Ms. Rosa said.

The English test scores showed 69 percent of city students passing. Mr. Bloomberg called the results “nothing short of amazing and exactly what this country needs.”

“We have improved the test scores in English,” he continued, “and we expect the same results in math in a couple of weeks, every single year for seven years.” Four weeks later, it was announced that 82 percent of city students had passed the math tests.

Because of the widespread improvement in the scores, 84 percent of all public schools received an A in the city’s grading system, something Mr. Klein said he later regretted. This year, the city limited the number of A’s to 25 percent of schools.

The 2009 numbers came out as the mayor was trying to accomplish two goals: to persuade the Legislature to give the mayor control of the schools for another seven years; and to convince city voters that he deserved a third term.

Mr. Bloomberg’s opponent, Comptroller William C. Thompson, had once been president of the Education Board.

“Mike Bloomberg changed that system,” said one of the mayor’s campaign advertisements. “Now, record graduation rates. Test scores up, violence down. So when you compare apples to apples, Thompson offers politics as usual. Mike Bloomberg offers progress.”

In his debates, Mr. Bloomberg hammered home the theme. “If anybody thinks that the schools were better when Bill ran them, they should vote for him,” he said in one face-off. “And if anybody thinks they’re better now, I’d be honored to have their vote.”

Indeed, according to exit polls, 57 percent of those who said education was their primary concern voted for Mr. Bloomberg, who won the election by a five-point margin.

Mr. Wolfson, the deputy mayor and 2009 campaign strategist, said the mayor had no regrets about focusing on the exams as a matter of policy, and during the election.

“What’s the converse?” he said. “The converse is that we don’t test and we have no way of judging success or failure. Either you believe in standards or tests, or you don’t and life is not like that. There are tests all the time.”

Ms. Tisch, in releasing the 2009 test results, had not heeded Ms. Rosa’s radical request. But the very day she put out the English test results, she began openly acknowledging doubts about the scores, irking the mayor and chancellor, who privately seethed that she was seeking to undermine their success. “As a board, we will ask whether the test is getting harder or easier,” she said.

Although the Regents did not immediately opt to create an entirely new test, Ms. Tisch and David Steiner, the new education commissioner, asked Professor Koretz, who had been rebuffed in previous requests, to analyze the ones that were in use. His conclusion and that of another researcher, Jennifer L. Jennings was that the tests had become too easy, and hence the scores were inflated. That led the State Education Department to raise the number of correct answers required to pass each test.

The state intends to rewrite future tests to encompass a broader range of material, and will stop publicly releasing them.

“We came in here saying we have to stop lying to our kids,” Ms. Tisch said in a recent interview. “We have to be able to know what they do and do not know.”

Bloomberg was first elected to the mayoralty in 2001. There was a two-term limit. He ran again in 2005, for what should have been his second and last term, and won easily. In 2009, he used his vast resources to persuade the City Council to vote to give him and themselves a third term. And that he is how he qualified to run for a third term and used his education record as a reason to be re-elected.

Now, after all this investment in testing, test prep, interim assessments, etc. what were the results?

New York State has shown no gains in reading on NAEP from 2003-2019, in either fourth or eighth grades.

New York City has shown no gains in reading on NAEP from 2003-2019, in either fourth or eighth grades.

Make of it what you will.

If Bloomberg is the Democratic candidate against Trump, I will vote for him.

But please don’t believe the boasting about the New York City education miracle.

It never happened.

An update on some of the individuals mentioned in the New York Times’ 2010 article. Betty Rosa is now Chancellor of the State Board of Regents. Kathleen Cashin is a member of the Board of Regents. Meryl Tisch is now on the board of the State University of New York (which has the power to authorize new charter schools, including those of Eva Moskowitz’s Success Academy chain). David Steiner–now a professor at Johns Hopkins University– served for two years as State Commissioner, during which time he approved Mayor Bloomberg’s choice to succeed Joel Klein as NYC Chancellor, a retired magazine publisher named Cathie Black, who lasted three months. Steiner was also in charge of the State Education Department when it won a Race to the Top grant and committed the state to using student test scores to evaluate teachers, increasing the number of charter schools, and adopting the Common Core standards. These changes, in turn, created the parent-led Opt Out movement, in which parents refused to let their children take the state tests and grew to represent 20% of the eligible students. John King succeeded David Steiner and eventually replaced Arne Duncan in the last year of President Obama’s second term. When Joel Klein stepped down, he hired a Department of Education vendor named Wireless Generation and created a technology company called Amplify. Rupert Murdoch bought Amplify and invested a reputed $1 billion; newspaper stories predicted that Amplify would usher in a new age of hardware and software. However, the biggest sale of Amplify tablets and software was made to Guilford, North Carolina, purchased with Race to the Top funding; it turned into a disaster when chargers melted and other problems emerged. Guilford canceled the contract. Murdoch, having lost about $500 million, put the company up for sale. Laurene Powell Jobs bought it, and Amplify is now part of her Emerson Collective, selling “personalized learning.” Klein works for an online healthcare company called OSCAR, co-founded by Joshua Kushner, brother of Jared Kushner.

Categories Accountability, Bloomberg, Michael, Corporate Reformers, Education Industry, Education Reform, Klein, Joel, New York, New York City, Online Learning, Opt Out, Technology, Testing

Jan Resseger: The Tragedy of “Portfolio Districts”

By dianeravitch

November 26, 2019 //

Jan Resseger writes here about the damage that “portfolio districts” do to students, schools, and communities. The original concept for “portfolio districts” was developed by Paul Hill of the Gates-funded Center for Reinventing Public Educatuon at the University of Washington. The fundamental idea was that the school board would act like a stock portfolio manager, closing low-performing schools, replacing them with charter schools, keeping open the schools with high test scores. Students would choose where to go to school. The concept was adopted by many districts as the latest thing, and many beloved neighborhood schools serving black and brown communities were shuttered. If their replacement got low scores, it was also closed. The students were collateral damage.

She writes:

Mayor Michael Bloomberg and Joel Klein launched this scheme in New York City by creating district-wide school choice, breaking up large comprehensive high schools into small schools with curricular specialties, encouraging the opening of a large number of charter schools, co-locating many schools—small specialty public schools along with charter schools—into the same buildings. Those running the school district would consider all of these schools of choice as if they were investments in a stock portfolio. The district would hold on to the successful investments and phase out those whose test scores were low or which families didn’t choose.

Portfolio school reform has created collateral damage across the school districts which have experimented with the idea. After the Chicago Public Schools, another district managed by portfolio school reform theory, closed 50 schools at the end of the 2013 school year, the University of Chicago’s Consortium on School Research, and separately a University of Chicago sociologist, Eve Ewing tracked widespread community grieving when neighborhoods lost the public school institutions that had anchored their neighborhoods.

But there have been other kinds of collateral damage beyond the tragedy of school closures. In a new piece for the NY Times, Eliza Shapiro documents how district-wide school choice in New York City has contributed to inequity along with racial and segregation.

One problem is inequitable access to information. Parents who can afford to pay for consultants and who have the skills and position to understand how to navigate the system are able to privilege their own children with access to the schools widely thought to be desirable. Shapiro explains: “There is a trick to getting to the front of the lines that clog sidewalks outside New York City’s top public high schools each fall. Parents who pay $200 for a newsletter compiled by a local admissions consultant know that they should arrive hours ahead of the scheduled start time for school tours. On a recent Tuesday, there were about a hundred mostly white parents queued up at 2:30 p.m. in the spitting rain outside of Beacon High School, some toting snacks and even a few folding chairs for the long wait. The doors of the highly selective, extremely popular school would not open for another two hours for the tour. Parents and students who arrived at the actual start time were in for a surprise. The line of several thousand people had wrapped around itself, stretching for three midtown Manhattan blocks.”

Resseger adds:

My own children graduated from a racially and economically diverse public high school in Cleveland Heights, Ohio. Articles like Shapiro’s cause me to appreciate our family’s privilege in a way I had never really previously considered. From the time they entered Kindergarten, our children knew they would someday go to the big high school at the corner of Cedar and Lee. At a week-long summer music camp in our school district, middle school students play side-by-side with some of the members of the high school band and orchestra. Our daughter learned to know the high school tennis coach when he worked with younger students in the city recreation program. And the summer before his high school freshman year, our son, knowing that the high school cross country team worked out in a city park during August, went to the park and asked the coach if he could start working out with the team. High school for our children was a natural, predictable, and exciting transition. How lucky we were.

Categories Accountability, Bloomberg, Michael, Corporate Reformers, Education Industry, Education Reform, Klein, Joel, New York City, Portfolio District, School Choice

Jan Resseger: Why I Will Not Vote for Michael Bloomberg for President

By dianeravitch

November 23, 2019 //

When Jan Resseger writes, she does so with authority and clarity.

In this essay, she explains why she will not vote for Michael Bloomberg, based on his record of disrespecting educators in New York City when he was mayor. Bloomberg as mayor employed all the same principles as No Child Left Behind: testing, accountability, school closings, charter schools, school choice, all based on “the business model.”

She writes:

Michael Bloomberg does have a long education record. Bloomberg served as New York City’s mayor from January of 2002 until December of 2013. In 2002, to accommodate his education agenda, Bloomberg got the state legislature to create mayoral governance of NYC’s public schools. In this role, Michael Bloomberg and his appointed schools chancellor, Joel Klein were among the fathers of what has become a national wave of corporate, accountability-based school reform. Bloomberg is a businessman, and Joel Klein was a very successful attorney. Neither had any experience as an educator. They took aggressive steps to run the NYC school district, with 1.1 million students, like a business. Their innovations included district-wide school choice, rapid expansion of charter schools, co-location of a bunch of small charter and traditional schools into what used to be comprehensive high schools, the phase out and closure of low-scoring schools, evaluation of schools by high stakes standardized test scores, the assignment of letter grades to schools based on their test scores, and a sort of merit pay bonus plan for teachers.

In her 2018 book, After the Education Wars, Andrea Gabor, the New York business journalist and journalism professor, comments on Bloomberg’s educational experiment: “The Bloomberg administration embraced the full panoply of education-reform remedies. It worshiped at the altar of standardized tests and all manner of quantitative analysis. The Bloomberg administration also had a penchant for reorganizations that seemed to create more disruption than continuous improvement among its 1.1 million students and 1,800 schools.” ( After the Education Wars, p. 75)

Gabor describes Bloomberg’s expansion of charter schools: “Harlem, in particular, has become the center of an unintentional educational experiment—one that has been replicated in neighborhoods and cities around the country. During the Bloomberg years, when close to a quarter of students in the area were enrolled in charter schools, segregation increased, as did sizable across-the-board demographic disparities among the students who attended each type of school. An analysis of Bloomberg-era education department data revealed that public open-enrollment elementary and middle schools have double—and several have triple—the proportion of special needs kids of nearby charter schools. The children in New York’s traditional public schools are much poorer than their counterparts in charter schools. And public schools have far higher numbers of English language learners… In backing charter schools Bloomberg and other advocates pointed to one clear benefit: charters, it was widely accepted, would increase standardized test scores. However, years of studies showed little difference between the test-score performance of students in charter schools and those in public schools.” After the Education Wars, p. 95)

And there is more. Open the link and read it to understand why the “business model” did not work.

Categories Accountability, Bloomberg, Michael, Charter Schools, Corporate Reformers, Education Industry, Education Reform, Klein, Joel, New York City, Privatization, Testing

Note to the National NAACP: Ignore Michael Bloomberg

By dianeravitch

August 6, 2019 //

Billionaire Michael Bloomberg spoke to the national convention of the NAACP about why they should believe in the saving power of privately managed charter schools. He tried to persuade them to rescind their brave 2016 resolution calling for a moratorium on new charters.

This thoughtful report explains why the NAACP called for a moratorium.

The NAACP deserves our thanks for its resolution and should not back down from its principles, which represent the views of its members, based on hearings in seven cities and long, careful deliberations.

The major conclusions of its resolution:

We are calling for a moratorium on the expansion of the charter schools at least until such time as:

(1) Charter schools are subject to the same transparency and accountability standards as public schools
(2) Public funds are not diverted to charter schools at the expense of the public school system
(3) Charter schools cease expelling students that public schools have a duty to educate and
(4) Charter schools cease to perpetuate de facto segregation of the highest performing children from those whose aspirations may be high but whose talents are not yet as obvious.

Historically the NAACP has been in strong support of public education and has denounced movements toward privatization that divert public funds to support non-public school choices.

“We are moving forward to require that charter schools receive the same level of oversight, civil rights protections and provide the same level of transparency, and we require the same of traditional public schools,” Chairman Brock said. “Our decision today is driven by a long held principle and policy of the NAACP that high quality, free, public education should be afforded to all children.”

Unlike the NAACP, Bloomberg believes in charter schools, along with other billionaires, including the Waltons, the Koch brothers, and the DeVos family. He has funded rightwing candidates across the nation to promote charters; he has also funded candidates who favor vouchers, such as a hard-right school board in Douglas County, Colorado, and in Louisiana, where one of his protégés, State Superintendent John White, is a strong voucher supporter.

Speaking recently to the NAACP, Bloomberg boasted about dramatic gains for black and Hispanic students during his 12 years in office. While he was in office, he boasted that he had cut the achievement gap between black and whites students in half. At his recent speech to the NAACP, he said he reduced it by 20 percent. Neither claim is true. On the National Assessment of Educational Progress, the gap between blacks and whites on eighth grade mathematics was 36 points in 2003 (when he began his education policies) and 38 points in 2013 (the end of his mayoralty). On the NAEP test of eighth grade reading, the gap was 25 points in 2003, 22 points in 2013, but jumped to 29 points in 2015. If he succeeded in reducing the gap, it should have been on a steady downward trajectory. It was not, and it was certainly not cut by 50 percent or 20 percent.

Bloomberg did not mention to the NAACP the many selective high schools he opened whose admission requirements narrowed opportunities for black and brown students (an article in Chalkbeat in 2016 referred to “staggering academic segregation” in the city’s high schools, noting that “over half the students who took and passed the eighth-grade state math exam in 2015 wound up clustered in less than 8 percent of city high schools. The same was true for those who passed the English exam.”

Nor did he did mention the ongoing decline in the number of black and Hispanic students who qualified for the city’s most selective high schools on his watch. The city’s most selective high school, Stuyvesant, has 3,300 students; only 29 are black. Of the 895 offered admission to Stuyvesant this fall, only 7 are black. The decline did not start with Bloomberg, but his policies accelerated the trend of declining enrollment of black and Hispanic students in the elite high schools. He even added more elite high schools. Worse, he raised the entry standards for the gifted programs in the elementary schools that prepare students to apply for the selective high schools, a move that was devastating to black and Hispanic students.

In 2007, Bloomberg’s Department of Education decided to raise the score needed to get into a gifted program, a decision that dramatically reduced the number of black and Hispanic students qualified to enter these programs. Chancellor Joel Klein announced that the city intended to standardize admissions to gifted and talented programs across the city. In the future, Klein said, only those who scored in the top 5% on a standardized test would be admitted. Up until that time, local districts made their own decisions about admissions to gifted programs. Local districts objected to Klein’s new policy, and educators and parents warned that the high cut score would disadvantage black and Hispanic children.

Klein and Bloomberg didn’t listen.

They were wrong.

By 2008, before the program launched, Klein eased the 95% cutoff, lowering it to 90%. Nonetheless, the proportion of minority students who enrolled in gifted and talented programs plummeted.

When New York City set a uniform threshold for admission to public school gifted programs last fall, it was a crucial step in a prolonged effort to equalize access to programs that critics complained were dominated by white middle-class children whose parents knew how to navigate the system.

The move was controversial, with experts warning that standardized tests given to young children were heavily influenced by their upbringing and preschool education, and therefore biased toward the affluent.

Now, an analysis by The New York Times shows that under the new policy, children from the city’s poorest districts were offered a smaller percentage than last year of the entry-grade gifted slots in elementary schools. Children in the city’s wealthiest districts captured a greater share of the slots.

The disparity is so stark that some gifted programs opened by Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg in an effort to increase opportunities in poor and predominantly minority districts will not fill new classes next year. In three districts, there were too few qualifiers to fill a single class.

The new policy relied on a blunt cutoff score on two standardized tests. According to the analysis, 39.2 percent of the students who made the cutoff live in the four wealthiest districts, covering the Upper East Side, the Upper West Side, Staten Island and northeast Queens. That is up from 24.9 percent last year, even though those districts make up 14.2 percent of citywide enrollment in the entry-level grades: kindergarten or first grade, depending on the district.

The total enrollment in gifted classes was not only whiter and more Asian, but the total enrollment was cut in half.

The number of children entering New York City public school gifted programs dropped by half this year from last under a new policy intended to equalize access, with 28 schools lacking enough students to open planned gifted classes, and 13 others proceeding with fewer than a dozen children.

The policy, which based admission on a citywide cutoff score on two standardized tests, also failed to diversify the historically coveted classes, according to a New York Times analysis of new Education Department data.

In a school system in which 17 percent of kindergartners and first graders are white, 48 percent of this year’s new gifted students are white, compared with 33 percent of elementary students admitted to the programs under previous entrance policies. The percentage of Asians is also higher, while those of blacks and Hispanics are lower.

Faced with the fact that the standardized test with a high cut score was excluding black and brown children and shuttering G&T programs in poor communities, the Bloomberg administration did not change the policy.

The policies that Bloomberg put in place continue to determine entrance to gifted and talented programs. For savvy white parents, a place in a G&T program is highly coveted because it promises small classes, smart peers, and special treatment. Getting into one of those programs is very difficult, even for savvy white and Asian parents. Many parents invest in tutoring and test prep to get their four-year-olds and five-year-olds ready for the crucial entry test.

At present, the citywide gifted programs are accepting only students who score at the 99th percentile or higher! The more demand, the fewer places and the higher the cutoff score.

Black and brown students are nearly 70 percent of the public school enrollment, but win only 27 percent of the seats in gifted programs. So much for Bloomberg’s plan to expand opportunities!

To understand the nightmare that Bloomberg and Klein foisted on the city’s children, read Josh Greenman’s recent account of his family’s experience. Josh is on the editorial board of The New York Daily News, which is very pro-charter and pro-testing.

He writes:

How does the process work? Four-year-olds take a nationally normed standardized test (actually, two tests, the NNAT and the OLSAT, which are supposed to measure reasoning ability and general intellectual aptitude). No bubble sheets: It’s administered in person by an adult. Those above 90th percentile qualify for district programs. Those above 97th percentile qualify for citywide programs.

Those are the technical qualification thresholds. In practice, you need a 99 to qualify for a citywide school and usually something like a 95 to qualify for a districtwide program, though it depends on the district.

Once you get in the door as a kindergartener, you stay in the school or program through fifth grade (in the case of district programs) or eighth or 12th (in the case of citywide schools).

If this strikes you as kind of nuts, well, that’s because it is: A test taken on one day as a 4-year-old, a test for which your parents can prepare you, can put you on one track, separate and apart from your peers, for your whole K-12 education.

The citywide schools are coveted. They have excellent reputations and are by most objective measures very good schools. Of course they’d be, as the kids only get in through an intense filter, essentially ensuring engaged parents and high test scores.

They also, surprise surprise, have few black and Latino students and fewer low-income kids than the citywide average…

Why the hell should kindergarteners, first graders, second graders and so on have separate programs in district schools, much less separate citywide schools? Isn’t this part of a big underlying problem, letting (mostly) whites opt out of the common public system?

It’s a very fair question…

Would we consider it a victory if eliminating those programs resulted in a public school system that’s now 70% black and Latino 80% or 90% black and Latino?

Of course, that outcome depends upon what individual parents do, including how they respond to having their kids, who they often consider advanced, taught in general education classrooms.

But my head hurts when I start to think through how unfair the process is, at least in New York City, for plucking young kids out of general-ed classrooms. I’m also cognizant of how doing that intensifies racial and ethnic and income segregation, and related resentments. And of the negative effect of draining a small number of “chosen” kids, who tend to have intensely engaged parents with extra time and money on their hands from those classrooms.

Josh’s daughter made it into a local G&T program. He recognizes the trade offs. He understands that the G&T programs keep white and Asian families in the city and the public schools.

But that was not the rationale in 2007. The rationale was that having a standardized test with a citywide cut score, the same in every district, would expand opportunities for black and Hispanic students. Bloomberg and Klein said that tightening the admissions requirements would increase diversity! Anyone familiar with education policy and practice could have told Bloomberg and Klein that a single high standard on standardized tests would have a dramatically negative effect on children of color. At the time, they tried to tell them. But they were arrogant and they never listened to anyone outside their corporate MBA (masters of business administration) circle.

Here is a parent who warned them in 2007 that basing admissions to the gifted programs would be a disaster and would increase segregation and decrease opportunity for the children who need it most.

Bloomberg was a great mayor on matters involving public health and the environment.

But on education, he surrounded himself with businessmen and corporate types, and he took their bad advice about the virtues of high-stakes testing, standardization, privatization, letter grades for schools, and “creative disruption.” Bloomberg should not be boasting to the NAACP now about his non-existent accomplishments. And the NAACP should not listen to Bloomberg, no matter how much money he offers them.

Categories Accountability, Bloomberg, Michael, Charter Schools, Corporate Reformers, Education Reform, Klein, Joel, New York City, Privatization

Louisiana’s Academic Standards Are Baloney, a Hoax

By dianeravitch

March 6, 2019 //

Mike Deshotels, veteran educator, exposes the myth of high standards in Louisiana in this post.

He discovered that John White, the State Superintendent of Education, has systematically and secretly lowered the state standards to make it appear that the state was making progress every year.

The raw scores on Louisiana’s state tests are kept secret from the public and the legislature. Deshotels got them by making public records requests backed up by 4 successful lawsuits that he won against John White for withholding public records.

All anyone ever sees are the scale scores which seem to be stable, but the underlying raw scores change depending on what the LDOE wants them to show. So, White has now inflated the state test scores compared to NAEP by an average of 59% in just a few years.

As a result of his lawsuits, this is what Deshotels found.

“Basically the Department of Education was allowed to set any standard they chose relative to the percentage of questions answered correctly. And they were also allowed to change that underlying percentage for passing without consultation from year to year. The passing standard has been quietly watered down over a period of years without the public or the legislature being informed. So at the end of the 2017-2018 school year my public records requests revealed that a student on average only needs to get about 30% of the questions right on their math and English tests in order to get a passing score. That’s just a little above what a student who knows absolutely nothing could attain with outright guessing….

”Even though 20% of students are repeatedly failing their state tests, public records reveal that only 1.8% of 4th and 8th graders are denied promotion. The truth is that the Louisiana Department of Education, using the latest BESE policy, expects our local school systems to promote basically all students to the next grade each year whether they have learned the material or not. Then the teachers in the next grade are magically supposed to teach them the new material in addition to what they did not learn in previous grades…

”As this blog explained in an earlier post, the improved graduation rate of Louisiana students is achieved using even more of the John White standards magic. Using the secret raw score standards implemented by John White, a student can pass his/her algebra I test by scoring only 15% correct answers. Geometry requires only 12% correct answers. English I can be passed by getting 17% of the questions right. Louisiana’s improved graduation rate was achieved by faking the stats….

“The National Assessment of Education Progress (NAEP) is a national test that is considered the gold standard for measuring proficiency of students in 4th and 8th grade in reading and math. On the latest NAEP test given, only 26% of Louisiana 4th graders achieved a proficient rating in reading, only 27% of Louisiana 4th graders got a proficient rating in math, only 25% of Louisiana 8th graders got a proficient rating in reading, and only 19% of Louisiana students got a proficient rating in math. My analysis reveals that our state tests have been inflated an average of 59% in recent years compared to the NAEP tests…

”The latest NAEP test results which compare Louisiana student performance in reading and math to all other states places Louisiana at its lowest ranking ever. We now rank at the bottom of all state systems. The only area scoring lower on NAEP is Washington D.C.

“Don’t blame the students or the teachers. The fact is the Common Common core standards are so bad, so age inappropriate, so filled with stuff these kids will never use, that the tests should not be used for any purpose, much less the promotion and graduation of students. Meanwhile our students are being denied instruction in real world problems and truly useful reading and writing skills.”

Shocking as this is, John White may have learned this trick while he was working for the Bloomberg-Klein regime in New York City, where the same thing happened on the state tests. The State Education Department watered the passing standards down every year from 2006-09, and it magically appeared that there was steady, even dramatic progress. The scoring on the tests was changed so that the number of students who scored a 1 (the lowest) fell to the lowest number ever. Bloomberg was able to boast about the “New York City Miracle” during his 2009 re-election campaign. The miracle disappeared after he was re-elected, after the State Board of Regents brought in outside experts to review the results, and after the scoring was recalibrated. At the time, the chair of the State Board of Regents was Mayor Bloomberg’s good friend, billionaire Merryl Tisch.

You can read the story in my book, “The Death and Life of the Great American School System,” pp.-78-79.

Here is the short version. The state began annual testing in 2006, and every year from 2006-09, the state made it easier to pass. “In 2006, significant numbers of New York City Students scored at level 1 and were subject to retention. The number of students at level 1 dropped so low that level 1 could hardly be considered a performance level. In 2006, 70,090 students in grades three through eight were at level 1 in mathematics; by 2009, that number had fallen to 14,305. In reading, the number of level 1 students fell from 46,085 to 11,755…In sixth-grade reading, 10.1 percent were at level 1 in 2006, but by 2009, only 0.2 percent were.”

Students in level 1 were denied promotion and entitled to remediation. Most were bumped from level 1 to level 2 by lowering the standards, thus allowing them to advance but denying them the remediation they needed.

The standards dropped so low that many students could reach level 2 by guessing.

A neat trick so long as no one notices.

Categories Accountability, Bloomberg, Michael, Education Reform, Klein, Joel, Louisiana, New York City

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Louisiana’s Academic Standards Are Baloney, a Hoax

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