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New Bedford, Massachusetts, Doesn’t Need or Want More Charter Schools

By dianeravitch
November 16, 2018 //
12

The public schools of New Bedford, Massachusetts, have gone through a remarkable turnaround in recent years. They are getting better and better. In 2016, nearly 60% of the voters of New Bedford opposed any increase in the number of charters in the state. But now the state—in the hands of charter zealots—wants to expand the number of charter seats in New Bedford. These two citizens of New Bedford explain why this is a terrible idea that will do irreparable damage to the public schools.

The authors of this article are Joshua Amaral, a member of the New Bedford School Committee and the chair of the Massachusetts Association of School Committees Division IX (urban districts), and Bruce Rose, president of the New Bedford NAACP. “Ignore the Charter School Think Tank Crowd,” they say, and they are right. Why sink the ship for the benefit of a leaky rowboat?

They begin like this:


YOU ARE AN EDUCATION RESEARCHER sent to discover best practices in urban schools so that you can replicate them to create results for more kids—kids who you believe are trapped in mediocre schools. You look at three exemplar schools to scale up:

School A has 336 students and rates in the state’s 85th accountability percentile, a measure now used to aggregate a school’s performance on MCAS relative to other schools in the state. This school made 95 percent improvement toward its own goals, such as increasing the percentage of students who score advanced or proficient on statewide exams, or improving attendance rates. Remarkably, 46 percent of this school’s students have a first language other than English, and 75 percent are considered economically disadvantaged. The school has been named a School of Recognition by the state, among only 50 others.

School B has 730 students and rates in the state’s 59th accountability percentile and made 83 percent improvement toward its targets. The school is home to specialized classrooms designed to serve students with severe behavioral and developmental delays, and 27 percent of the school’s students have disabilities, 44 percent are economically disadvantaged, and 21 percent have a first language other than English.

School C has 413 students and rates in the state’s 38th accountability percentile and made 47 percent improvement toward its targets. At the school, 23 percent of the students have a first language other than English, and 58 percent come from economically disadvantaged backgrounds.

If you had to make the call on which school to expand by 300 percent – to double- or triple-down on – I suspect you would favor schools A and B, New Bedford district public schools Congdon and Pulaski, respectively, over School C, Alma del Mar Charter School, the school actually proposing such an extraordinary expansion.

The New Bedford district public schools have a plethora of higher performing schools. Not just Pulaski and Congdon, but 10 of New Bedford’s elementary schools finished higher in accountability ranking than Alma del Mar, more than half of the city’s primary schools. On improvement toward targets, 18 of the district’s 23 schools exceed Alma’s 47 percent improvement rate. And among those performing worse than Alma? The city’s other two charters: Global Learning and City on a Hill. The district educates a higher percentage of English language learners, students with disabilities, and economically disadvantaged students and has schools soaring past Alma nonetheless.

Why siphon from the most successful of New Bedford’s schools, which outperform charters with a more challenging student population, just to increase charter seats? With a concerted and well-funded public relations strategy unmatched by cash-strapped district schools, it seems the only advantage charters have over traditional public schools is in the marketing department. It’s a credit to the public relations efforts of charters that the success of the New Bedford district public schools relative to its charters comes as a surprise.

The New Bedford district public schools have undergone a marked turnaround over the last six years, stemming the tide of mediocrity and ineffectiveness that branded the district poorly across the state. The wave of accountability that rolled in post-ed reform hit New Bedford hard. Systems were put in place, issues were corrected, difficult decisions were made. The road to improvement has not always been smooth, but focused leadership and putting students first has left the district primed for takeoff, not takeover.

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Education Industry, Massachusetts, Privatization

New York Times: After Long Romance, Democrats Turning Against Charter Schools: The Backlash

By dianeravitch
November 10, 2018 //
40

The New York Times spotted an important new trend: the new wave of Democratic elected officials are not in favor of charter schools. We knew this had to happen. Democrats could not be Democrats and remain in alliance with Wall Street, hedge fund managers, billionaires, the Walton family, the DeVos family, and the Koch brothers.

Eliza Shapiro writes:

Over the last decade, the charter school movement gained a significant foothold in New York, demonstrating along the way that it could build fruitful alliances with Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo and other prominent Democrats. The movement hoped to set a national example — if charter schools could make it in a deep blue state like New York, they could make it anywhere.

But the election on Tuesday strongly suggested that the golden era of charter schools is over in New York. The insurgent Democrats who were at the forefront of the party’s successful effort to take over the State Senate have repeatedly expressed hostility to the movement.

John Liu, a newly elected Democratic state senator from Queens, has said New York City should “get rid of” large charter school networks. Robert Jackson, a Democrat who will represent a Manhattan district in the State Senate, promised during his campaign to support charter schools only if they have unionized teachers.

And another incoming Democratic state senator, Julia Salazar of Brooklyn, recently broadcast a simple message about charter schools: “I’m not interested in privatizing our public schools.”

No one is saying that existing charter schools will have to close. And in fact, New York City, which is the nation’s largest school system and home to the vast majority of the state’s charter schools, has many that are excelling.

Over 100,000 students in hundreds of the city’s charter schools are doing well on state tests, and tens of thousands of children are on waiting lists for spots. New York State has been mostly spared the scandals that have plagued states with weaker regulations.

But it seems highly likely that a New York Legislature entirely under Democratic control will restrict the number of new charter schools that can open, and tighten regulations on existing ones.

The defeat is magnified because Mr. Cuomo, a shrewd observer of national political trends with an eye toward a potential White House bid, recently softened his support for charter schools. Mayor Bill de Blasio is a longtime charter opponent with his own national aspirations.

And New York is not the only state where the charter school movement is facing fierce headwinds because of the election.

Gov. Scott Walker of Wisconsin, an enemy of public sector unions, was unseated by a Democrat, Tony Evers, a former teacher who ran on a promise to boost funding to traditional public schools.

In neighboring Illinois, J.B. Pritzker, a Democrat who promised to curb charter school growth, beat the incumbent Republican, Gov. Bruce Rauner, a supporter of charter schools. And in Michigan, a Democrat, Gretchen Whitmer, promised to “put an end to the DeVos agenda.”

Ms. Whitmer won her race for governor decisively against the state’s Republican attorney general, Bill Schuette, who is an ally of Betsy DeVos, the education secretary under President Trump. Ms. DeVos has been an outspoken proponent of charter schools in her home state of Michigan and nationally.

Voters on Tuesday gave Democrats control of the New York State Legislature. It seems likely that the body will restrict the number of new charter schools that can open.CreditHolly Pickett for The New York Times
Now charter school supporters are wrestling with the unpleasant reality that a supposedly bipartisan movement, intended to rescue students from failing public schools, has been effectively linked to Wall Street, Mr. Trump and Ms. DeVos by charter school opponents.

Derrell Bradford, the executive vice president of a national group that backs charters, 50CAN, acknowledged that the election results raised new challenges. He said the situation was especially fraught because Mr. Trump has championed charter schools, making the issue toxic for some Democrats.

“I find it frustrating that the president’s support is often used as the reason for people to abandon support of charters and low-income families,” Mr. Bradford said.

Where insurgent national Democrats support charter schools, they do so carefully: Representative Jared Polis, the Colorado Democrat whom voters sent to the governor’s mansion on Tuesday, founded two charter schools. But he has made sure to criticize Ms. DeVos’s vocal brand of school choice advocacy.

Tuesday’s results were compounded by other recent blows for charters in liberal states.

In 2016, Massachusetts voters rejected a referendum that would have expanded the state’s high-performing charter schools. Though backers poured $20 million into the race, it was no match for Senator Elizabeth Warren and Senator Bernie Sanders, progressive stars who opposed the initiative.

Philanthropists tried again in California over the summer, when they spent $23 million to bolster the former Los Angeles mayor, Antonio Villaraigosa, in the primary for governor. Mr. Villaraigosa, a Democrat, was easily beat by Gavin Newsom, the Democratic lieutenant governor, who has been vague about the role of charters as he seeks to make California an epicenter of opposition to the Trump administration.

Some advocates find a sliver of hope in the fact that even the most liberal Democrats acknowledge that charter schools are here to stay. Many opponents want to slow growth, not destroy charters.

“No matter how hostile some of the cities get to charters, the charters have endured,” said Jeanne Allen, the chief executive of the Center for Education Reform, a national school choice advocacy group.

In New York, the insurgent Democratic candidates’ criticism of charters was somewhat less central to their campaigns than their support for traditional public schools. And though most of those Democrats said they would reject any plan to expand charter schools, they are aware that charters are popular among some families in their own districts.

“You don’t want to alienate anybody,” said Alessandra Biaggi, who in the Democratic primary unseated one of the charter lobby’s most reliable allies, State Senator Jeffrey D. Klein, in a Bronx district. “I understand why charter schools exist, I understand why they have come to the Bronx, I really get it. But we’ve got to focus on improving our public schools.”

But even the best-case scenario — widespread political ambivalence, rather than animus, toward charters — would have significant consequences for charter school supporters in New York.

The Legislature may not even bother to take up charter advocates’ most pressing need: lifting the cap on the number of charter schools that can open statewide. Fewer than 10 new charter schools can open in New York City until the law is changed in Albany.

That means the city’s largest charter networks, including the widely known Success Academy, will be stymied in their ambitious goal of expanding enough to become parallel districts within the school system.

“I understand why charter schools exist,” said Alessandra Biaggi, who will represent part of the Bronx in the State Senate. “But we’ve got to focus on improving our public schools.”

But it is the smaller, more experimental charter schools that may have the most to lose.

“A new generation of schools will be thwarted,” said Steven Wilson, the founder of Ascend, a small network of Brooklyn charter schools.

And charters will now be partially regulated by the movement’s political foes. State Senate Democrats, with the lobbying support of teachers’ unions, are likely to push laws requiring charter schools to enroll a certain number of students with disabilities or students learning English. Previous proposals indicate that those politicians may force charters to divulge their finances, and could make it harder for charters to operate in public school buildings.

Those legislators could even impose a limit of about $200,000 on charter school executives’ salaries. At least two operators made over $700,000 in 2016.

Charter school advocates in Democratic states said defeat has made their political mission clear: Convince the holdouts of their liberal bona fides.

“What people don’t understand is that our previous politics obscured just how progressive the vast majority of people in the charter movement actually are,” James Merriman, C.E.O. of the New York City Charter School Center, said.

Still, some of the political wounds New York’s charter school sector has sustained appear self-inflicted, especially in light of the state’s eagerness to challenge Mr. Trump’s agenda.

Days after the 2016 election, Eva Moskowitz, the C.E.O. of Success Academy, interviewed with Mr. Trump for the role of education secretary. When she announced that she would not take the job, Ms. Moskowitz praised the president on the steps of City Hall.

The next day, Ms. Moskowitz hugged Ivanka Trump, the president’s daughter, when she visited a Success Academy school. A few months later, Ms. Moskowitz welcomed the House speaker, Paul D. Ryan of Wisconsin, to the same school during the fight to repeal the Affordable Care Act, which Mr. Ryan helped lead.

Students peered out the windows of the Harlem school as angry protesters waited outside, playing bongos and waving signs.

After a backlash from her staff, Ms. Moskowitz said she “should have been more outspoken” against Mr. Trump.

The situation got worse when one of Ms. Moskowitz’s most prolific donors, the hedge fund billionaire Daniel S. Loeb, said last summer that a black state senator who has been skeptical of charter schools had done more damage to black people than the Ku Klux Klan.

His comment was met with fury from black supporters of charter schools, some of the movement’s most indispensable allies.

On Tuesday, that senator, Andrea Stewart-Cousins, became the next leader of the New York State Senate.

Categories Betsy DeVos, California, Charter Schools, Democrats, Massachusetts, New York City

Massachusetts: The Waltons Won’t Take “No” for An Answer

By dianeravitch
September 27, 2018 //
18

In 2016, the Waltons decided that Massachusetts needed more charter schools. It must have annoyed them that the Bay State is considered the best state in the nation even though it has less than 100 charters.

They began planning a strategy to lift the cap. After Republican Governor Charlie Baker was elected, they thought it would be easy to add more charters. But the legislature refused. They launched a referendum and poured millions into “Yes on 2,” aided by other billionaire who love privatization. When the vote was tallied in November 2016, Walton and Friends (many of their names kept secret by Dark Money groups) got their backsides kicked. Yes on 2 was overwhelmingly defeated (62%-38%), winning only in a handful of affluent districts that never expected to see a charter school in their town.

They filed a lawsuit, claiming that the cap on charters denied black children educational opportunity. The state’s highest court threw out their case.

The main purveyor of Dark Money in the referendum was “Families for Excellent Schools,” which was required to reveal the names of donors after the election, pay a fine of nearly half a million dollars, and stay out of the state for four years. Shortly after, the New York-based FES collapsed.

Did the Waltons learn anything from this fiasco?

No. They have returned to Massachusetts with another AstroTurf group called the Massachusetts Education Equity Partnership. Some of the same players are present.

Professor Maurice Cunningham has chronicled the Datk Money intrusion into Massachusetts.

He tells the story of the new fake front here.

What Is the Massachusetts Education Equity Partnership?

As he reminds us, “Dark Money Never Sleeps Follow the money.”

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Dark Money, Education Industry, Massachusetts, Privatization, Walton Foundation

Two Veterans of Disgraced “Families for Excellent Schools” Plan a New Charter Effort in Chicago

By dianeravitch
September 12, 2018 //
13

Chalkbeat reports that two veterans of the disgraced Families for Excellent schools are heading for Chicago.

Since there is so much money available to launch new charters, someone has to do it.

Families for Excellent Schools was a front for tycoons and billionaires who despise public schools and advocate for privately managed charter schools. When Mayor Bill de Blasio tried to rein in zeta Moskowitz’s power grab (she wanted to open 14 new charters, he approved only eight), FES unleashed a $6 million TV blitz attacking de Blasio for trying to ruin the lives of black and brown children, who would be thrown out of schools that did not yet exist. Cuomo was showered with money by FES supporters, and he announced himself to be the charter industry’s champion, even appearing at their lavish rally. Cuomo persuaded the legislature to give NYC charters whatever they wanted, including free public space.

In 2016, FES became the lead financier of the pro-charter coalition in the Massachusetts refendum on whether to expand the number of charters. FES raised at least $15 million and tried to hide the names of its donors. Despite heavy spending, Question 2 was overwhelmingly defeated. After the election, the state’s political ethics office demanded that FES release the names of donors, which it did. The donors were super-rich and included both Democrats and Republicans. The state fined FES $426,000 (all the money on hand) and banned it from Massachusetts for the next four years. Soon after, the FES executive director was accused of sexual misconduct at a Reformer retreat (Camp Philos) in DC. He was fired, and FES closed its doors.

Professor Maurice Cipunningham of the University of Massschusetts chronicled the role of FES and Dark Money in the 2016 election. Google his 2016 and 2017 articles about FES.

Now, of course, not everyone went down with the ship. There’s lots of millions out there for ambitious young people who want to undermine and privatize public schools.

Categories Accountability, Billionaires, Charter Schools, Chicago, Disruption, Education Industry, Illinois, Massachusetts

The Legacy of Barbara Madeloni

By dianeravitch
August 29, 2018 //
5

Let us now praise a fearless street fighter, who beat back and defeated the corporate reformers, billionaires, hedge fund managers, and Dark Money in Massachusetts in 2016. Let us now praise Barbara Madeloni, who as president of the Massachusetts Teachers Association, led the fight against the proliferation of charter schools in Massachusetts.

This article is a fitting tribute to her spirit and leadership.

The Reformers bundled millions of dollars and set their sights on Massachusetts as a ripe target. In 2016, the state voted on a referendum (Question 2) that would have allowed the addition of 12 charters schools a year for the indefinite future. It would have wreaked havoc on the budget of every school district in the state.

The “No on 2” forces included teachers, parents, and other citizens who believed in public schools. They were outspent 2-1 (both the AFT and NEA made sizable contributions). Almost every school district committee (elected school board) came out in opposition.

People power beat money power, by 62-38%.

After the election, the Massachusetts campaign finance officials fined the lead Reform organization Families for Excellent Schools nearly half a million dollars and barred them from the state for four years. Soon after, FES collapsed. Another organization soon popped up to take its place as a bundled of Dark Money.

But, let us not forget. We won. Public education won. Parents and teachers won.

Thank you, Barbara Madeloni!

I humbly add your name to the blog’s Honor Roll.

Categories Charter Schools, Corporate Reformers, Dark Money, Democrats for Education Reform, Honor Roll, Massachusetts, Privatization, Resistance, Unions

Please Read Andrea Gabor’s “After the Education Wars,” an Important Book That Points the Way to Genuine Reform

By dianeravitch
August 20, 2018 //
22

I hope you will buy and read Andrea Gabor’s After the Education Wars: How Smart Schools Upend the Business of Reform.

It is ironic that Gabor is the Bloomberg chair of business journalism at Baruch College of the City University of New York, because her book stands in opposition to almost everything Mayor Michael Bloomberg did when he had control of the New York City public schools. Bloomberg and his chancellor Joel Klein believed in carrots and sticks. They believed in stack ranking. They believed that test scores were the be-all and end-all of education. They believed that teachers and principals would be motivated to work harder if their jobs and careers were on the line every day. They created a climate of fear, where people were terminated suddenly and replaced by inexperienced newcomers. If they had brought in W. Edwards Deming—Gabor’s guiding star— as an advisor, their strategies would have been very different.

Gabor is a proponent of the philosophy of management of Deming, the management guru who is widely credited with reviving Japanese industry after World War II, by changing its culture and making it a world leader. If Bloomberg had hired Deming as his lead adviser, his strategies would have been lastting, and he might have really transformed the nation’s largest school system and had a national impact.

I first learned about Deming’s work by reading Gabor’s book about Deming titled The Man Who Discovered Quality. I read the book in 2012. I have repeatedly gone back to re-read chapter 9, the chapter where she explains Deming’s hostility to merit pay and performance rankings and his emphasis on collaboration and teamwork.

Describing his views, she wrote:

“The merit rating nourishes short-term performance, annihilates long-term planning, builds fear, demolishes teamwork, nourishes rivalry and politics…It is unfair as it ascribes to the people in a group differences that may be totally caused by the system that they work in.”

She wrote, citing Deming, that performance pay (educators call it merit pay) undermines the corporate culture; it gets everyone thinking only about himself and not about the good of the corporation. Everyone focuses on short-term goals, not long-term goals. If the corporation is unsuccessful, Deming said, it is the fault of the system, not the workers in it. It is management’s job to recruit the best workers, to train them well, to support them, and create an environment in which they can take joy in their work.

Deming understood that the carrot-and-stick philosophy was early twentieth century behaviorism. He understood that threats and rewards do not produce genuine improvement in the workplace. He anticipated what twenty-first century psychologists like Edward Deci and Dan Ariely have demonstrated with their social experiments: People are motivated not by incentives and fear, but by idealism, by a sense of purpose, and by professional autonomy, the freedom to do one’s job well.

In After the Education Wars, Gabor takes her Demingite perspective and writes case studies of districts that have figured out how to embed his principles.

She writes about the “small schools movement” in New York City, the one led by Ann Cook and Deborah Meier, which relied on performance assessment, not standardized tests; the remarkable revival of Brockton High School in Massachusetts, a school with more than 4,000 students; the Leander school district in central Texas, which embraced Deming principles; and the charter takeover of New Orleans.

The chapter on New Orleans is the best account that I have read of what happened in that city. It is not about numbers, test scores, graduation rates, and other data, but about what happened to the students and families who live in New Orleans. She describes a hostile corporate takeover of a city’s public schools and a deliberate, calculated, smug effort to destroy democracy. Her overall view is that the free-market reforms were “done to black people, not with black people.” She spends ample time in the schools and describes the best (and the worst) of them. She follows students as they progress through charter schools to college or prison. She pays close attention to the students in need of special education who don’t get it and who suffer the consequences. She takes a close look at the outside money fueling the free-market makeover. She explains the role of the Gates Foundation, New Schools for New Orleans, and other elements of what was essentially hijacking of the entire school system by venture capitalists and foundations who were eager to make a point about their own success as “gatekeepers” of reform. She finds that New Schools for New Orleans “functions more like a cartel than an open-source project.” It prefers “no-excuses” charter schools like KIPP. Gabor is critical of the Education Research Alliance at Tulane University for ignoring the “no-excuses” discipline policies, saying “ignoring no-excuses discipline practices at New Orleans charters is like covering the New England Patriots and ignoring Deflategate…[Douglas] Harris bristles at the suggesting that his research organization is anything but neutral in its assessments of the city’s charters. Yet ERA’s job must be especially difficult given its co-location with NSNO and the Cowen Institute on the seventh floor of 1555 Poydras Street.”

She writes wistfully of a New Orleans story that never was: “a post-Katrina rebuilding–even one premised on a sizable charter sector, albeit with better oversight and coordination of vital services like those for special-needs students–that sought to engage the community in a way that would have helped preserve, even enhance, its stake in their children’s education. What if, instead of raising the performance scores so as to lasso the vast majority of New Orleans charters into the RSD, the city had taken control of the worst schools while encouraging community groups…to lead by example. What if it had made a concerted effort to enlists dedicated, respected educators and involved citizens and parents…in the school-design and chartering process?”

Gabor’s chapter on New Orleans is a masterpiece of journalism and investigative reporting.

She concludes that “Contrary to education-reform dogma, the examples in this book suggest that restoring democracy, participative decision making, and the training needed to make both more effective can be a key to school improvement and to imbuing children–especially poor and minority children–with the possibilities of citizenship and power in a democracy.”

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Corporate Reformers, Education Industry, Education Reform, Massachusetts, New Orleans, New York City, Privatization, Testing, Texas

Andrea Gabor: An Education Reform That Worked–and That Needs to Be Revived

By dianeravitch
June 12, 2018 //
65

Andrea Gabor writes in the Boston Globe about the remarkable success of the Massachusetts Education Reform Act of 1993, which involved a bipartisan agreement: more funding, equalization of funding, in exchange for standards and assessments. Gabor’s new book, After the Education Wars: How Smart Schools Upend the Business of Reform, is officially published today. It is a smart book that deeply understands the futility of the corporate reform movement, which substitutes competition for collaboration and guarantees repeated failures.

She writes:

Twenty-five years after Massachusetts passed a historic education reform law that helped make it the gold-standard for American schooling, the Bay State reforms are coming under scrutiny again — and for good reason.

What happened in Massachusetts is actually a tale of two reforms. The first, signed into law on June 18, 1993, was a bipartisan achievement hammered out by a Republican governor and Democratic state legislators, and informed by a vigorous local debate among educators, parents, and business people who agreed on a “grand bargain”: substantially more state spending for schools in exchange for higher standards and increased accountability.

The law worked initially as intended. It infused over $1 billion in extra education funding — mostly to poor communities. Massachusetts achieved top scores on the National Assessment of Educational Progress, the nation’s report card. By 2000, the gap between NAEP scores of black and white students had actually narrowed.

But tax cuts, the Great Recession of 2008-2009 and the mandates of Race to the Top eroded the state’s gains:

A new 2010 education law only made matters worse. While providing a one-time $250 million cash infusion from the Federal government, the law failed to make up for school-funding inequities, yet imposed dire consequences on schools, districts, and teachers who failed to make test-score gains. It also gutted the much-lauded curriculum standards.

It is time to revisit how the original 1993 legislation worked — and why it remains a model worth building on. The law was a response to a decade of property tax cuts that hit poor communities hardest. A successful class-action lawsuit, led by Brockton students, and decided just days before the Education Reform Act was passed, sought to remedy that inequality, arguing that Massachusetts was not meeting its constitutional obligation to “cherish” education for all students — language written into the state constitution by John Adams.

Support for the plan in 1993 was not only bipartisan but had the support of the business leaders.

They were willing to pay more for better schools, and they wanted strong foundation aid for the poorest schools. In a time of charter-mania, charters were capped at only 25 for the entire state.

Erosion of that support in recent years hit Brockton High School, where the rebellion began, extra hard. What was once a miracle story–the failing school that became one of the best in the state–was upended as funding became unequal again.

In recent years, Brockton has struggled to navigate new state and federal mandates, including new teacher evaluations and a common core-aligned MCAS. In 2016, Governor Charlie Baker and his top education officials imposed a charter school on the community against overwhelming local opposition. During the last school year, Brockton ran a $16 million deficit; the town is now exploring a new funding lawsuit.

It is time to restore equitable funding for schools — the aim of an education-funding bill that just passed the state Senate — and to fully realize the vision of the 1993 reforms. This encompassed not just a rich curriculum, but also a robust role for local school-based decision-making and a wide array of accountability measures, and, as the MBAE pointed out in 1993, “not simply results of standardized tests.” All these measures are needed to return schools like Brockton High to their former levels of fiscal and educational sustainability.

Categories Accountability, Budget Cuts, Equity, Funding, Massachusetts

Peter Greene: EdNext and the Beanstalk

By dianeravitch
June 7, 2018 //
5

Peter Greene retired as a teacher but, happily, not as a blogger. He continues to eviscerate hot air balloons and pretensions.

In this post, he examines the questions raised by the conservative journal Education Next: Have states maintained high expectations and does it matter?

Daniel Hamlin and Paul Peterson “note that ESSA gave states license to dump the Common Core, either in its actual form or under whatever assumed name they hid it behind. For accountability hawks, this raises the concern that we’ll have a Race to the Bottom, as states make it easier for schools to clear the performance bar (yes, for the six millionth time, this blurs the barely-existing line between the standards and the tests used to account for them). Will the political expediency of being able to say, ‘All our kids are Proficient (as we currently define it)!’ be too much for politicians to resist?”

They write:

So, has the starting gun been fired on a race to the bottom? Have the bars for reaching academic proficiency fallen as many states have loosened their commitment to Common Core? And, is there any evidence that the states that have raised their proficiency bars since 2009 have seen greater growth in student learning?

In a nutshell, the answers to these three questions are no, no, and, so far, none.

Peter responds: “So nobody has loosened up requirements to– hey, wait a minute. Did they just say that raising proficiency bars hasn’t actually increased student learning?”

Yep. States still have high standards, but the states with those high standards did not see “greater growth in student learning.”

Peter observes: “We are now only one third of the way through the article, and yet the next sentence is not “Therefore, there really is no purpose in continuing to fret about how high state standards are, because they have nothing to do with student achievement.” But instead, the next sentence is “While higher proficiency standards may still serve to boost academic performance, our evidence suggests that day has not yet arrived.” And sure, I understand the reluctance to abandon a favorite theory, but at some point you have to stop saying, “Well, we’ve now planted 267 magic beans in the yard and nothing has happened– yet. But tomorrow could be the day; keep that beanstalk ladder ready.”

Peter thinks those magic beans will never grow into a giant beanstalk.

You would think that after almost 20 years of pursuing high standards and rigorous tests, there might be more discussion of the meager results of these policies.

I have to use this discussion as an opportunity to say a few words about the subjectiveness of the term “proficiency.” Setting the dividing line between “basic” and “proficient” is an arbitrary process. A group of people, some educators and non-educators, meet together to decide what children of a certain grade should know and be able to do. On different days, the same panel might draw a different line. A different panel might choose a different cut score. The decision about where the cut score falls is not objective. “Proficient” is not an objective term.

When I served on the NAEP board, it was understood that “Proficient” was a high bar that most students were unlikely to reach. I thought of it as equivalent to an A. Somehow it has been transformed into a goal that all students should reach. On NAEP, Massachusetts is the only state where as many as 50% of students have reached Proficient.

It is not reasonable to complain when students don’t reach an arbitrary goal that is out of reach, like the NCLB goal that 100% of students would be Proficient by the year 2014. Making tests harder doesn’t make students smarter.

Categories Accountability, Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA), Massachusetts, NCLB (No Child Left Behind), Testing

Dumbest Idea of the Month: Massachusetts May Have Computers Grade Student Essays

By dianeravitch
May 23, 2018 //
60

There are two ways to go wrong in scoring student essays. One is to have them graded by computers. The other is to have them graded by the low-wage slackers hired by testing corporations.

There is only one way to go right in scoring student essays. That is to have them read by teachers in the building or district where the student is enrolled.

Massachusetts is pondering turning over the grading of student essays to computers. Les Perelman, a retired professor of writing at MIT, has demonstrated how dumb the computers are when it comes to understanding what students have written. The computers like long sentences; big words; and long essays. But the computers have a serious defect: They can’t tell truth from falsehood. He told a New York Times writer, Michael Winerip, that a computer would not care if a student wrote that the War of 1812 began in 1945. Computers are not fact-checkers. That is why they can score thousands of essays in less than a minute. If you happen to think that knowledge matters, don’t have essays scored by computers.

If you think that it is better to ask Pearson or ETS or any of the other testing companies to have essays graded by humans, think again. Read Todd Farley’s book “Making the Grades: My Misadventures in the Standardized Testing Industry,” where he describes himself as a scorer who was in it for the hourly wage, surrounded by others with little or no interest in the quality of writing or the fate of students. In recent years, we have heard of ads placed on Craigslist, seeking essay readers at $11 an hour, no experience needed. Read the last paragraph of Farley’s book to know why mass-grading of student writing doesn’t work, why parents should fight it with every fibre of their being.

Who should read and assess student work? Teachers who work in the building or the district. At least then one can be certain that teachers are doing the grading, not unemployed and inexperienced college graduates who are expected to read and grade 100 essays an hour or more.

Categories Education Reform, Massachusetts, Technology, Computers, Testing

Reader: What the Boston Globe Did Not Say About Massachusetts Charters

By dianeravitch
May 2, 2018 //
25

 

Christine Langhoff, retired teacher in Massachusetts, writes:

 

The big news of the week of course, was the ruling by the MA Supreme Judicial Court that the cap on charters is constitutional. Coverage in the putative newspaper of record, The Boston Globe, sought to portray the decision as public schools and teachers hating on charters.

“The court fight escalated the long-running battle over charter schools, which are controversial because they do not have to be unionized, operate independently of local school districts, and are given more flexibility to set their curriculums, budgets, and staffing levels.”

https://www.bostonglobe.com/metro/2018/04/24/state-high-court-rejects-challenge-charter-school-cap/j6eoQGIp6JY2p0CxcZzLmO/story.html

Importantly, as Professor Cunningham points out, John Henry, The Globe’s owner and publisher, is Klarman’s business partner. Klarman, the billionaire hedge funder, contributed $3 million to the Yes on Question 2 faction. He also holds some $92 million in Puerto Rico’s debt, which bodes ill for the islanders as they face the impending, sweeping charterization of their public schools.

https://www.alternet.org/hedge-funder-puerto-rico-charter-schools

By contrast, Clive McFarlane, writing in the Worcester Telegram, unafflicted by allegiances among business partners, had this perspective:

“Mr. Nicolette (executive director of the Massachusetts Charter Public School Association) and other supporters will continue to point to the charter schools that are doing well, while highlighting the traditional public schools that are struggling.

But they won’t tell you about the attrition rates of students attending charter schools, that the top 11 and 17 of the top 20 schools statewide with the highest attrition rates are charter schools.

They won’t tell you that the top seven schools with the highest dropout rates (ranging from 21 percent to 54 percent) in the state are charter schools.

They won’t tell you that the top nine schools in the state with the highest churn rate (the percent of students leaving and arriving during the school year) are charter schools.”

http://www.telegram.com/news/20180425/clive-mcfarlane-states-high-court-rejects-argument-for-lifting-cap-on-charter-schools

The interests of the elite make it clear that though decisive victories against the charter industry have been won, the proponents are not about to walk away.
So, though we’ve won three times in the struggle to keep our “best in the nation” public schools here in Massachusetts, don’t count the charteristas out. Seems there’s a lot of money riding on them.

Categories Charter Schools, Education Reform, Massachusetts
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