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A Very Bizarre Graduate School of Education

By dianeravitch
July 8, 2012 //
49

Carol Burris is the principal of an outstanding public high school on Long Island, in New York State. She often writes about education for The Answer Sheet. Burris has won awards for her leadership and her school has been recognized for its achievements.

Burris just published an article about the Relay Graduate School of Education. This is a masters’ program that was created by three charter school chains to prepare teachers for working in charter schools. It is certainly not a traditional graduate school of education. There do not seem to be courses in cognitive development, child psychology, sociology of education, history of education, or varied pedagogical models and strategies. There is only one pedagogical strategy, and apparently it is the one that is best at raising test scores.

As I read Burris’ description of Relay, I had two questions:

Why did the New York State Board of Regents permit this “school” to call its program a “graduate” program of education with the authority to award masters’ degrees? There is something incestuous about a “graduate” program created by charter schools to give masters’ degrees to their own teachers.

And second, what is it in the psyche of young men and women, most of whom graduated from prestigious secondary schools, private and public, that enables them to impose a boot-camp style of discipline on boys and girls of color that is unlike anything in their own experience?

Categories Charter Schools, Education Reform, New York

Follow the Money

By dianeravitch
July 3, 2012 //
6

If you want to know why so many politicians think so highly of charters, there is a basic rule of  politics that explains it all: Follow the money.

The most visible organization promoting corporate reform is called Democrats for Education Reform, known as DFER (commonly pronounced “D-fer”). DFER is the Wall Street hedge fund managers’ group. It always has a few non-hedge funders on the board, especially one or two prominent African-Americans, to burnish its pretentious claim of leading the civil rights movement of our day. Kevin Chavous, a former council member from Washington, D.C., fills that role for now, along with the DFER stalwart, Cory Booker, the mayor of Newark. DFER has its own member of the U.S. Senate, Senator Michael Bennett of Colorado. It has also raised money generously for Congressman George Miller, the senior Democrat on the House Education and Labor Committee.

This group bankrolls politicians, woos them, raises campaign cash for them, and persuades them of the advantages of turning the children of their district over to privately managed schools. Watch their website to see which politician they favor this month and scan those they have recognized in the past.

In New York City, Hakeem Jeffries, DFERs’s candidate for U.S. Congress, announced his support for tax credits for religious schools on the day after he won the election. His support for charter schools was already well known. Unless there is targeted new funding, support for charters and religious schools comes right out of the budget for public schools, which are already stressed by cuts.

Categories Budget Cuts, Charter Schools, Corporate Reformers, Democrats for Education Reform, Education Reform, New York

How to Rip Off Children with Disabilities and Taxpayers Too

By dianeravitch
June 25, 2012 //
4

The New York Times reveals today some of the findings of an ongoing audit of New York State’s privatized program to provide special education services for prekindergarten children Thomas P, DiNapoli, the Comptroller of the state of New York, has found evidence of massive fraud. New York’s preschool special education program is a $2 billion system that relies mostly on private contractors, many of them for-profit operators. New York spends more to provide these services than any other state in the nation.

Here are key excerpts:

“The owners of a Bronx company that employs teachers for disabled toddlers used thousands of dollars in government funds to fix up a weekend getaway in the Poconos, state auditors found. A Brooklyn company in the same program, which provides treatment for prekindergarten special education students, billed taxpayers for his wife’s $150,000 salary as his assistant director when she was a full-time professor at the City University of New York, the auditors said.”

“And the owners of an upstate company improperly diverted more than $800,000 to pay, among other things, rent and interest to themselves and the full-time salary of an executive who lived in South Carolina and seldom worked.”

A valuable story to read and ponder as our nation’s policymakers are pushing more and more districts and states to privatize the management and control of their public schools.

Diane

Categories New York, Privatization, Special Education

How Charter Schools Get a Bad Reputation

By dianeravitch
June 25, 2012 //
37

The best investigative reporter in New York City–and possibly in the nation–is Juan Gonzalez of the New York Daily News.

Gonzalez writes about politics and occasionally writes about the politics of education. He has written some of the biggest scoops about the inner workings of the New York City Department of Education. He won the George Polk Award in journalism for reporting about the Citytime fraud, a giant high-tech scam in which a contractor ripped off the city for years and eventually agreed to repay almost $500 million.

This morning he revealed that Eva Moskowitz is seeking a big increase in her management fees from the state because she claims to be running a deficit. Today, he writes, the State University of New York is likely to approve “a huge 50% increase in the per-pupil management fee of one of the city’s wealthiest, biggest-spending and most controversial charter school operators.”

Gonzalez writes that “The Success Network, in fact, is a fund-raising colossus, having received $28 million from dozens of foundations and wealthy investors the past six years, and millions more in state and federal grants.” It has reported huge surpluses to the IRS, currently $23.5 million.

Last year, it spent more than $3 million on marketing and recruitment to drum up applicants for its much-ballyooed lotteries. The more applicants for every seat, the more Success Academy looks “successful.” It is a marketing tool in which people and their children are used to get more charters for Success Academy.

Whenever there is a public hearing about closing schools, hundreds of Success Academy children and parents are bused in–all wearing identical T-shirts–to insist on closing more public schools so that Success Academy can take their space and open more charter schools. Why would charter students demand more charters? They are already enrolled in one and they can only attend one school. They are used. You can imagine the opprobrium that would be heaped on a public school principal if he or she hired a bus to take children to public hearings to demand more space or more funding. The principal would be called out, rightly, for using the children and would be fired.

Today Success Academy will appeal for more public funding. It gets whatever it wants from city and state officials (Eva’s charter PAC–called Great Public Schools– made a $50,000 contribution to Governor Cuomo’s campaign).

This is how charters get a bad reputation.

Categories Charter Schools, Education Reform, New York, NYC

Debating Cuomo Plan for Teacher Ratings

By dianeravitch
June 20, 2012 //
22

Governor Andrew Cuomo has come up with a compromise on the issue of releasing teacher data rankings. He wants only parents to see the rankings and data reports for their children’s teachers, but to make public the data for individual classes and schools. This is a step in the right direction, but it doesn’t go far enough.

It doesn’t satisfy the tabloids, who want every teacher’s name and ranking to be published online and in print. Like Mayor Bloomberg, they believe that the rankings are an accurate reflection of teacher quality and should be freely displayed, perhaps on “wanted” posters in the post-office.

It doesn’t satisfy me either because I know based on research and experience that the rankings are inaccurate, unstable and will sully the reputation of good teachers. How are parents helped by seeing inaccurate ratings? How are teachers helped to improve, as Bill Gates pointed out in an article in the New York Times earlier this year, if their job evaluations are showed to anyone other than their supervisors?

The rankings, derived from the rise or fall of student test scores, are demonstrably inaccurate. When New York City released its teacher data reports in January and they were published in the media with the names and rankings of teachers, it warned the public to take them with more than a grain of salt because the margin of errors in both reading and math were so large–35 points in reading and 53 points in math. That means that a teacher of math who was labeled a 50 (on a 100 point scale) might actually be at the 15th percentile or the 85th percentile. In reading, the margin of error was so large as to make the numbers utterly meaningless. Statistical analyses showed that there was no correlation between the scores that a teacher “produced” from year to year, and that a teacher who taught both subjects got different grades. All that data, all those rankings were so flawed as to be pointless other than to provide fodder for the tabloids to attack teachers.

Why aren’t the tabloids howling for the release of the evaluations of police officers and firefighters? Why are their evaluations shielded (by law) from public view? Shouldn’t the public have a right to know about their performance?

What about the job evaluations of the top officials at the New York City Department of Education? When will their job evaluations be released? They are public employees and they are paid six figures. What value do they add? How many schools have they improved? What are they doing to strengthen public education? How can the public hold them accountable? Here’s one suggestion: Every time a public school closes, the top officials should lose points on their evaluation because a school closing represents a failure of leadership.

Diane

Categories Education Reform, New York, Teacher Evaluations

How Are Police and Teachers Alike These Days?

By dianeravitch
June 20, 2012 //
16

Read this article, which documents how data-driven policing has caused police to report statistics wrongly, classify crimes as more or less serious depending on the quota needed to fill, and has created constructs of “productivity” that warp the goals of policing.

What is the primary goal of policing? To keep our communities safe and crime-free. What is the primary goal of education? To assure that the younger generation is prepared in mind, character and body to assume the responsibilities of citizenship in our society. But what are the goals of education in a data-driven environment? To raise test scores, by whatever means necessary. This is akin to setting a quota for felony arrests for police or directing them that the crime statistics must go down.

Here we see a restatement of Campbell’s Law. When the stakes are high, people will not only forget the goals of their activity but the measure itself becomes corrupted. Thus, the data that are generated–whether by police or teachers–become meaningless because of the pressure applied to get them. In effect, we are paying people bonuses to generate good news that is not true. The good news is not true, the data are not trustworthy, the measures are no longer useful, and we are not achieving the purposes of policing or teaching. It’s what you might call a lose-lose.

But it does have certain benefits. It creates new industries for those who love counting and measuring and reporting. It creates new work for the consultants who will tell you how to reach your targets. It provides a rationale for endless workshops and professional development and study groups, all of which divert even more time from the original goals. It creates new work for the experts who will opine about better ways to reach the targets. And it gives bragging rights to the politicians who think they accomplished something.

Categories Accountability, Campbell's Law, Education Reform, New York, Teacher Evaluations

Vouchers in New York State?

By dianeravitch
June 19, 2012 //
12

Legislation was introduced on June 15 proposing to repeal the Blaine Amendment in the New York State constitution.

Enacted by many states in the nineteenth century, the Blaine amendment prohibits the allocation of public money to religious schools.

The proposed legislation would clear the way for vouchers for religious schools.

This is an opportune time for the repeal effort by supporters of religious schools. The proliferation of charter schools has dimmed the bright line that separates public and private schools. Many charter schools are private schools that operate with public funds. They are not open to all. They are free to write their own rules and to kick out kids who don’t live by their rules. They operate with minimal oversight. Most have wealthy directors, usually hedge fund managers, who supply extra funds. Most have a smaller proportion of students with disabilities and English-language learners than their nearby public school. And they claim to be better because they are not regular public schools. Also, there are places like Wisconsin, Indiana, and Louisiana, as well as D.C., that already send public funds to religious schools.

Now that it is hard to know what is a public school and what is a private school, it becomes harder still to explain why it’s okay to send public funds to thousands of privately managed charters but not to religious schools, or why some states may directly fund religious schools and others don’t. And that’s why voucher legislation becomes feasible in these times.

Since the change in the state constitution in New York requires a popular vote, this is no slam-dunk. There may still be voters who remember what they were taught in school about separation of church and state.

Diane

Categories Education Reform, New York, Vouchers

When Policymakers Are Clueless

By dianeravitch
June 7, 2012 //
7

Over the past decade of mayor control in New York City, the newly established Department of Education has had a free hand to do whatever it wanted with the city’s 1.1 million students, free of any concern about the reaction of parents, teachers, principals, or the public.

One reform after another has rolled out of City Hall, after Mayor Bloomberg or Chancellor Klein or someone else got a new idea or had a conversation at a dinner party. Sometimes these ideas are announced with great fanfare, and almost always they are announced as the solution to some problem, trumpets blaring, success preceding implementation.

The state scores went up and up, evidence of the New York City “miracle,” until 2010, when the New York State Education Department acknowledged that the state scores were a hoax. Someone at the SED had decided to help raise test scores by lowering the passing mark, and had done the same year after year, creating the illusion of progress. This was enough to enable New York to win Race to the Top funding, enough to help Mayor Bloomberg win a third term in 2009, and enough to get mayoral control extended in 2009 by the Legislature for another six years , all because of those amazing but phony test scores.

When the test score mirage dissolved, we learned that graduation rates had gone up into the low 60%, but there were no press conferences to talk about the persistently high remediation rates for entering college students, nor about their low persistence or graduation rates in postsecondary education.

A new blog by Peter Goodman, a veteran observer of the New York education scene, reveals a new round of thick-headed decisions:

City and state policymakers are now applying what they think is a sure cure for low academic performance: They will raise the bar, make the courses harder, more demanding. High schools will be incentivized to offer more college-level courses to students who are three or four grade levels behind in reading and/or math. This is supposed to incentivize students who can’t read or do math to take advanced placement courses, to work harder and to get higher test scores.

Here is the theory: If you raise standards, students will get higher scores.

What exactly is the logic here? If a student can’t jump over a four-foot bar, how exactly does it help if you raise the bar to six feet?

Goodman sensibly asks: What is the evidence that taking a “college level” course for which a student is not prepared will increase college readiness?

Other changes now about to be imposed involved the placement of special education students, not decided on a case-by-case basis by experienced professionals, but by fiat.

And Goodman sensibly suggests: Policy should be based on peer-reviewed research and years of experience in teaching and leadership positions within an urban school system.

But that is no longer the way things work these days.

Diane

Categories Education Reform, New York, Testing

NY State Ed Dept: Lie to Students

By dianeravitch
May 28, 2012 //
16

As you may know, there has been growing parent dissatisfaction about the amount of testing that their children are subjected to.

initially, the tests and test prep increased because officials wanted to measure student growth on tests.

Then, the testing increased because officials want to measure teacher quality.

From the vantage of parents, the school day and year are increasingly devoted to testing, not teaching.

Just weeks ago, students sat for the annual spring testing. Now, in New York state, there will be testing in June, but this time it will be a field test, part of the testing company’s trials of its test items.

When parents got wind that there would be more tests in June, and that the tests were for the benefit of Pearson, several parent groups began organizing boycotts. After all, neither the school nor the teachers would be penalized if students didn’t take the field tests, so it is an opportune time to opt out and make a statement.

Last week, the New York State Education Department sent out a memo instructing teachers that they must not tell students that the June tests are field tests. They must pretend that it is a real test.

Parents were aghast that the State Education Department would tell teachers to lie to students.

I’m beginning to sense a trend. Once the public understands that all this testing is counter-productive, that it steals time from instruction, that it has become an end and not a means, the game will change. The bureaucrats are hunkering down. But once the tide turns, there will be no going back.

Diane

Categories New York, Pearson, Testing

The Worst 8th Grade Math Teacher in NYC?

By dianeravitch
May 16, 2012 //
5

Aaron Pallas is one of the most insightful commentators on education in the nation. He teaches at Teachers College and if I were a student there, I would want to study with him. Not only is he smart, he is fearless. His regular columns in the Hechinger Report are “must” reading. His latest is about a teacher who was identified by New York City’s “teacher data reports” as the absolutely worst eighth grade teacher of math in the city. (http://eyeoned.org/content/the-worst-eighth-grade-math-teacher-in-new-york-city_326/).

Pallas shows how her rating has nothing to do with her performance as a teacher. She teaches gifted students and was a victim of her own success. Her students did so well last year that they did not meet the scores that the city’s computers predicted for them this year. But every one of them took and passed the state’s Regents exams.

The teacher, Carolyn Abbott, makes the interesting point in the article that the tests are high-stakes for the teacher, but not for the students. These students are so far advanced beyond the expectations of the state tests that the tests are almost a joke for them. But not for her. She is leaving teaching and going to work on a doctorate and then probably into college teaching.

Pallas writes, quoting Abbott: “I love to teach,” she says. And she loves mathematics. Ultimately, she decided, the mathematics was more important than the teaching, although she envisions teaching mathematics at the college level in the future. “It’s too hard to be a teacher in New York City,” she says. “Everything is stacked against you. You can’t just measure what teachers do and slap a number on it.”

When will the authorities in New York City and Albany and Washington, D.C., and in state education departments across the nation recognize that they have created a monstrous, counterproductive and utterly harmful means of evaluating teachers? Are they wise enough to recognize the errors of their ways?

Diane

Categories New York, Teachers and Teaching, Testing
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