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What Do Graduation Rates Mean?

By dianeravitch
June 16, 2012 //
11

Everyone talks about high school graduation rates, but no one-including me–has any idea what they mean and what they really are.

We operate from the assumption that 100% of students “should” graduate from high school and excoriate the schools when the numbers are anything less. The assumption–which is wrong–is that we used to have high graduation rates but now we don’t. This is simply wrong. Over the course of the 20th century, graduation rates started from a very low point–less than 10% of young Americans finished high school at the beginning of the 20th century–and the rate rose steadily until it reached 50% in 1940. By 1970, it was 70%, and since then it has inched up.

Today, it is difficult to know what the graduation rate is because there are so many different ways of counting. If you count only those who graduate in four years, then it is about 75%. If you include those who graduate in August, after four years, it goes up. If you add those who took five or six years, it goes up more. If you add those who received a GED or some other alternate degree, it is up to 90%. (Aficionados of the issue can have fun poring over the latest federal data here).

These days, politicians play with the graduation rate to make themselves look successful (never mind the students). They lament the “crisis” in dropouts when they enter office, then crow at every uptick once they are in office to demonstrate “their” success.

Unfortunately, the pressure to raise the numbers typically overwhelms the standards required for attaining a high school diploma. When teachers and principals are sternly warned that their school will close unless they raise their graduation rate, they usually manage to raise their graduation rate without regard to standards. The usual gambit these days is called “credit recovery,” a phenomenon that was unheard of twenty years ago.

Credit recovery means simply that students can earn credits for courses they failed by completing an assignment or attending a course for a few days or weeks or re-taking the course online. As I wrote this week in Education Week, online credit recovery is typically a sham, a cheap and easy way of getting a diploma that was not earned. Students sit down in front of a computer, watch videos, then take a test that consists of multiple-choice questions, true-false questions, and machine-graded written answers. If they miss a question, they answer again until they get it right. Students can”recover” their lost credits in a matters of days, even hours. I wrote about online credit recovery as academic fraud in my EdWeek blog this week. Students realize quickly that if they fail, it doesn’t matter because they can get the credits in a few days with minimal effort. In this way, the diploma becomes meaningless, and students are cheated while the grown-ups fool themselves into thinking that they succeeded in raising the rates.

In this way, Campbell’s Law applies. When the pressure is raised high to reach a goal, the measures of the goal become corrupted.

The same number may be used either to bemoan a lack of progress or to claim victory. For example, the recent “Blueprint” created by a business strategy group for the school district of Philadelphia lamented that “only” 61% of its students attained a high school diploma in four years. At the same time, Mayor Bloomberg in New York City was delighted to report that the graduation rate was up to 65.5%, a figure that included summer school plus a heaping of credit recovery. The state of New York, which did not include summer graduates, put the actual figure at 61%, no different from the rate in Philadelphia. The state says that only 21% of students are “college-ready,” and the City University of New York–where most of the city’s graduates enroll–reports that nearly 80% require remediation.

So what is the real high school graduation rate? I don’t know.

Categories Accountability, Bloomberg, Michael, Campbell's Law, Education Reform, NYC, On-Line Education, Philadelphia

Miracle Watch: Harlem Village Academy

By dianeravitch
June 15, 2012 //
14

A year ago, I wrote an article about “miracle schools” in the New York Times.

My beef was with politicians who pointed to a school and said that it had achieved dramatic test score gains and amazing graduation rates despite the poverty in which the children live. The usual “remedy” was to fire the teachers, close the school and bring in a new staff. On closer examination, however, the “miracle” evaporated. Some of the schools held up as models by the politicians had very high attrition rates, some had very low test scores coupled with high graduation rates, none of them had met the politicians’ descriptions of them. None proved that poverty doesn’t matter or that miracles happen when you fire the entire staff and close the school.

My point in debunking the myth of miracle schools was two-fold. It was not to embarrass the schools but to try to persuade the politicians that education is hard work and that closing schools doesn’t “fix” poverty. Education is an incremental process that happens day by day, one child at a time.  The people who do this work do their best work when they are in a collegial atmosphere, when they work together as a team, collaborating to help the children in their care. And, yes, poverty does drag down students’ motivation and ability to succeed in school. Being hungry and homeless interferes with one’s focus on academic work.

It is distinctly unhelpful to go forth to national media and claim that your school is the very one that has cracked the code, especially if your success is built on high attrition rates and spin.

The latest “miracle” school is a small charter chain called Harlem Village Academy. Its founder, Deborah Kenny, has written a new book to tout the latest miracle in Harlem. She has been featured on the major television shows, telling her story. She is neither a teacher nor a principal but she is the one garnering praise (and an annual salary in excess of $400,000). Her charters get amazing test scores. President George W. Bush visited HVA. A New York Times columnist hailed her achievements, especially her passion for cultivating “great teachers.

When I was writing my article for the New York Times a year ago, I turned to Gary Rubinstein to analyze state data about the “miracle” schools. Gary is a math teacher at Stuyvesant High School. As I said when I spoke to NCTM earlier this year, math teachers and mathematicians are hard-headed. They insist on evidence. They want proof. They like theory, but they are not content with theory alone. Sentiment doesn’t count with them. Nor does spin and hype. Gary has become the nation’s pre-eminent myth buster of education “miracles.” I urge you to sign up for his blog.

Gary investigated the Harlem Village Academy data, and he concluded there was no miracle. HVA has astonishingly high attrition rates among both students and teachers. In 2009-10, a startling 61% of teachers left HVA.

Gary’s blog includes a letter from a teacher who left HVA, angry and disillusioned by the imperious and disrespectful ways that teachers were treated by Deborah Kenny. Gary notes that truly great schools are great communities. Teachers don’t want to leave great schools. Great schools do not have high teacher attrition rates every year. They love their jobs, their students, their school, their community, and their colleagues.

There is no joy, as Gary notes, in debunking a school’s claims. Like Gary, I would like to find schools that are succeeding against all odds to provide a great education for their students. I know such schools exist. I have seen them. When I have been in such schools, the leaders and teachers don’t talk about their test scores. They talk about the community spirit that brings together teachers and parents to work together on behalf of students. They talk about the accomplishments of their students and the work they proudly exhibit. They talk about the students who are meeting their own goals, despite the deck stacked against them. They celebrate small victories. They don’t boast. They exemplify the respect and concern–and well, love–that make a school successful. Not a miracle, but a beloved community institution.

Diane

Categories Charter Schools, Education Reform, NYC

The High Cost of Privatizing Special Education

By dianeravitch
June 7, 2012 //
4

As the movement to privatize public schools grows stronger, we should pay attention to the costs of privatization.

Those who push for privatization also claim that private business operates more efficiently than government and will thus save taxpayers’ dollars.

If only it were true.

The latest example in the privatization sage was a story in the New York Times of June 6 about what has happened to the cost of privatized special education for preschool children in New York City. The cost, now at $1 billion for 25,000 children of ages 3 and 4, has doubled in the past six years. It is far more than is paid for the same services in other cities and states.

New York City now spends about $40,000 per child in the program. Says the article, “Massachusetts, whose program is considered “resource-rich” by experts in the field, spends less than $10,000 a child.”

Oversight by the city and state has been lax, and efforts to tighten regulation in Albany has been blocked by the industry’s lobbyists.

The private contractors, who have their tuition rates set by the state, have become an influential lobbying force in Albany, where they have regularly rallied parents of disabled children to protest spending curbs in the program.

Auditors’ reports have found that:

Some contractors have billed the program for jewelry, expensive clothing, vacations to Mexico and spa trips to the Canyon Ranch resort, The Times found in a review of a decade’s worth of education, financial and court records. Others have hired relatives at inflated salaries or for no-show jobs, or funneled public money into expensive rents paid by their preschools to entities they control personally.

New York is the only state that has turned this program over to private contractors, many of which operate for-profit. Typically, the same firms evaluate the children and then provide services to them. 83% of the firms that conducted the evaluation also provided the services needed. Critics believe, not without reason, that the companies have a finanical incentive to over-identify children’s needs to inflate their bottom line.

When services are privatized, there will inevitably be operators who overbill for their services and pad the books and their profits. Lax oversight enables fraud. In the case of this program, oversight is very lax indeed: Regulators rely on contractors’ own accountants to vouch for billing. City and state officials conduct audits infrequently, and when they do, the results often languish on the shelves of the State Education Department. Some audits have not been given final approval and released until years after the contractors being audited went out of business.

Thus, the growing cost does not mean that children are getting more services they need, but that private firms are getting more profits at the expense of the children they supposedly serve.

A spokesman for New York City’s Department of Education defended the program and said that although it was expensive, it works.

As this article shows, it certainly works for the private contractors, who use the children and their parents to prevent appropriate and necessary oversight.

Diane

Categories Education Reform, NYC, Pre-K, Privatization, Special Education

Newsflash: Bloomberg Backs Down on Social Promotion

By dianeravitch
June 3, 2012 //
4

The Bloomberg administration in New York City made national headlines in March 2004 when the Mayor unilaterally decided to end social promotion. He told the city’s “Panel on Educational Policy” (the successor to the once-powerful Board of Education which Bloomberg turned into a toothless group) that students should not be promoted if they scored at the lowest level on the state tests. Bloomberg controlled the eight votes on the 13-member panel, and he told his appointees to approve his new policy. Two of them expressed doubts, suggesting that more thought was needed before implementing this change, more attention to what supports the students needed. The Mayor fired them on the day of the vote, and arranged the firing of a third member of the panel appointed by another elected official. The night of the panel’s meeting was tumultuous, as protesters shouted and objected. That evening was memorialized among activists as “the Monday Night Massacre.”

Mayor Bloomberg defended his decision: “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.” Never again did a mayoral appointee ever disagree with the mayor’s orders. The Panel on Education Policy officially became a rubber stamp for the Mayor, and the “chancellor” no more than his mouthpiece.

In the first year of the policy’s implementation, nearly 12, 000 kids were flunked. As time went on, implementation of the policy was spotty. High school teachers still complained about students reading at a fourth grade level. And, the remediation rate at the City University of New York remained stubbornly high as the students schooled on Bloomberg’s watch arrived. Currently, about half of all those who enter CUNY require remediation. Most tellingly, 80% of the city’s high school graduates who enter community college require remediation in reading, writing, or mathematics. So, no one believed that “no social promotion” was a reality.

All that is context to a stunning decision that appeared in the press two days ago: The mayor is changing his hard line on social promotion. He has decided that principals may now have flexibility to decide whether to hold back students a third time and whether to hold back students who are already two years older than their classmates. There is even talk of added resources for the schools with large numbers of overage students.

Bear in mind that the mayor has now been sole proprietor of the New York City public schools since June 2002. And that “no social promotion” was one of the hallmarks of his reign. And that the New York City Department of Education has issued press release after press release boasting of its unheralded triumphs. And that the Mayor is known for never acknowledging an error. And that the publicity campaign for the “historic” achievements of the New York City public schools under his leadership was in high gear throughout the past decade, winning stories in every major news outlet. And that the collapse of the city’s claims about test scores in the summer of 2010 (after the state admitted that all the state scores were vastly inflated) popped the city’s bubble. And that Mayor Bloomberg to this day has never acknowledged that the “miracle” was a mirage. And that New York City has been a model for the national “reform” movement because of the city’s undemocratic governance structure for education, its alleged achievements, and its unbridled enthusiasm for choice. Reformers especially like the Mayor’s total control of the policymaking machinery, which make it easy to ignore parent and community protests, like the one that occurred at the Monday Night Massacre. Democracy has a nasty habit of getting in the way of “reform.”

Thus, the Mayor’s decision to modify the “no social promotion” policy is huge. Granted, it is a small step, but nonetheless this may mark the first time that the city (i.e., the Mayor) has admitted, however obliquely, a problem of his own creation. That is  historic.

Diane

Categories Bloomberg, Michael, NYC

Kirp vs. Liebman on Integration & Reform

By dianeravitch
May 29, 2012 //
0

David L. Kirp asked in a recent article why our society has abandoned school integration since it is “the one tool that has been shown to work.” Kirp wrote:

“To the current reformers, integration is at best an irrelevance and at worst an excuse to shift attention away from shoddy teaching. But a spate of research says otherwise. The experience of an integrated education made all the difference in the lives of black children — and in the lives of their children as well. These economists’ studies consistently conclude that African-American students who attended integrated schools fared better academically than those left behind in segregated schools. They were more likely to graduate from high school and attend and graduate from college; and, the longer they spent attending integrated schools, the better they did. What’s more, the fear that white children would suffer, voiced by opponents of integration, proved groundless. Between 1970 and 1990, the black-white gap in educational attainment shrank — not because white youngsters did worse but because black youngsters did better.”

Kirp’s article drew a response from James S. Liebman, a law professor at Columbia University and former chief accountability officer for the New York City public schools. Liebman, wrote a letter asserting that today’s “reformers” had found a way to advance racial integration. He wrote:

“David L. Kirp (“Making Schools Work,” Sunday Review, May 20) is right that school integration has done more to improve the life chances of poor and minority children than other known interventions. He is wrong to suggest that there’s no longer any way to achieve integration and to pit it against recent school reforms that also improve life chances.

“A cornerstone of the new reforms is to replace failing schools with higher performing ones. If the new schools are integrated, as a number of civil rights and new-school groups have recently proposed, we can get the best of both worlds.”

Kirp has the better of this debate.

When was the last time you heard a testing-and-choice corporate reformer propose a plan to reduce racial segregation in the schools?

What proportion of charter schools are racially homogeneous or racially integrated?

What evidence is there that new schools are more integrated than the large schools they replaced?

What evidence is there that the brand new school will be high-performing in comparison to the low-performing school that it replaces?

How many of the new schools “succeed” by avoiding or excluding the low-performing students who were previously enrolled in the “failing school”?

How many of the new schools are racially integrated?

If the Schott Foundation’s latest report is correct, New York City systematically provides schools that are more segregated and less likely to have adequate resources to students who are poor and black and Hispanic.

Until we have answers to these questions, it is wishful thinking to see the “closing schools” strategy as one that advances racial integration.

Based on history as well as research, it is likely that the reformers’ strategy of school choice will exacerbate S. And the replacement of large schools by small schools will also exacerbate racial segregation. One of the reasons that public policy encouraged comprehensive schools in the 1960s was to increase the demographic reach of schools and promote integration.

But that was then. We seem to learn nothing from history.

Diane

Categories NYC

Fahrenheit 451 in NYC

By dianeravitch
May 28, 2012 //
3

I read the other day that Occupy Wall Street and its librarians are suing the New York Police Department for destroying the OWS library of 3,600 books. The librarians had carefully catalogued every book they received. People checked them out and returned them, no questions asked.

When the police destroyed the OWS encampment at Zuccotti Park last fall, they swept up the OWS library, threw the books into a Sanitation Department truck (i.e., a garbage truck), and carted them off to a Sanitation Department depot, where they remained–soiled, crushed, torn, ruined.

This was of more than passing interest to me. Of course, I was outraged to read that the police had treated books with such disdain. I love books. I like to hold books. I like the smell of books. Books are precious. When I learned about the destruction of the OWS library, I had thoughts of book burnings, a bit melodramatic, but not entirely far-fetched.

I had a personal interest in these events. A few weeks before the OWS camp was destroyed, I was invited by email to speak at the park and to donate a book to the library. So I showed up early, donated my book, and searched for the organizer who invited me. I had a first name and a cell number, but I couldn’t find him. He was nowhere to be found, and I ended up wandering around among a mass of friendly, happy people. Some wore silly hats, some wore T-shirts or carried signs declaring their love for the earth or animals, whatever. There was nothing menacing, just a congregation of disparate views and causes.

It was only a matter of time until Mayor Bloomberg–apparently acting in concert with mayors across the country–decided to disperse OWS. They did so with a level of force that was unnecessary. As I watched the scenes of protesters dragged away, I kept thinking of that clause in the Bill of Rights that guarantees the people’s right to peaceably assemble. I thought that OWS was peaceably assembling and that this right was protected. But the mayors decided that this was an assembly they could not tolerate, and so the encampments in cities across the nation were destroyed.

But the books! My book. My book in a dumpster. How did it feel to know that one’s own book was thrown into the garbage by the NYPD? I was angry. But in some way, the idea of crushing books seemed ludicrous in this age of free-flowing information. So, the trashing of the books was a symbolic action. It’s not as if we don’t have the Internet and free public libraries. What NYPD did, what the mayor authorized, was a symbolic book-burning (ironically, his own book about his success in business, was in the OWS library).

I am hoping that the courts decide in favor of OWS. And that OWS returns in full vigor to remind us of the many unaddressed grievances of our increasingly unequal and increasingly uncaring society.

Diane

Categories NYC

Does Public Education Matter?

By dianeravitch
May 28, 2012 //
12

Yesterday I wrote a blog about a tiny rural district in Idaho where the community did everything possible to support their school but it wasn’t good enough. The tax base was so meager that the school was in deficit, and budget cuts were putting the school in peril.

A reader commented that this was an instance where the district might benefit by abandoning its public school and turning it into a charter school. This, the reader said, would make It possible to leverage funds from corporate sponsors.

Another reader responded to the first one and wrote:

“If you turn your tax supported schools over to corporate sponsors, in the process you lose your local representative government.  The corporate sponsors control all aspects of your public school/s-plus they will train your children for whatever the global economy dictates.  I suggest, there will be no upward mobility for your children in that area of Kansas or anywhere else in the USA. These charter schools destroy the “American Dream”. There is an old song that goes something like this:  “I owe my soul to the company store”.  Don’t allow the multi national corporations to do this to our children and destroy their American Dream!  We must, if we are to prevail as a nation, at least give every child the equal opportunity to achieve in the American Dream.”

 “Charter/Choice/Voucher schools destroy the American Dream.  Not only that- they destroy representative government  e. g. local school boards and local representation.  This is taxation without representation.  We fought a war of independence for that principle.  Why have Americans forgotten that?”

I agree with this response. I have come to believe that there is a vital connection between the community and the school. If public policy severs that connection, it is an abandonment of democracy. And in the case of charters, now the fad du jour, it hands children over to wealthy benefactors or corporate interests. I don’t mean to suggest that either wealthy benefactors or corporate interests have evil intent, but that their interests may not coincide with those of parents and the community. Public schools are an instrument of democracy to the extent that they maintain a vital connection with families and their community.

In the past decade, there has been a strong effort to hand schools over to some powerful figure or authority to “fix” them. So we have seen mayoral control in some cities, where the mayor has (in New York City, for example) unlimited authority to do as he wishes without regard to community wishes. This is nothing more nor less than the elimination of representative government. The purpose is to establish autocratic rule, in which the voices of the community don’t count. Schools are closed no matter what their communities say. We have also seen state takeovers (as in Philadelphia and St. Louis) where the state is so ineffective that the public schools are made worse than before the state intervened.

Democracy is hard, but it is still the best form of government that we know. We destroy the notion of public education at our peril.

Categories Charter Schools, NYC, Philadelphia, St. Louis

Psychologizing Female Critics

By dianeravitch
May 19, 2012 //
10

I received an email the other day from one of my email friends—that is, someone I have never met but have become very friendly with—and he made an interesting observation. He said he was reading Gail Collins’ book When Everything Changed, about the amazing changes in women’s lives since the mid-1960s, and he realized something that he wanted to share with me. He said, your critics have a habit of psychologizing their criticism of you. That is, instead of engaging with the substance of what I write, they look for some deep motive. This is simply a form of condescension, in this case, a male reaction to a female with whom they disagree.

He quoted Arne Duncan, who said, “Diane is in deep denial.” He quoted another critic who said that I was “angry,” though the critic didn’t say why I was angry. It all sounded like a version of the old saw that a feminist was acting as she was because of her hormones or some hidden grievance. We can’t take the little woman too seriously because she….

Now the emails that flowed between the New York City Department of Education and lobbyists for charter schools have been released and they continue in the same vein. I am described in them as “deranged,” a “dangerous crackpot,” “dishonest and platitudinous,” and “slippery.”

At no point does it appear that anyone discusses or debates my serious concerns about privatization. None of these men attempts to challenge or refute what I wrote. No, all these guys can do is to demean, condescend, and insult.

My correspondent put all this into context. These men are reacting by psychologizing my motives. Is that what men do when they think no one is listening and that no one will see their emails?

Diane

http://nycpublicschoolparents.blogspot.com/2012/05/crowd-sourcing-up-till-now-secret.html

http://www.edwize.org/foiled-again-an-inside-look-at-joel-kleins-war-against-public-schools-and-teacher-unions#more-11644

Categories Duncan, Arne, Klein, Joel, NYC, Ravitch, Diane

Charter School Rent Gouging in NYC

By dianeravitch
May 14, 2012 //
4

Yoav Gonen of the New York Post discovered a stunning allocation of public funds in Brooklyn. Gonen reported recently that for-profit National Heritage Academies was leasing buildings and then subletting them at a mark-up of 1,000%, charged to the taxpayers. NHA is leasing a school from the Brooklyn Diocese for $246,000, but charges the city of New York a whopping $2.76 million for rent and related charges.
Nice work if you can get it.

That extra $2.3 million could pay the salaries of quite a few teachers and reduce class size for many children. Instead it will fatten the profits of a charter corporation.

Diane

Categories Charter Schools, NYC

Something Scary Happened Last Night

By dianeravitch
May 12, 2012 //
85

I got an email last night from Leo Casey at the United Federation of Teachers, informing me that the UFT had just received a dump of emails from the New York City Department of Education, in response to a Freedom of Information Act request. Leo noticed that Deborah Meier and I were mentioned several times in the emails and so he shared the trove with us.

Pretty ugly stuff. Read it here, in two parts, if you can open a google document:

https://docs.google.com/open?id=0B1Ghj5xYLG5Ka0c2RUJLWHhNSmM

https://docs.google.com/open?id=0B1Ghj5xYLG5KcjZTem95WjZnUUU

The first thing I noticed was the chummy exchanges between the public officials in change of the New York City public school system and the top dogs of the charter leadership–the Wall Street hedge fund managers, the leader of Democrats for Education Reform (DFER), the leader of the New York City Charter Center, and various others. It comes clear that there is a strong and concerted effort to hand over as much public space as possible to the charters. The charter leaders are not the poor and oppressed of New York City; they are the powerful and monied, and the public officials who are paid to protect and support the PUBLIC schools of New York City are working hand-in-glove to advance the interests of the privately-managed charters, not the public schools. You will also notice, in one of the emails, that the charters are very concerned to make sure that there is no cap on their executive compensation. Heaven forbid! It’s important that their leaders continue to pull down $400,000 a year to oversee a few small schools.

The collusion between those who are sworn to protect the public schools and those who are incentivized to privatize them is surely the most important thing to be gleaned from this correspondence.

For me, the other interesting point is that they are so afraid of any criticism. They are especially afraid of Deborah Meier, me and Jonathan Kozol. They refer to columns by Deborah Meier and myself–she an educator with decades of experience, I a historian with a long view–as “moronic” and “idiotic.” They refer to Jonathan Kozol and me as “deranged crackpots.”

How can anyone take these mean-spirited, ignorant, arrogant people seriously?

The only thing frightening about them is that they are clamoring–with some success–to take control of the education of innocent children. Now, that is really scary! That is the scary thing that happened last night.

Diane

Categories Corporate Reformers, Democrats for Education Reform, NYC, Ravitch, Diane
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