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Who Owns a Public School?

By dianeravitch
August 15, 2012 //
9

The question of ownership arises because the “parent trigger” idea enables 51% of parents to “seize control” of their public school and turn it over to a private corporation to manage.

But do the parents “own” the school? Is it theirs to give away?

My view is that it belongs to the public. The public created it. The public paid for it. It belongs to the public. It belongs to those who attended it in the past and to those who will attend it in the future. Next year’s parents and students have the same interest as this year’s. And so do those who will be parents and students in the school five years from now.

If the school is unsatisfactory, if the principal is incompetent, take your concerns to the superintendent and the school board. If most parents speak up, they will not be ignored (unless you happen to live in a city with mayoral control, like New York City or Chicago, where the mayor doesn’t care about parent opinion).

This reader has similar concerns.

What exactly does “taking back a school” mean? Are you suggesting that we allow a group of people (whether it’s 51% of parents or some other group) to take over a public school and “give” it to a private corporation or organization? If so, then I disagree completely.

On the other hand, if you mean, changing the publicly elected school board then I would agree completely. If you mean working with the teachers and parents to improve the educational program, then I agree. If you mean changing the legislature, governor, or other elected officials who are killing public education then I agree — completely.

As Diane has said many times, public schools belong to the public, not 51% of the current parents. You can prove that for yourself by going to a high school basketball or football game. The “alumni” are often there in great numbers. Public schools belong to the community. They are centers for community pride and memories. They are (and should be) a stable influence in a community. 

If 51% of parents decide that a school is no longer meeting the needs of their children and give it away to a private company, what happens next year if 51% of the parents decide that they want to convert it back to a traditional public school? The parent trigger laws do not allow that. Once the public school is gone…it’s gone.

I’m a retired teacher…and I would LOVE to “take back” public schools from the “reformers.” That’s why I write to my legislators. That’s why I belong to a community group which works for public education (neifpe@blogspot.com). That’s why I blog. That’s why I try to inform as many people as I can about what’s happening to public education.

Categories Chicago, Education Reform, NYC, Parent trigger, Parents

Does Value-Added Make Sense?

By dianeravitch
August 13, 2012 //
9

Many people assume that value-added assessment started with Race to the Top.

Value-added assessment or value-added modeling means judging teachers by how much students scores went up.

Actually, it started in the 1980s, when William Sanders, an agricultural statistician in Tennessee, claimed that it was possible to measure student growth the way he was accustomed to measure the growth of plants, with the teacher as the independent variable.

In Dallas, at about the same time, a group of school district statisticians developed their own model to measure teacher effectiveness.

You would think that by now Tennessee and Dallas would be leading the nation, having figured out this stuff that the Obama administration has imposed on the nation. But they are not.

New York City started experimenting with a value-added model not long after Bloomberg took control. Marc Epstein, then a teacher at Jamaica High School, figured out that what the city was doing was shifting responsibility for learning from the student to the teacher. It seemed benign at the time. Now we can see this idea sweeping the nation, demoralizing teachers and turning schooling into a data-driven environment where learning becomes a numbers game. Anyone can play.

Marc, who holds a Ph.D. in Japanese naval history, is now a member of the large group of teachers in New York City called ATR (absent teacher reserve). His school was closed, through no fault of his own or any other faculty member. So with his long experience and deep knowledge of history, he floats from school to school. He is too expensive. A school can hire two young teachers in place of his salary. New York City’s Department of Education would prefer to keep teachers like him as ATR–collecting a salary without a real assignment–because…sorry, I can’t recall the reason. Maybe they hope he will go away, along with the hundreds or thousands of other teachers that have been displaced by a policy of closing schools and allowing new schools to maximize their budget by excluding veteran teachers.

Categories Accountability, Bloomberg, Michael, NYC, Teacher Evaluations

In NYC, Fair Student Funding Is Unfair

By dianeravitch
August 12, 2012 //
8

Not long after corporate reform started in New York City, the Department of Education adopted a formula promoted by conservative think tanks called “fair student funding” or “weighted student funding.” The surface idea was that each child would have the money he or she deserved “strapped to his/her back.” (Sorry for the clumsy effort to be gender neutral.) The real purpose, from the point of view of those on the right, was to enable students to go to charter schools or maybe even voucher schools bringing their public dollars with them. After all it was only “fair.”

In New York City, the funding system was designed by Robert Gordon, an economist and reformer who now works for President Obama’s Office of Management and Budget.

A reader in New York City examined how fair student funding was affecting the schools serving the neediest students. The answer: they get a raw deal.

Wouldn’t you think that in an effort to be fair, the DOE would attach MORE funding to students who have the greatest needs? It turns out that they aren’t even getting a fair deal.

The New York State Department of Education has expressed concern about New York City’s pattern of concentrating high needs students in specific schools. New York City has refused to acknowledge the merit of those concerns.  In fact, the leaders of New York City’s schools place all responsibility on individual schools as in this recent story.

Blaming schools and teachers seems to have become the go-to strategy of high-level education bureaucrats. This is one way to avoid personal accountability. All they need to do is “evaluate” schools using standardized exams and manage their “portfolio” of schools using a range of punitive measures. We decided to look at one area where these bureaucrats can’t deny their role in helping schools either ameliorate or worsen the effects of poverty on kids. Namely, how does the New York City Department of Education fund the richest and poorest schools? As can be seen in the charts below these bureaucrats have decided to fund schools in ways that increase these inequities. The richest 10 elementary/middle schools (as measured by the percent of students who are eligible to receive free lunch) receive an average of 89.1% of the funds they are entitled to by the city’s own formula. On the other hand, the poorest 10 schools receive an average of 82.7% of the funds they are entitled to.  The range of values also favors the richest schools. None of them receive less than 86% of their funding formula. Some of the poorest schools, on the other hand, receive 22% less money than they would be entitled to under the city’s “Fair” Student Funding formula. 

Richest Schools

% of Fair Student Funding Actually Received

School Name

% of Students Free Lunch
90.68 Special Music School

3.7%
88.52 P.S. 006 Lillie D. Blake

4.6%
89.34 The Anderson School

4.6%
88.08 P.S. 77 Lower Lab School

5.7%
86.09 P.S. 234 Independence School

6.4%
93.07 P.S. 098 The Douglaston School

6.4%
87.23 P.S. 89

6.7%
90.89 BATTERY PARK CITY SCHOOL

7.4%
88.1 P.S. 041 Greenwich Village

7.9%
89.16 P.S. 290 Manhattan New School

9.3%

 

Poorest Schools

% of Fair Student Funding Actually Received

School Name

% of Students Free Lunch
85.4 P.S. 167 The Parkway

98.9%
79.35 P.S. 199X – The Shakespeare School

99.1%
78.81 P.S. 115 Alexander Humboldt

99.5%
80.14 M.S. 302 Luisa Dessus Cruz

99.6%
102.67 P.S. 034 Franklin D. Roosevelt

99.7%
Closed M.S. 321 – Minerva

100.0%
84.76 P.S. 025 Bilingual School

100.0%
78.57 P.S. 230 Dr Roland N. Patterson

100.0%
78.02 I.S. X303 Leadership & Community Service

100.0%
79.46 P.S. 291

100.0%

 

Perhaps when these bureaucrats announce that “poverty is not destiny” they could explain why they insist on sending poor kids to schools that they have deliberately impoverished through their own decisions. Do they feel that schools with poor kids don’t deserve the same funding as schools with rich kids? 

Categories NYC, Poverty, Students

Reform Beat This Teacher

By dianeravitch
August 9, 2012 //
12

This New York City teacher has been beaten down and out by ten years of reform that ended in more segregation and demoralizing actions by those at the top.

My advice to you: Don’t leave. There will be a new mayor. Maybe it will be someone who recognizes the damage of the past decade of endless and pointless reform and bragging. Stay and fight for the  kids. Don’t let them push you out. Your students need you!

After 10 years of teaching in NYC public schools, I’m quitting because I’ve become discouraged and can no longer deal with the upheavals that the so-called “reforms” bring to the everyday task of teaching. I’ve literally shed blood, sweat, and tears during these years of teaching at a school where the majority of the students live below the poverty line. Poverty Is the problem! NYC schools are segregated. How shameful that this is the case in this great city, and how unfair to students, teachers, and administrators.
Categories Bloomberg, Michael, NYC, Poverty

After Ten Years of Reform in New York City….

By dianeravitch
August 9, 2012 //
10

This is what school reform looks like in New York City after ten years of mayoral control.

In nearly 200 of the city’s 1,500 schools, at least 90 percent of the students are below the poverty line.

Four out of five of these schools have disproportionate concentrations of students who are limited English proficient or special education.

Only 31 percent of the students in these high-needs schools passed the state reading test, as compared to 47 percent citywide.

Only 45 percent of the students in these high-needs schools passed the state math tests, compared to 60 percent citywide.

Chancellor Dennis Walcott responded: “I know schools that have a variety of percentages of students, through over-the-counter or special ed or English language learners, who are knocking the socks off the ball.”

According to the NY1 story, the chancellor is referring to 21 of the high-needs schools that beat the odds. That’s 6 percent.

Next time you hear someone from the New York City Department of Education boasting about the “miracle” of mayoral control, think about these children.

Next time they tell you that “poverty is not destiny,” ask them about these schools and what the DOE did to change the odds.

After ten years of mayoral control, who will be held accountable for the system’s inability or unwillingness to meet the needs of these students?

A reader sent this analysis of the city’s data:

A recent story in NY1 examined New York City schools where 90% of the students are below the poverty line. NYC School Chancellor, Dennis Walcott, was quoted as saying that there are schools “who are knocking the socks off the ball.”
We took a careful look at the 2010-11 New York City data on elementary and middle schools and identified 153 schools where 90+% of students were eligible for free lunch. Of those schools only 3 were in the top half of the city in Math and English as calculated by the New York City progress report. PS 134 and PS 130 in Brooklyn and PS 002 in Manhattan were in the top half of students scoring at or above grade level in Math and English. In other words less than 2% of high poverty schools beat the city average and, unfortunately, not by much. In English for example the highest school was at the 65th percentile.

School ELA % Level 3 or 4 City Percent of Range
PS 134 64.4%
PS 002 52.1%
PS 130 51.6%

Digging deeper we noticed that all of these 3 schools have higher levels of student movement out of the school (ranging from 20-12% of the student population) than most elementary schools. This raises questions about how the high scores are generated. Additionally, one is not making AYP for English Language Learners.

New York City’s own data shows that schools with high concentrations of poor students are not knocking the socks off of any balls. Perhaps the Chancellor should stop spending time inventing new idioms (one knocks the cover off of balls and socks off of people, although one can sock a ball over the fence) and should start paying attention to his own data. Making up numbers and success stories will not improve schools for kids. Figuring out the supports and services that would help high poverty schools might. 

Anyone?

Categories Accountability, Bloomberg, Michael, Corporate Reformers, Education Reform, NYC

NYC Reformers Killing Another School

By dianeravitch
August 8, 2012 //
6

I recently wrote a post about how the NYC DOE kills schools. It does this because it wants their real estate. It wants to place four or five small schools or charter schools in its building or find another use for the building. So the DOE starts the killing process first by calling the school a “failing school,” which causes many students and families to avoid it. Then the DOE cuts back on resources and staffing and programs, because the school has fewer students, and it plunges the school into a death spiral. i have heard from many teachers who were immersed in this horrible scenario, but unable to stop it. Several from John Dewey High School and Jamaica High School have told me what is happening at these once estimable schools.

Here is another story from someone caught in the middle as the authorities seek ways to sink a school:

Jamaica H.S. is not alone in this regard. I work at The H. S. of Graphic Communication Arts in midtown west Manhattan and the DOE has done everything in its power to close this school. We are a CTE school who have students from all 5 boroughs on our roster. We do not get to pick and choose who our student body is but we accept with open arms so many of the students that no other school wants. We have worked very hard to improve attendance, graduation rates, and test scores but every time we improved, the DOE raised the levels needed to achieve a good school rating- surely, we do want to do better but the DOE has pre-determined that our school, also in a VERY desirable location, should close. They have lowered our incoming class each year, added one, two, then three schools to the “campus” and made us a “turnaround model” school last year, basically telling parents “Do NOT send you children there,” even though our student body, parents and staff members all agree that we do a wonderful job under the worst of circumstances. Mayor Bloomberg and the DOE lost that battle in the courts BUT they have won the battle because so many schools that were good places for students, have been turned into schools that are now fighting to stay alive and having difficutly in doing so. It is a sad day in education when non-educators not only think they know what is best, but try to force their views and ways upon those of us who know differently!
Categories Charter Schools, Education Reform, NYC

Why She Left Teaching

By dianeravitch
August 6, 2012 //
35

I don’t think teachers who are passionate about teaching should quit, no matter how awful the circumstances.

I know it’s easy for me to say, because I am not there.

But it is important to keep experience and wisdom in the profession.

Don’t let them push you out.

Do what you love and what you believe in.

Be there the day this war on teachers ends, a victim of its inanity, stupidity, and ignorance.

Be there for your students.

This is a teacher who couldn’t take it anymore.

I retired early with just 20 years because the profession I have been so dedicated to and passionate about my entire life has been trashed by reformers like this idiot who don’t know what they are talking about; by the mayor and his educrats who have taken to vilifying teachers and disrespecting us at every turn; by the principals who haven’t taught long enough to be considered pedagogical experts on anything; by the most micromanaged, scripted, suffocating instructional mandates (everyone teaching the same lesson on the same day at the same time…day1, day2, day 3, day4, day 5, test); by the incessant and overwhelming collection of data that appears to have more value than actual creative planning and professional judgement. We have principals and Network leaders whose english and communication skills are abysmal; superintendents who don’t visit the schools they oversee; and a culture that supports the abusive and punitive treatment of teachers. This is antithetical to everything that made me want to become a teacher. New York City has lost many outstanding and experienced teachers in the past 5 years who left because they refuse to continue working under such conditions. Under the current system of school based budgeting, it’s always a good thing when a senior teacher leaves -they can hire two teachers at half the salary. When you’re looking at numbers and not people, that’s what really matters.
Categories NYC, Teachers and Teaching

The New York Times Editorial Is Clueless

By dianeravitch
August 6, 2012 //
21

The New York Times published an editorial calling for “carrots and sticks” for teachers and principals.

What  the editorial means is that professionals should get bonuses for higher test scores, and this would recognize high performance and get educators to work harder and produce more high performance (higher test scores).

As I said in my speech in Detroit to the AFT convention, carrots and sticks are for donkeys, not professionals.

The schools in New York City have been subject to budget cuts for the past few years. The Times’ editorial doesn’t suggest where the money will come from to award bonuses. Should some teachers be laid off so others can get a bonus? Should the schools eliminate the arts so that some teachers can get bonuses?

The Times makes no mention of the long and consistent history of failure of merit pay plans. See here and  here and here and here and here.

After ten years of carrots and sticks in New York City, the Times concludes that what is needed is more carrots and sticks.

Teachers are doing the best they can, with or without bonus pay. I posted several times yesterday about why merit pay doesn’t work. I wish the Times’ editorial writer were reading those posts, and more important, reading the comments by teachers, such as this one:

I work in a challenging inner city school in NYC-DOE. Just about every teacher there works hard. Our administration is ok but not great. Our teachers collaborate and cooperate. I love working in my school.
This past June during our final staff meeting on the last day of school our principal who was thanking everyone for their hard work let slip that thanks to our hard work, she and her assistant principals all received substantial bonuses from the DOE.
There was complete silence in the room. It was a very sad way to end the school year. No one listened much to anything the “suits” said after that. She did say it was part of her union contract and we should pressure our union.
Many teachers were very discouraged. Teachers are between a rock and a hard place. If they don’t work hard and make the administration look great (which is not likely because in the end it would hurt our students) our school will most likely close. If we work hard, the administration will be rewarded for our efforts.
This is not going to do much for morale come September.
If states made it more difficult to enter the teaching profession and provided adequate resources, none of this bonus stuff would be necessary.
Categories Chicago, Education Reform, Merit pay, NYC, Tennessee

The Secret Trick Behind Merit Pay

By dianeravitch
August 5, 2012 //
12

Hardly a day goes by without another politician or businessman calling for merit pay, performance pay, incentivize those lazy teachers to produce higher scores!

The Obama administration put $1 billion into merit pay, without a shred of evidence that it would make a difference.

Merit pay schemes have recently failed in New York City, Chicago, and Nashville, but who cares?

The Florida legislature passed legislation mandating merit pay but didn’t appropriate any money to pay for it. That was left to cash-strapped districts.

So here is the secret trick.

There is no money to pay for merit pay!

In a time of fiscal austerity, the money appropriated for merit pay (when it is appropriated) is money that should have been spent on reducing class size, preserving libraries or school nurses, or maintaining arts programs or other school-based services.

Instead, districts will lay off some teachers so that other teachers get bonuses. That leads to larger classes for the remaining teachers.

That is ridiculous, but that is the way of thinking that is now prevalent among our nation’s policymakers.

A reader knows this:

 I find the whole premise behind merit pay insulting.  If the districts have extra money, let’s use it to improve teaching conditions such as providing class sets of reading books, pencil sharpeners, science materials, or any of the hundreds of items teachers end up paying for out of pocket.

Categories Budget Cuts, Chicago, Florida, Merit pay, NYC, Tennessee

How Charter Schools Divide Communities

By dianeravitch
August 5, 2012 //
81

Critics of charter schools have noted that they undermine neighborhood public schools and decimate communities. By offering a slot to a small proportion of students in the neighborhood, they break up any sense of community spirit centered on the community school and they simultaneously promote the free-market fetishizing of consumer choice. Add to the charter movement the effects of NCLB: labeling a school with low scores as a “failing school,” which causes families to abandon it and demoralizes teachers; and the effects of Race to the Top, which encourages school closings as a remedy for low scores. All of this is a great avoidance strategy, a way of not facing up to the most consistent predictor of low test scores: poverty. Yes, poor kids can learn, and yes, it is possible to create a high-test score school composed of poor kids, but neither of those facts contradicts the consistent correlation between poverty and low academic achievement. Corporate reformers like to pretend that poverty doesn’t matter, because they know of 1 or 20 schools where poor kids got high test scores. But that is a non sequitur. There is no district in the nation, even those run by the most ardent reformers, that has closed the achievement gaps of race and income. Certainly not DC or NYC.

A reader reflects on this scenario:

One of the less-developed discussions about charter schools is their role in destroying the neighborhood school – now effectively accomplished among NYC high schools, for example – and how that is integral to the class and racial reconfiguration of the neighborhoods in which they are being placed.

As Mark Naison perceptively wrote weeks ago, throughout the grim Reagan, Bush I and post-NAFTA years of deindustrialization that hollowed out so many communities, the one place that remained was the neighborhood public school, which often employed neighborhood residents and provided an island of stability. Now, as developers have their eyes on some of those communities, they have allied with charter school operators. It’s no coincidence, for example, that one of the most active real estate developers in rapidly gentrifying Harlem (Gideon Stein) is on the Board of Eva Moskowitz’s aggressively metastasizing Harlem Success Academies.

It’s a vicious irony that, hyped as a panacea for poor Black and Latino urban children, charter schools in many cities and neighborhoods are in fact a vehicle for ultimately displacing them. After all, as census data has been showing for a while, the slums of the future are forming in the suburbs (charter operators take note: a rapidly developing market!), and the urban core is becoming whiter and more affluent.

Charters, whether brick-and-mortar schools or virtual sweatshops started by ex-felons (as is the case with K-12 and its founder, Michael Mlken) are not just about busting the unions and monetizing every last data point generated in the school building, but are also a real estate play, eliminating what is often one of the last public, universally accessible institution in these neighborhoods, and making way for more desirable consumers who don’t rely upon or care about the ongoing destruction of the public realm.
Categories Charter Schools, Corporate Reformers, NYC
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