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About Those Superintendents on Broad Board

By dianeravitch
July 8, 2012 //
15

At the suggestion of a reader, I posted a list of the board of directors of a Broad Center for the Management of School Systems, dating from 2009. It included several school superintendents.

Readers have commented on the track record of the superintendents on that board.

Let’s see:

Joel Klein: Resigned in 2010, after NY State Education Department revealed  statewide score inflation and New York City’s celebrated test scores collapsed

Michelle Rhee: Resigned in 2010 after D.C. Mayor Adrian Fenty defeated, largely because of her divisive reputation

Arlene Ackerman: Resigned in 2011 in Philadelphia after tempestuous reign

Maria Goodloe-Johnson: Fired in 2010 in Seattle

Arne Duncan: His plan called Renaissance 2010 failed to lift Chicago public schools, now U.S. Secretary of Education

Margaret Spellings: Not a superintendent, but architect of disastrous NCLB

And to think that this is the organization that is training superintendents to “reform” urban education!

Categories Broad Foundation, Chicago, Duncan, Arne, Education Reform, Klein, Joel, NYC, Philadelphia, Rhee, Michelle

Where Does Arne Duncan Stand?

By dianeravitch
July 7, 2012 //
33

When John White was appointed to run the Recovery School District in New Orleans, Secretary of Education Arne Duncan called him a “visionary school leader.”

Now John White is doing the bidding of a Tea Party governor and leading the most reactionary drive in the nation to dismantle public education; to take money away from the minimum foundation budget for public schools and give it to voucher schools and charter schools; to give public money to small religious schools that don’t teach evolution; to strip teachers of all protection of their academic freedom; to allow anyone to teach, without any credentials, in charter schools; to welcome for-profit vendors of education to take their slice out of the funding for public schools.

I wonder if Arne Duncan still considers him a “visionary leader”?

I wonder what Arne Duncan thinks of the Louisiana legislation. I wonder why he has not spoken out against any part of it. I wonder why he is silent when Tea Party governors like Chris Christie attack the teachers of their state and try to take away whatever rights they may have won over the years. I wonder if he agreed or disagreed with the Chiefs for Change–the rightwing state superintendents–when they saluted Louisiana’s regressive legislation to take money from public schools and hand it over to private sector interests.

I wonder why he never went to Madison, Wisconsin, to speak out for public sector workers there when it mattered. I wonder what he thinks of the emergency manager legislation in Michigan, where state-appointed emergency managers have closed down public education in two districts and handed it off to charter operators. I wonder what he thinks about the Boston Consulting Group’s plan in Memphis to increase the proportion of students in privately managed charters from 4% to 19%. I wonder what he thinks about the Boston Consulting Group’s plan to privatize up to 40% of Philadelphia’s schools. I wonder what he thinks about the rollback of collective bargaining rights in various states or the removal of job protections for teachers. I wonder what he thinks about ALEC’s coordinated plan to destroy public education. I wonder what he thinks of the emerging for-profit industry that is moving into K-12 education.

He has many opportunities to express his views about the escalation of the war against public education and the ongoing attacks on teachers and their unions.

Why is he silent?

Just wondering.

Categories ALEC, Duncan, Arne, Education Reform, For-Profit, Jindal, Bobby, K12 Inc., Louisiana, Michigan, Philadelphia, Privatization

TFA Alum Criticizes Reform in Philly: Video Disappears

By dianeravitch
July 7, 2012 //
15

Dr. Camika Royal, a 1999 Baltimore TFA alum, recently spoke at the opening of the TFA training institute in Philadelphia and she gave the incoming TFA corps members a dose of hard-earned reality. Philly is a hotbed of corporate reform ideas right now, with a plan drafted by Boston Consulting Group to privatize as much as 40 percent of the public schools, cheered on the the wealthy and powerful local titans.

When I wrote this post yesterday, I was able to link to a YouTube video of the  speech. Gary Rubinstein, a critic of TFA and former TFA corps member, told me about the video. However, after Gary posted about it, it was mysteriously taken down and is now available only to those with “permission” to view it.

In her 7-minute speech, she told the new teachers, who were there to “make history,” to “save” the children and to “close the achievement gap,” some of what she had learned since teaching in Baltimore and earning her doctorate in urban education.

Here is a snippet of the speech, thanks to Gary Rubinstein. Gary has printed portions of the speech on his website. Originally, he had a link to the entire speech, but that is no longer available.

Dr. Royal said:

Recently, there has been a constant state of flux and reform producing lateral movement but little to lift us higher or take us forward.”

“The mayor appointed school board was disbanded and replaced with a governor appointed school reform commission whose latest reform plan is to educate by abdicating its responsibility for the schools   that have been most  difficult to manage.”

“It doesn’t matter what you see, or what you’ve read about schools and educators here, don’t believe the hype.  Our schools are more than the lie of successful charters and failing districts.  Our educators are more than the false dichotomy of good vs bad, of us vs. them.”

“By and large, educators here are not bad.  Educators here are tired.  Educators here are reform weary.”

“Our students are more than test scores, graduation rates, and disciplinary issues.”

“Our education is more than failure rhetoric and the achievement gap misnomer.”

It is a shame that someone felt the need to take down the video of Camika Royal’s speech. It shows a woman who thinks for herself and does not spout the party line. We all need more of that kind of independence and critical thinking.

Categories Education Reform, Philadelphia, Teach for America TFA

Keep Following the Money in Philly, part 2

By dianeravitch
July 6, 2012 //
3

The Citypaper in Philadelphia learned that the city’s major foundation (William Penn) is funding the privatization forces, and the foundation didn’t like it. It launched pushback in other media.

What appears to be unquestionably true in the offensive and counteroffensive is that powerful people are mobilizing to turn many public schools in Philadelphia over to privately run charters or even to voucher schools. This move was predictable in the wake of the report by the Boston Consulting Group, one of those big management consulting teams that prefers private management to public government control. Wherever you find the advice of Boston Consulting Group, you will find a plan to privatize public schools.

Despite loud public demonstrations in support of community schools, the wealthy philanthropists and businessmen of Philadelphia do not like to be thwarted. It annoys them when unimportant people who send their children to public schools have the nerve to oppose their plans to “save” those children. How dare they? Who cares what “the little people” say? Why don’t they just listen to their “betters”?

Categories Boston Consulting Group, Corporate Reformers, Education Reform, Philadelphia

Follow the Money in Philadelphia

By dianeravitch
July 6, 2012 //
9

One man and one foundation decides what’s good for Philadelphia. One sharp-eyed investigative reporter learned the details.

That foundation–the William Penn Foundation–used to be concerned about equitable funding for the children and public schools of Philadelphia.

No longer.

The William Penn Foundation brought in the Boston Consulting Group to develop a plan to redesign the Philadelphia school system, and that plan predictably involved a heavy dose of privatization. If you ask business consultants what to do, their answer is always the same: bring in private entrepreneurs who keep their eye on the bottom line, who look on children as a profit or a loss, not as if they were their own children.

The Boston Consulting Group’s “Blueprint” ran into heavy opposition from parents. But don’t expect the privatizers to quit. They have more aces up their sleeve.

Categories Accountability, Boston Consulting Group, Charter Schools, Education Reform, Philadelphia, Privatization

A Sickening Feeling in Philadelphia

By dianeravitch
June 19, 2012 //
1

I wrote a blog about the press for privatization in Philadelphia, and someone sent me the following email. For a minute, I felt as helpless as he does, then I took a deep breath, redoubled my resolve, and determined to fight back. We can’t let the elites take away what belongs to all of us.

He wrote:

I read your recent article about privatization in Philly.  Thanks for the support.  We need it.  You likened it to the nineteenth century when we were dependent on the largesse of the wealthy.  The current threat is even worse.  Organized money is picking over the carcass of public education.  Taxpayers pay taxes to enrich the already wealthy who have bought lobbyists and politicians.  Even the robber barons didn’t do that nearly as blatantly.  Sadly, we are losing ground and the end could come this summer.  As a “little person” I’ve done what little people can do.

Categories Education Reform, Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, Privatization

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

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

The Philadelphia Story

By dianeravitch
May 26, 2012 //
2

These days, U.S. education is beginning to look like a slow-motion train wreck. In some places, it is fast motion, not slow motion.

One of the places where the train seems to be speeding rapidly towards a wreck is Philadelphia. The wreck will

There, the schools have been under state control for a decade, and the state legislature has underfunded the public schools to the extent possible, even though (or because) the school system has a large proportion of poor black and Hispanic students.

The city leaders, in their wisdom (or lack thereof), brought in one of those ubiquitous management consulting firms, Boston Consulting Group, to devise a “turnaround” plan for the public schools. Of course, this is treating public schools as if they were just any old business, selling auto parts or paper products, which they are not. Public education is not a product; it is not even a service. It is an essential part of our social fabric, a democratic institution that must be preserved and strengthened.

Business consultants don’t understand this. They look at public schools, and they don’t see teachers and children. They see an investment opportunity. They see a cash flow. They make calculations about return on investment. They see a deficit, and they think bankruptcy, reorganization, sell off the healthy parts, and kill the weak ones.

When you bring in business consultants, you can count on them to recommend that the “business” should be downsized and right-sized. It should be privatized. That’s the way they think. When you have a superintendent who was trained by the Broad Superintendents’ Academy, you can expect to get the same perspective.

The irony in Philadelphia is that the district tried privatization on a large scale a decade ago and it failed. The district has a sizable number of charters, a number of which are under investigation for corruption and financial malfeasance.

I guess the moral of the story is: If at first you fail, do the same thing over and over and over until public education has been completely eliminated.

I just came across this excellent summary of privatization in Philadelphia, which contains excellent links to sources: http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/2012/05/2012521114853681761.html

The article says: “As in other cities, public money was extensively abused in real estate profiteering schemes, as charter school operators used schools as tenants, paying money to themselves to rent their own property. In one particularly classy instance, the charter operator was running a private parking lot on school property. Exorbitant salaries were common for the charter school operators, and some implausibly held fully salaried jobs in multiple schools, billing the city for more than 365 days in a year.”

This is what Philadelphia’s leaders want more of.

And for anyone wanting another story about the dismantling of public education in Philadelphia:

http://www.citypaper.net/cover_story/2012-05-03-whos-killing-philly-public-schools.html?viewAll=y

I cited this story before. It deserves to be cited whenever the Philadelphia situation is up for discussion.

Diane

Categories Boston Consulting Group, Broad Foundation, Philadelphia

Corporate Reformers Love Lofty Goals

By dianeravitch
May 21, 2012 //
12

One of the favorite tactics of corporate reformers is to set lofty goals.

We have learned over the past twenty years that you can’t have reform without goals.

I remember back when No Child Left Behind was passed, and it included the goal (mandate, actually) that all students in grades 3-8 would be proficient by the year 2014. (By the way, if anyone wonders, I was not an architect of NCLB. I wasn’t involved at any point in writing it. That distinction goes to Sandy Kress, Margaret Spellings, Education Trust, and maybe even Rod Paige, who was Secretary of Education.)

I remember the six  national goals set in 1990 by the nation’s governors and the George W. Bush administration. Goal one was, “By the year 2000, all children in America will start school ready to learn.” There was also, “By the year 2000, United States students will be first in the world in mathematics and science achievement.” The Clinton administration added two more national goals I don’t think any of the national goals were met, but there were no punishments attached to them so they quietly disappeared.

With NCLB, everything changed. Suddenly, there were real consequences attached to not meeting a goal (100% proficiency) that no nation in the world had ever reached.

Schools that persistently failed to make “adequate yearly progress” would eventually be closed or turned over to a private management company or turned into a charter (same difference) or taken over by the state or staff would be fired. At the time, none of these sanctions had any evidence behind them. They still don’t. No state had ever taken over a school and made it a better school. Charters had almost no record at all. And private management companies had failed to demonstrate that they knew how to “fix” schools with low scores.

So now we have moved on to higher levels of goal-setting, since that is what business strategists like to do. Reformers must have goals! And goals must have accountability!

When I was in Detroit, the local business-civic groups that wanted to take over the schools said that if they were given a free hand, the graduation rate would rise to 90% in ten years. Well, why not 100%, as long as they were making promises? Why only 90%?

In Indianapolis, a local group of corporate reformers has proposed the usual remedy of privatization and promised remarkable achievements, come the by-and-by.

In Philadelphia, the former gas company executive who is currently in charge promised that if the plan he purchased from the Boston Consulting Group were adopted…well, you know, a dramatic increase in test scores, graduation rates, etc.

As I wrote just yesterday, Mike Miles—the Broad-trained military man who holds his troops in low regard—pledged grand goals for 2020.

But my current favorite goal is the one pledged by John White, the Broad-trained Commissioner of Education in Louisiana. White has promised that by 2014, all students in Louisiana would be proficient. (http://louisianaeducator.blogspot.com/2012_05_06_archive.html). Now, the reason I especially like this goal is that the timeline is so short. That means that we can hold Commissioner White accountable for results in only two years! If 100% of Louisiana’s students are not proficient in 2014, he has failed.

Now there is a man willing to stake his career and reputation on his goals. That’s impressive.

I wouldn’t exactly take that pledge to the bank, but I think we should treat his promise seriously and hold him to it in 2014.

Diane

Categories Broad Foundation, Indiana, Louisiana, Michigan, Philadelphia
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