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Stephen Colbert on Betsy DeVos: Very Funny!

By dianeravitch
March 13, 2018 //
12

 

Stephen Colbert has his turn deconstructing the 60 Minutes interview of Betsy DeVos.

He perceptively zeroes in on her nonsensical claim that she doesn’t pay much attention to schools (they are just “buildings”) or systems, but only on individual students. Colbert wonders how the Secretary of Education can pay attention only to each of 50 million students. He suggests renaming the Department of Education the Department of Jennifer.

Of course, she was unable to talk about Michigan, whose numbers on national tests have sharply declined since DeVos took charge of education policy by generously funding key legislators.

Remember, DeVos says she is “not a numbers person.” How can anyone be Secretary of Education and not pay attention to states, districts, schools, and the trends embodied in national data? Why would she be unaware of the backward trends in her home state, where she has been deeply engaged?

By the way, after her disastrous appearance on TV, she quickly tweeted data from NAEP and international tests to assert that public schools are making no gains. Neither is true. I wish she would read my book “Reign of Error” and see that NAEP scores are the highest ever (but flattened out in 2015 after a solid decade of reform strategies) and that the USA never posted high international test scores, that we typically score in the middle, and that poverty is the root cause of low test scores.

I promise you will never hear this billionaire talk about poverty and/or segregation. These are root causes of poor school performance, but they are of no interest to her. She prefers to promote failing and failed school choice programs.

Peter Greene has a different take on Betsy’s refusal to acknowledge “school systems,” “school districts,” or even “schools.” She says it is because she only wants to focus on individuals, which is really hard to do when you are in charge of the U.S. Department of Education. Actually, it is impossible. Peter thinks she is wishing away those buildings and districts and schools. She has her own agenda.

Categories Betsy DeVos, Michigan, Poverty, Segregation

The Kerner Commission Report, 50 Years Later: An Agenda for theFuture

By dianeravitch
March 1, 2018 //
52

 

On Tuesday, I went to D.C. for a meeting to discuss the state of civil rights in the half-century since the release of the Kerner Commission Report. The nation was rocked by civil disorders and riots in the early 1960: cities like Detroit and Newark experienced devastating clashes between angry black people and police, and many of our cities were in flames. President Lyndon B. Johnson appointed a commission to analyze the causes of the riots and report back. The commission acted expeditiously and released a devastating indictment of American society, memorably warning that unless we acted to reverse and remedy the root causes, America would be two societies, separate and unequal.

The root causes of the violence, the commission concluded, were racism, poverty, segregation, and police brutality. President Johnson was not pleased with the report and did not endorse its conclusions, but the report was on target.

The sole survivor of the Commission, Senator Fred Harris, and his ally, Alan Curtis, now president of the Milton Eisenhower Foundation (founded by the public-spirited brother of President Dwight D. Eisenhower), organized a fifty-year retrospective devoted to the Kerner Commission Report. I was invited to write a chapter about what has changed in education over the past 50 years. Others wrote about jobs, the economy, mass incarceration and policing, housing, and the other issues raised by the report. You can read the essays in a book just out called “Healing Our Divided Society.” It is an agenda for a better future.

Senator Harris, by the way, ran for president in 1972 and 1976. His campaign slogan was “The issue is privilege.” He didn’t win, obviously, but the issue is still privilege.

The theme of the meeting Tuesday was, we are all in this together. Whatever our race or religion, we must work together for a better society where everyone—everyone—has a decent standard of living, good housing, good medical care, good education, and just treatment.

Harris and Curtis wrote an article in the New York Times summarizing the findings of the 50-year retrospective. It may be behind a pay wall. I hope not. The graphics tell the story. Progress, then backsliding.

The story in education is well documented: a sharp decline in segregation, then the courts release school districts from court orders to desegregate, followed by a reversion to segregated schools. The problem is national, not limited to the south. When court orders end, segregation resumes. States never under court order have intense segregation. Right now, the most segregated schools in the nation are in California, followed by Texas, New York, Maryland, Nevada, and Connecticut. When you consider that only 13% of the population is black, the concentration of black students in majority black schools is shocking.

Over the past fifty years, inequality has deepened:

“The disheartening percentage of Americans living in extreme poverty — that is, living on less than half the poverty threshold — has increased since the 1970s. The overall poverty rate remains about the same today as it was 50 years ago; the total number of poor people has increased from over 25 million to well over 40 million, more than the population of California.

“Meanwhile, the rich have profited at the expense of most working Americans. Today, the top 1 percent receive 52 percent of all new income. Rich people are healthier and live longer. They get a better education, which produces greater gains in income. And their greater economic power translates into greater political power.”

Mass incarceration of poor black and brown people has become a new normal:

”At the time of the Kerner Commission, there were about 200,000 people behind bars. Today, there are about 1.4 million. “Zero tolerance” policing aimed at African-Americans and Latinos has failed, while our sentencing policies (for example, on crack versus powder cocaine) continue to racially discriminate. Mass incarceration has become a kind of housing policy for the poor.”

What have we learned in fifty years? We know what works, and our government doesn’t do it.

“Policies based on ideology instead of evidence. Privatization and funding cuts instead of expanding effective programs.

“We’re living with the human costs of these failed approaches. The Kerner ethos — “Everyone does better when everyone does better” — has been, for many decades, supplanted by its opposite: “You’re on your own.”

“Today more people oppose the immorality of poverty and rising inequality, including middle-class Americans who realize their interests are much closer to Kerner priorities than to those of the very rich.

“We have the experience and knowledge to scale up what works. Now we need the “new will” that the Kerner Commission concluded was equally important.”

The article then contrasts what doesn’t work with what does work.

In education, what doesn’t work: Racial segregation, vouchers, charters, and school choice.

What does work: Racial integration, investments in public school equity, quality teachers, early childhood education, community schools and other proven models

This report updates an epochal one. The Trump administration won’t read it or act on it. If we want a better future, a better society, a real commitment to equality of opportunity and the realization of the American dream for all, this new report is a great starting point.

 

 

Categories Education Reform, Equity, Justice, Poverty, Segregation

America Today: Astonishing Poverty Amidst a Booming Economy

By dianeravitch
February 6, 2018 //
47

 

We often read that the lion’s share of economic gains and tax cuts  has gone to the upper 1% or 10%, but less attention is paid to those who are left at the bottom, living lives of desperation in a land of plenty.

Martin Levine describes the forgotten Americans in this powerful article.

https://nonprofitquarterly.org/2018/02/02/world-class-poverty-americas-booming-economy/

He writes:

“How bad is the situation? Over the first two weeks of December, Professor Philip Alston, United Nations Special Rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights, visited the United States. His findings, perhaps surprising, painted a very disturbing picture as he compared how the US, one of the world’s wealthiest nations, compares to other developed nations:

*US health care expenditures per capita are double the OECD.…

*But there are many fewer doctors and hospital beds per person than the OECD average.

*US infant mortality rates in 2013 were the highest in the developed world.

*Americans can expect to live shorter and sicker lives.

*U.S. inequality levels are far higher than those in most European countries.

*In terms of access to water and sanitation, the US ranks 36th in the world.

*The youth poverty rate in the United States is the highest across the OECD, with one-quarter of youth living in poverty compared to less than 14 percent across the OECD.

*The Stanford Center on Inequality and Poverty ranks the most well-off countries in terms of labor markets, poverty, safety net, wealth inequality, and economic mobility. The US comes in last of the top 10 most well-off countries, and 18th amongst the top 21.

*In the OECD, the US ranks 35th out of 37 in terms of poverty and inequality.

*US child poverty rates are the highest amongst the six richest countries—Canada, the United Kingdom, Ireland, Sweden and Norway….

“For years…the needs of poor Americans (or poor Europeans) have received little priority relative to the needs of Africans or Asians. As an economist concerned with global poverty, I have long accepted this practical and ethical framework. In my own giving, I have prioritized the faraway poor over the poor at home. Recently, and especially with these insightful new data, I have come to doubt both the reasoning and the empirical support. There are millions of Americans whose suffering, through material poverty and poor health, is as bad or worse than that of the people in Africa or in Asia.
Alston observed that “There is no magic recipe for eliminating extreme poverty, and each level of government must make its own good faith decisions. But at the end of the day, particularly in a rich country like the USA, the persistence of extreme poverty is a political choice made by those in power. With political will, it could readily be eliminated.” The current administration does not see those in need as a priority.”

 

 

Categories Poverty

Christine Yeh: Forget Grit. Focus on Inequality.

By dianeravitch
January 16, 2018 //
33

 

 

This is the most sensible commentary I have read about “grit.” It was written by Christine Yeh of the University of San Francisco. 

The notion that kids in poverty can overcome hunger, lack of medical care, homelessness, and trauma by buckling down and persisting was always stupid and heartless, exactly what you would expect to hear from Scrooge or the Koch brothers or Betsy DeVos.

She writes:

”Grit is an easy concept to fall in love with because it represents hope and perseverance, and conjures up images of working-class individuals living the “American dream.” However, treating grit as an appealing and simple fix detracts attention from the larger structural inequities in schools, while simultaneously romanticizing notions of poverty…

“Perhaps this idea of grit resonates with so many people who believe in the popular American adage that if you work hard and pull yourself up by your bootstraps, then you can achieve anything. This belief unfortunately, assumes that individuals have the power, privilege, and access to craft their own futures, regardless of circumstance and systemic barriers.

“Statistics on educational access consistently reveal vast differences in resources in affluent versus poor neighborhoods. Predominantly white, middle- and upper-income school districts tend to spend significantly more money per student than the districts with the highest percentages of marginalized students. Our poorest schools also tend to have large class sizes, unsafe school transportation, damaged and outdated facilities, and high staff turnover. All of these conditions directly contribute to low educational outcomes and underscore the link between access to school resources and improvements in students’ success. Schools that focus on grit shouldn’t ignore structural inequities because they assume that regardless of your race, class, or social context you can still triumph.

“To be sure, there have been many examples of poor students possibly using their grit to overcome the greatest of odds—such as unstable housing, our troubled foster care system, and community violence. And there are probably advantages for teaching students to persevere and stick with a goal while facing challenges and obstacles. However, the responsibility of a great education should not be placed on the individual student to achieve through grit. Rather, schools need to build their own type of grit—that is, a long-term investment and goal, a stick-to-itiveness—to serve all students, but especially those in the margins.

“Educators need to resist the temptation to hyper focus on singular qualities—such as grit, self-esteem, or IQ—as quick cure-alls for our nations’ education problems and identify meaningful changes that tackle discrepancies in student resources. We don’t want to teach grit as a skill without making larger systemic and contextual changes in schools that promote equitable conditions for success…

”Numerous educational research studies demonstrate that schools that provide culturally relevant curriculum—including books by authors of color, critical explorations of histories and social movements, and school-based programs that creatively foster positive identities and cultural empowerment—dramatically increase students’ engagement in school, bonding with teachers, and academic achievement. These practices work because students feel connected and represented as a meaningful part of school, and subsequently they develop a focus on future goals. These ideas may not conform to the recent movements on character education and, more specifically, on teaching grit, but they do embody the lives and stories of many targeted and vulnerable communities. The notion of grit has certainly spurred important discussions about the nonacademic experiences and skills we want our students to have, but it has often obscured the very conditions that created educational inequities in the first place.”

 

 

 

Categories Inequality, Poverty, Students, Stupid

The U.S. Has the Highest Rate of Child Poverty in the Developed World

By dianeravitch
December 25, 2017 //
41

On Christmas Day, it is traditional to remember those who are less fortunate and to resolve to make the world better for them, not just to offer charity.

It is important to recognize the growing inequality in America and the return of extreme poverty and to understand why this is happening.

This article by Premilla Nadasen of Barnard College helps us understand what has happened to our great country.

The New Deal enacted programs that reduced poverty and enabled many to rise into the middle class.

But something changed. Many things changed. Over several decades, the social safety net built to strengthen our nation and spread hope and opportunity has been shredded by the rich and powerful.

“Since the 1970s, the safety net has been diminished considerably. Labor regulations protecting workers have been rolled back, and funding for education and public programs has declined. The poor have been the hardest hit. With welfare reform in 1996, poor single parents with children now have a lifetime limit of five years of assistance and mandatory work requirements. Some states require fingerprinting or drug testing of applicants, which effectively criminalizes them without cause. The obstacles to getting on welfare are formidable, the benefits meager. The number of families on welfare declined from 4.6 million in 1996 to 1.1 million this year. The decline of the welfare rolls has not meant a decline in poverty, however.

“Instead, the shredding of the safety net led to a rise in poverty. Forty million Americans live in poverty, nearly half in deep poverty — which U.N. investigators defined as people reporting income less than one-half of the poverty threshold. The United States has the highest child poverty rates — 25 percent — in the developed world. Then there are the extremely poor who live on less than $2 per day per person and don’t have access to basic human services such as sanitation, shelter, education and health care. These are people who cannot find work, who have used up their five-year lifetime limit on assistance, who do not qualify for any other programs or who may live in remote areas. They are disconnected from both the safety net and the job market.

“In addition to the reduction of public assistance and social services, the rise in extreme poverty can also be attributed to growing inequality. To quote the U.N. report: “The American Dream is rapidly becoming the American Illusion, as the U.S. … now has the lowest rate of social mobility of any of the rich countries.” In 1981, the top 1 percent of adults earned on average 27 times more than the bottom 50 percent of adults. Today the top 1 percent earn 81 times more than the bottom 50 percent.

“Declining wages at the lower end of the economic ladder make it harder for people to save for times of crisis or to get back on their feet. A full-time, year-round minimum wage worker, often employed in a dead-end job, falls below the poverty threshold for a family of three and often has to rely on food stamps.”

Do we want America to be the Land of Illusion, no longer the Land of Opportunity? Are we prepared to do something about it?

Categories Betsy DeVos, Billionaires, Inequality, Koch Brothers, Poverty

Jan Resseger: Living in Dickens’ America

By dianeravitch
December 24, 2017 //
13

Jan Resseger, social and political activist, writes here about the “new” America, the America imagined by Charles Dickens, where life is hard and mean. (She wrote it before passage of the GOP Tax Plan, which was already certain.)

“Mr. Bumble, the parish beadle who oversees provisions for the poor in Charles Dickens’ Oliver Twist, complains: “We have given away… a matter of twenty quartern loaves and a cheese and a half, this very blessed afternoon, and yet them paupers are not contented… Why here’s one man that, in consideration of his wife and large family, has a quartern loaf and a good pound of cheese, full weight. Is he grateful, ma’am? Is he grateful? Not a copper farthing’s worth of it! What does he do, ma’am, but ask for a few coals; if it’s only a pocket handkerchief full, he says! Coals! What would he do with coals? Toast his cheese with ’em, and then come back for more. That’s the way with these people, ma’am; give ’em a apron full of coals to-day, and they’ll come back for another the day after to-morrow, as brazen as alabaster.”

“Disdaining dependency. That was the attitude Dickens exposed 180 years ago.

“That same attitude is driving social policy in the United States today. Only now that the tax overhaul is all but a done deal have we begun to read about why our Republican House and Senate and President seem so little worried about tax cuts that, simple arithmetic tells us, we cannot afford. All month we have been reading about the size of the tax cuts and the plutocrats who will benefit, but there has been very little honest reckoning about what will be the most serious human consequences.

“Now, however, are we learning the reason. The real goal is eliminating dependency by punishing the poor for being poor.”

Categories Poverty

Kevin Welner: Can the New Gates Initiative Make a Difference in Closing Opportunity Gaps?

By dianeravitch
December 13, 2017 //
13

Kevin Welner of the National Education Policy Center has written a thoughtful (and optimistic) commentary on the Gates Foundation’s latest big bet on reforming education. The new one will invest $1.7 billion in networks of schools in big cities, in the hopes that they can work together to solve common problems.

Welner, K. (2017). Might the New Gates Education Initiative Close Opportunity Gaps? Boulder, CO: National Education Policy Center. Retrieved [date] from http://nepc.colorado.edu/publication/bmgf.

Welner notes that the previous big initiatives of the Gates Foundation failed, although he believes that Gates was too quick to pull the plug on the small schools initiative in 2008, into which he had poured $2 billion. Gates bet another $2 billion on the Common Core, and that was sunk by backlash from right and left and in any case, has made no notable difference. Gates poured untold millions into his plan for teacher evaluation (MET), but it failed because it relied too much on test scores.

Welner says that Bill Gates and the foundation he owns suffer from certain blind spots: First, he believes in free markets and choice, and he ends up pouring hundreds of millions into charters with little to show for it; second, he believes in data, and that belief has been costly without producing better schools; third, he believes in the transformative power of technology, forgetting that technology is only a tool, whose value is determined by how wisely it is used.

Last, Welner worries that Gates does not pay enough attention to the out of school factors that have a far greater impact on student learning that teachers and schools, including poverty and racism. These are the factors that mediate opportunity to learn. Without addressing those factors, none of the others will make much difference.

Welner is cautiously optimistic that the new initiative might pay more attention to opportunity to learn issues than any of Gates’ other investments.

But he notes with concern that Gates continues to fund charters, data, technology, and testing. He continues to believe that somewhere over the rainbow is a magical key to innovation. He continues to believe in standardization.

It seems to me that Kevin Welner bends over backwards to give Gates the benefit of the doubt. With his well-established track record of failure, it is hard to believe he has learned anything. But let’s keep hoping for the best.

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Common Core, Corporate Reformers, Data and Data Mining, Education Industry, Education Reform, Gates Foundation, Bill Gates, Innovation, Poverty, Privatization, Racism, Standardized Testing, Technology, Testing, VAM

Paul Thomas: The Political and Judicial Abandonment of Poor and Black Children in South Carolina

By dianeravitch
November 29, 2017 //
6

Paul Thomas summarizes the long conservative tradition of racism and classicism in South Carolina, once the property of the Democrats, now the domain of Republicans.

The politicians never wanted to spend money on black and poor children. Even the judiciary says it’s time to stop throwing money at schools, which has never happened.

“SC public schools (and public universities, in fact) exist in 2017 as a bold middle finger to everything promised by a democratic nation. But despite the political rhetoric, SC has failed its public schools; public schools have not failed our state, whose political leaders care none at all about poor, black, or brown children being currently (and historically) mis-served by K-12 education….

“Political and judicial negligence in SC—a microcosm of the same negligence nationally—remains entrenched in commitments to ideology over evidence, hard truths neither political leadership nor judicial pronouncements will admit.

“First, and foremost, one hard truth is that public schools in SC are mostly labeled failures or successes based on the coincidence of what communities and students those schools serve. Schools serving affluent (and mostly white) communities and students are framed as “good” schools while schools serving poor (and often black and brown while also over-serving English language learners and students with special needs) communities and students are framed as “bad” or “failing.”

“This political lie is grounded in the three-decades political charade called education reform—a bureaucratic nightmare committed to accountability, standards, and testing as well as a false promise that in-school only reform could somehow overcome the negative consequences of social inequity driven by systemic racism, classism, and sexism.

“The ironic and cruel lesson of education reform has been that education is not the great equalizer.

“Education reform is nothing more than a conservative political fetish, a gross good-ol’-boy system of lies and deception.

“Second, and in most ways secondary, another hard truth is that while education is not the great equalizer, public schooling tends to reflect and then perpetuate the inequities that burden the lives of vulnerable children.

“In-school only reform driven by accountability, standards, and testing fails by being both in-school only (no education reform will rise about an absence of social/policy reform that addresses racism and poverty) and mechanisms of inequity themselves.

“Affluent and white students are apt to experience a higher quality of formal schooling than black, brown, and poor students, who tend to be tracked early and often into reduced conditions that include test-prep, “basic” courses, and teachers who are early career and often un-/under-certified.

“Nested in this hard truth is that much of accountability-based education reform depends on high-stakes standardized testing, which is itself a deeply flawed and biased instrument. Tests allow political negligence since data appear to be objective and scientific; in fact, standardized testing remains race, class, and gender biased.

“Like school quality, test scores are mostly a reflection of non-academic factors.”

Bottom line: racism and classism.

Categories Inequity, Injustice, Poverty, Racism, South Carolina

Justin Parmenter: The Advice I Would Give Myself If I Were a First-Year Teacher

By dianeravitch
October 11, 2017 //
6

Justin Parmenter is an English teacher in North Carolina and is nationally board certified. He recently was part of a professional conference where he was asked what advice he would give himself if he were a first year teacher. Be aware as you read that Justin teaches in a state that was once considered the leader in the South in education policy, in the number of NBCT teachers, and in teacher pay. Since 2010, when a hard-right Tea Party Group took control of the legislature and gerrymandered the state, many laws have been passed with the intent of reducing the professional status of teachers and privatizing public schools.

Justin writes about his first year teaching on an Apache reservation in Arizona.

“My first job in an American public school was teaching 6th grade Language Arts at Whiteriver Middle School. This school is located on the White Mountain Apache Reservation in the poorest county in Arizona. It was a very difficult place to be a teacher but an even harder place to be a child. Many of my students were chronically absent and exhibited serious behavior problems when they were at school. Some suffered from the effects of fetal alcohol syndrome. Some of them struggled to read at a first grade level. Parent support was spotty, as some of my students’ families maintained deep misgivings about public education–understandably so given the appalling recent history of American Indian boarding schools that used inhumane methods to forcibly assimilate Native children into European-American culture.

“I began my job in Whiteriver believing that I was going to transform every child. My fresh graduate school perspective, cutting edge pedagogy, and research-based literacy practices were going to bring all of my students up to reading on grade level in a hurry and change the way they felt about education forever. I was in for a rude awakening.

“Despite my best efforts at applying what I’d learned in grad school, my students’ reading proficiency levels remained relatively unchanged. School and district-level formative assessments yielded disastrous results. Our pass rates on Arizona’s standardized reading test hovered around 20-25%, where they remain today(the school has since been renamed Canyon Day Junior High). Every day, the outcomes I was getting reminded me that my students were failing and, by extension, I was failing them. I would sometimes wake up in the middle of the night and lie in bed wondering whether I was cut out for this work at all.”

He includes a graph showing the large attrition of teachers in their early years, which interestingly shows that most leave to teach in another state. This is not surprising given the legislature’s attacks on career teachers and its preference for TFA (the recently elected state superintendent is a TFA alum).

Initially, Justin blamed himself for his students’ poor scores. But over time, he realized the negative impact of poverty on school performance:

“While I was beating myself up about my inability to get my students to pass a test, I was unaware that our educational system’s data is more about measuring socioeconomic status than it is about measuring academic achievement. That was true in Whiteriver, Arizona two decades ago and it’s just as true in North Carolina today. Consider School Performance Grades, which routinely stigmatize entire schools as failures. The NC Department of Public Instruction’s most recent analysis of Performance and Growth of North Carolina Public Schools clearly shows that school report card grades and levels of poverty are inversely proportional to each other. As poverty goes up, school grades go down.”

Justin described the changes he made in his teaching so that students found the school work meaningful. The results did not necessarily show up in test scores, but he could see a difference in student work and engagement.

He writes:

“In an incredibly taxing profession that is chronically underpaid and under respected, our sense that our efforts are worth it is sometimes the only thing that keeps teachers going. Frequent turnover at our high poverty schools means those schools are more likely to house teachers who are just starting their careers, some of them probably believing they are going to transform every child and looking for evidence of their impact on their students. What we tell or don’t tell those teachers about that impact is critical. Our successes should not just be reflected in test scores and school letter grades which are often inextricably linked to our students’ backgrounds. As former Wake County Teacher of the Year Allison Reid puts it, we need to remember to focus on what is meaningful and not just what is measurable.”

There is a lot that Justin can teach new teachers.

There are many changes North Carolina could make if it valued teachers.

Categories North Carolina, Poverty, Teachers and Teaching

Ohio: Legislators Consider Revising School Report Cards Because Most Schools Are Failing, Even Charters

By dianeravitch
September 25, 2017 //
24

Ohio legislators decided that it was a nifty idea to give grades to schools, based mainly on their test scores. This was an idea first developed by Jeb Bush, who saw it as a way to identify “failing” public schools and set them up for privatization and handover to his friends in the charter industry.

Most people understood that the test scores would reflect the affluence or poverty of the district, not the efficacy of the school, but legislators ignored what was otherwise common knowledge.

Many Ohio legislators are now unhappy with their school grades, because schools in their own districts are getting low grades.

Most districts…got Cs. And just under 4% of traditional public school districts got As for how their students scored on 26 state tests. More than 80% got Fs in that category.

State school superintendent Paolo DeMaria says report cards show important data, but that the letter grades aren’t the only factor that determines good schools.

“There are lots of things that aren’t measured on the report card – things like art programs, music programs, the school climate, cohesiveness among staff,” said DeMaria.

But the report cards were disappointing to many districts, including where Republican Rep. Mike Duffey lives in Worthington. That district got some of its lowest grades since 2012.

That’s when state lawmakers, including Duffey, voted to replace labels such as “continuous improvement” and “academic watch” with letter grades. On Facebook Duffey called the report cards “utter trash” and “fake news” – because he says they seem to show only that more diverse districts are scoring lower grades.

“Frankly, in my opinion, it’s disrespectful to minorities and it’s borderline racist in the way that it goes about it because it is going to reflect the nature of the district, the socio-economic diversity. It’s not going to show your potential to learn.”

Duffey says he’ll draft legislation to scrap the A-F grading system he once supported, saying it doesn’t result in fair comparisons among districts. He says the cards would still show data on subgroups and student growth, but not an overall letter grade.

House Education Committee chair Andrew Brenner of Powell says the report cards are important, but he’s open to moving away from overall letter grades too.

“The school district is different than a student getting a letter grade on a test or something. If a school district is getting Fs on everything, you know, they need to see something where they’re showing progress and whether they’re improving and they need to focus on the positives and look to see where the negatives are to try to improve those negatives. And if they’re stuck on the report card letter grade they may not be doing any of the underlying corrections.”

Brenner is a non-voting member of the state board of education along with Senate Education Committee chair Peggy Lehner of Kettering. Lehner says she feels improvements could be made, but she says the letter grades aren’t the real problem with the report cards.

“If you look deep down at them, you’re going to find that there’s an increase in poverty in those school districts. And it’s being reflected in some of those scores.”

The Ohio Education Policy Institute’s Howard Fleeter analyzes report card data for Ohio’s traditional public school districts. Fleeter says the highest performing schools have double the median income of the lowest performing districts. And those that got Fs have, on average, nearly 7 times as many economically disadvantaged students as the districts that got As do. Fleeter says for the past two decades, report cards have shown that districts with higher scores have fewer low-income kids, who have a set of needs their higher-income peers don’t face.

“I don’t want people to draw the conclusion that says, low-income kids can’t learn. Districts or schools that have low-income kids are bad schools – they’re not doing their job.’ It’s more challenging. It’s more difficult. I think we need to know this information.”

Fleeter and other advocates for schools have said investing state dollars in preschool and intervention specialists can help lower-income kids catch up to their more economically advantaged peers.

By the way, most of the state’s 276 charter schools got either Ds or Fs in their performance index scores. A spokesman for the pro-charter study group the Fordham Institute says most charters are in urban areas, and have the same challenges the traditional schools in those areas do.

Categories Accountability, Bush, Jeb, Charter Schools, Ohio, Poverty, Testing
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