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New Study: Cami Anderson’s “One Newark” Will Not Create One Newark

By dianeravitch
January 27, 2014 //
9

Cami Anderson, appointed by the Christie administration as superintendent of Newark, New Jersey, has a plan called “One Newark.”

Newark has been under state control since 1995.

Oddly enough, Anderson’s plan is not about “One Newark.”

“One Newark” would be a plan to unify the schools, the students, the families, and the community into a single purpose: educating the young.

But “One Newark” is about splitting Newark up into fiefdoms for charter operators.

Maybe the real name should be “Many Newarks.”

Bruce Baker and his doctoral student Mark Weber (aka Jersey Jazzman) did a study of the One Newark plan, and this is what they concluded:

On December 18, 2013, State Superintendent Cami Anderson announced a wide-scale restructuring of the Newark Public Schools. This brief examines the following questions about One Newark:

  • Has NPS identified the schools that are the least effective in the system? Or has the district instead identified schools that serve more at-risk students, which would explain their lower performance on state tests?
  • Do the interventions planned under One Newark — forcing staff to reapply for jobs, turning over schools to charter operators, closure – make sense, given state performance data on NPS schools and Newark’s charter schools?
  • Is underutilization a justification for closing and divesting NPS school properties?
  • Are the One Newark sanctions, which may abrogate the rights of students, parents, and staff, applied without racial or socio-economic status bias?

We find the following:

  • Measures of academic performance are not significant predictors of the classifications assigned to NPS schools by the district, when controlling for student population characteristics.
  • Schools assigned the consequential classifications have substantively and statistically significantly greater shares of low income and black students.
  • Further, facilities utilization is also not a predictor of assigned classifications, though utilization rates are somewhat lower for those schools slated for charter takeover.
  • Proposed charter takeovers cannot be justified on the assumption that charters will yield better outcomes with those same children. This is because the charters in question do not currently serve similar children. Rather they serve less needy children and when adjusting school aggregate performance measures for the children they serve, they achieve no better current outcomes on average than the schools they are slated to take over.
  • Schools slated for charter takeover or closure specifically serve higher shares of black children than do schools facing no consequential classification. Schools classified under “renew” status serve higher shares of low-income children.

These findings raise serious concerns at two levels. First, these findings raise questions about the district’s own purported methodology for classifying schools. Our analyses suggest the district’s own classifications are arbitrary and capricious, yielding racially and economically disparate effects.  Second, the choice, based on arbitrary and capricious classification, to subject disproportionate shares of low income and minority children to substantial disruption to their schooling, shifting many to schools under private governance, may substantially alter the rights of these children, their parents and local taxpayers.

========================================

Conclusions

One Newark is a program that appears to place sanctions on schools – including closure, charter takeover, and “renewal” – on the basis of student test outcomes, without regard for student background. The schools under sanction may have lower proficiency rates, but they also serve more challenging student populations: students in economic disadvantage, students with special educational needs, and students who are Limited English Proficient.

There is a statistically significant difference in the student populations of schools that face One Newark sanctions and those that do not. “Renew” schools serve more free lunch-eligible students, which undoubtedly affects their proficiency rates. Schools slated for charter takeover and closure serve larger proportions of students who are black; those students and their families may have their rights abrogated if they choose to stay at a school that will now be run by a private entity.[1]

There is a clear correlation between student characteristics and proficiency rates on state tests. When we control for student characteristics, we find that many of the schools slated for sanction under One Newark actually have higher proficiency rates than we would predict. Further, the Newark charter schools that may take over those NPS schools perform worse than prediction.

There is, therefore, no empirical justification for assuming that charter takeovers will work when, after adjusting for student populations, schools to be taken over actually outperform the charters assigned to take them over. Further, these charters have no track record of actually serving populations like those attending the schools identified for takeover.

Our analysis calls into question NPS’s methodology for classifying schools under One Newark. Without statistical justification that takes into account student characteristics, the school classifications appear to be arbitrary and capricious.

Further, our analyses herein find that the assumption that charter takeover can solve the ills of certain district schools is specious at best.  The charters in question, including TEAM academy, have never served populations like those in schools slated for takeover and have not produced superior current outcome levels relative to the populations they actually serve.

Finally, as with other similar proposals sweeping the nation arguing to shift larger and larger shares of low income and minority children into schools under private and quasi-private governance, we have significant concerns regarding the protections of the rights of the children and taxpayers in these communities.

 

Categories Corporate Reformers, New Jersey, Privatization

EduShyster Imagines Dr. MLK & Today’s “Reform” Movement

By dianeravitch
January 20, 2014 //
8

EduShyster has a dream, but it is not the one that Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., spoke about in 1963 at the March on Washington.

She has a dream of Dr. King returning today to see the new “reform” movement which so often claims that it is the “civil rights movement” of our time.

He tours the “no excuses” school and sees that it is segregated. He discovers that the new “civil rights movement” is funded by many billionaires.

He might be shocked to discover that poverty is now considered “an excuse,” not something to be opposed and banished.

He might be even more amazed to discover that in today’s world, the labor unions are an obstacle to closing the achievement gap, and not–as he thought–a valued ally in his efforts to advance social justice.

As he completes his tour of “excellent” charter schools, more surprises in store for him:

Separate but innovative
Tough news on this issue, reformers. Even Dr. King 2.0, now with more excellence, might have a problem with our apparent abandonment of the ideal of universal public education. In Detroit, for example, where he delivered his speech at the Great March in 1963, there are now dual school systems: one of charter schools and the other a public system that must accept all children and is rapidly becoming the last resort for the toughest-to-serve kids. And in Washington DC, where King dreamed of an equal future for children of all races, two separate systems, one for strivers, one for discards, compete for public resources. I’m going to go out on a limb and predict that even Dr. King 2.0 would not be a fan of “separate but innovative.”

 

Categories Charter Schools, Corporate Reformers, Education Industry, Education Reform, Privatization, Unions

Bob Braun: More on the Outrage in Newark

By dianeravitch
January 20, 2014 //
20

Bob Braun covered politics and education in New Jersey for the Star-Ledger for 50 years until his recent retirement. He now has his own blog, which is an invaluable source of information and insight into New Jersey political doings.

Here he writes about the ouster of five Newark principals by state-appointed superintendent Cami Anderson. Four of them spoke at a public hearing about the pending closure of their public schools, which will be handed over to KIPP. The fifth was suspended because she supported the president of the school’s PTSA, who was banned from entering the school his children attended.

Here is how the story begins:

At Newark’s Hawthorne Avenue School, the test scores are up, higher than state-imposed goals—and certainly better than those of the highly touted “Renew” schools favored by the administration. The hallways are quiet. Teachers and administrators get along. And this was all done despite central office’s stripping away of faculty resources and shameful neglect of the building. So, in the crazy, bullying logic of Gov. Chris Christie’s administration of city schools, it was time to suspend the school’s successful  principal, H. Grady James. He was just too good to be allowed to stay.

Time to suspend him—and to try to smear his reputation by saying he was involved in some sort of “incident” now under  “investigation.”  The “incident” was a community meeting at the Hopewell Baptist Church last Wednesday where he spoke, praising the efforts of his students, teachers and parents.

James was one of five principals indefinitely suspended in one day by Cami Anderson, Christie’s agent in Newark. The others were Tony Motley, Bragaw Avenue School; Dorothy Handfield, Belmont-Runyon School; Deneen Washington, Maple Avenue School, and Lisa Brown, Ivy Hill School.

Braun’s article is maddening. It all seems so unfair. These principals were ousted the way a corporation fires a dangerous or possibly criminal employee: They were called to central headquarters, where their keys were taken away, and their computer access blocked. They were told not to enter the schools until further notice.

Governor Christie and Commissioner Chris Cerf want to privatize the entire Newark school district, to make it like New Orleans. Cami Anderson is their agent. She bullied the principals the same way that Christie bullies teachers and mayors.

Categories Charter Schools, Corporate Reformers, Education Industry, New Jersey, Privatization

Tom Friedman Is As Clueless As Arne Duncan

By dianeravitch
January 19, 2014 //
71

Most educators and even most legislators seem to recognize that No Child Left Behind and Race to the Top have failed to “reform” American education. After 13 years of test-based evaluation and school closings, no one claims success. We need what: More of the same! Congress doesn’t know what to do to change a failed status quo. Feckless Arne Duncan, having failed in Chicago, now looks for scapegoats for the failure of the Bush-Obame bipartisan consensus.

Duncan has one sure ally: Tom Friedman of the Néw York Times

They are certain that American schools are terrible, even though test scores and graduation rates are at a historic high. They want us to be just like South Korea, where exams determine one’s life (see Mercedes Schneider on examination hell in Korea).

They blame parents. They blame teachers. They blame students. They blame schools.

They blame everyone but the obvious perpetrators: failed federal policies that undermine the autonomy of teachers, principals, superintendents, school boards, and states; budget cuts that have increased class sizes and narrowed curricula, closed libraries and eliminated social workers, nurses, psychologists, and guidance counselors; the highest child poverty rate of any advanced nation; the largest inequality gap in a century; rising levels of segregation; a popular culture that celebrates instant success, not the earnest hard work required for academic success; the ubiquity of distracting electronic toys: the intrusion of philanthropic behemoths like Gates, with its own failed solutions; a media indifferent to a rapacious privatization movement that cares more about budget-cutting and profiteering than education.

They are looking for blame in all the wrong places.

Categories Budget Cuts, Education Reform, For-Profit, NCLB (No Child Left Behind), Poverty, Privatization, Race to the Top, Segregation , Racial Isolation and Integration

TFA’s Mighty Ambitions

By dianeravitch
January 17, 2014 //
14

Teach for America has created a spin-off called Leaders for Educational Excellence that quietly trains and supports the ambitions of former TFA and their ascent to positions of power.

Teach for America, through LEE, hopes to take charge of the reins of power in many districts, states, and the halls of Congress.

TFA, of course, is a mainstay of the corporate reform movement, supplying the ill-trained recruits to the charter chains like Rocketship and gaining elective positions by espousing the slogans of “reform.”

Electoral work amounts to less than a third of LEE’s budget, its officials say, but it has nevertheless fueled popular accounts of the organization, mostly critical. Such accounts accuse the group of supporting candidates who espouse a particular “corporate” brand of education policy focused on expanding charter schools and test-based accountability.

Critics point to prominent TFA alumni and LEE members, such as Bill Ferguson, a state senator in Maryland, who sponsored legislation that included an iteration of the “parent trigger.” That policy permits parents to turn over the management of schools to outside operators.

LEE officials contest such depictions.

“We do not exist to propagate policy,” said Mr. Buman.

And Stephen Sawchuck’s article in Education Week adds:

The connection to TFA also appears to have given LEE-backed candidates access to an informal network that can fuel spending. Campaign-finance records from the Nevada state board races, for instance, turn up some of the same donors who have contributed to other endeavors affiliated with so-called “reform” priorities, including charter school expansion and teacher evaluations linked to student test scores.

Those contributors include Alan Fournier, who helps finance the New Jersey chapter of StudentsFirst, the advocacy group founded by former District of Columbia Schools Chancellor Michelle A. Rhee, and Charles Ledley, a donor to Democrats for Education Reform, a political action committee.

“There’s a strong network of people who are supportive of TFA alums, regardless of what their policy or visions are for the respective school systems,” Mr. Esteves said.

In essence, the issue boils down to one of self-selection: Even if LEE itself is politically neutral, it supports candidates who by definition must take policy stands. And those who reach out for its help may well favor a certain approach after being immersed in TFA’s philosophy, Mr. McGuinn of Drew University said.

It is doubtless sheer accident that TFA/LEE-supported candidates support charter schools, test-based evaluation, and the same policy prescriptions as Michelle Rhee’s StudentsFirst.

Hey, I live in Brooklyn. Anyone want to buy a world-famous bridge?

Categories Charter Schools, Corporate Reformers, Education Industry, Privatization, Teach for America

Why Outsourcing to For-Profit Enterprises is Bad Public Policy

By dianeravitch
January 17, 2014 //
6

An organization called “In the Public Interest” keeps tabs on the scams that private entrepreneurs foist on the public sector, often in collusion with public officials who contract out important public services.

This report documents the coast-to-coast failure of handing public sector activities over to for-profit enterprises.

Outsourcing promises savings that never materialize. Instead, “too often it undermines transparency, accountability, shared prosperity and competition – the underpinnings of democracy itself…Outsourcing means taxpayers have very little say over how tax dollars are spent and no say on actions taken by private companies that tcontrol our public services. Outsourcing means taxpayers cannot vote out executives who make decisions that hurt public health and safety. Outsourcing means taxpayers are contractually stuck with a monopoly run by a single corporation – and those contracts often last decades. And outsourcing too often means a race to the bottom for the local economy, as wages and benefits fall while corporate profits rise.”

Meetings are held in secret. Decisions are made in secret. Costs spiral out of control without accountability. Weak and vulnerable patients are turned away, denied access to vital services because it costs too much to care for them.

In Arkansas, a journalist “asked the CEO of Tiger Correctional Services, a company that contracts for jail commissary services with the Craighead County Sheriff’s Department, about information regarding the company’s monthly sales and profits related to the contract. The chief executive officer of the company told the reporter, “That’s none of your damn business.”

That pretty much sums up the report. It is the public’s money, but the public does not have a right to know how it is spent.

Categories Privatization

NC: Here Come the Corporate Charter Carpetbaggers!

By dianeravitch
January 17, 2014 //
16

Jessica B. Swencki of the Brunswick County schools in North Carolina knows a scam when she sees one. With the near total deregulation of charter schools in that state, the corporate charter chains are moving in to where it’s easy to run a school and skim huge profits.

Here’s the deal. A big for-profit operation finds a local board to act as its front during the application process.

One doesn’t have to look any further than the Eastern part of the state for a case study in how savvy companies use this loosely regulated system to pocket millions of taxpayer dollars.

Here’s how it works: A for-profit educational management organization “helps” the nonprofit board write the charter application. Once the charter is granted, the nonprofit board hires the same EMO to operate the charter school. The charter school pays the EMO sizable fees to “manage” the schools – those fees added up to over $15.7 million taxpayer dollars for one EMO in Eastern North Carolina over the past five years.

Coincidentally (or not), in at least one case, the founder of the EMO also happens to be the organizer of a second company that leases facilities and equipment to the charter school (i.e., landlord).

Now, remember, the nonprofit board hired the EMO to track and report all the financial data; and it is the EMO that advises the nonprofit board as to whether the landlord’s fees are reasonable. But don’t forget, the landlord also runs the EMO.

This deal got even sweeter for the landlord this summer when the General Assembly amended a statute. Now the landlord is no longer required to pay any state tax on the land the landlord rents to the charter school. I suppose from a business perspective nothing could be finer. Why isn’t this making headlines? Isn’t this illegal? Surprisingly, no. There is little to no public accountability for the financial decisions made by charter schools, and there is no transparency mandate from the General Assembly.

In a time of shrinking financial markets, charter schools remain an excellent marketplace for savvy corporations looking for consumers.

 

Read more here: http://www.newsobserver.com/2014/01/06/3511351/how-savvy-companies-can-use-nc.html#storylink=cpy

 

 

Categories Charter Schools, Education Industry, North Carolina, Privatization

A Charter Teacher Writes in Response to Jeff Bryant

By dianeravitch
January 16, 2014 //
15

After reading Jeff Bryant’s article on abuses in charter schools, a teacher posted this letter on the site where it was originally posted:

 

She writes:

      Charter schools suffer from the problems that this article highlights–gobs and gobs of public money with virtually no public supervision.
      That money is a magnet to profit motivated conmen/conwomen, simple disarmingly pious crooks, and megalomaniacs. The truth is that those millions of dollars keep flowing with few questions once the charter is granted and the school opened.
      The school systems are run by an executive staff that is answerable to almost no one except their hand picked board. Administrators often draw huge salaries not merited by the student population density (or their expertise and contribution to their charter systems).
      I can speak with authority because I was a “teacher” at a charter school. I say “teacher” because I have no training in anything but the the subjects which I supposedly taught.
      Teaching is a craft like any other I discovered when I tried to teach for a single year. A craft that I had not learned.
      I was underpaid, over worked, and, to be honest, had no idea what I was doing. I also had no curriculum to teach from in either of my subjects. Believe it or not I was not the worst teacher there.
      While I was trying to teach without any sort of training and without text books or a curriculum the President of this educational Potemkin village was drawing $250,000 per year for a total student count over seven schools of less than 1000. He once remarked to me that he “didn’t give a damn about education!” and proved it every day..
      Technically he wasn’t even stealing. The board had voted him one bonus and pay increase after another for doing very little positive. I won’t go into all of the issues with run down buildings, bathrooms that didn’t work, roofs that leaked, no toilet paper/paper towels, special Ed….
      When a system without controls is created these sorts of abuses are invited and they, indeed, come right in.
Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Corporate Reformers, Privatization

Bruce Baker: Kansas City Is About to Be Ripped-Off

By dianeravitch
January 15, 2014 //
13

Bruce Baker of Rutgers University is well known for his candor and scholarly acumen.

Here he dissects the new plan to destroy public education in Kansas City and shows what an outright farce it is.

He writes:

This past week, the good citizens of Kansas City and Missouri Department of Elementary and Secondary Education were graced with one of the most vacuous manifestos on education reform I’ve read in a really long time. Yes, on my blog, I’ve pontificated about numerous other vacuous manifestos that often take the form of blog posts and op-eds which I suspect have little substantive influence over actual policies.

But this one is a little different. This report by an organization calling itself CEE, or Cities for Education Entrepreneurship Trust, in collaboration with Public Impact, is a bit more serious. No more credible, but more serious, in that it is assumed that state policymakers in Missouri might actually act on the report’s recommendations.

I’ve had the displeasure of reviewing several reports by Public Impact in the Past. Their standard fare is to establish a bold conclusion, and then cite (including self citation) materials that support – with no real validation- their forgone conclusion, cite other stuff that’s totally unrelated, and cite yet other stuff that doesn’t even exist. Thus, they are actually able to construct a report with a few graphs here and there and lots of footnotes, without ever validating a single major (albeit forgone) conclusion (see for example, this one, by the same author, under a different organizational umbrella, or this one).

Is the plan original? No, he says, it is the same old song, which has no research to support it, just a mountain of assertions and assumptions. Here goes:

Here’s a synopsis – call it an advanced organizer – of the story line crafted in the report:

  • Urban districts don’t work (and aren’t stable)
  • Kansas City is an urban district, therefore, it doesn’t work (even though we find it has stabilized)
  • Privately operated charter schools in Newark, New Jersey, New York City, Texas and New Orleans are producing miracles – yielding incredible graduation rates and high test scores while serving comparably low income and otherwise needy children (even though they really aren’t serving similar kids, and many have far more resources)
  • Thus, the same can – no must – work in Kansas City (even though it hasn’t)
  • Somewhat tangentially, decentralized financing – driving money to schools for site based control – is necessarily good (even though reviews of the research suggest otherwise)

Therefore, the only solution is to deconstruct the entire failed urban district, turn control over to a non-government authority which shall loosely govern a confederation of private non-profit entities that shall compete with one another for students, choose which market niche and geographic space within KC they wish to serve and be evaluated on the test scores and graduation rates they ultimately produce.

None of the assertions and assumptions are true, but so what? That is what it will take to tear apart the KC school district and hoax the fools who buy the story.

After a good deal of fascinating analysis of demography and statistics about results, Baker concludes:

While the authors of this report so confidently conclude that the obvious solution is to replace the failed urban district with an under-regulated, loosely governed confederation of benevolent non-profit actors, one might easily alternatively conclude from the evidence herein… that simply put, large scale chartering in urban centers like Kansas City simply doesn’t work. It never has and likely never will. It fails to serve the neediest children because “market forces” and accountability measures favor avoiding those children and the neighborhoods in which they live.

Further, large scale chartering leads to deprivation of important constitutional and statutory rights for children, primarily low income and minority children. Meanwhile, suburban white peers are not being asked to forgo constitutional protections in order to access elementary and secondary schooling.

Finally, large scale chartering has made far more opaque financial and governance accountability as governing institutions have created more complex private structures in order to shield their operations, records and documents from full public view.

Categories Charter Schools, Education Industry, Education Reform, Missouri, Privatization

StudentsFirst Issues Another Ludicrous State Report Card

By dianeravitch
January 14, 2014 //
84

StudentsFirst, the organization created by Michelle Rhee to promote her ideas about fixing schools by high-stakes testing and choice, has issued its second state-by-state report card.

The highest scoring states are not those whose students have the highest achievement on NAEP; that would be Massachusetts, New Jersey, and Connecticut.

No, the highest scoring states are those that do what Rhee did in D.C., the nation’s lowest-scoring district on NAEP.

She awards points for “elevating the teaching profession,” which means tying evaluations of teachers and principals to test scores, eliminating teacher tenure, eliminating collective bargaining, awarding bonuses to teachers whose students get higher test scores, and opening teaching jobs to teachers who have no certification or other credentials. In other words, the way to “elevate the teaching profession” is to make teachers into temporary workers whose job depends on the test scores of their students and to lower standards for entry into teaching. I wish that whoever defined this category would read the research on value-added methodology (VAM), like here and here. Tying teacher and principal evaluations leads to narrowing the curriculum, teaching to the test, and CHEATING.

She awards points for “empowering parents,” which means that a state gets higher scores if it offers charters and vouchers and has a parent trigger so that parents can hand their public school over to a charter corporation. Of course, the report offers no research to support these recommendations since voucher schools do not outperform neighborhood public schools-their advocates, nor do charters, on average. Some charters get higher test scores, because they enroll motivated students who apply. Others get high scores because they exclude students with disabilities and English learners. But on average, there is not much difference in outcomes between public schools and charter schools. The “parent trigger” has thus far–in its four years as state law in California–converted one public school to charter status and fired one principal.

Her third priority–spending wisely and well–promotes governance by the state and mayoral control. In other words, states get a plus if they override or preferably abolish local school boards.

The highest scoring states: Louisiana: #1; Florida (#2); Indiana (#3); Rhode Island (#4); D.C. (#5).

How did the highest performing states in the nation do on the StudentsFirst report card:

Massachusetts: (first in nation on NAEP): D (#21 on Rhee’s report card);

New Jersey: (tied for second place in the nation on NAEP): D (#31 on Rhee’s report card);

Connecticut (tied for second in the nation on NAEP): D+ (#24 on Rhee’s report card).

It is ironic that an organization that wants states to rank teachers, students, and schools in relation to student test scores issues a report card that evaluates states without any reference to student test scores.

Clearly, the rankings have nothing whatever to do with any academic outcomes for students. These are the states that comes closest to complying with Michelle Rhee’s ideological preferences: privatization and dismantling the teaching profession.

Categories Charter Schools, Corporate Reformers, Education Reform, Privatization, Teacher Evaluations, Testing
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