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Gary Rubinstein: CONFIRMED! The Complete and Total Failure of the Tennessee Achievement School District at a Cost of $100 Million

By dianeravitch
September 24, 2018 //
21

Gary Rubinstein reports that the latest Tennessee school rankings were just released. Now we know. The Tennessee Achievement School District was a complete and total failure. $100 million down the drain, which came from Race to the Top funding. The same money might have been used to reduce class sizes in these schools. Instead, it was used to induce charter operators to come to Tennessee and work their magic. It failed.

Would someone tell Bill Gates, John Arnold, Reed Hastings, Eli Broad, Michael Bloomberg, and the other billionaires who are still spreading the phony claim of charter miracles?

Spread the word to states like Nevada, Georgia, and North Carolina, which created their own “achievement school districts” based on the Tennessee model.

Seven years ago, as part of Tennessee’s Race To The Top plan, they launched The Achievement School District (ASD). With a price tag of over $100 million, their mission was to take schools that were in the bottom 5% of schools and, within five years, raise them into the top 25%.

They started with six schools and three years into the experiment, Chris Barbic, the superintendent of the ASD had a ‘mission accomplished’ moment where he declared in an interview that three of those six schools were on track to meet that goal.

But a year later, the gains that led to that prediction had disappeared and it wasn’t looking good for any of those six schools. By the time the five year mark had been reached, in the Fall of 2016, Chris Barbic had already resigned and taken a job with the John Arnold Foundation.

The thing about 2016, though, is that whether or not the ASD schools met the lofty goal could not be determined, officially. Tennessee releases their official ‘priority’ list of the bottom 5% schools every three years. And, conveniently enough, the last one was in 2015. So even though it was clear in 2016 that the original 6 ASD schools would not be in the top 25%, an even more important question — how many of those schools remained in the bottom 5%? — would not be known officially for two more years, in the Fall of 2018.

A few days ago, Tennessee finally released the long-awaited 2018 priority schools list, and for the ASD, the results were decisive and devastating.

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Corporate Reformers, Education Industry, Education Reform, Failure, Privatization, Race to the Top, Tennessee

Peter Greene: Why Top-Down Mandates from Washington Always Fail

By dianeravitch
September 21, 2018 //
28

Congress and the U.S. Department of Education can take different paths as it dispenses money: It can give school districts money to meet certain defined purposes (e.g., equitable resources) or it can give money for school districts to follow instructions and change what teachers are doing. The latter, as Peter Greene reminds us here, always fails. Policy direction, imposed from above on millions of teachers, must pass through multiple layers of interpretation, reinterpretation, and misinterpretation before it reaches the classroom. By then, it bears little resemblance to what was intended, and what was intended may have been misguided and muddled to begin with.

From Outcome Based Education (remember the 90s?) to Common Core to ESSA to a hundred policy initiatives on the state level, the story is usually the same: Policymakers create a policy for K-12 education, it rolls out into the real world, and before too long those same policymakers are declaring, “That’s not what we meant at all.” Explanations generally include “You’re doing it wrong” or “Maybe we should have put a bigger PR push behind it” or “The teachers union thwarted us.” Common Core fans still claim that all Common Core problems are because of trouble with the implementation.

Somehow policymakers never land on another possibility– that the policy they created was lousy. But good or bad, education policy follows a twisty path from the Halls of Power where it’s created to Actual Classrooms where teachers have to live with it. Here are all the twists that can lead to trouble.

Good luck with this

It begins with the policy generators, who might be legislators, or they might be thinky tank lobby policy wonkists who have an idea they want to push. The important detail is that the policy starts with just a handful of people who actually understand it. But the policy’s first obstacle is a larger group of legislators, some of whom have absolutely no idea what we’re talking about, and worse yet, some who don’t even know what they don’t know, but have some thoughts about how the policy could be tweaked. Let’s say for our example that the group doesn’t fiddle too much, and we end up with a simple policy:

Students will learn about how to produce excellence in widgets.

“Excellence” is one of those words that legislators use to get past the fact that they can’t agree on what an excellent widget is. But to implement the policy, teachers will have to know what the expectation is, so the Department of Education next has to “interpret” what the regulation means.
(John King and Lamar Alexander had some spirited disagreements about ESSA on just this point).

If we’re talking about federal regulations, they’ll pass through both federal and state departments of education. Reports, notes, letters, and other guidance tools will be issued by state bureaucrats who have some ideas about what widget excellence should look like and some other ideas about what the policy goals really are here.

The farther removed from the classroom, the less likely that the intended policy will make sense to the individual teachers who are required to implement it.

It is a bit like having the federal or state government do your menu planning and plan the same meal for every family in the state, without providing the food.

Peter has a better metaphor:

You can think of policy implementation as a giant Plinko board with a million slots at the bottom. The policymakers can drop the chip, and not only will it not go exactly where they want, but if they drop a hundred chips at once, they will all end up in a different place. Education policy isn’t just a game of telephone– it’s a game of telephone in which each player whispers to ten other players, until a million people have completely different messages.

This is what some folks are talking about when they demand vociferously that policies and materials be implanted “with fidelity,” which means roughly “do what I tell you and stop thinking for yourself.” But the critical problem is that actual classroom teachers are not involved until the final step. If government insists on a top-down model of education policy, they are never going to get what they think they’re asking for.

Categories NCLB (No Child Left Behind), Race to the Top, U.S. Department of Education

Good News! New Jersey Trashes VAM!

By dianeravitch
September 1, 2018 //
33

Good news! The Governor of New Jersey, Phil Murphy, and the State Commissioner, Lamont Repollet, slashed the stakes attached to PARCC testing. Until now, 30% of a teacher’s evaluation was tied to test scores on the Common Core PARCC Test. The governor and Commissioner just dropped it to 5%.

The practice of evaluating teachers by student test scores was heavily promoted by Arne Duncan and Race to the Top. It has been widely discredited by scholarly organizations like the American Statistical Association. It remains on the books in many states as a dead vestige of the past, a zombie policy that has never worked but never died.

New Jersey drove a stake in its icy heart.

“New Jersey Commissioner of Education Dr. Lamont Repollet today announced that PARCC scores will account for only five percent of a teacher’s evaluation in New Jersey next year, down from the damaging 30 percent figure mandated by his predecessors. State law continues to require that standardized test scores play some role in teacher evaluation despite the lack of any evidence that they serve a valid purpose. In fact, researchers caution against using the scores for high-stakes decisions such as teacher evaluation. By cutting the weight given to the scores to near the bare minimum, the Department of Education and the Murphy administration have shown their respect for the research. The move also demonstrates respect for the experience and expertise of parents and educators who have long maintained that PARCC—or the Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers—is an intrusive, harmful test that disrupts learning and does not adequately measure student learning or teacher effectiveness.

“Today’s announcement is another step by Gov. Murphy toward keeping a campaign promise to rid New Jersey’s public schools of the scourge of high-stakes testing. While tens of thousands of families across the state have already refused to subject their children to PARCC, schools are still required to administer it and educators are still subject to its arbitrary effects on their evaluation. By dramatically lowering the stakes for the test, Murphy is making it possible for educators and students alike to focus more time and attention on real teaching and learning.

“NJEA President Marie Blistan praised Gov. Murphy and Commissioner Repollet for putting the well-being of students first and for trusting parents and educators. “Governor Murphy showed that he trusts parents and educators when it comes to what’s best for students. By turning down the pressure of PARCC, he has removed a major obstacle to quality teaching and learning in New Jersey. NJEA members are highly qualified professionals who do amazing work for students every day. This decision frees us to focus on what really matters…”

“While the move to dramatically reduce the weight of PARCC in teacher evaluation is a big win for families and educators alike, it is only the first step toward ultimately eliminating PARCC and replacing it with less intrusive, more helpful ways of measuring student learning. New Jersey’s public schools are consistently rated among the very best in the nation, a position they have held for many years. Despite that, New Jersey students and educators are among the last anywhere still burdened by this failed five-year PARCC experiment. By moving away from PARCC, New Jersey’s public education community will once again be free to focus on the innovative efforts that have long served students so well.”

Categories Accountability, Duncan, Arne, New Jersey, Race to the Top, Teacher Evaluations, VAM

Valerie Strauss: “Arne Duncan Never Learns”

By dianeravitch
August 13, 2018 //
54

Valerie Strauss read Arne Duncan’s book. There is nothing Duncan did or said during his seven years as Secretary of Education that moved us beyond the stale and failed ideas in George W. Bush’s No Child Left Behind. In education, W. got another two terms for policies that were wrong from the beginning, based on the erroneous belief that schools and teachers needed to be published if scores don’t go up.

Valerie Strauss has a long memory. She recounts just a few of the times Duncan accused educators or parents of “lying” to students, telling them they were doing better in school than they were. He has a low opinion of our students and their teachers. She notes that he continues to believe that standardized testing is the very best way to gauge how students are faring and whether their teachers are any good.

Duncan seems to believe that calling people “liars” is a successful tactic.

He wasted billions on his “School Improvement Grants” and discounts his own department’s judgement that his ideas failed. His campaign for school choice paved the way for Betsy DeVos and her even bigger campaign for school choice.

She writes:

“Duncan still thinks, apparently, his biggest mistake involved poor communication rather than the substance of the policies. If only the Education Department had better communicators, the states could have convinced everyone that standardized testing is valuable in holding schools and teachers accountable — even though there’s no evidence of that in the testing era that began with the 2002 No Child Left Behind law.

“Let’s be clear: Ample evidence exists that Duncan’s push for annual standardized testing for high-stakes decisions on teachers, students and schools was destructive and in some cases nonsensical. In some places, teachers were evaluated on students they didn’t have and subjects they didn’t teach simply because test scores had to be used as an evaluation metric.

“He still insists the problem was lousy communication.

“Duncan is now focused on gun control and says he has long been concerned about the subject, but he didn’t make it a priority when he was education secretary.

“Back then, he talked about the importance of kids being in class every weekday and supported expanding the school day, but now he is trying to build support for a nationwide strike of public schools until Congress passes comprehensive gun-control legislation. (Given the importance of education to him, it is unclear why he didn’t call for a general strike of workers, while kids and teachers continued to show up at school, but never mind.) He’s been to Parkland, Fla., where 17 people died in a high school shooting, seeking the community’s help with the boycott idea.

“In his book, he wrote that if he could do the education-secretary stint over again, he would push even harder for his policies. It is reminiscent of the insistence by Margaret Spellings, the education secretary under President George W. Bush when No Child Left Behind was passed, that the federal law was great long after its fatal flaws had been revealed to most everyone else.

“Arne Duncan never seems to learn.”

Categories Charter Schools, Duncan, Arne, Education Industry, Education Reform, Lies, NCLB (No Child Left Behind), Privatization, Race to the Top, Testing

Jan Resseger: How High-Stakes Testing is Ruining Education

By dianeravitch
August 12, 2018 //
20

In this post, Jan Resseger reminds us why Daniel Koretz’s book, The Testing Charade, is essential reading.

Read this book about the failure of NCLB and Race to the Top before you listen to Arne Duncan repeat his baseless claim that we need more testing and more of what already failed.

How has high stakes testing ruined our schools and how has this strategy, which was at the heart of No Child Left Behind, made it much more difficult to accomplish No Child Left Behind’s stated goal of reducing educational inequality and closing achievement gaps?

Here is how Daniel Koretz begins to answer that question in his 2017 book, The Testing Charade: Pretending to Make Schools Better: In 2002, No Child Left Behind “mandated that all states use the proficient standard as a target and that 100 percent of students reach that level. It imposed a short timeline for this: twelve years. It required that schools report the performance of several disadvantaged groups and it mandated that 100 percent of each of these groups had to reach the proficient standard. It required that almost all students be tested the same way and evaluated against the same performance standards. And it replaced the straight-line approach by uniform statewide targets for percent proficient, called Adequate Yearly Progress (AYP)…. The law mandated an escalating series of sanctions for schools that failed to make AYP for each reporting group.” Later, “Arne Duncan used his control over funding to increase even further the pressure to raise scores. The most important of Duncan’s changes was inducing states to tie the evaluation of individual teachers, rather than just schools, to test scores… The reforms caused much more harm than good. Ironically, in some ways they inflicted the most harm on precisely the disadvantaged students the policies were intended to help.”

Koretz poses the following question and his book sets out to answer it: “But why did the reforms fail so badly?”

I recommend Daniel Koretz’s book all the time as essential reading for anyone trying to figure out how we got to the deplorable morass that is today’s federal and state educational policy. I wish I thought more people were reading this book. Maybe people are intimidated that its author is a Harvard expert on the design and use of standardized tests. Maybe it’s the fact that the book was published by the University of Chicago Press. But I don’t see it in very many bookstores, and when I ask people if they have read it, most people tell me they intend to read it. To reassure myself that it is really worth reading, I set myself the task this past weekend of re-reading the entire book. And I found re-reading it to be extremely worthwhile.

Categories Accountability, Duncan, Arne, Education Industry, Education Reform, Failure, Fraud, NCLB (No Child Left Behind), Race to the Top, Testing

Arne Cashes in Again

By dianeravitch
August 5, 2018 //
46

Arne Duncan just was invited to join the board of Dreambox, a digital math program selling technology to schools. Dreambox also got $130 Million from a new investor. Board members of private corporations typically get $100,000 or more to show up for a few meetings and add prestige to the board. Nice work, Arne. I assume Dreambox doesn’t know that Rave to the Top was a flop.

Categories Duncan, Arne, For-Profit, Race to the Top, Technology

Tennessee: Achievement School District is a Colossal Failure

By dianeravitch
August 1, 2018 //
24

Arne Duncan was very proud of Tennessee, which was one of the first states to win Race to the Top funding. $100 million of its $500 million prize was devoted to creating an all-charter Achievement School District, made up of the state’s lowest scoring schools. The leader of ASD, Chris Barbic (ex-TFA) promised that these schools would be catapulted to the top 20% in the state within five years. Barbic bailed after four years. None of the ASD schools improved.

A series of leaders replaced Barbic.

Now we know: ASD made no progress.

Test scores in the ASD high school are a disaster.

“This year’s batch of scores, which were released early in July, revealed that test scores for state-run schools remain far below the statewide average and dropped in high school. School-level data is not yet available.

“Education Commissioner Candice McQueen called the new state test data for the turnaround district “sobering…”

“The Achievement School District — now made up of 30 schools, mostly in Memphis — was launched to transform the state’s bottom 5 percent of schools by converting them to charter schools.

“In English II, only 4 percent of high schoolers were on or exceeding grade-level, down from 9.8 percent last year. Three years ago, 10.2 percent of students were on grade level.

“In geometry, the drop was smaller, with 0.9 percent of high schoolers on or exceeding grade level, compared to 1.3 percent last year. The percentage of students on grade level has hovered around 1 percent in geometry for the last three years.”

Nevada and North Carolina rushed to create their own ASDs, modeled on Tennessee.

Way to go, Reformers!

I hope the new National Center on Research on School Choice at Tulane studies the ASD, which was modeled on New Orleans’ Recovery School District.

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Privatization, Race to the Top, Tennessee

Gary Rubinstein: Everything You Ever Wanted to Know about the Reform Movement and Its Critics, But Didn’t Ask

By dianeravitch
July 21, 2018 //
4

This is a hilarious, must-see video, narrated by Gary Rubinstein, about his life in Teach for America, his disillusionment with Reform, and his collision with Reformers as they set about to remake American education.

I play a minor role in his story, because I too was an apostate, and my turnaround helped him make his own turnaround.

You will see all the stars of Reform, as Gary gives each of them their few seconds of glory and dispatches some of their heroes.

You will also see how he had his own moment of reckoning and developed a passion for calling out lies and propaganda.

It really is delightful and informative.

The moral of the story, he says, is that Tufts University (where he was a student) beats Harvard University (where most of the Reformers were students).

There are lots more morals to the story, and you will see how he skillfully weaves the history of the past 25 or so years together into a slide show.

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Corporate Reformers, Duncan, Arne, Education Industry, KIPP Charter Schools, Lies, Michelle Rhee, NCLB (No Child Left Behind), Privatization, Race to the Top, Teach for America

Rick Hess: Arne Duncan is Still Clueless

By dianeravitch
July 19, 2018 //
30

Rick Hess of the American Enterprise Institute reviewed Arne Duncan’s memoir about his seven years as Secretary of Education and concludes that Arne seemed to learn nothing from the experience.

Rick was not impressed.

When Arne Duncan was named the ninth U.S. secretary of education in early 2009, the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) had shown a decade of substantial growth, efforts to launch the Common Core and reform teacher evaluation were getting under way with ample support and little opposition, and education seemed a bipartisan bright spot in an increasingly polarized political climate.

Seven years later, when Duncan stepped down, NAEP scores had stagnated, the Common Core was a poisoned brand, research on new teacher-evaluation systems painted a picture of failure, and it was hard to find anyone who would still argue that education reform was a bipartisan cause. It would be ludicrous to say any of this was Duncan’s “fault,” but it’s fair to say that his self-certitude, expansive view of his office’s role, and impatience with his critics helped bring the great school-reform crackup to pass.

Now, Duncan has written a book about his years in education. It could have been a meditation on why things went awry, what he’s learned, and how all this should inform school improvement in the years ahead. That would have been a book well worth reading. Or Duncan might have really taken on the skeptics, answering their strongest criticisms and explaining why the path he chose was the best way forward. Instead, Duncan has opted to pen a breezy exercise in straw men and self-congratulation, while taking credit for “chang[ing] the education landscape in America.” The narrative follows Duncan from his time as a Chicago schools central-office staffer, to his tenure as superintendent in Chicago, to his service in Washington during the early years of President Barack Obama’s first term (skipping the second half of Duncan’s time in Washington), before closing with his thoughts on gun violence and an eight-point education agenda.

Throughout, Duncan comes across as a nice, extraordinarily confident guy who really likes basketball and has no doubts about how to fix schools or second thoughts about his time in Washington.

I had exactly that impression when I met Arne in 2009 and urged him not to follow in the same punitive path as NCLB. What a very nice guy! How tall he is! He took notes. But I don’t think he remembered or cared about anything I said.

Categories Charter Schools, Duncan, Arne, Education Industry, Privatization, Race to the Top, Testing

Gary Rubinstein: Tennessee’s $100 Million ASD Melts Down

By dianeravitch
July 18, 2018 //
13

Tennessee was one of the first states to win a grant from Arne Duncan’s Race to the Top. It won $500 million. It placed its biggest bet on an idea called the Achievement School District. The big plan was to have the state take over the state’s lowest performing schools and do a turnaround. The ASD was launched in 2012 with much fanfare. Its leader promised that the lowest performing schools would be turned around within five years. Reformers loved the idea so much that it was copied in Nevada, North Carolina, and a few other states. Most of the schools were converted to charter schools.

As Gary Rubinstein explains here, the ASD was a complete flop.

“Two years after they launched, an optimistic Chris Barbic, the first superintendent of the ASD, had a ‘mission accomplished’ moment when he declared that three of the original six schools were on track to meet the goal on or before the five year deadline. But the projected gains did not pan out and now, six years later, five out of six of the original schools are still in the bottom 5% with one of them not faring much better. Chris Barbic resigned in 2015 and his successor Malika Anderson resigned in 2017.

“The ASD was, at one time, an experiment that Reformers were very excited about. In 2015, just before Barbic resigned, Mike Petrilli hosted a panel discussion at the Fordham Institute celebrating the lofty goals of the ASD, the RSD, and Michigan’s turnaround district.

“Year after year, all the research on the Tennessee ASD has been negative (except for research that they, themselves, produced). In 2015, a Vanderbilt study found the district to be ineffective. In 2016, a George Washington study agreed. And now, as if we need any more proof, a new 2018 Vanderbilt study found that schools in the ASD have done no better than schools in the bottom 5% that had not been taken over by the ASD.”

A complete flop.

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Duncan, Arne, Education Industry, Education Reform, Failure, Privatization, Race to the Top
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