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Obama Is Out of Touch on Education

By dianeravitch
October 25, 2012 //
14

Yesterday I announced my intention to vote for President Obama, and given the choice confronting us, I will vote for President Obama.

I will vote for him despite his terrible education policy known as Race to the Top.

It is a disaster. It has all the faults of No Child Left Behind, and it is worse.

It is incentivizing the creation of more privately managed charter schools, which are more segregated than the public schools in the same district and which do not even get higher test scores. It is pushing more testing, more school closings, more destabilizing of communities, more labeling of children, more layoffs, more money spent for compliance with federal mandates.

Race to the Top is harmful to children, to teachers, to principals, and to the future of public education in America.

Education Week reporter Alyson Klein wrote an analysis of what lies ahead in a second Obama term, and it is more of the same. What is especially disgusting is that the President continues to believe that Race to the Top is a positive policy; he seems to think that it will improve public education. He has not heard anything that teachers and parents and principals across the nation have been shouting. Stop the high-stakes testing! Stop the evaluation of teachers by test scores! Stop the privatization!

Federal policy is supposed to be devoted to equity, to helping the neediest children, not to a race. What is the point of a “race” in education? Are we racing to get the highest test scores? How does that promote equality of educational opportunity?

What is even more disgusting is that your representatives in Congress are voting the funds to continue the advance of these toxic policies. Raise your voices. Let your Senator and member of Congress know that Race to the Top is racing for the edge of a cliff. Stop. Stop now.

Here is the article linked above:

What Would a Second Obama Term Look Like on Education?

Posted: 24 Oct 2012 11:28 AM PDT

President Barack Obama has talked a lot on the campaign trail about his education record—but not as much about what he would do in a potential second term.

Yesterday, the Obama campaign put out a big, glossy brochure with ideas for next steps, including:

• Cutting tuition growth in half over the next ten years; recruiting and preparing at least 100,000 new math and science teachers;
• A plan to “strengthen public schools in every community,” in part by expanding Race to the Top to school districts
• Offering states waivers from the mandates of the No Child Left Behind Act;
• Using community colleges as economic development engines.

None of the ideas outlined in the brochure are brand new—and at least one of them, Race to the Top for districts—is going to happen whether or not Obama wins a second term. But it makes sense for Obama to highlight some of the proposals still on his to-do list, to give voters an idea of where he wants to take education policy.

As districts struggling to finalize their applications know, Congress has already provided $400 million for the district competition, and the U.S. Department of Education has already crafted the rules. The dollars are scheduled to go out the door by the end of the year, no matter what happens on election day. Still, if Obama is re-elected, there could be additional rounds of Race to the Top, which could conceivably go to school districts.

And granting states waivers from parts of the No Child Left Behind Act isn’t a second-term idea, it’s already well way underway. Waivers for districts in states that didn’t apply are a whole other matter.

When it comes to slowing the growth of college tuition, the Obama administration already has a bunch of ideas on the table—in fact there’s even a proposal to create yet another iteration of the administration’s signature Race to the Top franchise, this time to reward states for their efforts on higher education. So far, Congress has yet to bite, in part, I’m guessing, because of the program’s $1 billion price tag.

The proposed competition would reward states that maintain their own spending on higher education, improve alignment between K-12 graduation requirements and higher education entrance standards, and seek new ways to curb costs without sacrificing educational quality.

Mr. Obama has also floated the idea of tying some federal college aid—specifically campus-based aid programs, such as Perkins loans—to college outcomes, including graduation rates for at-risk populations, such as disadvantaged students, and the ability to keep tuition in check.

As for the math and science teacher proposal, anyone paying attention to the campaign has probably heard it—the president mentioned it in his speech accepting the Democratic nomination this summer. So that’s not a new idea either, although, so far, Congress hasn’t acted on the proposal.

The community college idea isn’t new either—it was part of a recent budget proposal. But it too, has not made it very far in a Congress bent on curbing costs. More here.

What else might be in the hopper for Obama’s second term, if it happens? Comments section is open.

– Alyson Klein

   
Categories Obama, Privatization, Race to the Top, Segregation , Racial Isolation and Integration

Sam Chaltain Takes Tom Friedman to the Woodshed

By dianeravitch
October 24, 2012 //
2

Sam Chaltain has an excellent post dissecting Tom Friedman’s clueless column praising Race to the Top.

Sam points out that Friedman’s book The World Is Flat made the case for collaboration, not compulsion.

Sam gently explains to Friedman that Race to the Top contradicts what Friedman recommended in his best-selling book.

He concludes that Race to the Top is fundamentally flawed because it lacks both technical expertise and emotional commitment.

“…its formulas for technical expertise, such as new teacher evaluation systems (good idea) based significantly on student test scores (bad idea), move the goalposts but ignore the skill levels of the players. As international change expert Michael Fullan points out, RTTT ‘pays little or no attention to developing the capacity of leaders to improve together or as a system: it is based on a failed theory that teacher quality can be increased by a system of competitive rewards, and it rests on a badly flawed model of management where everyone manages their own unit, is accountable for results, and competes with their peers – creating fiefdoms, silos, and lack of capacity or incentives for professionals to help each other’ – in short, the sorts of habits Friedman defines as the key to becoming successful in the flat world of the twenty-first century.

….programs like RTTT reflect a technocratic insensitivity to the actual rhythms of human beings, and a complete disregard for the necessity of building a shared emotional commitment for the changes we seek (Chicago, anyone?). So whereas attaching a dollar sign to the “recommended” reforms of RTTT was an effective strategy, as was tying each state’s conditional funding under ARRA to its agreement to adopt the common core learning standards, it’s equally true that there are short games and there are long games. And what I loved about The World is Flat was its recognition that to win the long game of the current century, compulsion was fool’s gold; commitment was the gold standard.”

 

Categories Race to the Top

EduShyster Is Seriously Worried about Tom Friedman’s Value-Added Rating

By dianeravitch
October 23, 2012 //
3

Poor Tom Friedman! Everyone who knows anything at all about education knows that Tom has egg all over his face. They are either angry at him or laughing at him. He made such a fool of himself with his over-the-top (the same one we are racing to) praise of Race to the Top. If he had ever talked to a real educator, he would have not have praised Race to the Top. Instead, he would have written about Libya or Syria. But, no, he chose to act like Arne Duncan’s PR flack, repeating Arne’s favorite lines and doing no fact-checking.

Fortunately we have EduShyster, who has done the fact-checking. The result of this laborious activity is that E.S. is worried that both Tom Friedman and Arne Duncan have extremely low value-added scores. Before long, both may be replaced by someone young, innovative, and data-driven.

Categories Duncan, Arne, Race to the Top

Thomas Friedman Needs Your Help

By dianeravitch
October 21, 2012 //
25

I am assuming Thomas Friedman knows a lot about foreign affairs, which is what he mostly writes about. He certainly knows very little about America’s public schools. I wonder when was the last time he stepped into a school or talked to a real teacher. My guess: it has been many years. Maybe he went to a public school.

His article in Sunday’s New York Times demonstrates that he is not only out of touch, but woefully misinformed. Everything he knows about Race to the Top he learned not by any research or school visits or investigative reporting, but by talking to Arne Duncan.

Guess what? Arne Duncan thinks Race to the Top is a huge success. He says so. It must be so. It will make the entire population college-ready. Everyone will go to college, get a good job, poverty will end, and we will outcompete every other nation in the world.

If you believe that, I have a bridge I’d like to sell you. It’s not too far from where I live, and it is regularly sold to the gullible.

Of course, Friedman also really admires No Child Left Behind too, even though it wasn’t perfect. and he sees the close connection between NCLB and RTTT. Where do you begin with a man who opines but knows so little?

Please, someone, bombard Mr. Thomas Friedman with the nearly 400 letters from parents, teachers, administrators, and students about the massive disaster called Race to the Top.

Ask him where we are racing. Ask him who will get to the top. Ask him why we ditched equality of educational opportunity.

Categories NCLB (No Child Left Behind), Privatization, Race to the Top, Teacher Evaluations, Testing

Why Won’t the Reformers Let Us Teach?

By dianeravitch
October 21, 2012 //
20

An English teacher in Rhode Island writes:

I’m a great teacher. I’m waiting for the opportunity, at the ripe old age of 49, to switch careers. My heart is broken. I am deluged with PLC’s, SLO’s, dog and pony lesson plans that go nowhere, and impossible observations that require me to make my students lie through their teeth. I’m tired of the “idiocracy” that states things like “the SAT is an achievement test” and that “all children can learn” without providing qualifiers and quantifiers. I am waiting for the hammer to fall when I get caught not teaching the new Common Core Curriculum because I’m ignoring it and teaching to the curriculum I created that works VERY well. If I have to learn one new acronym I’m going to eat a bullet. Rhode Island is being run into the ground by a Broad Academy robot. Teachers in my district are running scared, the administrators are capos, the union has been neutered, and the school board couldn’t find it’s hiney with a flashlight. All of this “educational reform” is just making us chase our tails; it’s not letting us teach.

Categories Broad Foundation, Corporate Reformers, Education Reform, Race to the Top, Teacher Evaluations, Teachers and Teaching

Breaking News! VAM in Florida County is a Disaster

By dianeravitch
October 20, 2012 //
36

The Tampa Bay Times reports that teachers are baffled, confused, and outraged by their value-added ratings, which will determine their evaluation, their longevity and their career.

The story begins like this:

Geoffrey Robinson is a National Board certified teacher at Osceola High School in Pinellas County who says 60 percent of his upper-level calculus students last year tested so well they earned college credit.

But this week Robinson received his teacher evaluation, based on a controversial new formula being rolled out statewide.

He was shocked to see how poorly he scored in the “student achievement” portion: 10.63 out of 40.

He’s not alone. Teachers all over Pinellashave received their scores, calculated by a new formula that confounds even math teachers. Hillsborough teachers also got their scores, though their situation is different due to participation in a grant program with its own evaluation rules. In Pasco, the scoring is on hold while the teachers union and the district figure out how to implement it.

Another teacher said that she is one of the best in the state in terms of test scores, but was rated only 57 out of 100 points. She said:

“I know I’m good, I’ve been teaching for 19 years, I’m not stressing about that. But if I was new, I’d go home crying.”

Teachers were wondering how these wildly erratic and inaccurate ratings are supposed to improve education.

In Hillsborough, where the Gates Foundation poured in many millions of dollars ($100 million?), 95 percent of teachers were rated either “effective” or “highly effective.” So they are not as unhappy as the bewildered teachers in Pinellas County.

Some teachers were rated based on the scores of students they never taught.

As one teacher says in the article, this system is not ready for prime time.

Can anyone remember how or why it was supposed to improve education?

It would be interesting if someone figures out how much money Florida received from Race to the Top and how much it has spent to implement the mandates of Race to the Top.

 

Categories Florida, Gates Foundation, Bill Gates, Race to the Top, Teacher Evaluations, Testing

The Absurdity of NCLB

By dianeravitch
October 18, 2012 //
11

Commenting on an earlier post, a teacher pointed out that students in his/her district in a low-performing school are allowed to transfer (thanks to No Child Left Behind) to a higher-performing school.

In my district, parents have the right to transfer their child to a “higher performing” school in the district if their local school is “lower performing”. Because my local school is in one of the more affluent areas of town, it usually scores a C, which is one of the higher grades in town. Because it scores higher, parents do transfer their kids, which means it has the largest class sizes in the district. I’d sooner send my kids to a “lower performing” school with smaller class sizes.

Now the higher-performing school is overcrowded and has larger classes. In time, it may well become a low-performing school. But by then, the low-performing school (thanks to Race to the Top) will be closed.

How crazy is that? What happens then? Will everyone go to charter schools? And when they are low-performing, where do they go then? Oh, yes, to those very low-performing cyber charters. In the midst of all this turmoil and upheaval, will anyone get an education? Education. Remember?

Categories Charter Schools, NCLB (No Child Left Behind), Race to the Top

James Meredith on Saving Public Education

By dianeravitch
October 17, 2012 //
5

James Meredith bravely integrated the University of Mississippi fifty years ago. It is hard to imagine now, but at the time it took nerves of steel and a willingness to die. Mississippi was the most racist state in the nation (others were close contenders), and black people put their life at risk by speaking too boldly. Meredith put his life on the line to enroll in the university.

He has published a memoir. I have not read it yet, so I am not reviewing it here. Next time the Wall Street hedge fund managers or Condoleeza Rice or Mitt Romney or Joel Klein say they are leading the “civil rights movement of our time,” think about this man who was willing to give his life to integrate the most segregated state in the nation.

This is a press release about the book:

CIVIL RIGHTS HERO BLASTS OBAMA AND ROMNEY FOR DESTROYING AMERICAN EDUCATION

On the Eve of 50th Anniversary of his Historic Desegregation of the University of Mississippi on September 30, James Meredith Urges Citizens to “Storm the Schools”

September 21, 2012: Civil rights giant James Meredith, author of the provocative, just-released book A MISSION FROM GOD: A MEMOIR AND CHALLENGE FOR AMERICA (Simon & Schuster), charged today that both President Obama and Governor Romney are contributing to the destruction of American K-through-8 public education by proposing failed or unproven policies, supporting the continued waste of billions of dollars of taxpayer funds on education, and neglecting America’s children, especially the poor.

“There is no real difference between the two candidates and parties when it comes to the most critical domestic issue of our age, public education,” Meredith says. “Both Obama and Romney are in favor of multi-billion-dollar boondoggles and money-grabs that have little or no evidence of widespread benefit to K-through-8 children or the community at large, like over-reliance on high-stakes standardised testing; over-reliance on charter schools and cyber-charters; and the funding and installation of staggering amounts of unproven computer products in schools.”

According to Meredith, “Education is much too important to be left to politicians. They have failed. They came up with No Child Left Behind and Race to the Top, both of which are largely failures. It is time for parents, families and teachers to take back control, and to step up to their responsibilities to take charge of education.”

His solution? “Storm the schools,” says Meredith, echoing the challenge he issues in his book A MISSION FROM GOD, which has been compared by one reviewer to a work by Dostoyevsky and hailed by Publishers Weekly as “lively and compelling.” He says, “I call on every American citizen to commit right now to help children in the public schools in their community, especially those schools with disadvantaged students.” He also suggests that citizens flood the schools with offers to volunteer to read to young children, and flood every school board and political meeting to demand that politicians and bureaucrats justify, with concrete evidence, every proposal made and every dollar being spent on public education, line by line.

While Meredith does not endorse either Barack Obama or Mitt Romney, and does not endorse most individual education policy proposals, he is announcing a 4-point Manifesto to Rescue American Education, that calls for America to:

• Suspend billions of dollars of public spending on unproven high-stakes standardized testing and unproven computer products in schools, and redirect those and other necessary funds to;
• Support sharply boosting teacher quality, qualifications and pay, especially in the poorest neighborhoods,
• Expand early childhood education and community schools, especially in the poorest neighborhoods, and,
• Strengthen the back-to-basics fundamentals of K-8 education, including play-based learning for youngest students; add or restore history, civics, the arts, music and physical education to the core subjects of math, science and English; and provide proper nutrition, medical and social support services for poor children through the schools.

“The outrageous, unjust public shaming and scapegoating of teachers by politicians and self-appointed pundits must end, our problems are mostly not their fault,” says Meredith. “Teachers should be respected, revered, compensated, empowered, loved and supported to give our children the education they desperately need. And that will only happen when we, as a people, take back control of our schools.”

About James Meredith: Meredith’s one-man crusade to desegregate the University of Mississippi at Oxford exactly 50 years ago, on September 30, 1962, is considered one of the great turning points and triumphs of the civil rights era, and led the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr. to place Meredith at the top of his own list of heroes in his Letter From a Birmingham Jail. In 1966, Meredith was shot while leading a “March Against Fear,” a campaign that helped open the floodgates of voter registration in the South.

Written with award-winning author William Doyle, A MISSION FROM GOD: A MEMOIR AND CHALLENGE FOR AMERICA is published to commemorate the 50th Anniversary of the “Battle of Oxford” and reveals the inside story of James Meredith’s epic American journey and his challenge for Americans to save their education system.

Categories NCLB (No Child Left Behind), Race to the Top, Segregation , Racial Isolation and Integration, US Education

Read This to Understand TFA’s Outsize Influence in DC

By dianeravitch
October 16, 2012 //
11

Alexander Russo has written an interesting paper on how TFA has managed to have unusual influence inside the Beltway.

If you wonder why members of Congress seem determined to support unpopular and ineffective programs like No Child Left Behind and Race to the  Top, read this.

Interesting that the two TFA state commissioners (John White in Louisiana and Kevin Huffman of Tennessee) work for two of the nation’s most reactionary governors

Categories Corporate Reformers, Education Reform, NCLB (No Child Left Behind), Race to the Top, Teach for America TFA, Tennessee, US Education

Why Does the U.S. Department of Education Support Privatization?

By dianeravitch
October 14, 2012 //
19

A reader points out that the U.S. Department of Education has the following program information on its website:

“The U.S. Department of Education’s Charter Schools Program (CSP) has invested more than $255 million in charter schools this year. The purpose of the program is to increase financial support for the startup and expansion of these public schools, build a better national understanding of the public charter school model, and increase the number of high-quality public charter schools across the nation. More information about the Charter Schools Program is available from the U.S. Department of Education’s Office of Innovation and Improvement here.”

Why is the DOE spending $255 million on privately managed charters that are free to exclude low-performing students or students with high needs? Why does it support a sector that is more racially segregated than community schools in the same district?

Charter schools are not public schools. Charter schools are run by private management. Most charter schools do not have a parent association. Charter schools do not get better test scores than public schools, on average.

Categories Charter Schools, Education Reform, Privatization, Race to the Top, Segregation , Racial Isolation and Integration, U.S. Department of Education
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