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The Shocking But Not Surprising Story Behind Florida’s Lowest-Performing Schools

By dianeravitch
August 19, 2015 //
21

Michael LaForgia, Lisa Gartner, and Cara Fitzpatrick of the Tampa Bay Tribune investigated five of the lowest-performing schools in Florida and got to the bottom of their failure. Their story, “Failure Factories,” described five schools in one of the state’s most affluent district that had been “average” (when judged by test scores) in the recent past and are now among the “worst” in the state.

They write:

In just eight years, Pinellas County School Board members turned five schools in the county’s black neighborhoods into some of the worst in Florida.

First they abandoned integration, leaving the schools overwhelmingly poor and black.

Then they broke promises of more money and resources.

Then — as black children started failing at outrageous rates, as overstressed teachers walked off the job, as middle class families fled en masse — the board stood by and did nothing.

Today thousands of children are paying the price, a Tampa Bay Times investigation has found.

They are trapped at Campbell Park, Fairmount Park, Lakewood, Maximo and Melrose — five neighborhood elementary schools that the board has transformed into failure factories.

Every year, they turn out a staggering number of children who don’t know the basics.

Eight in 10 fail reading, according to state standardized test scores. Nine in 10 fail math.

Ranked by the state Department of Education, Melrose is the worst elementary school in Florida. Fairmount Park is No. 2. Maximo is No. 10. Lakewood is No. 12. Campbell Park is No. 15.

All of the schools operate within six square miles in one of Florida’s most affluent counties.

NPR interviewed Michael LaForgia and Cara Fitzpatrick about their investigation.

MICHAEL LAFORGIA: We spent a year examining what was going on with five elementary schools in our predominantly African-American neighborhoods in Pinellas County. What we found was that 95 percent of black children who were tested at these schools failed reading or math. Teacher turnover in the schools is a chronic problem. Last year, more than half of the teaching staff at these five schools requested transfers out. We found that all of this is a recent phenomenon. By December of 2007, when our school board voted on a plan that effectively re-segregated the district, none of the schools in question was ranked lower than a C. Today, all of them are Fs in the state ranking system.

VIGELAND: Wow. Well, Cara, how would you describe the county where these five schools are located – Pinellas County – because I think that is one of the surprises here.

CARA FITZPATRICK: Well, Pinellas County is one of the most affluent counties in Florida, so that’s part of the surprise, I think, here. And one of the things that’s interesting about this, too, is that these five elementary schools are all in a relatively small area of South St. Petersburg.

VIGELAND: Michael, as you noted, these schools were doing a lot better about a decade ago, and they had a very different demographic at the time because of integration and busing. So what changed?

LAFORGIA: So a decade ago, there still was in effect federal oversight that was mandated by a civil rights lawsuit that dated to the 1960s. The district got out from under that lawsuit in 2007. Rather than stick with the integration efforts that had been working up till that time, the school board opted to go to a neighborhood schools model which effectively re-segregated the school district.

VIGELAND: What did it mean in terms of the student population?

LAFORGIA: Well, it meant that schools that previously had been 60, 50, 40 percent black were now suddenly 80 and 90 percent black. And they were drawing from a high-poverty area. The children who previously had been spread among other more-affluent schools who had had access to 15 or 20 schools’ worth of guidance counselors or behavior specialists suddenly only had access to five schools’ worth.

Categories Florida, Race, Segregation , Racial Isolation and Integration

Osamudia R. James: School Choice as Racial Subordination

By dianeravitch
August 17, 2015 //
16

Osamudia R. James is a law professor at the University of Miami School of Law. She is a scholar of race and equity. She has written a scholarly article that was published in the Iowa Law Review titled “Opt-Out Education: School Choice as Racial Subordination.” I hope that readers of this blog will take the time to read it. It is an important legal analysis of the social inequities caused by school choice.

As more children are induced to leave the public school system, the public schools are less able to provide a decent education for those who remain behind. Many of those who leave will attend charter schools and voucher schools that are no better and possibly worse than the public school they abandoned. The harm done to children by this strategy is powerful, and the harm done to society is incalculable.

James advocates for limitations on school choice “to prevent the disastrous social consequences–the abandonment of the public school system, to particularly deleterious consequence for poor and minority schoolchildren and their families–that occur as the collective result of individual, albeit rational, decisions. I also advocate for limitations on school choice in an attempt to encourage individuals to consider their obligations to children not their own, but part of their community all the same….The actual impact of school choice cannot be ignored. Given the radicalized realities of the current education system, choice is not ultimately used to broaden options or agency for minority parents. Rather, school choice is used to sanitize inequality in the school system; given sufficient choices, the state and its residents are exempted from addressing the sources of unequal educational opportunities for poor and minority students. States promote agency even as the subjects supposedly exercising that agency are disabled. Experience makes clear that school choice simply should not form an integral or foundational aspect of education reform policy. Rather, the focus should be on improving public schooling for all students such that all members of society can exercise genuine agency, initially facilitated by quality primary and secondary education. Ultimately, improving public education begins with preventing its abandonment.”

Categories Equity, Privatization, Race, School Choice

Little Rock: White Supremacy Takes Over Again

By dianeravitch
August 13, 2015 //
29

This is the story of what is happening in Little Rock, Arkansas, told by a white parent with children in the public schools. Barclay Key is a professor of history at the University of Arkansas in Little Rock.

Little Rock has a special place in our nation’s history. In 1957, three years after the Brown decision declaring “separate but equal” schools unconstitutional, nine black students attempted to enroll in Central High School. Governor Orval Faubus called out the Arkansas National Guard to prevent the students from entering. The NAACP won a federal district court injunction against Governor Faubus. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. urged President Dwight D. Eisenhower to intervene. President Eisenhower sent the 101st Airborne Division to protect the students and uphold the law.

Fast forward to to 2015. The schools of Little Rock are again under siege, different cast of characters. This it is about both race and power.

Parents have been trying to protect their public schools against a Walton takeover. What is the metaphor? Not David and Goliath. More like the lone young Chinese man who stood up against a long line of tanks during the suppression of the rebellion in Tienanmen Square.

Barclay Key writes::

“From the chaos of initial desegregation efforts to the white flight of the past few decades, Little Rock’s hopes for strong public schools have consistently been sacrificed on the altar of white supremacy. As a historian, I knew the general contours of this story before my family and I moved here in 2012. The story differs only in its details as one travels the country….

“One cannot possibly overlook the state’s role in suppressing black political power and local white elites supporting that suppression. Even though students in the LRSD have been majority black for forty years, a white majority controlled the school board until 2006. We had a democratically elected board with three new black members and a strong white ally. The state board of education replaced our democratically elected board with Tony Wood, the white state education commissioner. He literally had no specific plans for the LRSD or the “academically distressed” schools, outside of what was already occurring. There was no magic wand, no special scenario that he or the Arkansas Department of Education was prepared to implement.

“It’s worth noting, however, that the state immediately took one action. It appointed Baker Kurrus to chair a “budget efficiency advisory committee” for the LRSD. The district was not in financial distress. Cuts were looming because of the loss of those desegregation funds, but plans were already being developed by the elected board to minimize the effects of that loss. The state’s sudden concern over LRSD finances suggested fears over a progressive-minded school board with a facilities plan and firm commitment to equality that would almost certainly give a fair share of business to minority-owned companies for construction and renovation projects. Kurrus, a white businessman and attorney, previously served on the LRSD board for twelve years. The state, which had just complained of long-term dysfunction on the LRSD board, chose to appoint as superintendent a former white board member who served during some of the board’s most tumultuous—some might say dysfunctional—years….

“This point deserves emphasis: a majority black school board in a majority black school district was displaced by whites who accept the status quo about the education of many of our children. Democrats were responsible for the initial damage, but now Republicans have taken firm control of state government to continue the barrage. Mr. Wood resigned his position as state education commissioner and our new governor, Asa Hutchinson, appointed a white political crony named Johnny Key to take his place. His only qualification appears to be service on the state senate’s education committee and operation of a private Christian daycare. Indeed the governor announced his appointment before the law could be changed to make Key eligible to serve in this capacity. And by serve I mean make $130,000 per year….

“Now on the eve of another school year, the state just announced that it will renege on its contract with our teachers, citing financial worries. The negotiated agreement has been in place for fifty years, and these financial worries didn’t prevent Mr. Kurrus from giving teachers a one-time bonus of $350 in the spring. Most of our teachers deserved that and more, I’m sure, but it was irresponsible to give those bonuses and clearly intended to placate union leadership before this contract controversy. I’ve been around public education for all of my life, but I’m having a difficult time understanding how undermining our teachers’ financial stability, cutting their benefits, and targeting their union for destruction will help our “academically distressed” schools. We will neither attract nor retain the best teachers for our students. Even a casual observer must admit that the state of Arkansas seems hell-bent on destroying our school system, maintaining white supremacy, and keeping our most vulnerable children in a cycle of poverty. The vultures of privatization are circling.”

And so the story goes. The billionaires are buying the schools, the children, our democracy.

Where is the national media? 60 Minutes? Rachel Maddow? Anderson Cooper? The New York Times? The Washington Post?

Categories Arkansas, Corporate Reform, Privatization, Race, Walton Foundation

Civil Rights Groups Call for End to High-Stakes Testing and School Closings, and for Moratorium on Charters

By dianeravitch
July 9, 2015 //
22

A large coalition of grassroots groups and civil rights organizations wrote a powerful letter to the leaders of the U.S. Senate and every member of the Senate expressing their views about what should–and should not–be in the rewrite of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act.

 

This is how their letter begins:

 

The Journey for Justice Alliance, an alliance of 38 organizations of Black and Brown parents and students in 23 states, joins with the 175 other national and local grassroots community, youth and civil rights organizations signed on below, to call on the U.S. Congress to pass an ESEA reauthorization without requiring the regime of oppressive, high stakes, standardized testing and sanctions that have recently been promoted as civil rights provisions within ESEA.

 

We respectfully disagree that the proliferation of high stakes assessments and top-down interventions are needed in order to improve our schools. We live in the communities where these schools exist. What, from our vantage point, happens because of these tests is not improvement. It’s destruction.

 

Black and Latino families want world class public schools for our children, just as white and affluent families do. We want quality and stability. We want a varied and rich curriculum in our schools. We don’t want them closed or privatized. We want to spend our days learning, creating and debating, not preparing for test after test….

 

The letter points out that the children of Chicago will have taken 180 standardized tests by the end of eighth grade. This is not education.

 

We want balanced assessments, such as oral exams, portfolios, daily check-ins and teacher created assessment tools—all of which are used at the University of Chicago Lab School, where President Barack Obama and Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel have sent their children to be educated. For us, civil rights are about access to schools all our children deserve. Are our children less worthy?

 

High stakes standardized tests have been proven to harm Black and Brown children, adults, schools and communities. Curriculum is narrowed. Their results purport to show that our children are failures. They also claim to show that our schools are failures, leading to closures or wholesale dismissal of staff. Children in low income communities lose important relationships with caring adults when this happens. Other good schools are destabilized as they receive hundreds of children from closed schools. Large proportions of Black teachers lose their jobs in this process, because it is Black teachers who are often drawn to commit their skills and energies to Black children. Standardized testing, whether intentionally or not, has negatively impacted the Black middle class, because they are the teachers, lunchroom workers, teacher aides, counselors, security staff and custodians who are fired when schools close.

 

Standardized tests are used as the reason why voting rights are removed from Black and Brown voters—a civil right every bit as important as education. Our schools and school districts are regularly judged to be failures—and then stripped of local control through the appointment of state takeover authorities that eliminate democratic process and our local voice—and have yet so far largely failed to actually improve the quality of education our children receive….

 

They don’t just complain. They have clear solutions that Congress could enact if it had the will.

 

First, there are 5000 community schools in America today, providing an array of wrap around services and after school programs to children and their families. These community schools serve over 5 million children, and we want to double that number and intensify the effort. We are calling for a significant investment in creating thousands more sustainable community schools. They provide a curriculum that is engaging, relevant and challenging, supports for quality teaching and not standardized testing, wrap-around supports for every child, a student centered culture and finally, transformative parent and community engagement. We call on the federal government to provide $1 billion toward that goal, and we are asking our local governments to decrease the high stakes standardized testing with its expensive test prep programs and divert those funds into resourcing more sustainable community schools.
Second, we want to include restorative justice and positive approaches to discipline in all of our sustainable community schools, so we are calling on the federal government to provide $500 million for restorative justice coordinators and training in all of our sustainable community schools.
Third, to finally move toward fully resourcing Title I of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, we call on the federal government to provide $20 billion this year for the schools that serve the most low income students, and more in future years until we finally reach the 40% increase in funding for poor schools that the Act originally envisioned.
Finally, we ask for a moratorium on the federal Charter Schools Program, which has pumped over $3 billion into new charter schools, many of which have already closed, or have failed the students drawn to them by the illusive promise of quality. We want the resources that all our schools deserve – we don’t need more schools. We need better ones.
So now we are prepared to say, clearly, that we will take nothing less than the schools our children deserve. It will cost some money to support them, but that’s okay, because we have billionaires and hedge funders in this country who have never paid the tax rates that the rest of us pay. We are a rich country, and we can afford some world class community schools.

 

 

 

Categories Charter Schools, Education Industry, Education Reform, NCLB (No Child Left Behind), Privatization, Race, Testing

Bob Braun: Chris Christie’s Insensitive, Self-Satisfied Version of the American Dream

By dianeravitch
July 2, 2015 //
17

Bob Braun listened to Chris Christie’s announcement of his candidacy for the GOP nomination, and he was struck by Christie’s peculiar version of the “American Dream.”

While other candidates–past and present–spoke of fleeing religious persecution, tyranny, and privation to find refuge in America, Christie spoke of fleeing a racially-changing Newark for the comfort of an all-white suburb.

Braun writes:

“The Christie family did not escape from English monarchs who insisted on a state religion. Not from revolutions in southern Europe. Not from the potato famine. Not from the czar. Not from pogroms or the Holocaust. Not from grinding poverty. The Christie family escaped from black families moving into the neighborhood–new neighbors whose ancestors were brought to this country as slaves in chains. The Christies did not face the unknown wilderness or the known hostility of earlier settlers. They faced the grass, the open space, the all-white neighborhoods, of Livingston, New Jersey.

“I cannot speak for people of color but I can imagine the pain many must have felt when Christie told the adoring and mostly white crowd at Livingston High School, “I’m here in Livingston because all those years ago, my mother and father became the first of either of their families to leave the city of Newark to come here and make this home for us.”

“Not Jamestown. Or Plymouth. Or Ellis Island. Livingston.”

Categories New Jersey, Newark, Race, Republicans

Paul Thomas: 5 Questions to Ask Every Presidential Candidate

By dianeravitch
June 29, 2015 //
11

Paul Thomas, professor at Furman University, taught in South Carolina for 18 years. He is an eloquent and informed critic of social and education policy.

 

In this post, he poses five questions that every Presidential candidate should be asked (again and again).

 

I paraphrase his words and questions so you will read his post. They boil down to these principles:

 

Test-based accountability does not change the underlying social and economic conditions that cause disparate test results.

 

Test-based accountability has stripped teachers of their professional autonomy. As a result, fewer people choose teaching as a career.

 

Due to underlying economic inequality, children of color are more likely to be poor, to be segregated, to get fewer educational opportunities, to be suspended or expelled, and to have less opportunity to succeed in school and beyond. Tests don’t reduce income inequality or wealth inequality.

 

What, sir or madam, will you do to reduce these economic gaps instead of spending billions to measure them?

Categories Education Reform, Poverty, Race

New Teacher Tests Have Disparate Impact on Minority Teachers

By dianeravitch
June 21, 2015 //
54

It is indisputable that standardized tests have a disparate impact on members of minority groups. Asian students perform exceptionally well on math tests. White and Asian students have higher scores than black and Hispanic students.

The same disparate impact is found on teacher tests as on student tests. Occasionally, an African-American teacher will sue, claiming test bias. They usually win. New York State’s teacher licensing exam attempted to be “more rigorous,” but making them harder to pass cemented the gap between the pass rates of different racial groups.

“On a common licensing exam called Praxis Core, a new test given in 31 states or jurisdictions that was created to be more rigorous than its predecessor, 55 percent of white candidates taking the test since October 2013 passed the math portion on their first try, according to the preliminary data from the Educational Testing Service, which designed the exam. The passing rate for first-time African-American test takers was 21.5 percent, and for Hispanic test takers, 35 percent. A similar gap was seen on the reading and writing portions.

“In New York, which now has four separate licensing tests that candidates must pass, an analysis last year of the most difficult exam found that during a six-month period, only 41 percent of black and 46 percent of Hispanic candidates passed the test their first time, compared with 64 percent of their white counterparts.”

This is a paradox, as two policy goals conflict: to diversify the teaching force and to make teacher certification exams more difficult to pass. It seems likely that aligning teacher exams with the Common Core will worsen the problem.

Read Alan Singer here on the uselessness of standized tests for teacher certification. He writes that such tests are notoriously unable to predict who will be a good teacher and who will be a bad teacher.

He recommends remedies, beginning with FIRE PEARSON.

He concludes:

“There is no foolproof way to evaluate prospective teachers or anybody else for that matter. People have bad hair days and perform below expectation. Life also interferes with work and sometimes people do not develop as expected. Just look at some of the high draft choices in professional sports. There needs to be support and evaluations along the way and alternative career paths. There is no inoculation or test that can be administered at the start of someone’s career that will ensure people will be great teachers down the road.”

Categories Equity, Race, Standardized Testing, Teachers

The Absurd Lies That Politicians Are Spreading about the Charleston Massacre

By dianeravitch
June 20, 2015 //
27

Michael Keegan, President of People for the American Way, sent out a letter today describing the ridiculous claims of far-right politicians about the Charleston massacre.

 

Keegan writes:

 

A horrific event like this — an attack on our people, our values, and our very way of life — should bring us together in mourning. And it should force us, as a country, to confront the uncomfortable truths about our history and our culture that erupt, too often, in devastating violence.

 

But no. We can’t have that full discussion. Because the powerful interests — and the political leaders beholden to them — that benefit from the status quo and from Americans being divided won’t let us.

 

What do I mean by that? Let’s have a look at the responses to this tragedy from the Republican candidates for president and other leading right-wing figures, which range from willfully ignorant to astonishingly delusional to crassly dishonest.

 

When asked if the shooting in Charleston was racially motivated, Jeb Bush said, “I don’t know.”
Lindsey Graham joined the right-wing media trend of trying to take the focus off race and advance the myth that this was really a hate crime against religious Christians, saying the shooter may have been “looking for Christians to kill.”
Rick Perry called the shooting an “accident,” that was possibly caused by the over-prescription of medication and that is being exploited by President Obama to try to “take the guns out of the hands of everyone in this country.”
Mike Huckabee joined a chorus of many on the Right in saying the shooting could have been prevented if only the church members were armed.
The American Family Association’s Sandy Rios said that President Obama “enjoys” such incidents because it will give him another chance to “remove guns from the hands of the American people.”
Right-wing talk show host Alex Jones linked the shooting to a socialist race war plot.
Far-right radio host Jesse Lee Peterson said simultaneously that the shooting was intended to start race war but that racism is not an issue in America today, and said that identifying racism is the real threat because white people are being made to feel guilty and fearful about being called racist, which will lead to built-up anger boiling over into more violent race-based attacks like the one in South Carolina.

 

He might have added to this list that a board member of the National Rifle Association blamed Reverend Clementa Pinckney for the massacre because, as a state legislator, he had opposed “conceal carry.” If the members of the church had been armed, they could have shot the killer. Thus, in his view, gun control causes gun violence. Everyone should be packed and ready to fire.

 

What a country that would be. Everyone armed and everyone on edge, wondering when the firing begins.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Categories Race, Religion

South Carolina: Republican Legislator Will Introduce Legislation to Remove Confederate Flag from State Capitol

By dianeravitch
June 20, 2015 //
9

It was always an insult to African-Americans to keep a Confederate flag flying over the South Carolina Capitol. They are citizens of the state; the Confederate flag is not their flag.

 

Now, after the massacre of nine African-Americans at a historic church in Charleston, a Republican legislator has said he will introduce a bill to remove the Confederate flag.

 

South Carolina State Representative Doug Brannon made news tonight by going where most other Republicans refuse to go. He said in unqualified terms that race was the reason for the shooting that took the lives of nine Black South Carolinians gathered for bible study in an historic Black Charleston church. Then he announced he would sponsor a bill in the next legislative session to remove the Confederate flag from the state house grounds.

 

MSNBC’s Chris Hayes talked by phone with the obviously emotional Rep. Brannon, first confirming his plan to introduce a bill to remove the flag, and then asking him why he had decided to sponsor the legislation, which is sure to be controversial in the state.

 

“I had a friend die Wednesday night for no reason other than he was a Black man,” said Brannon, with unmistakeable emotion in his voice.

 

Rep. Brannon referred to Reverend Clementa Pinckney, a former state senator, as “an incredible human being.”

 

It should not take a tragedy to persuade people to do what is right and decent.

 

 

Categories Race, South Carolina

Belinda Edmondson: Black Parents Opt Out Too

By dianeravitch
June 18, 2015 //
9

One of the ways that reformsters put down the Opt Out movement is to assert that it consists only of privileged white suburban mothers, thus echoing Arne Duncan’s dismissive reaction.

Belinda Edmondson lives in the suburbs but she is not white. She sees through the reformsters’ hollow efforts to claim the support of African-American parents.

She writes;

“The reformers should have notified the large multiracial group of opting-out students who crowded into Montclair school auditoriums during PARCC testing that opting-out is a whites-only privilege. They should have informed the protesting black and brown students who took over the Newark schools superintendent’s office that they are the wrong color. They should take aside those outspoken black parents at the Newark Board of Education meetings and minority anti-reform groups like the New York City Coalition for Educational Justice, and let them know: these are not the actions of black people. Stay in your lane, already.

“Yes, it’s true that majority-black-and-brown districts in NJ are less likely than well-off districts to have students who oppose PARCC and other reforms. Camden, a high-poverty, majority-black city, is an example. There the state has hijacked the school system and children of color are being forced into charter schools. Groups like Save Camden Schools are fighting back, but it looks like a losing battle. Silly me, I thought that was due to class, and social capital: you know, the fact that educated, well-connected families of any color are more likely to be able to challenge the reform mandates and not be punished for it precisely because of their intimate knowledge of how the system works. The more educated professionals in a town, the better able its residents are to challenge the corporate raiding of their schools. Negative repercussions are far less likely: if their kids don’t take the PARCC, so what? Professionals who know the system know their kids will still graduate from high school, still get into college. Not so with poor families in poor districts. Reforms are presented to them as the gateway to a good education and the social mobility that comes with it. Even if those families don’t buy the reform mantra, what choice do they have? Poor families don’t control their own schools.”

Edmondson observes the passion that millionaires and billionaires bring to the cause of “saving” black and brow children. She has difficulty crediting their sincerity.

She notes:

” Reformers constantly raise the specter of the achievement gap as justification for pushing more standardized testing. They argue that black and brown kids are the chief beneficiaries of all these reforms. Precisely how our kids benefit is unclear when their school curriculum is narrowed to focus on test prep, their test scores are used to tell them they’re ignorant, and their teachers are under threat of being fired. But the reformers have done their homework and know what’s best. Of course none of this has anything to do with the fact that there’s lots of money to be made in reforming the schools. Or that the pesky teacher’s union is getting in the way of profits.”

Categories Opt Out, Race
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