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Thomas Friedman Goes to the Graduation at the SEED Boarding School in Maryland

By dianeravitch
June 3, 2015 //
60

Thomas Friedman has a column in the New York Times about attending the graduation ceremonies at the SEED high school in Baltimore. His wife, he writes, “chairs the foundation behind the SEED schools.” The column, of course, is a celebration of the young people who have made it to graduation in this very unusual school. It is a boarding school, which begins in sixth grade. Although other SEED schools are charter schools, this one in Maryland is not; it is described as a “statewide public college-preparatory boarding school.” It relies on private contributions to get started, but its operations are funded by public dollars.

Friedman writes:

As the saying goes: “If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together.” Unfortunately, not everyone made it to the finish line: Of the 80 who won the lottery that day in 2008, only 29 stuck it out or made it from sixth grade to graduation. The good news is that the graduates are going to the University of Virginia, the University of Wisconsin, University of Michigan, U.S.C., Villanova and others; one is joining the Coast Guard.

SEED has long been lauded in national media for its test scores and its college placements. But, at the Maryland campus described by Friedman, only 36% of students persisted from sixth grade to graduation from twelfth grade.

I first became aware of the SEED boarding school concept when I saw the movie “Waiting for ‘Superman.'” It was one of the charter schools featured as an escape for students who seemed doomed to fail in urban public schools. I wrote a review of the movie and in doing so, checked out the schools that were featured. What I learned about SEED in 2010 was that it had a very high attrition rate, and it was very expensive (at that time, about $35,000 per student in public funding, more recently the cost per student was $40,000).

Here is a description of the D.C. SEED charter school that was featured in the movie,

“In order to help kids do better in school, the SEED School takes them away from their home environments for five days a week and gives them a host of supporting services. The results of this educational experiment have been promising so far, and SEED believes their model can be used on a broader scale.

When consultants Eric Adler and Rajiv Vinnakota founded the school in 1998, it was the first and only urban public boarding school in the country. Much like Geoffrey Canada of the Harlem Children’s Zone, Adler and Vinnakota saw the classroom as only one component of a college-preparatory education.

“The SEED model includes academic, residential, mental health, physical health, social, and enrichment programs,” explains Laura O’Connor, director of communications for the SEED Foundation. The school provides volunteer tutoring, extracurricular programs like robotics and cooking classes, and a scholarly environment where Facebook, MySpace, and television are forbidden.”

I take away three lessons from the story that Friedman tells.

One is that public schools should have the resources to provide “academic, mental health, physical health, social, and enrichment programs.” They too should have the advantages that are clearly beneficial to students.

Second, SEED is not in any sense “scalable.” No state is ready, willing, or able to pay $40,000 per student for children who live in distressed urban districts. Nor should a school with an attrition rate over 60% be considered appropriate for entire districts.

Third, without knocking the people who are trying to help kids in need, I question the value of separating children from their families and communities as a broad-scale approach. It is not likely to happen because it is too expensive, but it also operates on the presumption that the children can thrive only by getting away from home. For some that may be true. But for our society, it is a way of evading our obligation to address the systemic problems of segregation, poverty, and racism. Saving our children one at a time is a noble cause, but it is even more noble to fix the social and economic conditions that put them at risk.

Categories Charter Schools, Education Reform, Poverty, Race

Wisconsin: Legislature Wants to Privatize Low-Performing Public Schools

By dianeravitch
May 26, 2015 //
10

A radical privatization proposal has been inserted into the Wisconsin state budget and approved by the budget-writing committee. The plan initially applies to Milwaukee (where the public schools outperform voucher schools and get similar test scores to charter schools), but it could be extended to Madison, Racine and other “large, racially diverse” school districts. Under the plan, a commissioner would be appointed and have the power to fire all staff, both teachers and administrators, and hand the school off to a private operator to run as a charter or voucher school. In other words, public assets, schools paid for by the community, will be given away to private operators.

Under the plan, an independent commissioner appointed by the county executive would take control of three of the lowest-performing schools in the district after the 2015 school year. Everyone who works at the school would be fired and forced to reapply for their jobs. The commissioner could also convert the schools into private — but non-religious — voucher schools or turn over operation to an independent charter school.

For the first two years, up to three schools could be chosen. After that, five more a year could be added.

Republican supporters of the plan said they wanted something dramatic to turn around chronically failing schools in Milwaukee. The most recent school report card ranked 55 schools within the district as “fails to meet expectations,” the lowest of five rankings.

Some Democratic legislators were outraged:

But Democrats said the plan does nothing to address the root causes of problems in Milwaukee schools, including high poverty, and they argued the Legislature should not interfere in running the city’s schools.

Democratic Sen. Lena Taylor, the only lawmaker from Milwaukee on the Joint Finance Committee, blasted the proposal as part of a history of diverting resources from public schools in Wisconsin’s largest city.

“For years, individuals who sit on this committee and in this building have known that they have been raping the children of MPS,” Taylor said.

The comparison drew a sharp rebuke from Rep. Dale Kooyenga, R-Brookfield, one of the plan’s authors.

“I just find that sick,” he said. “That’s actually sick.”

Taylor refused to back down.

“I get it. The word ‘rape’ sounds offensive,” she said. “But when you consider the fact that 15 out of 100 kids can read on grade level while $89 million have been skimmed from the education of kids, and that you don’t invest it in even the crisis areas, who are you fooling?”

Categories Charter Schools, Privatization, Race, Vouchers, Wisconsin

Watch Jesse Hagopian and Rita Greene on #BlackStudentLivesMatter at NPE

By dianeravitch
May 2, 2015 //
4

Here is the video of an outstanding discussion at the Network for Public Education conference, featuring Seattle teacher-leader Jesse Hagopian and Rita Greene, education director of the Seattle NAACP.

I was in the audience, sitting next to Jose Luis Vilson. I was lucky to get a seat, as the room was packed, and people were sitting in the aisles and lined up against the back wall.

Jesse explained the racist history of standardized testing, and Rita Greene described why the Seattle NAACP had endorsed the Opt Out movement. She encouraged people to work with their local NAACP, since the national organized was supporting standardized testing.

It was a very important and powerful presentation.

Here is the discussion that followed.

This is your homework assignment! It will be on the test.

Categories Justice, Race, Standardized Testing

Conor Lynch: The Roots of the Baltimore Tragedy

By dianeravitch
May 1, 2015 //
11

Conor Lynch writes in Salon that the rightwing media is having fun blaming liberals and liberal social policies for the unrest that followed the death of Freddie Gray.

 

He quotes commentators from Fox News who see the civil disorders and riots as the fault of the protestors.

 

What Lynch points out, however, is that Baltimore (like Detroit) was once a thriving industrial city. As globalization and technological change produced deindustrialization, jobs dried up, especially for those striving to rise from poverty to the working class. The war on drugs, he writes, led to mass incarceration of black men, even though whites use drugs as often as blacks. And then there is the historic residential segregation in Baltimore, enforced by federal, state, and local policies.

 

Back in the mid-20th century, Baltimore was a booming manufacturing hub, as were many other cities that today have become shadows of their former selves, such as Detroit. In 1916, Bethlehem Steel bought a steel plant in Baltimore, and by the Second World War, more than a quarter of a million people were employed in the city’s manufacturing industry. This was the so-called Golden Age of American capitalism, where manufacturing accounted for 50 percent of corporate profits and 30 percent of American employment. Today, by contrast, industry profits have dropped to about 20 percent, and employment has dropped to less than 10 percent. This is not a phenomenon unique to Baltimore — the process of deindustrialization has occurred throughout America, turning formerly thriving cities into impoverished ghost towns.

 

There are various reasons for why America’s manufacturing industry has fallen from grace, but the two major ones are globalization and technological innovation. Globalization, which really began to take off in the ’70s and ’80s, has made capital much more flexible, and today many companies choose to produce in developing countries where labor costs are significantly lower, owing in large part to scant protection for workers, who make a fraction of what it would take to live a decent middle-class lifestyle. Technology has been even worse for America’s middle class; it has been reported that the great advancements in computer and robotic technology over the past few decades have hollowed out the middle class and destroyed jobs faster than it created them.

 

Baltimore was hit hard by deindustrialization – in the latter half of the 20th century its industrial workforce was depleted by 75 percent. And as manufacturing jobs left, so did the middle class and white Baltimoreans. Since the death of manufacturing in the city, the economy became a service-based one, and the incomes have dropped significantly.

 

This is not the story you will hear on Fox News. But it is the context you need to know.

Categories Baltimore, Economy, Race, Segregation , Racial Isolation and Integration

Jaded Educator: On the Baltimore Riots

By dianeravitch
April 28, 2015 //
100

Yesterday, demonstrations and violent protests erupted in Baltimore. A young black man, Freddie Gray, died while in police custody. The protests began after his funeral. Quoting Martin Luther King, Jr., the Jaded Educator says: “A riot is the language of the unheard.”

She connects the hopelessness of the young people who are rioting to her own role as a teacher:

Point blank, we have not given these students anything of value. We have not given them a reason to think twice about throwing that rock and landing them in a heap of trouble. We have robbed them of what is within their rights which is an equal opportunity for education.

The question can be asked, are schools supposed to fix everything? Of course not. As an educators, we are already inundated with a myriad of responsibilities to attend to. However, we are the staple community institution, that possesses the power to make a life altering influence on our children.

I must say, I don’t blame my students for their often unruly behavior in the classroom. If you felt that your education was totally inaccessible to you, and didn’t incorporate aspects of your life, you would place little to no value in it. During my year long student teaching I, as well as a colleague of mine, wondered, “So we do all this work on the inside, but how does it translate on the outside of these four walls?” And what I am coming to terms with, is that, for the masses, it doesn’t. What long lasting impact will teaching my students how to multiply 2×2 digit numbers, if I am not able to supply them with life skills, and equip them with constructive strategies to manage their conflicts, and promote socially appropriate emotional responses, educate them using a curriculum that is most salient and relevant to them? What it seems we’ve been told is that it’s not important because its not on the test.

They have not failed, she says. We have.

Categories Injustice, Race

Is Standardized Testing a Civil Right?

By dianeravitch
April 11, 2015 //
35

Civil rights groups, led by Kati Hatcock of Education Trust, assert that standardized testing is a civil right. Without it, they say, black and brown children would be overlooked, neglected, forgotten. No one would know about the achievement gaps.

Of course, we do know about the achievement gaps in the nation, states and major cities whose NAEP scores are reported every other year. It is not necessary to test every child every year to report what is already known.

Nonetheless:

““Removing the requirement for annual testing would be a devastating step backward, for it is very hard to make sure our education system is serving every child well when we don’t have reliable, comparable achievement data on every child every year,” Kati Haycock, president of the Education Trust, said in recent testimony before the Senate education panel. Her group joined 20 civil rights organizations to lobby Congress to keep the requirement to test all children each year in math and ­reading.

“The civil rights argument adds a new dimension to one of the most contentious education issues in decades: whether standardized testing is good for students. Congress is wrestling with that question as it reauthorizes No Child Left Behind. The Senate education panel is expected to begin debating a bipartisan bill next week that would maintain annual testing, but it is unclear how the bill will fare in the House, where conservative Republicans want to drastically scale back the federal role in education.”

But Gary Orfield, a long-time civil rights watchdog, says that testing does not help minorities:

““The main victims of this misguided policy are exactly the people the civil rights groups want to help: teachers and students in high-poverty schools,” said Gary Orfield, co-director of the Civil Rights Project at UCLA. The focus on math and reading has squeezed out science, social studies and the arts from high-poverty schools, he said.

“Tests don’t address the social problems that poor children bring to school or the fact that many start kindergarten already lagging behind more affluent children, he said.

“They also don’t fix the inequality of a public education system funded primarily by real estate taxes, where schools in wealthy communities are well equipped and attract the strongest teachers, while high-poverty schools often have fewer resources and weaker teachers, he said.

“The idea that you can just ignore the conditions that create inequality in schools and just put more and more pressure on schools and if that doesn’t work, add more sanctions, makes no sense,” Orfield said. “As if it’s just a matter of will for the students and teachers in these schools of concentrated poverty.”

The civil rights groups apparently are unaware if the history of standardized testing, and its ties to the eugenics movement. I wrote about that in chapter 4 of “Left Back.” Historically, standardized tests were used to deny educational opportunities to under served groups and to re-enforce theories of white supremacy, based on test scores.

Like school choice, standardized testing was a weapon used by racists to deny civil rights, not a force for civil rights.

Categories Civil Rights, Poverty, Race, Standardized Testing

Arthur Camins: Boosting a Few More Children Out of Poverty Is Not a Worthy National Goal

By dianeravitch
February 20, 2015 //
16

Arthur Camins, Director, Center for Innovation in Engineering and Science Education, Stevens Institute of Technology, critiques here the now-popular idea that the best way to end poverty is by improving education. While both parties continue to talk about race and poverty, they have given up on integration as a strategy. What they propose, he says, is that education is the best anti-poverty program. Unfortunately, this claim has neither evidence nor  logic to support it.

 

He writes:

 

Integration has largely evaporated as a key driver in the struggle for equity. It has been replaced by the idea that education is the most effective anti-poverty program. The argument is framed by the following ideas:

 

“A high-quality education offers the best path out of poverty and into to the middle class. The new and improved, common-core aligned, standardized tests will accurately reflect the differential levels of student learning in areas that matter for their own future and that of the nation. Students who perform poorly on these assessments are unlikely be very successful in their post-secondary college and career endeavors. As a result, they are headed for low paying jobs or unemployment. Therefore, if we can increase their performance on these tests they will be more likely to succeed and escape poverty.”

 

This argument, while simplistic, sounds reasonable and appealing. However, close examination reveals that it is not evidence-based, nor is it logical.

 

Camins adds:

 

The logic about escape from poverty only works on the individual level. While individuals are certainly better off with the best possible education, there is no evidence that attaining a significantly increased percentage of high achieving students would eliminate the need for people to clean our offices, homes and hospitals, stock our store and warehouse shelves or serve us in fast food restaurants. There is no evidence that employers will suddenly agree to pay such better-educated workers a living wage that would enable them to provide adequate food, clothing and shelter so that poverty would cease to exist.

 

Maybe, more effective teaching will increase the size, diversity and creativity of the nation’s knowledge workforce, who will subsequently spur innovation and new kinds of well-paying employment for others. Maybe, our superior innovation capacity will offset the competitive advantage of lower wage countries. These would be good outcomes, but they will not end poverty. Unless, we commit to real high-quality universal health care, food and housing security, and full employment at fair living wages for all (through, for example public investment in infrastructure improvement), it is illogical to believe that universally high-quality education will significantly reduce, much less end poverty. Imagining that it will do so represents magical, not evidence-based logical thinking….

 

Sadly, too many policy makers seem more committed to enabling profiteering from the results of poverty than ending it. The testing industry is an excellent example. Education policies sanction and encourage multi-billion dollar testing and test preparation corporations that enable destructive punishment and rewards for educators, gaming the system and sorting of students for competitive access to an increasingly unaffordable post secondary system that perpetuates inequity. State and federal education policies support costly, overly stressful and time consuming high-stakes testing in order to verify and detect small differences within the very large socio-economic disparities we already know exist.

 

Well-designed large-scale assessments can contribute evidence for institutional and program level judgments about quality. However, we do not need to test every student every year for this purpose. Less costly sampling can accomplish this goal. I am not opposed to qualifying exams- if they validly and reliably measure qualities that are directly applicable to their purpose without bias. However, imagine if we shifted the balance of our assessment attention from the summative to the formative. Then we could focus more on becoming better at interpreting daily data from regular class work and use that evidence to help students move their own learning forward. Imagine what else we could accomplish if we spent a significant percentage of our current K-12 and college admission testing expenditures on actually mediating poverty instead of measuring its inevitable effect. Imagine the educational and economic benefit if we invested in putting people to work rebuilding our cities, roads, bridges, schools and parks. Imagine if we put people to work building affordable housing instead of luxury high rises. Imagine the boost to personal spending and the related savings in social service spending if a living wage and full employment prevailed. Imagine the learning benefit to children if their families did not have to worry about health, food and shelter. Imagine if our tax policies favored the common good over wealth accumulation for the 1%ers.

 

Such investments are far more logical than the current over-investment in testing and compliance regimes. Education, race and poverty are inextricably intertwined. Let’s do everything we can to improve teaching and learning. More students learning to use evidence to support arguments would be terrific. But, if we want to do something about poverty we need to ensure good jobs at fair wages for the parents of our students. That is where evidence and logical thinking lead.

 

At least since the adoption of No Child Left Behind legislation education reform has been promoted as an anti-poverty program and a way to narrow the racial achievement gap. Maybe that appeal is a good sign about the conscience of US citizens. Apparently, many people still believe that the connection between educational achievement, race and socio-economic status is unfair. However, no policy makers have been forthright enough to reveal or admit to themselves their real underlying logic: We have given up on ending or seriously mediating poverty. The best we can do is to give some kids who are willing and able to work hard a better chance to make good. That is why we support school choice. No one will say this out loud because it sounds so pessimistic and cynical.

 

Maybe it is time to hold policy makers accountable in their own behavior for what they demand of students: At least be clear about your hypothesis, experimental design and collect appropriate evidence. That would allow the public to participate in deciding whether escape from poverty for a few more students is a worthy goal that represents our values as a nation.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Categories Education Reform, Poverty, Race

Must-See: Two High Schools–One All-Black, One All-White–Collaborate to Produce a Play: “Our Mockingbird”

By dianeravitch
February 18, 2015 //
15

This video, shown on PBS, documents a wonderful story: Two high schools in Birmingham, Alabama, collaborate to produce “To Kill a Mockingbird.” One high school is all-black, the other is all-white. We are reminded that desegregation peaked in the 1980s, according to the UCLA Civil Rights Project.

 

The video shows high school students working together to present the play. The video devotes more time to the historical setting of the book, the realities of life in Birmingham and the segregated South than to the production. This is not a disadvantage but a strength because the play and the novel are set in time. The video includes film footage of the segregated South in the 1930s (which the book portrays) and the 1950s (when the book was written and the civil rights movement was on the march). It includes film footage of civil rights protests in Birmingham, when the police loosed dogs on black demonstrators. It interviews black and white adults about life under segregation. It includes clips from the film that starred Gregory Peck and home-made films from local families. It interviews the actors who appeared in the 1962 film and the students who appear in the play today. It raises the irony of white families who trusted black servants to raise their children yet would not allow black children to attend the local schools or universities.

 

It is a must-see, partly for the ideas of the play, but mostly for its realistic portrayal of segregation then and now and for the reactions of today’s students. It is an important story about our history, our past and our present.

Categories Alabama, Civil Rights, Race, Segregation , Racial Isolation and Integration, Students

Yohuru Williams: Malcolm X and the Problem of High-Stakes Testing

By dianeravitch
February 12, 2015 //
5

Yohuru Williams, a professor of history at Fairfield University, marks the 50th anniversary of the death of Malcolm X by revisiting the cultural and racial biases that robbed him of his dreams.

Williams argues that black students today are labeled and stigmatized by test scores as surely as Malcolm was labeled and disparaged because of his race.

Williams writes:

“It is the kind of racial determinism that many students of color have become accustomed to. Proponents of high stakes testing resurrect such determinism, presumably without the racial overtones, by reducing students, their hopes and dreams for the future, to test scores. Effectively, they close the door to the hope of achievement through hard work and academic engagement…..

“In shrinking students’ lives to test scores, the opportunity for them to dream and achieve beyond the arbitrary measures of intelligence offered by standardized tests will be lost. Coupled with punitive disciplinary policies, high stakes tests narrow the pathways to success for poor and minority youth even as they come neatly wrapped in the language of colorblind assessment.

“More significantly, testing will continue to feed, not eradicate the real great civil rights issue of our time; the growing school to prison pipeline, which like a malignant cancer, continues to eat away at the fabric of many inner cities by robbing students of their future…..”

“Rather than acknowledging the potential dangers posed by the adoption of high stakes assessments, testing’s proponents press forward heralding such evaluations as the best hope for a level playing field. In the same way that segregation laws limited opportunity under Jim Crow, high stakes testing has become one of the primary instruments of exclusion in support of what legal scholar Michelle Alexander has termed the New Jim Crow…..

“We are saddled with an education system that transforms believers in fairness and equality into staunch critics of a system that reduces the hopes and dreams of future generations to a score.”

Categories Race, Segregation , Racial Isolation and Integration, Standardized Testing

George Joseph: Black Lives Matter in School

By dianeravitch
January 25, 2015 //
31

George Joseph is rapidly becoming one of our best education writers. In this article in The Nation, he shows how education “reform” is contributing to the “school to prison pipeline.” At best, he says, “no excuses” charter schools are preparing black students for low wage jobs.

He writes:

“As assistant professor of education Beth Sondel and education researcher Joseph L. Boselovic detailed in a Jacobin Magazine investigation, the “No Excuses” disciplinary approach, promoted by KIPP, the largest charter school chain in America, has transformed schools into totalizing carceral environments. Sondel and Boselovic write:

“There were, for example, specific expectations about where students should put their hands, which direction they should turn their heads, how they should stand, and how they should sit.… Silence seemed to be especially important in the hallways. At the sound of each bell at the middle school, students were expected to line up at “level zero” with their faces forward and hands behind their backs and, when given permission, step into the hallway and onto strips of black duct tape. There they waited for the command of an administrator: ‘Duke, you can move to your next class! Tulane, you can walk when you show me that you are ready!’ Students then marched until they reached the STOP sign on the floor, where their teacher checked them for hallway position before giving them permission to continue around the corner. Throughout this process, students moved counter-clockwise around the perimeter of the hallway (even if they were going to a classroom one door to the left).

“This extreme control over the movements of black students teaches them that they neither have, nor deserve control over their own bodies—a disturbing message to send in a country still shaped by the legacy of slavery. Furthermore, it perpetuates the normalization of surveillance and domination that law enforcement authorities inflict on black communities every day. Indeed, as the education writer Owen Davis points out, this “no excuses” disciplinary approach is a direct adaption by schools of the “broken windows” policing theory.”

Joseph relates that black students are beginning to protest the abuses that are inflicted on them by paternalistic authorities. That is an awakening that could change the narrative.

Categories Corporate Reformers, Education Industry, Education Reform, Race, Students
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