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Frank Adamson: Is Education a Choice or a Right?

By dianeravitch
May 9, 2017 //
43

Frank Adamson of Stanford University wrote a marvelous article that lays out the issues with enormous clarity and insight. To read the references and links, open the article.

The United Nations has identified “free, equitable, and quality primary and secondary education” by 2030 as a goal for sustainable development. This goal reaffirms the right to education guaranteed by countries in multiple U.N. declarations over the last half-century.[i] Although these treaties reflect a general consensus that everyone has a right to education, most countries do not actually deliver on this promise. To address the issue, different countries are organizing their education systems based on contrasting values. Some countries have placed the responsibility for choosing schools on families, while others have delivered the right to education at a system-level, with the latter approach correlating with better national outcomes.

Instead of countries delivering on their U.N. treaty commitments to the right to education, some have proposed that parental choice should drive the education “marketplace.” This approach varies across countries. In countries in the global south such as India and Uganda, families can “choose” to send their children to “low fee” private schools, or else their children will likely not receive an education. In countries in the global north like Sweden and the U.S., school “choice” usually happens when governments give parents the option to leave public schools. However, in both cases, governments place the responsibility on the family to figure out the best option for their child instead of fulfilling their child’s right to a free, equitable, high quality education.

Even more problematic is the reality that school “choice” does not guarantee a better education, for a variety of reasons. One issue is that, when a charter school or low-fee private school does provide a good education, everyone wants to go there and there are not enough spots for every student. And that’s the best-case scenario. The more common problem is that schools of choice do not provide higher quality education. In addition, they often exclude certain types of harder and/or more expensive-to-each students – those with disabilities, discipline histories, lower socio-economic status – as well as racial and ethnic minorities and second-language learners. These students may have lower scores on the tests used to judge schools or they may require extra attention from teachers, incentivizing these schools to choose their students, instead of students being able to choose their schools.[ii]

The results are not surprising because these schools compete with each other instead of providing education to everyone. School choice systems operate under a market-based rationale. In this marketplace, schools depend on competition to get students to enroll. This sounds like a great idea—the companies (schools) that produce the best product (education) have the most customers (students), while those that don’t will go out of business (closing the school). But market-based approaches require schools to seek a competitive advantage that leads to their exclusionary approaches. And when these schools exclude the more “expensive” students, these students end up in overcrowded and underperforming schools that lack basic services, or, even worse, without the opportunity for an education at all.

Countries seeking to provide a free, equitable, quality education aren’t trying to create competitive advantage within their systems. Instead, they fulfill their “education as a human right” imperative at the system level by investing in teachers and infrastructure. Their public investments produce some of the highest outcomes on international assessments, with smaller differences between students, meaning the systems function more equitably. These countries, including Finland, Singapore, Canada, Cuba, and others, have signed at least some of the U.N. treaties that declare the right to education, have opted for investing in their public education systems instead of pursuing market-based approaches that lead to inequity, and continually deliver high quality education to their citizens. Instead of forcing parents to choose schools, or even be chosen by schools, countries employing market-based approaches would do well to shift their focus towards ensuring the educational rights of their citizens on a proven pathway to better outcomes.

Categories Corporate Reformers, Education Industry, Education Reform, Equity, International, Justice, Privatization, School Choice

Steve Nelson on the Fallacies of the New York Times’ Story on School Choice: He Nails It!

By dianeravitch
May 8, 2017 //
28

Steve Nelson writes here about the erroneous assumptions behind the New York Times’ article on the “broken promise of school choice,” posted earlier today.

I was especially happy to see this article, because I sensed something awry about the Times’ article, and Nelson nails it.

By the Times’ definition, the schools that select the most accomplished students are the “best” schools, and the non-selective high schools are “bad” or “not good” schools.

These are false assumptions, he says. And he is right. If a school cherrypicks the best students with the highest scores, then the school will have a high rating based on its students’ test scores and academic accomplishments. Both public and charter schools have recognized this truism, but the media should have the sense not to buy it.

This is the same fallacy that lies behind the U.S. News & World Report rating of high schools: the best schools are those that weed out the weak students or cull the best ones. The best high school might be the one that takes all students and helps all of them reach their full potential.

Nelson writes:

The first assumption is that there are easily identified “good” schools and “bad” schools – or, more diplomatically, “less good schools.” Readers are asked to stipulate, for example, that Stuyvesant High School is a “good” school – a really “good” school – and that Herbert H. Lehman High School in the Bronx is a “bad” or “less good school.” The “good” schools are more selective, whether by entrance exam or grade point average and the “less good” school are less selective, often to the point of being a last resort for students who fail to gain entry into a “good” school.

The assumption is categorically false. Stuyvesant is assessed as “good” on the basis of the relatively conspicuous achievements of its students, particularly as measured by graduation rate and college placement. The further assumption is that Stuyvesant’s faculty and program were the critical variables in achieving those ends. Accepting those assumptions then leads to the final, implicit assumption resting under all this statistical clutter; that exposing more students to Stuyvesant’s faculty and program would bring similar results, thus helping solve the education reform problem.

Stuyvesant may or may not be a “good” school by other, more meaningful measures, but it is certainly not a “good” school because its carefully culled flock performs precisely as the culling process would predict. Many kids who get into Stuyvesant might do quite well if they didn’t go to the school at all.

At the other end of this delusional continuum, Herbert H. Lehman is considered a significantly “less good” school because its graduation rate is about half of Stuyvesant’s rate and its graduates seldom matriculate at highly selective colleges. Herbert H. Lehman may or may not be a “less good” school by other, more meaningful measures, but it is certainly not a “less good” school because its very different culled flock performs precisely as the culling process would predict. I propose that you might take all of Stuyvesant’s faculty members and switch them with Lehman’s faculty members, and the results would not be substantially different.

This meaningless game plays out in the private school world and in higher education too. Highly selective schools attract students who are most likely to succeed, based on factors from privilege to preparation, and the schools are then considered fabulous by virtue of the glittering credentials of the students they selected. Not a dollop of meaning in that self-fulfilling prophecy of pretense.

It doesn’t mean that Choate and Exeter or Harvard and Stanford are lousy. It merely means that they are not “good” just because they admit only the most successful students. As many honest observers note, even within the lofty confines of the most selective colleges, undergraduate classes at Yale are not necessary better than, or even as good as, undergraduate courses at SUNY Binghamton…

When viewed through this clearer lens, the article, and the process, is a farce of Shakespearian proportions. Young children are sifted through a bureaucratic sorter, spilling out in relatively unchanging proportions to the “good” schools and “less good” schools depending on their predictors of success. This process, however earnestly designed or studiously analyzed, simply perpetuates the glowing or dim reputations of the schools where the children are dropped.

This in essence is the mirage of school choice in all its fraudulent glory. By rigging the system, by cruel attrition, by statistical sleight of hand, the choice movement is simply sifting kids through a similar sorter, leaving the false impression that the plutocrat-funded, heavily-hyped charter schools are “good,” and the increasingly deprived district schools are “less good.”

Instead of sifting and sorting America’s least advantaged children through these arcane systems, we should be investing in early childhood experiences, ameliorating poverty, facing racism honestly, and providing generous support to the least privileged among us.

Categories Hoax, New York City, School Choice

The Broken Promise of Choice in New York City

By dianeravitch
May 8, 2017 //
28

The New York Times published a lengthy article about New York City’s complicated and byzantine high school admissions process, which was launched 14 years ago to give choice to every student. With few (if any) exceptions, neighborhood high schools were a thing of the past. Students went to school fairs and scanned a lengthy catalogue to review the offerings of hundreds of high schools across the city. Zip code mattered not at all. Some schools had specific entry requirements, such as a difficult entrance examination or a talent audition. Most were open admissions. Now, a generation later, the results are in:

Under a system created during Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg’s administration, eighth graders can apply anywhere in the city, in theory unshackling themselves from failing, segregated neighborhood schools. Students select up to 12 schools and get matched to one by a special algorithm. This process was part of a package of Bloomberg-era reforms intended to improve education in the city and diminish entrenched inequities.

There is no doubt that the changes yielded meaningful improvements. The high school graduation rate is up more than 20 points since 2005, as the administration of Mayor Bill de Blasio has built on Mr. Bloomberg’s gains. The graduation gap between white and black or Hispanic students, while still significant and troubling, has narrowed.

But school choice has not delivered on a central promise: to give every student a real chance to attend a good school.

Fourteen years into the system, black and Hispanic students are just as isolated in segregated high schools as they are in elementary schools — a situation that school choice was supposed to ease.

The average black or Hispanic student attends an elementary school where 80% of his or her classmates are black or Hispanic.

The average black or Hispanic students attends a high school where 79% of his or her classmates are black or Hispanic.

It wasn’t supposed to be this way.

Within the system, there is a hierarchy of schools, each with different admissions requirements — a one-day high-stakes test, auditions, open houses. And getting into the best schools, where almost all students graduate and are ready to attend college, often requires top scores on the state’s annual math and English tests and a high grade point average.

Those admitted to these most successful schools remain disproportionately middle class and white or Asian, according to an in-depth analysis of acceptance data and graduation rates conducted for The New York Times by Measure of America, an arm of the Social Science Research Council. At the same time, low-income black or Hispanic children like the ones at Pelham Gardens are routinely shunted into schools with graduation rates 20 or more percentage points lower.

While top middle schools in a handful of districts groom children for competitive high schools that send graduates to the Ivy League, most middle schools, especially in the Bronx, funnel children to high schools that do not prepare them for college.

The roots of these divisions are tangled and complex. Students in competitive middle schools and gifted programs carry advantages into the application season, with better academic preparation and stronger test scores. Living in certain areas still comes with access to sought-after schools. And children across the city compete directly against one another regardless of their circumstances, without controls for factors like socioeconomic status.

Ultimately, there just are not enough good schools to go around. And so it is a system in which some children win and others lose because of factors beyond their control — like where they live and how much money their families have.

The New York City public schools are highly segregated. The demographics are challenging. According to a report from The Century Foundation, the city school system is predominantly black and Hispanic (and has been since 1966, when whites became a minority): As of 2015, citywide student demographics2 were 27.1 percent black, 15.5 percent Asian, 40.5 percent Hispanic, 14.8 percent white, and 2.1 percent identified as “other.” Nearly 77 percent of students were classified as living in poverty, while 12.5 percent were identified as English language learners, and 18.7 percent as students with disabilities. With a total enrollment of 1.1 million students, of whom only 14.8% are white, it is hard to see racial balance, except in isolated instances, because the opportunities are limited.

The choice system is difficult to maneuver, even with the help of a guidance counselor. Eighty thousand students apply to 439 schools, broken up into over 775 programs. When Michael Bloomberg took office as mayor, the city had 110 high schools, most of them enrolling thousands of students. Most students went to their zoned high schools. Bloomberg eliminated zoned high schools and embraced small high schools, with the support of the Gates Foundation.

Rare is a 13-year-old equipped to handle the selection process alone.

The process can become like a second job for some parents as they arm themselves with folders, spreadsheets and consultants who earn hundreds of dollars an hour to guide them. But most families in the public school system have neither the flexibility nor the resources to match that arsenal….

The citywide graduation rate for all kinds of high schools is 72.6 percent, according to the Education Department. But that average masks sharp variations between schools based on their admissions methods. When Measure of America analyzed the rate for each method, it found that selectivity and graduation rates declined essentially in lock step, and that as graduation rates fell, the students were more likely to be poor and black or Hispanic…

Kristen Lewis, one of the directors of Measure of America, said the data revealed, in essence, two separate public school systems operating in the city. There are some great options for the families best equipped to navigate the application process. But there are not enough good choices for everyone, so every year thousands of children, including some very good students, end up in mediocre high schools, or worse…

An analysis by the Center for New York City Affairs at the New School found that half of all students who got top scores on state tests came from just 45 middle schools out of more than 500. And 60 percent of students who went to specialized high schools came from those same 45 schools. None of those middle schools are in the Bronx.

The Times’ article focused on a middle school in the Bronx called Pelham Gardens. About 95 percent of the middle school’s students are black or Hispanic, many of them the children of Jamaican immigrants or immigrants themselves. Most of them come from poor families…

Last year, 146 seventh graders at Pelham Gardens took the state tests. On the English exam, 29 passed, which requires a score of at least 3 out of 4. Fifteen did that well in math. Only seven scored at least a 3 on both tests.

This means that a majority of the children had no real chance of getting into the most selective schools, like Manhattan/Hunter Science High School or Townsend Harris High School in Queens, where students must have a 3 or higher on the tests. The high school directory lists 29 programs in the city that did not accept anyone with a score lower than 3 on the math exam.

In a system with 1.1 million students, change is difficult. School segregation tends, inevitably, to mirror housing segregation. Housing segregation tends to reflect family income ad deliberate government policy decisions made decades ago when locating large housing projects. The choice plan assumed that students would be freed form the constraints of their zip code and that choice would promote desegregation. As the article shows, it has not.

Categories New York City, School Choice, Students

Adam Bessie and EriK Thurman: A Graphic Essay on School Choice, DeVos, and Segregation

By dianeravitch
May 8, 2017 //
4

Adam Bessie (writer) and Erik Thurman (artist) have created a graphic essay that explains in a series of drawings the consequences of school choice and how it affected students with disabilities in New Orleans. Their graphic essay is especially pertinent at a time when the U.S. Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos is an evangelist for school choice and indifferent to the consequences.

I recommend that you see it. It illustrates the adage that a picture is worth 1,000 words.

Categories Accountability, Betsy DeVos, Charter Schools, New Orleans, Privatization, School Choice, Special Education

The Great Retreat Now Begins: Choice is No Longer About “Saving Poor Children from Failing Schools”

By dianeravitch
May 6, 2017 //
18

Do you remember back in the old days when the privatization movement began that choice was going to “save poor children from failing schools”?

Well, that slogan is now obsolete. Now the advocates say that the purpose of choice is choice, regardless of results.

That subtle shift has happened because of the many recent studies and evaluations showing that charters and vouchers do not necessarily get better results, and that they may even have a negative effect, as we learned from recent evaluations of voucher programs in D.C., Louisiana, Indiana, and Ohio.

Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos sounded the bugle call for retreat after learning of the poor results of the latest evaluation of the D.C. voucher program, funded by the U.S. Department of Education.

In the past, she had said that choice would “save poor kids from failing schools.” Now, however, she says, “When school choice policies are fully implemented, there should not be differences in achievement among the various types of schools.” Parents are satisfied, and that is good enough for her, even if the children’s test scores are falling. If you parse this sentence, what she is saying is that when everyone chooses, none of the schools will be better than any others. They will all get the same results, even if they are dismal. The purpose of choice is choice.

Results don’t matter. Only parent satisfaction matters. If poor kids are moved from a “failing public school” to a “failing charter school” or “failing religious school,” that’s fine. An opinion piece in a D.C. paper suggested that we should not pay attention to those studies, because critics of school choice twist their findings anyway, especially if their findings are negative.

Categories Accountability, Betsy DeVos, Charter Schools, Education Industry, Privatization, School Choice, Testing, Vouchers

Carol Burris: Three Problems with School Choice That Advocates Won’t Talk About

By dianeravitch
May 4, 2017 //
19

Carol Burris, executive director of the Network for Public Education, wrote an analysis of the major problems with school choice that advocates refuse to address.

She begins by writing that privatized school choice directly threatens public education:

Privatized school choice is the public financing of private alternatives to public schools. Examples include charters run by corporate boards, private schools funded by vouchers, online learning charters and publicly subsidized home schooling. Then there are the disguised voucher plans such as Arizona’s Empowerment Scholarship Accounts, or ESAs, which give taxpayer money on debit cards to parents with little oversight as to how it is spent.

Privatized school choice, in its various forms, has been rapidly gaining ground in many of our states. The thinly veiled agenda of privatized choice is the destruction of public schools, which Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos and her allies refer to as “government schools.”

What the privatizers never talk about is that every dollar that goes to school choice is taken away from public schools. To adjust for the loss of revenue, public schools have to lay off teachers and close down programs. So the great majority of students are injured so a few can attend a charter or use a voucher.

Voucher programs almost always begin small–targeted at poor children, or children with disabilities, or foster children, or military children–but then expand to apply to all students. Sometimes the privatizers admit that they are pursuing a camel’s nose-under-the-tent strategy, but usually they claim to want “only this small program.”

Unaccountable, unsupervised privately-managed schools waste taxpayers’ dollars with bloated administrative salaries and overhead. In these conditions, without public oversight, fraud and corruption go undetected, and when a whistleblower complains, we learn that hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars were squandered or stolen.

She writes:

When we turn our backs on our public schools, we turn our backs on our most profound American values. We are not embracing conservatism; we are embracing consumerism. It is as simple and sad as that.

I would put it somewhat differently. I would say that the privatizers’ goal is not only to destroy public education but to encourage us to think as consumers, not as citizens. As citizens, we support public services that are for everyone, even if we don’t use those services. Thus, childless people pay taxes for public schools, even though they don’t use them, as do people whose children are grown. But consumers take care of themselves only. In the future, if this movement for privatization prevails, taxpayers may well reject bond issues because they don’t want to pay taxes for private choices. If we think only of ourselves, we lose the sense of civic responsibility that a democracy requires in order to protect and serve the interests of all its citizens.

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Citizenship, Democracy, Deregulation, Fraud, Privatization, School Choice

Jeannie Kaplan: Denver’s Corporate Reformers Try to Distance Themselves from DeVos

By dianeravitch
May 4, 2017 //
28

Jeannie Kaplan watches with amusement as the corporate reform-led Denver School Board tries to distance themselves from Betsy DeVos.

She says, “They can run, but they can’t hide.”

You see, Denver Board of Education and superintendent, once the drip of privatization as characterized particularly by choice and charters starts, it is very difficult, if not impossible, to stop. What starts as a drip quickly becomes a flood that is almost impossible to control. You may truly not believe in vouchers, but you have fostered an atmosphere in Denver where vouchers could be the logical outcome of Choice and Charters, intended or not. And while DFER, too, tried to separate itself from parts of the Trump/DeVos agenda, it simultaneously sent out a notice congratulating “Betsy DeVos on her appointment as Secretary of Education, and we applaud Mrs. DeVos’s commitment to growing the number of high-quality public charter schools.” Further, Betsy DeVos has given money to DFER which in turn has given lots of money to DPS campaigns including the Committee for Denver’s Kids cited below. You can’t always have it both ways, and even the best public relations departments cannot always convince you of their stories.

This is a problems for all the Democrats who have cheered on “school choice,” but thought they could draw the line at vouchers. Like Senator Michael Bennett of Colorado, who is a major supporter of charters. Like Governor Andrew Cuomo of New York, who wants to be President and has been a major supporter of charters. Like California Governor Jerry Brown, who never saw a charter he didn’t like. Like Senator Cory Booker of New Jersey, who voted against DeVos, but advocates both charters and vouchers.

Once you jump on board the school choice train, it is hard to explain why you only meant charters, not vouchers.

Categories Betsy DeVos, Charter Schools, Corporate Reform, Democrats for Education Reform, Denver, Education Reform, School Choice, Vouchers

Can Schools Cure Poverty?

By dianeravitch
May 4, 2017 //
29

Jennifer Berkshire posted this interview with economist Harvey Kantor in response to a column in the New York Times by David Leonhardt suggesting that schools were the best way to address poverty.

Leonhardt wrote that education “is the most powerful force for accelerating economic growth, reducing poverty and lifting middle-class living standards.” He then goes on to argue that vouchers don’t work, but charters do. This runs contrary to Roland Fryer and Will Dobbie’s study of charters in Texas, where they found that attendance in charter schools had no effect on future earnings.

What Kantor has to say is crucial in this discussion.

Kantor says what I have come to believe is bedrock truth. Poverty should be addressed by reducing poverty. No matter how high the standards, no matter how many tests, no matter how swell the curriculum is, those are not cures for homelessness, joblessness, and lack of access to decent medical care. This realization explains why I changed my mind about the best way to reform schools. It is not by turning schools over to the free market but by seeing them as part of a web of social supports for families and children.

Here is part of a fascinating discussion:

One of the consequences of making education so central to social policy has been that we’ve ended up taking the pressure off of the state for the kinds of policies that would be more effective at addressing poverty and economic inequality. Instead we’re asking education to do things it can’t possibly do. The result has been increasing support for the kinds of market-oriented policies that make inequality worse.

If we really want to address issues of inequality and economic insecurity, there are a lot of other policies that we have to pursue besides or at least in addition to education policies, and that part of the debate has been totally lost. Raising the minimum wage, or providing a guaranteed income, which the last time we talked seriously about that was in the late 1960’s, increasing workers’ bargaining power, making tax policies more progressive—things like that are going to be much more effective at addressing inequality and economic security than education policies. That argument is often taken to mean, *schools can’t do anything unless we address poverty first.* But that’s not what we were trying to say.

Berkshire: But isn’t part of the attraction of today’s education reform movement, that it holds out the tantalizing possibility that we can correct the effects of poverty without having to do anything about, well, poverty?

Kantor: That’s right. What’s interesting about our our contemporary period is that we’re now saying schools can respond to problems of achievement and we don’t need to address any of these larger structural issues. When you think about these larger questions—what causes economic inequality? What causes economic insecurity? How are resources distributed? Who has access to what?—they’ve been put off to the side. We’re not doing anything to address these questions at all.

Please read the entire discussion. It is very important in understanding the attack on schools and the fruitlessness of corporate reform, which ignores the causes of poor student achievement.

It will help you understand why billionaires and right-wingers love corporate reform. It enables policymakers to forget about the necessity of social policy that affects the conditions in which many families live.

Categories Accountability, Betsy DeVos, Billionaires, Charter Schools, Corporate Reformers, Education Industry, Poverty, Privatization, School Choice, Vouchers

Peter Greene: Is Betsy DeVos Misunderstood?

By dianeravitch
May 3, 2017 //
19

Peter Greene tries to determine whether Betsy DeVos is wrongly portrayed by the media and her critics.

She’s no dummy, he says, but she does have the misfortune of saying inappropriate things at inappropriate times.

True, she is often a punch line for late-night TV comics.

Her problem is that she knows so little about American education, almost nothing about public education, and she has only one idea: school choice. Is it her fault that she is totally out of touch?

“DeVos…holds up some Florida choicey programs as a model of excellence, which if nothing else shows once again that DeVos has not done her homework. But her praise of the Miami-Dade system shows, again, where her heart is. She does not praise it for providing excellent education; she praises it for providing lots of choice. This is the greatest danger we face from Choice True Believers– given the options of a no-choice system that provides a great education for every child, and a super-choicey system that delivers lousy educational results, they would choose the latter because when it comes right down to it, they value choice more than they value education.

“DeVos calls public schools the backbone of the system, which is, I suppose, better than calling them the spleen, but not as good as recognizing that they are the education system, and modern choice is just a flock of leeches.

“Then DeVos throws in a line straight out of 2010– “What we will not do, however, is accept the status quo”– which is a hilarious line because the status quo is, of course, a bunch of public schools being undercut and gutted, strapped to bad standards with the bungee cords of toxic testing, while charter- and voucher-privatizers hold positions of high office that they use to further attack and dismantle public education so that they can sell off the parts. The more typical reformster stance is to rail against schools that haven’t existed for decades, but since DeVos has no real frame of reference for public schools, she can cast back even further. DeVos throws out the old saw about public education being stuck in the 19th century which only makes sense if you’re someone who has spent no real time in a public school.

“Technology! she declares, and you might think that this is, again, because she hasn’t been in public schools to see that we actually have them new-fangled computer machines, but it turns out that she has particular tech in mind:

“Today, it’s possible for every student to learn at their own pace, with responsive technologies advancing them through topics they’ve already mastered and delving deeper into areas where they’re struggling.

“So, competency based education, or personalized learning, or computerized training modules for the underclass, or whatever we’re calling it this week.

“She also thinks it’s foolish to assign schools based on where you live, which is another way of saying that’s it’s foolish to let a community organize, maintain and run its own schools. Having previously failed metaphorical framing by suggesting that education should be a Uber, DeVos now compares schools to banks and video rental stores, neither of which need bricks and mortars any more, and both of which are totally like public education. Also, a bicycle, because a vest has no sleeves.

“DeVos frames these ideas as necessary because (again harkening back to the 2010 reformster playbook) we are falling behind our economic competitors in the world, because having students who score better on standardized tests would totally make up for having someone in the White House who keeps discovering that governmenty things are hard.”

But, but, but, it’s all about the kids! Of course!

“As I said– any shred of sympathy I might have felt for DeVos is pretty much shredded when she starts talking. Is she occasionally criticized unfairly? Yes, I think she is. But is she misunderstood, with her policy goals unfairly maligned and misrepresented? I think not. We have a person in charge of our nation’s public education system who does not value that system and would happily preside over its destruction, a dismantling she has worked for her entire adult life and never disavowed.”

Categories Betsy DeVos, Privatization, School Choice

Mother Jones: DeVos’ Favorite “Reform” Gets Horrible Grades

By dianeravitch
May 2, 2017 //
18

Edwin Rios of Mother Jones writes here about the dreadful evaluations on Betsy DeVos’ favorite form of school choice: Vouchers.

Researchers used to find that students who received vouchers saw little or no difference in their test scores.

Now a new body of research is reporting that students (who enter the program with low scores) actually lose ground when they transfer to a voucher school.

We had seen these discouraging reports before about Louisiana, Indiana, and Ohio.

Now the latest study from D.C. reaches the same conclusion. Students are negatively affected by switching from a public school to a voucher school.

The logic seems clear. The public school has experienced and credentialed teachers. Many voucher schools do not.

School choice advocates (aka reformers) used to claim that they were “saving poor kids from failing schools.”

DeVos, however, told the Washington Post that when the choice movement is fully implemented, all three sectors (public, charter, and voucher) will have the same results. “When school choice policies are fully implemented,” she said, “there should be no differences in achievement among the various types of schools.”

In other words, the children who are now low-performing will continue to be low-performing, and all three sectors will have the same outcomes they have now.

Remind me of the reason for school choice?

Categories Betsy DeVos, Charter Schools, District of Columbia, Failure, School Choice, Vouchers
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