Archives for category: School Choice

Arthur Camins, scientist and specialist in innovation, kicks off our celebration of April Fools Day with his timely warning not to be fooled by Trump and DeVos: in a democratic society, public schools are better than private schools. They are the only path to a better education for all. We need them. We do not need to resurrect the segregation that existed before the Brown decision. We have not achieved its democratic goals, but we should not abandon them.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/58deb703e4b03c2b30f6a629

He writes:

“It’s April Fools Day, which reminds me: Donald Trump and Betsy DeVos want us to think that private schools are better, not just for rich folks like them, but for everyone else too– Just like with Paul Ryan and health care. Don’t be fooled. It is a ruse. Public is better!

“Growing up, I knew the meaning of private places. Private places were about gates, both physical and de facto. Private meant, “Keep out!” Private schools were not for me, but for someone else. Private clubs were for someone else. Private roads were for someone else. I understood that the people who were saying, “Stay on your side of the gate,” were usually rich and Christian, and always White. That meant not me as a Jew. I knew for certain that it also meant, not for Blacks and not for poor folks. Sometimes, private meant no women. The message was always clear: “We do not want you around us!”

“As a nation, we need to be better than that.

“Make no mistake. The folks inside the gates of privilege aim to stay there. However, to do so they need the rest of us to believe three things: First, that they have privileges because they deserve them and the rest of us do not; Second, that there is a chance, however slim, that a few of us just might get inside and become privileged too; Third, having just a few folks inside the gates and the rest of us outside is the way things are and always will be.

“Unfortunately, in the minds of some of those standing outside the gates looking in, private implies, “That’s Better than what I have. I want that too.” Growing up, I also knew about some outside folks who managed to slip inside the gate. I grew to despise them because once inside they chose to identify with their former gatekeepers. They did not join struggles to remove gates or to make things better for everyone….

“If we want a country in which the greatest good for the greatest number of people is a high priority, public is better. I think most folks think so too. That’s why we have public schools, roads and bridges, police, firefighters, parks, Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid just to name a few public services. These are common-good activities that we cannot afford as individuals, so we share the costs. Not everyone goes to school, but we all benefit from an educated citizenry. Not everyone drives, but without good road and bridges, we would all suffer. Some of us are not old and in need of extra medical care, but we might be someday. Cost sharing brings broad access. It makes economic sense. For most of us, it is also a moral responsibility.”

Categories Corporate Reform, Democracy, Education Reform, Hoax, Hypocrisy, School Choice, Supporting public schools, Trump

Bruce Baker: Why #PublicGoodsMatter

By dianeravitch

March 31, 2017 //

Bruce Baker employs a series of tweets to demonstrate the fallacy of “the money follows the child.” Public money is collected for the public good. Public money supports services and institutions for future generations, not just for those now using them. The oft-heard demand that “the money follows the child” is fallacious. It is used to privatize institutions created for all.

https://schoolfinance101.wordpress.com/2017/03/28/public-goods-the-money-belongs-to-the-child-fallacy-in-tweets/

Categories Charter Schools, Democracy, Education Industry, For-Profit, Privatization, School Choice, Supporting public schools, Vouchers

Peter Greene Reviews Performance of DeVos as “Mom with an Axe”

By dianeravitch

March 30, 2017 //

Peter Greene watched the first full performance of Betsy DeVos playing the role of Secretary of Education and characterizes her “mom with an axe.”

The first thing he notices is the DeVos Look, which he calls “church lady smirk….like it amuses her to imagine that all those Lessers are just having fits that she is this amazing. It is the look for which ‘supercilious’ was coined, and it’s not a good look on anyone, let alone a starched white heiress. Her Trump-approved minder should really help her with that.”

She pushes the idea that while other people believe in institutions and buildings, she believes in children! Got that, you building-huggers? Anyone who disagrees with her is promoting adult concerns, while she on the other hand, cares for children, in her selfless way. If only everyone chooses, without any regulation or oversight, everything will turn out for the best. It worked for her.

It won’t do to fix the schools we have, because Obama tried, he failed, and there’s no point throwing money at them. Ah, says Peter, strange to hear from a woman who throws millions at the schools and causes she does like.

When she and Whitehurst get to the question and answer, he asks some normal questions like, how do you measure the success of your policy of full frontal choice, and she coyly responds that she is not “a numbers person.” As long as parents have many choices, and they are free to choose, things will go swimmingly. Whitehurst asks, but what if academic outcomes get worse under your plan, and she answers, things are so terrible now that they can’t get worse.

Now, questions from the audience. Won’t unfettered choice promote segregation? Answer, of course not. Question, what if parents make bad choices, doesn’t the government have a role to protect them? Answer, parents don’t make bad choices. The free market always works. If parents choose a school, it must be good.

“This is another DeVosian mystery– the implication that public schools are operated by a bunch of lying liars, but charter and private school operators are somehow more virtuous? Or is the belief here that the Free Market somehow forces people to be honest or else they’ll be deselected. Does she believe that people won’t choose you if you’re a big fat liar, because I’m pretty sure DeVos is serving at the pleasure of the living embodiment, the walking proof that lying can actually be a great way to succeed in the Free Market.”

Performance over, curtain falls.

Something tells me this line of thought–if that’s what it is–will be repeated again and again, with an occasional new anecdote about a student who was saved by a voucher or whose life was blighted by a terrible public school.

As the Warner Brothers cartoon series “Looney Tunes” used to say at the end, “That’s all there is, folks.” Was that Daffy Duck or Porky Pig or Bugs Bunny?

Categories Betsy DeVos, School Choice

DeVos Thinks She is Promoting the “Common Good” by Attacking Public Schools

By dianeravitch

March 30, 2017 //

I am writing this post for the journalists who cover education. Please fact-check every word that DeVos says. She literally doesn’t know what she is talking about.

This is the New York Times’ report on Betsy DeVos‘ press conference at Brookings.

She claims that the Bush-Obama policies of test-and-punish failed because throwing money at the problem doesn’t work. Any teacher could have told you that NCLB and Race to the Top were failures, not because they threw money at the problems, but because they spent money on failed strategies of high-stakes testing, evaluating teachers by test scores, closing schools, and opening charters.

She is so ill-informed that she would be well advised never to speak in public.

Her comparison of selecting a public school to hailing a taxi is offensive: schooling is a right guaranteed in state constitutions, taking a cab or car service is a consumer choice. She was echoing her mentor Jeb Bush, who compared choosing a school to buying a carton of milk, when he addressed the GOP convention in 2012.

As you will see if you read the account in the story, she has the unmitigated gall to say that her crusade for consumer choice in education–whether charters, vouchers, homeschooling, cyberschooling, whatever–serves the “common good.” What an outrage! Providing a high-quality public school,in every zip code serves the common good. Tossing kids to the vagaries of the free market subverts the common good. Anyone who has been reading this blog for any period of time has learned about the entrepreneurs who open charter schools to make money, about the sham real estate deals, about the voucher schools that teach science from the Bible, about the heightened segregation that always accompanies school choice. Wherever George Wallace and his fellow defenders of racial segregation are, they are rooting for DeVos.

Furthermore, she is utterly ignorant of the large body of research showing that charters do not get better results than public schools, voucher schools get worse results, and cybercharters get abysmal results.

Then she makes a crack about how America’s scores on international couldn’t get worse. She is wrong, and Grover Whitehurst should have told her so. Our scores on the international tests have never been high. Over the past Hal century, we have usually scored in the middle of the pack. Yes, our scores could get much worse. We could follow the Swedish free-market model and see our scores tumble.

Grrr. It is frustrating to see this kind of ignorance expressed by the Secretary of Education, although Arne Duncan should have lowered our expectations.

Please read “Reign of Error” and learn that test scores are the highest ever for whites, blacks, Hispanics, and Asians (although they went flat from 2013-2015, probably in response to the disruptions caused by Common Core); graduation rates are the highest ever; dropout rates are the lowest ever. When our students took the first international test in 1964, we came in last in one grade, and next to last in the other. But in the years since, our economy has surpassed all the other nations with higher scores. The test scores of 15-year-olds do not predict the future of the nation.

Categories Accountability, Betsy DeVos, Charter Schools, Common Core, Corporate Reform, Duncan, Arne, Education Industry, Education Reform, Privatization, School Choice, Teacher Evaluations, Vouchers

Betsy DeVos Suck-Up Watch

By dianeravitch

March 30, 2017 //

The website Chalkbeat posted an article about the sunny side of Secretary DeVos.

http://www.chalkbeat.org/posts/us/2017/03/28/rave-reviews-here-are-the-states-schools-and-programs-that-have-gotten-betsy-devoss-seal-of-approval/

She likes really good programs!

Like Florida’s tax credit programs for vouchers! (Which sucks tax dollars away from public schools)

Like Milwaukee’s school choice programs! (Which have produced no positive results for students in 26 years)

Like Nevada’s Achievement School District (which does not yet exist and is modeled on Tennessee’s failed Achievement School District; unmentioned: most of Nevada’s charters are failing schools by the state’s metrics–Nevada needs an Achievement School District for failing charters)

She is cheerleader-in-chief for school choice. Given her deep-seated antagonism for the democratically-controlled community public schools that 90% of our nation’s children attend, we should expect a change of heart.

By we should expect unsentimental, critical reporting.

Categories Betsy DeVos, Charter Schools, Education Reform, Media, School Choice, Vouchers

Brookings Sullies Its Reputation By Aligning with DeVos Agenda for Privatization

By dianeravitch

March 29, 2017 //

The Brookings Institution used to be referred to as a liberal think tank. In reality, it was a nonpartisan think tank that hired former high-level officials from both Democratic and Republican administrations and produced valuable studies and reports. As I was ending my time in the first Bush administration in late 1992, the president of Brookings came to my office at the US Department of Education and invited me to accept the Brown Chair in Education Policy. Since I did not want to live permanently in DC, I declined his offer but agreed to be a Senior Fellow. I was in residence at Brookings until 1995, wrote a book on national standards, then returned to Brooklyn. I continued to be a Non-Resident Senior Fellow until 2012, when I was summarily fired from my unpaid position by Grover Whitehurst, who joined Brookings as chair of the Brown Policy program after serving as director of education research in the George W. Bush administration. Perhaps it was happenstance, but the email from Whitehurst came a few hours after the online release of my blistering critique of Mitt Romney, whom Whitehurst was advising. Whitehurst fired me because, he said, I was “inactive.”

Whitehurst served for a few years as head of the Brown Center but was quietly removed as the Chair. Now, he uses Brookings and its prestige to promote the Republican agenda of privatization.

Here is the latest, in which Whitehurst plugs charters because “We do not know how to create or sustain uniformly great neighborhood schools.” He should have added that “We also don’t know how to create or sustain uniformly great charter schools.” There is no existence proof, even though charters choose their students and exclude students with serious disabilities and ELLs and push out behavior problems. Residents of Clark County, Nevada, may be surprised to see that he raised their grade, since most charters in Nevada are failing schools, concentrated in Clark County, and the funding for the voucher program (which he hails) has been halted by state courts. Columbus, Ohio, got good marks even though the scandal-ridden charters in Ohio have become a bad joke.

To make sure that everyone noticed that Brookings was linking its reputation to the most controversial, least qualified member of the Trump cabinet, DeVos was invited to speak at the press conference on the only subject she knows: the glories of school choice.

The press release reads:

School Choice Increasing Nationally; Secretary DeVos to Speak at Release of Brookings’ Annual School Choice Rankings
Proportion of large school districts allowing choice has nearly doubled since 2000; Denver wins top spot for large districts for second year in a row

Rankings from Brookings’ 2016 Education Choice and Competition Index (ECCI)—an annual ranking of school choice in the nation’s 100 largest school districts—will be unveiled today at a Brookings event featuring keynote remarks by U.S. Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos. You can watch a livestream of the Secretary’s remarks at 9:30 AM EDT.

In a summary of the results (PDF), ECCI’s author and Brookings Senior Fellow Grover J. “Russ” Whitehurst highlights the growth of choice across the nation’s school districts according to trends tracked by ECCI, many of which can be observed since 2000. Whitehurst notes that the proportion of large school districts allowing choice has nearly doubled over the past 16 years. That coincides with other measures of the growth of school choice, including that the number of large districts for which charter school enrollment is at least 30 percent of total public enrollment has increased from one to ten.

Whitehurst writes: “There is no question empirically that opportunities for parents to choose among traditional public schools for their children, to choose a charter school, and to receive a financial subsidy to attend a private school have grown leaps and bounds in the last 15-20 years. The traditional school district model is no longer the monopoly it used to be.”

The ECCI is not designed to answer causal questions about what system or education delivery mechanism works best, but to reveal what’s happening on the ground by providing a snapshot of choice and competition in each district and allowing for comparisons of specific policies and practices across districts. The rankings are based on objective scoring of 13 categories of education policy and practice. School choice options considered by the rankings include: the opportunity of choosing any traditional public school in a district (open enrollment), charter schools, magnet schools, virtual schools, and affordable private schools.

Whitehurst notes that critics of school choice often assert that the alternative to choice is to assure that every public school is of high quality, but that “universal access to a great neighborhood school is a pipedream.”

“We do not know how to create or sustain uniformly great neighborhood schools. There is no existing proof that we do, and there is strong empirical evidence that the performance of schools varies substantially everywhere there are large numbers of schools to compare…School choice is one way of addressing the reality of the normal curve of school performance by giving parents the opportunity of moving their children out of schools that are in the lower tail of the distribution.”

Students in the nation’s 100+ largest school districts are overwhelmingly (91 percent) in public schools, with 56 percent of the ECCI districts allowing choice within the traditional public schools. According to Whitehurst, “advocates of school choice should take note of the reality that for the foreseeable future the greatest opportunities for the expansion of choice are in the public school sector through furthering the reach of open enrollment.”

Denver, which received the highest score on this year’s ECCI, and the Recovery District serving New Orleans are the only two districts in the ECCI that receive grades of A on school choice. Both are characterized by: open enrollment and a centralized assignment process requiring a single application from parents for all public schools; a good mix and utilization by parents of alternatives to traditional public schools; rich information to parents to support school choice, including a school assignment website that allows parents to make side-by-side comparisons of schools; funding that follows students to the school in which they enroll; a fair and efficient formula for matching school assignments for students to the expressed preferences of their parents; and provisions for transportation of students to schools of choice outside their neighborhoods.

Notably, Camden City School District in New Jersey and Clark County School District in Nevada saw substantive enough changes to move them from receiving an F in the previous year to a B- and C-, respectively. Clark County’s increase in score was largely due to Nevada’s Educational Choice Scholarship program, which was enacted and launched in 2015. Camden, NJ experienced a dramatic increase in score and grade on the 2016 ECCI by virtue of rolling out a new process for school search, application, and assignment.

New to the top 10 list this year are Columbus, Ohio, and Chicago, while Baltimore and Tucson dropped off. Chicago showed a score increase due to its decision to include data on student growth among the information on school performance provided to parents on its website. The score for Columbus increased, in part, because the district documented a student-based funding formula for schools.

Almost one-quarter, or 26 of the 112 school districts scored on the 2016 ECCI, received a grade of F, meaning that families have very little in the way of school choice other than what they can exercise by choosing to live within the geographical assignment zone of their preferred public school. Or, if they do provide school choice, the process is hidden from parents.

You can learn more about the 2016 ECCI rankings by exploring an interactive breakdown of results or reading a report of topline takeaways (PDF).

CONTACT
Delaney Parrish
Assistant Director of Communications, Economic Studies
202-797-2969 | DRParrish@brookings.edu | @DParrish
BROOKINGS
1775 Massachusetts Avenue NW
Washington, DC 20036

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

Poll: Betsy DeVos is the Most Unpopular Member of Trump’s Unpopular Cabinet

By dianeravitch

March 26, 2017 //

Usually a new presidency has a honeymoon period, a time of good feeling and high poll numbers. As they battle for their policies and legislation, their poll numbers change, for better or worse.

Newsweek reports that Trump and his cabinet have very low approval ratings.

The cabinet member with the lowest approval rating is Betsy DeVos at 34.5%. She is highly divisive because her agenda is unpopular.

Parents across the nation understand that DeVos is an enemy of public schools. She doesn’t understand the purpose of community schools as the center of a community. Nearly two-thirds of the public reject her agenda.

That’s good news. It means in state after state, we can mobilize, organize, protest, and defeat her.

Categories Betsy DeVos, Charter Schools, Opinion Polling, Religion, School Choice, Separation of church and state, Vouchers

Jeff Bryant: The Big Lie Behind Trump’s Budget Proposals for Education

By dianeravitch

March 26, 2017 //

Jeff Bryant spells out the Big Lie embedded in Trump’s budget proposal for education. He plans to cut programs that directly aid poor kids while bolstering charters and vouchers, pretending they are equivalent. They are not. Yet much of the mainstream media has fallen for the Trump-DeVos bait-and-switch.

“Public school supporters are angry at President Trump’s budget proposal, which plans to cut funding to the Department of Education by 13 percent – taking that department’s outlay down to the level it was ten years ago. But the target for their anger should not be just the extent of the cuts but also how the cuts are being pitched to the public.

“Trump’s education budget cuts are aimed principally at federal programs that serve poor kids, especially their access to afterschool programs and high-quality teachers.

“At the same time, Trump’s spending blueprint calls for pouring $1.4 billion into school choice policies including a $168 million increase for charter schools, $250 million for a new school choice program focused on private schools, and a $1 billion increase for parents to send their kids to private schools at taxpayer expense.

“The way the Trump administration is spinning this combination of funding cuts and increases – and the way nearly every news outlet is reporting them – is that there is some sort of strategically important balance between funding programs for poor kids versus “school choice” schemes, as if the two are equivalents and just different means to the same ends. Nothing could be further from the truth….

“The message being spun out of Trump’s education budget is that it takes money away from those awful “adult interests” – like, you know, teachers to actually teach the students and buildings so students have somewhere to go after school to play sports, get tutored, or engage in music and art projects – in order to steer money to “the kids” who will get a meager sum of money to search for learning opportunities in an education system that is increasingly bereft of teachers and buildings.

“Even competent education reporters are falling for this spin, writing that education policy is experiencing a “sea change in focus from fixing the failing schools to helping the students in the failing schools.”

“However, there’s evidence that federally funded efforts like afterschool programs and class size reduction tend to lead to better academic results for low-income children, while the case for using school choice programs to address the education needs of poor kids is pretty weak.

“The Weak Case For Choice

“School voucher programs, like the ones Trump and DeVos seem intent on funding, are particularly ineffective ways to address the education problems of poor kids. Indeed, these programs seem to not serve the interests of poor kids at all.

“Studies of voucher programs In Wisconsin, Indiana, Arizona, and Nevada have found that most of the money from the programs goes to parents wealthy enough to already have their children enrolled in private schools.

“Voucher programs rarely provide enough money to enable poor minority children to get access to the best private schools. And a new comprehensive study of vouchers finds evidence that vouchers don’t significantly improve student achievement. What they do pose is greater likelihood that students who are the most costly and difficult to educate – low-income kids and children with special needs – will be turned away or pushed out by private schools that are not obligated to serve all students.

“Charter schools, another program the Trump budget wants to ramp up funding for, also don’t have a great track record for improving the education attainment of low-income students.

“Perhaps the best case made for using charter schools to target the needs of low-income students comes from a study on the impact of charters in urban school systems conducted by research outfit CREDO in 2015. The study indeed found evidence of some positive impact of charters in these communities. But as my colleague at The Progressive Julian Vasquez Heilig points out, the measures of improvement, in standard deviations, are .008 for Latino students and .05 for African American students in charter schools.

“These numbers are larger than zero,” Heilig writes on his personal blog, “but you need a magnifying glass to see them. Contrast that outcome with policies such as pre-K and class size reduction which are far more unequivocal measures of success than charter schools. They have 400 percent to 1000 percent more statistical impact than charters.”

“Indeed, choice programs in all their forms, at least in how they are being promoted by the Trump administration and its supporters, seem more interested in diverting money away from public schools than they are intent on delivering some sort of education relief to the struggles of poor families.”

School choice will actually harm children by diverting money from public schools that now enroll 90% of America’s students to provide choices for a few children. Most of those choices will be for schools with uncertified teachers and a Bible-based curriculum.

This may satisfy billionaire Betsy DeVos but it won’t be good for children.

Categories Betsy DeVos, Budget Cuts, Charter Schools, Education Industry, Funding, Lies, Poverty, School Choice, Vouchers

Notre Dame: A Debate about School Choice

By dianeravitch

March 22, 2017 //

On Wednesday night, there will be a debate about school choice at the Notre Dame Law School. South Bend, Indiana.

Robin Potter, a lawyer,will support the importance of public schools.

John Schoenig of Notre Dame will defend school choice.

Wednesday night March 22 at 5:30 pm.

If you can attend, contact Robin Potter to get on the list for admission.

Robin@potterlaw.org

This should be interesting in light of recent research showing that kids in voucher schools are actually harmed and lose grounds compared to kids who stay in public schools. Indiana is one of the voucher states where kids are set back and have lower test scores in voucher schools.

https://www.brookings.edu/research/on-negative-effects-of-vouchers/

Categories Charter Schools, Education Reform, School Choice, Vouchers