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Arne Duncan, the Secretary of Education Who Pays No Attention to Evidence and Never Learns from Experience

By dianeravitch
August 8, 2018 //
53

Politico reports that Arne Duncan stubbornly clings to his belief that teacher quality can be measured by test scores and lashes out at those who disagrees. This despite the fact that several states have dropped it, several courts have suspended or ended it, and it worked Nowhere. Of course, his boook went to print before the release of the RAND-AIR study of the total failure of the Gates $575 Million program to use Arne’s VAM approach. But, the study is out, and you would think he might backtrack. But no.

Also, before the recent finding that the effect of the LA publication of teacher ratings meant that the richest families scooped up the teachers with the highest scores and the poorest kids got those with the lowest scores. And Arne forgot, but we won’t, Roberto Riguelas, the LA teacher who committed suicide after his rating was published. The LA ratings, by the way, we’re made up at the request of the LA Times and had many flaws.

Duncan accuses Lamar Alexander of “lying” or wanting to cover up poor teacher performance, but Alexander was right. The feds have zero authority to foist half-baked—and in this case, harmful and expensive—ideas on the states.

“HOW ARNE DUNCAN SEES ‘LIES’ IN EDUCATION: Arne Duncan, one of the most outspoken Education secretaries to hold the job, is out with an incendiary new book about the “lies” he says the public is fed about education and student potential.

— Duncan’s 200-plus-page read, “How Schools Work,” published Tuesday, tells how the former secretary attempted to dispel these “lies” and sell education reform while at the helm of both the Chicago Public Schools and the Education Department. The book is peppered with anecdotes spanning decades, some of them very critical of other education players. A few of the highlights are below; more from your host here.

— ‘Bare-knuckle politicking’: That’s how the Chicago native describes multiple interactions with elected officials and his attempts to “insulate” his education reform work from “political attack” and “stay above the political fray.”

— Senate HELP Chairman Lamar Alexander (R-Tenn.) figures in one anecdote. Duncan says that he was left “stunned” when Alexander refused to back the administration’s pursuit of policies that tied teacher evaluations to student test scores and higher standards. “This was the Tea Party talking, pure and simple. It was as if he’d been captured,” he writes of Alexander, also a former Education secretary, and governor of Tennessee. “Senator Alexander’s stance was one of the least principled things I’d ever heard from a politician, and it showed zero political courage.”

— Alexander said in a statement to POLITICO that Duncan came to Washington to “create a national school board” and that he came to reverse that trend. “Arne and I have a difference of principle, not politics. I believe that teacher evaluation is the holy grail of education and, as governor, helped Tennessee become the first state to pay teachers more for teaching well. As U.S. Education Secretary, I challenged every state to create voluntary national education standards and accountability systems. But I told Arne on the first day he walked into my office that Washington, D.C., has no business telling states how to evaluate teachers and what education standards to set,” Alexander said.

— ‘Teacher accountability was the third rail’: That’s how Duncan described the controversy he faced around the issue, not just from Alexander, but also from teachers unions and Democrats. He writes he was “shocked” that, when conceiving the Race to the Top grant program, he found states like California and Wisconsin banned school districts from using student test scores to measure teacher effectiveness.

— “What was the lie at the center of these laws?” Duncan writes. “Was it that good teaching was immeasurable? Or was it that some teachers … preferred to claim that they couldn’t help the kids who most desperately needed their help?”

— The idea that teacher quality is the most important variable remains up for debate — a recent report on a Gates Foundation initiative that attempted to prove as much claimed its effort was largely unsuccessful. But in his book, Duncan remains committed to the idea. “The simple fact is that quality teaching matters more than anything,” he writes.”

Categories Accountability, Duncan, Arne, Education Reform, Lies, Stupid, Teacher Evaluations, Testing, VAM (value-added modeling)

DFER Will Spend Millions to Support Pro-Charter, Pro-High-Stakes Testing Candidates

By dianeravitch
August 7, 2018 //
25

If you like high-stakes testing and charter schools, you will love “Democrats for Education Reform.”

DFER, as it is known, was condemned by resolution by the Democratic party conferences in Colorado and California for using the word “Democrat” to promote a corporate agenda that is hostile to public schools. DFER is also hostile to public school teachers and unions, but loves TFA and merit pay. All the usual Corporate Reform failures. Real Democrats, like the parties in Colorado and California think that DFERs are Republicans pretending to be Democrats.

Democrats for Education Reform is a group funded by Wall Street hedge fund managers who despise public schools. They never support candidates who are opposed to privatization or those who are fully committed to public schools. They only support candidates who want to siphon money away from public schools to support charter schools. They support candidates who love high-stakes testing. They never look at evidence that shows the damage that charters do to public schools or the evidence that shows the total failure of high-stakes testing to make any difference other than demoralizing students and teachers. They don’t care that a decade of their policies driven by the U.S. Department of Education has led to stagnation of NAEP scores.

In New York State, hedge funders supporting charter schools are pouring millions of dollars into races for the State Senate, both to support the charter school industry and to make sure that Republicans retain control of the State Senate, thus fending off higher taxes and protecting charter schools. Another DFERite dumping big money into New York State campaigns is Paul Tudor Jones, who gave $150,000 to something called “Parents Vote,” which seems to be controlled by StudentsFirst (hard to tell the Astroturf organizations apart). The treasurer of “Parents Vote” is the attorney for StudentsFirst. Jones may be a parent, but he lives in Connecticut, not New York, and you can bet your bottom dollar that he does not send his own children to public schools or charter schools. This outpouring of money is meant to keep the State Senate firmly under GOP management, to make sure that charters continue to operate without oversight and do their own thing.

You may or may not remember that Paul Tudor Jones is one of the nine billionaires who determined that it was up to them to remake the public schools of New York, although no one elected them to do so.

Just five years ago, Forbes ran a big article about Paul Tudor Jones and his plan to “save American education.” While busy saving American education, Jones also served on the board of Harvey Weinstein’s company and fought to save Harvey’s battered reputation.

Please note that the following story misidentifies DFER and treats them as a legitimate “reform” group when DFER acts only in the interest of Corporate Reform, high-stakes testing and privatization. The story also errs in not acknowledging that many DFER members are not Democrats.

From Politico:


FIRST LOOK: EDUCATION REFORM GROUP BETS BIG ON GOVERNOR’S RACES: Democrats for Education Reform plans to spend $4 million on campaign contributions and advertising this election cycle, boosting Democratic candidates who want to support public schools but are open to reform-minded ways of improving them.

— The organization — which advocates for a host of school reform policies nationwide like strong test-based accountability and high-quality public charter schools — through its political action committee is prioritizing gubernatorial races in Colorado, Connecticut and New York, in addition to the California state superintendent’s race and some state legislative races. DFER exclusively detailed its spending and campaign plans with Morning Education in an interview late last month. Asked the source of the $4 million, a spokeswoman the figure comes from their “supporters” and “contributors.”

— In Colorado’s battle for governor, DFER is backing Rep. Jared Polis, a House education committee Democrat who’s running against state Treasurer Walker Stapleton, a Republican.

— The race to replace term-limited Gov. John Hickenlooper has proven divisive for Colorado Democrats — the state teachers union backed another Democrat, Cary Kennedy, during the primary. Allies of Kennedy sought to tie Polis to Education Secretary Betsy DeVos and her support for private school vouchers. Polis founded two charter schools, but hasn’t shown support for vouchers or federally funded private schools in Congress. When Kennedy lost to Polis, the state teachers union released a statement that didn’t even mention Polis’ name.

— In Connecticut, DFER is supporting Ned Lamont, the Democratic hopeful looking to replace Gov. Dannel Malloy, who’s not seeking reelection. And the organization is pushing for Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s reelection in New York.

— In California, DFER wants to lift Marshall Tuck to victory as state schools superintendent. Tuck is an education reform advocate who has run both charter schools and district schools in Los Angeles. In 2014, he narrowly lost a bid for state schools chief to Tom Torlakson, the current superintendent, who had the support of teachers unions. Tuck will face another Democrat, state Assemblyman Tony Thurmond, in the general election this fall.

— DFER in addition is launching a social media campaignon what it means to be an “education progressive.” The group defines that term as fighting to spend more money on public education while embracing “new ideas” to bring about faster improvement. Some of those ideas, like stronger test-based accountability measures, have faced staunch opposition from progressive groups like teachers unions. But DFER is pushing new polling results that President Shavar Jeffries says illustrate strong support. More on that polling here.

— Jeffries, who recently sat down with Morning Education, stressed that more than half of Democratic primary voters, African American voters and Hispanic voters don’t think public schools are changing or improving fast enough. The poll also found broad support for public school choice — a divisive issue for the Democratic Party — and more equitable funding for public schools, particularly disadvantaged ones. The results stem from two nationwide phone polls of more than 1,000 voters each between May and July of this year. The poll was conducted by consulting firms Benenson Strategy Group and 270 Strategies.

Would it be asking too much to hope that Caitlin Emma and the crack reporters on the Politico team might consider interviewing a critic of billionaire “Reformers.” Maybe a teacher? Say, someone like Steven Singer or Peter Greene or Mark Weber, or other well-informed critics of the intrusion of billionaire know-nothings into education policymaking? Maybe Carol Burris of the Network for Public Education?

Categories Charter Schools, Colorado, Corporate Reformers, Democrats for Education Reform, Education Industry, New York, Privatization, School Choice, Teacher Evaluations, Testing, Unions

Wisconsin: Why Educators Should Vote for Kelda Roys, Not Tony Evers

By dianeravitch
August 3, 2018 //
2

I posted a strong endorsement of Kelda Roys. She is a candidate in the Democratic candidate for Governor of Wisconsin. The leading candidate in the race is Tony Evers, who is currently State Superintendent of Education. Some people think that he would be a strong supporter of education. But, in fact, he has made teachers’ lives worse during his tenure in office. Teachers are deeply demoralized by the combination of Governor Walker and State Chief Evers’ policies.

Read what Tim Slekar wrote about Tony Evers’ record on education. It is very bad, almost as bad as Scott Walker.

From dean of education at Edgewood College and strong public education advocate Tim Slekar.

“Tony Evers has “name recognition.” He can beat Walker. Except…

I know that’s the “theory.” But on his own issue—education—there are serious problems. For me specifically (as dean of a school of education) his Leadership Group’s dismantling and deregulating of teaching licenses because of a refusal to understand the cause of the “teacher shortage” tells me that using sound research to make policy decisions will take a back seat to neoliberal market solutions that actually cause more damage.

Teachers are leaving the profession in droves. Making it easier to enter our classrooms as a “teacher” does nothing to stop the exodus. It actually adds to it by further demoralizing the teachers that are still teaching. And that’s the real reason teachers are leaving. They are demoralized.

Excessive testing, educator effectiveness bunk, continued accountability (reform word for teachers are to blame for the achievement gap), expansion of non-public charter schools, and a top down system that denies teachers professional autonomy. And a Broad Academy Fellow (Privatization) as second in command. These are all issues DPI have significant control over but for some reason remain silent or worse supportive of.

And the candidate to take on Walker will not win without the support of the teaching profession. Assuming teachers will support Tony is rejecting their moral compass. They know Walker is horrible but they are also quite aware of the fact that DPI has left them hanging.

Give me a candidate that understands “demoralization.” That candidate will fire up education voters.”

Tim Slekar is supporting Kelda Roys for the Democratic nomination for Governor. I hope you will too!

Categories Teacher Education, Teacher Evaluations, Teacher Shortage, Walker, Scott, Wisconsin

D.C.: Teacher Fired by Rhee Wins Arbitration After 9 Years of Delays, Will Receive Lost Compensation and His Job Back

By dianeravitch
July 26, 2018 //
32

Michelle Rhee always boasted about how many teachers she fired. She was sure that “bad teachers” were the root of the low academic performance in D.C. She loved her IMPACT program, which weeded out teachers, and many good teachers were fired and went elsewhere, where they were not ineffective.

Here is one teacher who fought back and won. It took nine long years, but he won. Michelle Rhee ruined his life.

For nine years, Jeff Canady lived in a cash-strapped limbo. The D.C. Public Schools teacher was fired in 2009 after 18 years in city classrooms, the school system deeming him ineffective.

Canady, 53, contested his dismissal, arguing that he was wrongly fired and that the city was punishing him for being a union activist and for publicly criticizing the school system.

For nearly a decade, Canady, jobless and penniless, waited for a decision in his case — until now.

Earlier this month, an arbitrator ruled in favor of the fired teacher, a decision that could entitle him to hundreds of thousands of dollars in back pay and the opportunity to be a District teacher again. The school system can appeal the ruling, which was made by an arbitrator from the American Arbitration Association, a nonprofit organization that settles disputes outside of court.

“I’ve been a hostage for nine years,” Canady said. “And the District wants to keep it that way.”

School system spokesman Shayne Wells said DCPS “just received the arbitrator’s decision and is in the process of reviewing it.”

Elizabeth Davis, president of the Washington Teachers’ Union, said Canady isn’t the only one fighting to get his job back. Other educators who were fired years ago and allege unjust dismissals are waiting for their cases to be settled with the school system.

Canady was one of nearly 1,000 educators fired during the 3½ -year tenure of Michelle Rhee — the controversial former D.C. schools chancellor who clashed with the union and instituted a teacher evaluation system that dictated teachers’ job security and ­bonuses. About 200 of those teachers lost their jobs because of poor performance, 266 were laid off amid a 2009 budget squeeze and the rest failed to complete new-employee probation or did not have licensing required under the federal No Child Left Behind law.

The union, which had assailed Rhee’s evaluation system, filed a series of grievances in a bid to salvage the lost jobs.

In 2016, a teacher won a case against the school system after claiming he was wrongly fired in 2011 for a low score on Rhee’s evaluation system, known as ­IMPACT. The educator won on procedural grounds and the arbitrator’s decision did not address IMPACT, but the union still hailed it as a victory in its battle over the teacher evaluation system.

“We are certain that there are still a number of cases pending, unresolved, which were first filed during Michelle Rhee’s tenure as chancellor,” Davis said in an email.

Canady was a third-grade teacher earning about $80,000 a year when he was fired in 2009 from Emery Elementary, a school in the Eckington neighborhood that later closed. The school system, according to the arbitrator’s decision, said Canady scored low on an evaluation system that preceded IMPACT.

But Canady and the teachers union argued that his third-graders performed well and that he had previously posted strong scores on his evaluations. They said they suspected his low score was linked to his public criticism of the school system and not to his performance in the classroom. They also argued that the city did not follow proper protocol when evaluating him.

In defending its action, the school system claimed that the union had included Canady’s case as part of a larger class action complaint and had waited years to proceed with his case individually. By that point, the school system said it no longer had documents or email exchanges in the case.

Davis said she could not discuss specifics of the class action filing because parts of it are ongoing.

The arbitrator said the school system was responsible for many of the delays in the case. The ruling also said D.C. schools improperly evaluated Canady and showed “anti-union animus toward him.”

Canady said in an interview last week that he was confident he would prevail and that he had a moral imperative to keep fighting.

He said that he had ambitions to be a top official in the school system and that his firing stymied career opportunities. He imagines that by now, his salary would be substantially higher than $80,000 had he not lost his job.

“I’ve been fighting for justice for people for years,” Canady said. “Surely if I am going to fight for others, I am going to fight for myself.”

Canady remained in the District and continues to attend political and community meetings but has not held a steady job. With no income, he has moved around the city frequently and said his firing has extracted a physical and emotional toll and “devastated relationships.”

Even if the arbitrator’s decision holds, he said he is unsure if he will return to the classroom. He said he still disagrees with how the District operates its schools.

“I love teaching where they are actually trying to help people,” he said. “And I’ll do it at the appropriate time and in the appropriate situation.”

rhee

 

Categories Accountability, District of Columbia, Rhee, Michelle, Teacher Evaluations

Carol Burris: The Definitive Account of Bill Gates’s Disastrous Teacher Evaluation Project

By dianeravitch
July 18, 2018 //
28

Carol Burris, the brilliant executive director of the Network for Public Education, has written the definitive account of Bill Gates’s disastrous teacher evaluation project, which wasted $215 million of his dollars, but over $350 million of state, local, and federal dollars (ours).

I urge you to read it. Not many are likely to read the 600 page RAND report evaluating the project. Burris did. The results were both a tragedy and a farce.

A few excerpts:

The study examined the effects over six years of the Gates Foundation’s Intensive Partnerships for Effective Teaching (IP) initiative that included, as a key feature, teacher evaluations systems similar to New York’s. It concluded that the IP project did not improve either student achievement or the quality of teachers. In fact, it did more harm than good…

The cost was astronomical. Across the seven sites over half a billion dollars were spent — $574.7 million between November 2009 and June 2016. While many believed that the Gates Foundation paid the bill, overall the foundation paid less than 37 percent — $212.3 million. Taxpayers paid most of the costs via local or federal tax dollars.

Florida’s Hillsborough County Public Schools was one of the participants. Its program alone cost $262.2 million. Federal, state and local taxpayers paid $178.8 million, far more than the Gates Foundation’s contribution of $81 million. Gates used his money as a lever to open the public treasury to fund his foundation’s idea. The taxpayers picked up the lion’s share of costs.

There were indirect costs as well. According to the study, the average principal spent 25 percent of her time administering the complicated evaluation system and teachers spent hours every month on their own evaluations.

The report estimated that “IP costs for teacher-evaluation activities totaled nearly $100 million across the seven sites in 2014–2015 … the value of teacher and SL [school leader] time devoted to evaluation to be about $73 million, and the direct expenditures on evaluation constituted an additional $26 million.” According to Business Insider, the total cost of IP was nearly $1 billion.

When President Barack Obama’s education secretary, Arne Duncan, decided to include compliance with similar models of evaluation in order for states to receive Race to the Top funds, billions of federal taxpayer dollars were put in play. States and local school districts were forced to ante up for data-collection systems, new tests designed to produce metrics of student growth, training seminars that infantilized experienced principals, and pages upon pages of rubrics designed to turn the art and science of teaching behaviors into a numerical score…One of the goals of IP was to help districts recruit better teachers and to assign the most effective teachers to classrooms with low-income minority students. This was to be accomplished through revised recruitment practices as well as financial incentives for teachers to work in high-needs schools.

One participating district, Shelby County Schools in Tennessee, turned over its teacher recruitment efforts to the New Teacher Project (TNTP). TNTP was founded by Michelle Rhee, the controversial former chancellor of D.C. public schools who was a leader in corporate-style education reform. The Gates Foundation gave TNTP $7 million in 2009, the year that it published a report entitled “The Widget Effect,” which was highly critical of the teacher evaluation systems that the foundation was so anxious to replace.

Shelby County Schools allowed TNTP to run its human-resources department, resulting in a strained relationship between TNTP and the existing staff. Other participating districts and CMOs used some TNTP services and, following the advice of TNTP, sought teachers from alternative preparation programs, most notably Teach for America (TFA).

This, according to the report, resulted in increased teacher turnover, since many TFAers only “intended to remain in teaching for only a few years.” The report found no evidence that the quality of the teachers recruited improved.

Access to ‘effective’ teachers for disadvantaged students

A related goal of the project was to move “effective” teachers into schools with the most disadvantaged kids. Not only was this goal not realized, there was evidence that in one district access to more effective teachers declined.

Even with a cash incentive, teachers were reluctant to transfer to schools with high needs because they believed that would result in their receiving a lower VAM score, which was now part of their evaluation. VAM refers to value-added modeling, which in this case uses student standardized test scores in a complicated computer model to supposedly determine the “value” of a teacher on the growth of student achievement by in part factoring out all other influences.

There was statistically significant evidence that the project decreased low-income minority students’ access to effective teachers in Hillsborough County Public Schools — both between schools and within the same school — as teachers sought to flee to the honors classes to avoid low VAM scores, which under the new evaluation system, could cost them their jobs.

Although the report notes that some reformers hoped that the new evaluation system would result in teacher dismissals in the range of 20 percent, the actual rate of dismissal based on performance was similar to the rate under the former system — around 1 percent.

Categories Gates Foundation, Bill Gates, Teacher Evaluations

Nancy Bailey: What is Bill Gates’ End Game for Teachers and Schools?

By dianeravitch
July 12, 2018 //
19

Nancy Bailey reviews the latest failure of Bill Gates in his efforts to reinvent public education.

This is just the latest in a long series of failures for Gates.

She asks, what is he really aiming for?

It is not to make schools better, but to make them unnecessary. The goal: using technology to tailor education to each child.

“All of this will lead to:

-No more teachers.
-No more public schools.
-Students using technology anyplace, anytime.
-Technology in charter schools.
-Continuous online assessment.
-No more privacy rules.
-Connecting children with workforce needs.

His acumen is to put down the seed money and get you to pay for his next experiment.

No accountability for him as he wrecks your schools with his latest brainstorm.

Categories Accountability, Billionaires, Gates Foundation, Bill Gates, Philanthropy, Teacher Evaluations, Technology

Peter Greene: If You Had $575 Million to Spend on School Reform, What Would You Do?

By dianeravitch
July 12, 2018 //
41

Peter Greene is flummoxed by the idea that Bill Gates leveraged his giving to persuade several districts and charter chains to spend a total of $575 million on a failed experiment to evaluate teachers by student test scores.

The experiment flopped.

He asks, what would you do if you had $575 Million to improve schools. Not that. He reminds readers that this is a lost opportunity cost. If you do X with that discretionary money, you are giving up the chance to do Y, which has real research behind it.

What is the Gates Foundation lacking? Common sense.

Categories Accountability, Education Reform, Gates Foundation, Bill Gates, Teacher Evaluations, VAM (value-added modeling)

John Thompson: A Letter to a Young Teacher and Walkout Leader

By dianeravitch
July 7, 2018 //
10

JOhn Thompson, retired teacher in Oklahoma, explains to a young teacher who led the walkout in Oklahoma why unions are still necessary.

A Letter to a Young Teacher Walkout Leader

The New York Times’ Dana Goldstein and Erica Green report that “about 70 percent of the nation’s 3.8 million public school teachers belong to a union or professional association,” but that is “down from 79 percent in the 1999-2000 school year.” The Supreme Court’s Janus decision could mean the loss of tens of thousands of union members (or more) and tens of millions of dollars that would otherwise promote education and other efforts to help our students and families.

The Goldstein and Green report:

The teachers who led the protests first gathered supporters on Facebook, sometimes with little help from union officials. But the state and national unions stepped in with organizing and lobbying muscle — and money — that sustained the movement as it grew. That support could wane if teachers in strong-union states like California or Illinois choose not to pay dues and fees.
The Times cites a 25-year-old Oklahoma teacher, Alberto Morejon, as an emerging leader who has “little loyalty to unions.” Morejon is one of many Oklahoma teachers who expressed frustration when union leaders called off the nine-day walkout.

In my experience, however, most teachers later realized that the unions not only funded the labor action, but quickly became more responsive to the grass-roots movement’s concerns. Now that Oklahoma teachers have pivoted and led this summer’s unprecedented and successful election campaigns, my sense is that teachers understand why unions needed to work with school districts to reopen schools before a backlash occurred. We were then able to keep up the momentum, maintain unity, and commit to political actions.

The Times offers just one example of the reason why a continuing intergenerational dialogue about teachers union and Janus is essential:

“Teachers starting off, the salary is so low,” Mr. Morejon said. Foregoing union fees means “one less thing you have to pay for. A lot of younger teachers I know, they’re not joining because they need to save every dollar they can.”
I sure hope to converse with Mr. Morejon. I very much appreciate his organizing efforts. But I would remind him that the year before the 1979 Oklahoma City teachers’ strike, the Oklahoma average teacher salary, adjusted for inflation, was $13,107. I’d also like to share these recollections.

https://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d16/tables/dt16_211.60.asp

The bipartisan, anti-union, corporate school reform movement took off in the 1990s when “New Democrats” used accountability-driven reform as a “Sister Soldja” campaign. It allowed them to act tough by beating up on traditional allies, teachers and unions. My sense is that reform began with non-educators treating teachers as if we were a mule who needed a club upside the head to get its attention. Angered by educators who didn’t embrace their theory, corporate reformers now seek to knee-cap unions – or worse.

In 2003, the notorious and ruthless Republican consultant, Karl Rove, articulated the scenario that the New Yorker’s Nicholas Lehman dubbed “the death of the Democratic Party.” Rove explained that school reform and the destruction of public sector labor unions could be one of the three keys to destroying the Democrats.

I hope young teachers will read the papers by reformers gloating about the way they defeated unions. After 2011, when Right to Work became the law in Wisconsin, teachers’ union membership dropped from over 80,000 to below 40,000. The decline in union membership after Michigan adopted Right to Work in 2013 was twice as great as the gap between the state’s votes for Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton. This raises the question as to how much these reformers thus contributed to Trump’s electoral college victory.

After Janus

Neoliberal reformers are crying crocodile tears as they downplay their role in imposing Right to Work on the entire nation’s public sector workers. Peter Cunningham acknowledges:

Corporate power is increasing and income inequality is worsening. Anti-tax politicians are starving governments at every level. President Trump is dividing Americans in ways we could not imagine and reversing progress on important issues from climate change to trade. The Supreme Court has shifted to the right, and with Justice Anthony Kennedy stepping down, the entire progressive agenda is in peril.

http://educationpost.org/after-janus-unions-need-to-give-teachers-a-reason-to-opt-in-and-i-hope-they-give-them-one/

Cunningham admits that “unions built America’s middle class,” and that because they have been decimated in the private sector, “wage growth has been anemic for decades.”
Cunningham says teachers should respond by getting on board with the data-driven campaign to evaluate school outcomes.

The TNTP’s Dan Weisberg also says correctly, “The past six months have shown that teachers no longer need to rely on union leadership to advocate for basics like higher salaries.” Then, he admits that when many legislatures are “freed from the unions’ political clout,” then teachers’ political victories are likely to be preempted or limited.

https://tntp.org/blog/post/how-teachers-unions-could-win-by-losing-janus#2953

Weisberg calls for unions to “get out of the collective bargaining business and become professional associations.” In other words, teachers should go with the Janus flow and give up their due process rights.

It sounds like the long-time union hater would love to support unions – once they became Rotary Clubs.

I want to be clear that I seek an inter-generational discussion, and I’m not criticizing colleagues who are too young to have witnessed twenty years of assaults on teachers and unions. Today’s Millennials are struggling in a notorious “gig economy.” To keep young educators from being reduced to transitory clerks who are even more under-paid, we must learn from recent history. And in Oklahoma, it was the combined passage of “Right to Work” in 2001, as the NCLB Act of 2001 became law, which launched our tragedy.

In my experience during the first years after NCLB and Right to Work, weakened teachers unions and state and local education leaders suffered plenty of defeats but, together, we mitigated the harm. Year by year, however, our strengths – and our professional autonomy – were undermined.

The single most destructive policy that I witnessed was implemented in 2005 when weekly high stakes tests drove 40 percent of our school’s tested students out of school. I attended a meeting that was mostly boycotted by Baby Boomers like me, and I tried to persuade younger teachers to resist. A great young teacher yelled at me, “You are just like my parents! Your generation had unions and could fight back! We can’t!”

Less than five years later, I was at many of the tables when value-added teacher evaluations, the concessions made to compete for the Race to the Top, and School Improvement Grant regulations were imposed. The intent of the new rules was clear; an obvious component was “exiting” Baby Boomers in order to rid districts of our salaries and keep veteran teachers from socializing young teachers into opposing teach-to-the-test mandates.

Our weakened unions had little choice but to continue to work within the system to mitigate the damage done by bubble-in accountability. With the help of another grassroots movement, the Save Our Schools (SOS) campaign, we became more and more successful in defending our students’ rights to a meaningful education. Without our SOS experiences, would teachers have been able to organize this year’s walkouts?

None of these fights are over. We still have to fend off corporate reformers with one hand, as we battle budget cuts with the other. Even if we push back this latest assault on collective bargaining, there is no guarantee that the technocratic micromanagers won’t eventually privatize our schools. But, Mr. Morejon, please remember that without due process rights, we will be incapable of defending our profession. We have a duty to our students to unite and defend the principles of public education and our kids’ welfare

Categories Education Reform, Oklahoma, Teacher Evaluations, Teacher Pay

When Bill Gates Revealed His Views about Education and His Biggest Adversary, and I Replied

By dianeravitch
July 1, 2018 //
57

In 2010, journalist Jonathan Alter interviewed Bill Gates about education. Alter is a passionate supporter of charter schools and obviously synpathetic to Gates’ dismal view of American education.

Gates had just addressed the Council of Chief State Dchool Officers, telling these mostly veteran educators what was wrong with the schools. The biggest driver of rising costs, he said, was “seniority-based pay and benefits for teachers rising faster than state revenues.” This interview occurred about the same time that Gates began to pump $1 billion or more into teacher evaluation projects that linked teacher effectiveness to student test scores. That ill-fated venture promoted demoralization, teacher resignations, and a national teacher shortage.

Gates explained to Alter:

“Seniority is the two-headed monster of education—it’s expensive and harmful. Like master’s degrees for teachers and smaller class sizes, seniority pay, Gates says, has “little correlation to student achievement.” After exhaustive study, the Gates Foundation and other experts have learned that the only in-school factor that fully correlates is quality teaching, which seniority hardly guarantees. It’s a moral issue. Who can defend a system where top teachers are laid off in a budget crunch for no other reason than that they’re young?

“In most states, pay and promotion of teachers are connected 100 percent to seniority. This is contrary to everything the world’s second-richest man believes about business: “Is there any other part of the economy where someone says, ‘Hey, how long have you been mowing lawns? … I want to pay you more for that reason alone.’ ” Gates favors a system where pay and promotion are determined not just by improvement in student test scores (an idea savaged by teachers’ unions) but by peer surveys, student feedback (surprisingly predictive of success in the classroom), video reviews, and evaluation by superiors. In this approach, seniority could be a factor, but not the only factor.

“President Obama knows that guaranteed tenure and rigid seniority systems are a problem, but he’s not yet willing to speak out against them. Even so, Gates gives Obama an A on education. The Race to the Top program, Gates says, is “more catalytic than anyone expected it to be” in spurring accountability and higher standards.”

Here is my favorite part, where Gates says I am his “biggest adversary” and Alter calls “the Whittaker Chambers of school reform.”

For those who don’t know, Whittaker Chambers was a Communist spy who turned against the Party and named Alger Hiss as a Party member. Maybe I was supposed to be insulted, but I wasn’t. I got a good laugh from this article.

I also wrote a response, in which I answered Gates’ five questions. It was posted by Valerie Strauss in her blog, The Answer Sheet.”

Straus called Alter’s interview “a paean to Gates.”

Here are the answers to the first two questions:

Gates: “Does she like the status quo?”
Ravitch: “No, I certainly don’t like the status quo. I don’t like the attacks on teachers, I don’t like the attacks on the educators who work in our schools day in and day out, I don’t like the phony solutions that are now put forward that won’t improve our schools at all. I am not at all content with the quality of American education in general, and I have expressed my criticisms over many years, long before Bill Gates decided to make education his project. I think American children need not only testing in basic skills, but an education that includes the arts, literature, the sciences, history, geography, civics, foreign languages, economics, and physical education.

“I don’t hear any of the corporate reformers expressing concern about the way standardized testing narrows the curriculum, the way it rewards convergent thinking and punishes divergent thinking, the way it stamps out creativity and originality. I don’t hear any of them worried that a generation will grow up ignorant of history and the workings of government. I don’t hear any of them putting up $100 million to make sure that every child has the chance to learn to play a musical instrument. All I hear from them is a demand for higher test scores and a demand to tie teachers’ evaluations to those test scores. That is not going to improve education.”

Gates: “Is she sticking up for decline?”
Ravitch: “Of course not! If we follow Bill Gates’ demand to judge teachers by test scores, we will see stagnation, and he will blame it on teachers. We will see stagnation because a relentless focus on test scores in reading and math will inevitably narrow the curriculum only to what is tested. This is not good education.

“Last week, he said in a speech that teachers should not be paid more for experience and graduate degrees. I wonder why a man of his vast wealth spends so much time trying to figure out how to cut teachers’ pay. Does he truly believe that our nation’s schools will get better if we have teachers with less education and less experience? Who does he listen to? He needs to get himself a smarter set of advisers.

“Of course, we need to make teaching a profession that attracts and retains wonderful teachers, but the current anti-teacher rhetoric emanating from him and his confreres demonizes and demoralizes even the best teachers. I have gotten letters from many teachers who tell me that they have had it, they have never felt such disrespect; and I have also met young people who tell me that the current poisonous atmosphere has persuaded them not to become teachers. Why doesn’t he make speeches thanking the people who work so hard day after day, educating our nation’s children, often in difficult working conditions, most of whom earn less than he pays his secretaries at Microsoft?”

Categories Charter Schools, Education Industry, Education Reform, Gates Foundation, Bill Gates, Privatization, Teacher Evaluations, Testing

Valerie Strauss: How Bill Gates Blew Away $575 Million on Teacher Evaluation

By dianeravitch
June 30, 2018 //
28

We have by now read about the independent Rand study of Bill Gates’ bet on Making test-based teacher evaluation the keystone of education reform. I distinctly recall Melinda Gates saying on PBS that “we now know” how to get a great teacher in every classroom in America.

Well, no, they didn’t.

The Gates put up $215 million and found willing suckers, I mean, partners to add even more of their own money to bring the total to $575 million to test the Gates’s shiny new idea.

It failed.

It exhausted the reserves of Hillsborough County in Florida, where MaryEllen Elia was Superintendent. She was fired but landed on her feet as State Commissioner of Education in New York. Believe it or not, the fiasco in Hillsborough County did not diminished her love of testing.

Valerie Strauss tells the sad saga here of Bill Gates’ latest failure.

“The six-year project began in 2009 when the foundation gave millions of dollars to three public school districts — Hillsborough County in Florida (the first to start the work), Memphis and Pittsburgh. The districts supplied matching funds. Four charter management organizations also were involved: Alliance College-Ready Public Schools; Aspire Public Schools; Green Dot Public Schools; and Partnerships to Uplift Communities Schools.

“The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation pumped nearly $215 million into the project while the partnering school organizations supplied their own money, for a total cost of $575 million. The aim was to create teacher evaluation systems that depended on student standardized test scores and observations by “peer evaluators.” These systems, it was conjectured, could identify the teachers who were most effective in improving student academic performance.”

There is a silver lining.

“In 2014, he gave a nearly hour-long interview at Harvard University, saying, “It would be great if our education stuff worked, but that we won’t know for probably a decade.””

It’s 2018.so far, nothing funded by Gates has reformed education. We have only six more years to wait, and maybe then he will invest in children’s health or something else where he has a chance of doing good work instead of messing up the schools.

Categories Accountability, Failure, Florida, Gates Foundation, Bill Gates, Teacher Evaluations, VAM
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