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Hail and Farewell! Achieve Is Finished!

By dianeravitch
April 24, 2020 //
6

Unless you are a policy wonk or live inside the Beltway, you probably never heard of Achieve.

Achieve is an organization that was founded in 1996 by governors and business leaders to raise academic standards and to advocate for college and career readiness. Achieve is closing its doors this summer. Is the job done or did the money run out or did people just get tired of the same old same old? Years ago, when I was on the other side, believing that standards and tests would solve all our education problems (note bene: I was wrong), I went to Massachusetts on behalf of Achieve to review the Massachusetts standards and tests, then considered the gold standard. Years later, the Common Core came along, and the state ditched its gold standard in order to get some federal Race to the Top gold.

Anyway, Achieve is closing its doors and passing the baton.

You can read about it here.

Let’s hope this means that in the midst of a global pandemic, the thought has dawned that American students are not in need of more standards, testing, and accountability.

What they need is a fresh vision of what education can be and should be.

And it won’t be found by testing kids more often.

Categories Accountability, Common Core, Education Industry, Education Reform, Testing

An Open Letter to Joe Biden, by Diane Ravitch and Carol Burris

By dianeravitch
April 22, 2020 //
45

Carol Burris and I wrote “An Open Letter to Joe Biden,” which was published by Valerie Strauss on her blog “The Answer Sheet” at the Washington Post.

Valerie Strauss begins:

During the Obama administration, public school advocates led by Diane Ravitch opposed the education agenda of Education Secretary Arne Duncan, who had embraced standardized testing, charter schools and the Common Core State Standards as the way to improve America’s schools.
Ravitch, an education historian and research professor at New York University, became the titular leader of the grass-roots movement against the privatization of public education in 2010, when she published her best-selling book, “The Death and Life of the Great American School System.” It detailed her conversion from a No Child Left Behind supporter to an opponent.

From 1991 to 1993, Ravitch served as assistant secretary of research and improvement in the Education Department under President George H.W. Bush. She was, too, an early supporter of No Child Left Behind, the chief education initiative of his son, President George W. Bush, which ushered in the high-stakes standardized-testing movement. But when she researched the effects of the measures, she saw that NCLB’s testing requirements had turned classrooms into test prep factories and forced schools to narrow the curriculum to focus on tested subjects.

She changed her long-held views about how to improve schools and for the last decade has been speaking and writing about education reform. She also co-founded and heads the nonprofit Network for Public Education, which links people and groups that advocate to improve public schools and fight school privatization.
Ravitch became a lightning rod for criticism by supporters of President Barack Obama’s Race to the Top initiative, which made standardized tests more important than ever. But, at 81 years old, she is still writing and advocating for public schools. Her most recent book was published this year, “Slaying Goliath: The Passionate Resistance to Privatization and the Fight to Save America’s Public Schools.”

The Network for Public Education that she leads opposes charter schools — which are publicly funded but privately managed — seeing them as part of a movement to privatize public education. It published two reports last year about how the federal government wasted millions of dollars on a program aimed at expanding the charter sector.

Charter supporters criticized the reports, but the overall story of waste and abuse in the federal Charter Schools Program helped to prompt Sens. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) and Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) to promise to end funding for the program when they were both running for the Democratic presidential nomination. Some Democratic legislators in the House also expressed concern about the program after the reports were released.
Joe Biden was Obama’s vice president but was not in the forefront of the administration’s education agenda. He has promised that if elected, he would, among other things, triple the federal funding for high-poverty schools, increase teachers salaries and ban for-profit charter schools. He has also expressed opposition to standardized testing.

In the following open letter to Biden, the presumptive Democratic nominee for president, Ravitch and Carol Burris write about public education and their reaction to his public comments about school policy, saying they are encouraged.

Burris, a former award-winning principal in New York, is the executive director of the Network for Public Education. Burris has been writing for this blog for years, chronicling the effects of Race to the Top and about charter schools.

Here is the open letter to Biden about education policy, written by Diane Ravitch and Carol Burris:</strong

Dear Vice President Biden,

We write on behalf of the Network for Public Education, the nation’s largest group of volunteers and advocates for public schools in the nation, with more than 350,000 followers spread across all 50 states.
We have strongly opposed the education agenda of Donald Trump. For the first time in the history of the Department of Education, its secretary seems dedicated to the destruction of public schools. From her enthusiastic support of private school vouchers, charter schools, and virtual charter schools, Betsy DeVos has made clear that she believes that schools should be run by private agencies and as entrepreneurial start-ups, not as centers of community life, subject to democratic governance by elected school boards.

Our public schools and their students desperately need a champion. We hope you will be that champion. For two decades, our schools and their teachers have been micromanaged by misguided federal mandates that require states to judge students, teachers, and schools by standardized test scores, as though a test score could ever be the true measure of a child, a teacher or a school.

We know that you know better. At the Public Education Forum in Pittsburgh in December 2019, NPE Board member Denisha Jones asked you whether you would commit to ending standardized testing in public schools. You did not hesitate when you said, “Yes. You are preaching to the choir.”

You continued by saying, “Teaching to a test underestimates and discounts the things that are most important for students to know.” You explained that what is most important is building a child’s confidence and you referred to evaluating teachers by test scores as a “big mistake.”

You are right in your assessment of standardized, high-stakes tests and we appreciate your response. Hold firmly to those beliefs. We understand that federal law must be rewritten to free the schools from their fixation on test scores. We count on you to make that happen, and to put an end to the legacy of President George W. Bush’s No Child Left Behind law. Billions of dollars have been wasted on testing during these past twenty years. It is time for a fresh vision of what education can be.

Former supporters of President Obama’s Race to the Top program will whisper in your ear to persuade you to double down on failed policies. They will try to convince you that testing is a “civil right.” It is not. In fact, standardized testing has its roots in eugenics — it was used for years as a means by which to shut out immigrants, students of color, and students who live in poverty in order to reserve privilege for affluent students, who more typically excel on standardized tests.

All children deserve a well-resourced public school filled with high-quality educational experiences. All children deserve experienced and well-prepared teachers. All children deserve schools that have counselors, social workers, librarians, and nurses. All children deserve a full curriculum, with science labs and arts programs. When schools become test-prep factories, the civil rights of children to equal education opportunities are denied.

Others will tell you that funding does not matter and that only choice and competition will improve public schools. They are wrong. Research consistently demonstrates that increases in funding make a difference in the educational outcomes of children. But we cannot tinker around the edges and expect to get dramatic results. That is why we fully support your plan to triple Title I funding while giving educators voice in how that money should be best spent.

We are pleased that you support community schools as a pathway for school improvement. During the forum, you said that “Betsy DeVos’s whole notion from charter schools to this [her blame the victim position on sexual harassment on campus] is gone,” if you are elected. We are glad that you endorse district public school improvement instead of embracing the expansion of what has become a competing alternative system whose growth has drained funding from public schools.

Banning for-profit charter schools is not enough. There are only a handful of for-profit charters, and they exist only in Arizona. There are, however, many for-profit charter management companies as well as nonprofit charter management companies whose CEOs enjoy exorbitant salaries, far exceeding the salaries of district school superintendents. These charter chains hide their lavish spending on travel, marketing, advertising, rental payments to related companies, and administrative salaries from community, state and federal taxpayers even as they claim to be public schools.

Although the policies of the states regarding charter schools are beyond your control, the Federal Charter School Program is not. A once modest program intended to spark innovation community-led charter schools is now a program that sends hundreds of millions of dollars each year to corporate charter school chains. Just last month, DeVos gave $72 million to the IDEA charter chain whose chief executive officer hired a private jet on which he was the only passenger to meet DeVos in Florida. That same charter chain received over $175 million from DeVos through the Charter Schools Program in 2017 and 2018.

It is time to eliminate the federal Charter Schools Program, which is no longer needed since billionaire-directed foundations supply ample funding for new charters and charter expansion. We issued two reports last year, demonstrating that the federal Charter Schools Program is riddled with waste and fraud, having spent approximately $1 billion on schools that never opened, or that opened and subsequently closed.

Your public statements encourage us to believe that you do not intend to follow the disastrous education policies of No Child Left Behind and Race to the Top. We are hopeful that you will renounce the status quo and bring a fresh vision that supports the work of teachers and public schools.

You will receive no better counsel on public education than you will from your educator wife, Jill Biden. We have no doubt that she will advise you well. It is time to turn the page on failed policies and invest in our nation’s public schools, which enroll nearly 90 percent of all American children.

The future of our nation depends on the success of public schools and their leaders, teachers, and support staff, who even, in this crisis, are working tirelessly to educate our students and keep them fed, well, and safe. Please stand with them and with the more than 50 million children who attend district public schools.

Diane Ravitch
Carol Burris

Categories Charter Schools, Civil Rights, Corporate Reformers, Education Industry, Education Reform, For-Profit, NCLB (No Child Left Behind), Privatization, Race to the Top, Testing, Vouchers

Peter Greene: Why Business Ideas Don’t Work in Education

By dianeravitch
April 21, 2020 //
17

Peter Greene once again nails a basic fact: education is not a business, and it can’t be run like a business.

Business ideas work well in the world of commerce, where businesses compete to provide a better product or better service. Probably there will be readers who question how well business is functioning right now, as megastores like Walmart gobble up neighborhood stores, destroying Main Street, and as online giants like Amazon threaten to gobble up all brick-and-mortar stores, even Walmart.

Greene writes, and I quote him in part:

We are living through yet another demonstration of the ways in which market-based approaches fail, and in some cases, fail really hard.

Long Term Preparation Is Inefficient But Essential

Back when I was a stage crew advisor, there was a pep talk I had to give periodically to crew members, particularly those working in the wings as grips or fly. “I know that you sit and do nothing for a lot of this show,” I’d say, “but when we need you, we really need you. In those few minutes, you are critical to our success.” In those moments we were talking about, every crew member was occupied; there was no way to double up or cut corners.

Emergency preparation is much the same. It’s economically efficient to, for instance, keep a whole stockpile of facemasks or ventilators. Big-time businessman Trump justified his cuts to various health agencies by citing business wisdom:

And rather than spending the money—I’m a business person. I don’t like having thousands of people around when you don’t need them. When we need them, we can get them back very quickly.

This turns out to be just as smart as disbanding the fire department and figuring you’ll just round up personnel and equipment when something is actually on fire. It doesn’t work. And as we have witnessed, it leaves you unprepared to deal with the critical moment when it arrives.

But the market hates tying up money in excess capacity or emergency readiness, because you’re spending all that money on capacity that isn’t being used this second. Are those guidance counselors and school nurses seeing students every single minute of the day? Well then, we should be able to cut them back. Are we sure that every teacher is teaching the maximum number of students possible? Couldn’t we just put some of those students on software? This is why so many business heads are convinced that public education is simply filled with waste–because there seems to be so much excess capacity in schools.

But in many schools, there’s not enough excess capacity. When a student is in the middle of a crisis, we should be able to respond immediately, whether it’s a personal crisis, a medical crisis, or an educational issue. The response should not be “tough it out till the counselor is on duty tomorrow” or “we’ll just wrap that in some gauze until the nurse comes in three hours from now” or “I know you need help with the assignment, but I can’t take my attention away from the other thirty-five students in this classroom.” And that’s on top of the issue of preparedness, or having staff and teachers who have the capacity–the time and resources and help– to be prepared for the daily onslaught of Young Human Crises. When wealthy people pay private school tuition or raise their own public school taxes, this is what they’re paying for– the knowledge that whenever their child needs the school to respond, the response will come immediately.

Sure, you can cut a school to the bones in the name of efficiency, but what you’ll have is the educational equivalent of a nation caught flatfooted by a global pandemic because it didn’t have the people in place to be prepared.

Competition Guarantees Losers

Ed Reformsters just love the bromide about how competition raises all boats and makes everyone better. And yet, the pandemic’s free market approach to critical medical supplies doesn’t seem to bear that out. States are being forced to compete with each other and the federal government, and all it’s doing is making vendors rich. This is free market competition at its baldest– if you have more money, you win. If you have less money, you lose. At some point, if it has not already happened, some people in this country are going to die because their state, municipality or medical facility will not have enough money to outbid someone else.

The free market picks losers, and it generally picks them on the basis of their lack of wealth. The notion that losers can just compete harder, by wrapping their bootstraps in grit, is baloney. It’s comforting for winners to believe that they won because of hard work and grit and not winning some fate-based lottery, and it also releases them from any obligation to give a rat’s rear about anyone else (“I made myself, so everyone else should do the same”).

A system built on picking losers and punishing them for losing is the exact opposite of what we need for public education. You can argue that well, we just want free market competition for schools and teachers, but if that kind of competition is in the dna of the system, it will stomp all over students as well, just as all free market businesses pick customers to be losers who don’t get served because they aren’t sufficiently profitable. Kind of like a low-revenue state or old folks home that can’t get its people necessary supplies because they don’t have enough wealth to bid with.

“Compete harder” just means “be richer.” It is not helpful advice.

Please open the link and enjoy the rest of his good essay on why business thinking and cost cutting doesn’t work in education.

Categories Accountability, Competition, Corporate Reform, Corporate Reformers, Education Industry, Education Reform, Privatization, Testing

Nancy Bailey: Stop the Talk about “Reinventing” and “Reimagining” Schools After the Pandemic Unless You Are a Parent or Teacher

By dianeravitch
April 20, 2020 //
44

Nancy Bailey has grown disgusted with the talk of “reinventing” and “reimagining” the school when the talk is coming from the same people who have wrecked the schools with their uninformed and harmful ideas for the past 20 years.

If there is going to be any “reinvention,” it should be done by parents and teachers at their own schools, she says.

Those who have failed us in the past should not be allowed to take control yet again, she says.

She writes:

Teachers and parents on the frontlines of this pandemic should be given control of how their schools are reimagined in the future. When this crisis ends, they should be given the voice on how to bring back democratic public schools and make them their own. Any revolution surrounding schools is theirs.

Those who foisted unproven and draconian school reform on America’s public schools in the past, now attack those reforms like they’re the fault of teachers and school systems. If public schools are broken it’s largely due to what these so-called reformers did to schools. They’re criticizing the mess they created!

Who…

insisted on high-stakes standardized tests?
pushed a no-play, no-recess curriculum on our youngest learners?
denied children with disabilities the services they need?
wrote and insisted on Common Core State Standards?
insisted on one-size-fits-all goals and instruction?
drove parents to distrust teachers?
ignored the mental health needs of children in our schools?
destroyed student privacy, especially online privacy protections?
reduced or removed the number of school nurses, counselors, and support staff in schools?
fired the librarians and closed libraries?
removed the arts from poor public schools?
set up EMO charter schools that drain funds from true public schools?
gave vouchers to schools unaccountable to the public?
praised and funded alternate teachers with fast-track training?
insisted on large class sizes?
said teachers don’t need to improve their knowledge with advanced degrees?
insisted teachers need to be evaluated by tests, using test scores of students they never taught!
opened the door to administrators who never studied or worked with children?
Trying to justify replacing schools with charter schools and online instruction will make for a nice profit.

Since their reforms failed, they and their ideas should be put out to pasture.

Bailey goes on to cite numerous examples of self-appointed “leaders” offering advice about what other people should do.

These are the people she wants to “put out to pasture.”

Read it.

Categories Accountability, Corporate Reformers, Education Industry, Education Reform, Play, Testing

NPE ACTION ENDORSES JOE BIDEN!

By dianeravitch
April 17, 2020 //
64

Please read the NPE Action endorsement of Joe Biden for President.

We support public schools.

Donald Trump and his Secretary of Education, Betsy DeVos, are hostile to the very idea of public schools. They have spent three years proposing deep cuts to public education and attempting to establish federally-funded vouchers for private and religious schools.

In contrast, Joe Biden has proposed dramatic increases in funding to public schools by tripling the amount that Title I schools would receive. He has voiced strong support for more counselors and psychologists in our schools, as well as increased funding for high-quality pre-kindergarten programs. He supports community schools that link social services and the school together to serve children and their families better.

At the Public Education Forum held in Pittsburgh in December of 2019, Joe Biden was asked by NPE Board member Denisha Jones if he would commit to ending standardized testing in schools. His unequivocal response was, “Yes. You are preaching to the choir.” He said to a national audience that “teaching to a test underestimates and discounts the things that are most important for students to know.” He described evaluating teachers by the test scores of their students as a “big mistake.”

At the same public forum in Pittsburgh, he was dismissive of the policies of Secretary of Education DeVos, saying that under his administration, “Betsy DeVos’s whole notion of charter schools…are gone.”

The public statements expressed by Joe Biden encourage us to believe that he does not intend to follow the disastrous education policies of the Obama years included in Race to the Top, which were closely aligned with the failed policies of George Bush’s No Child Left Behind.

We are taking candidate Joe Biden at his word. We believe that he recognizes that Race to the Top and No Child Left Behind were harmful to our schools and our children.

However, if those policies re-emerge, we will vigorously oppose them. We will also continue to be engaged in monitoring the words of both candidates and their parties’ platforms.

We urge our supporters and all friends of public education to go to the polls in November and vote for Joe Biden. The future of our public schools and our democracy is at stake.

In the words of NPE Action President, Diane Ravitch, “We support Joe Biden because he has promised to reverse the failed “test-and-punish” federal policies of the past two decades. For the sake of our children, their teachers, our public schools, and our democracy, Trump must go.”

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Corporate Reformers, Education Industry, Education Reform, For-Profit, NCLB (No Child Left Behind), Networkfor Public Education Action Fund, Privatization, Race to the Top, Support for public schools, Teacher Evaluations, Testing, VAM, Vouchers

Parent: I Refuse to Run a Coronavirus Homeschool

By dianeravitch
April 15, 2020 //
22

This article was written by Jennifer Weiner, an education professor at the University of Connecticut. She explains why she refuses to follow the worksheets and detailed instructions for her twin sons. She recognizes that she is privileged as a person who has economic security, healthcare and is white. But there’s no reason to believe that children who lack her privileges need to be subjected to dull routine.

I read her article with pleasure, a welcome respite from the dire warnings issued by the test-and-punish crowd, by various bureaucrats, by think-tanks underwritten by the Gates Foundation, and many others who are certain that children’s brains will wither if they are not subjected daily to worksheets, test prep, and the holy tests themselves.

What happens if there is a respite in our academic Hunger Games? How will we know who will win and who will lose? This mother wants her children to have a timeout. I’m a grandmother now, but I suspect if my children were still in school, I would be in her camp. School is not a global race to the top. It should be a time to learn and explore and to find joy in reading, writing, thinking, and growing. What children miss most now is the personal contact with their teachers and the social interactions with other students. Jennifer Weiner reminds us that the NCLB pressure-cooker is unhealthy for all children, not just her own. When school resumes, we need to rethink the oppressive and pointless regime imposed on children by federal mandates and groupthink. It’s past time to rethink the status quo and place our faith in real education, students, and teachers, not tests and technology.

She writes:

Thanks to the coronavirus, my third-grade twins are home all day for the foreseeable future. I’m not going to recreate school for them.

Judge me all you want.

Out of respect for their amazing teachers, I’m making a good-faith effort to get my kids to do the work that’s been sent home, but that does not come anywhere close to filling what would have been a school day. After accomplishing the bare minimum, the agenda is to survive and watch too much TV. We are eating cookies and carbs and hoping for the best. We are loving one another and trying not to go insane.

When we got the call that our schools were closing, I knew I’d start seeing social media posts with home-schooling schedules and amazing and quite labor-intensive (for adults) activities for children.

My predictions were right: There have been color-coded home school charts with every minute scheduled, online resources on how to lead children through yoga and meditation, French lessons, and building their own rocket ships. Parents are sharing recipes with the right nutritional balance to enhance study productivity. Many have already begun to lament that they’re failing at meeting these new expectations.

I want to send a message to parents, and in particular to working moms, who will inevitably take on most of this home labor along with working remotely: This is going to be messy and that is OK.

I am not an expert in teaching third graders, particularly those like one of my sons, who has special needs and receives numerous services from talented professional educators every day to ensure he can thrive. We are so grateful to them and to our other son’s teachers and their patience, wisdom, and skill. We know that we don’t share these qualities.

I’m also not a parenting expert — a fact that would be clear if you met our wonderful but somewhat feral children. But I do know, from often painful firsthand experiences, that trying to turn mothering into a competitive sport is straight up unhealthy. It’s not a game I want to play.

My husband and I both work full time. Like so many others, we’re attempting to keep our family safe and fed during our state’s Covid-19 shutdown while simultaneously working to convince our boomer parents to practice social distancing, reaching out to other loved ones and friends and trying not to panic. Even when everything in our life is working the way it should, and with all the privileges we have — our solid health care, our economic stability, our whiteness — we often feel overwhelmed. So this pandemic felt like a bridge too far. We had to meet it head on: holding our breath, crossing our fingers. And not judging ourselves.

I’ve heard predictions from other parents about how this time without classroom instruction could lead to my kids (who, remember, are 8) falling behind so far that college will no longer be in their future. I hate to think of how parents who are preoccupied with worry about loss of income and how to provide food and shelter for their families feel.

They must be terrified their children will be unable to keep up as moms and dads with more flexibility, more security, or even full-time help talk about their aggressive at-home enrichment agendas for their little ones. Maybe this is the perfect time to call a timeout on the academic rat-race that was never healthy or fair in the first place.

Yes, we have embraced the need for some schedule, taking turns keeping an eye on the kids as they surf the internet to make sure whatever they are looking at is age-appropriate. (Of course, one of the boys wanted to learn about bombs.)

So far, we’ve seen them digging into mastodons, dwarf planets, the Mars rover and who made Legos and why. They’ve been reading a lot (mostly graphic novels and “Big Nate” books) because my kids were always avid readers and I don’t have to fight with them to do it. But there are no flash cards and no made-up projects to “enrich” them. We do not assign them essays or ensure their explorations are aligned with Common Core standards. There is no official “movement” or music time. We have not set up a makeshift classroom or given our family’s “school” a name.

We bake and have taste tests to see which cookie recipes are the best, because we like cookies and they are among the few things I know how to make. We walk and walk and walk. We eat together. We think about how lucky we are and try to help those who are more vulnerable and without our resources.

So far, the boys have played more video games and watched more television than they did during any given week before schools shut down. It keeps them busy while their dad and I try to finish our meetings before Zoom crashes.

We love each other, we yell, we apologize, we laugh, they punch each other, we yell some more, we make up. We live, we try to be compassionate and we hope this will all be a memory soon. And when it’s over, the schoolwork will be there.

Categories Academic Freedom, Accountability, Childhood, Education Industry, Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA), NCLB (No Child Left Behind), Race to the Top, Testing

“The Coronavirus Just Might End School Privatization Nonsense”

By dianeravitch
April 14, 2020 //
70

This is an essay I wrote for Education Week. I thank them for their close reading, fact-checking, and careful editing.

The vast majority of the nation’s schoolchildren are out of school because of the deadly coronavirus. Parents are frantically trying to figure out how to keep their children engaged in learning, and many districts are providing online instruction or recommending resources for lessons. After teaching her two children for a week, Shonda Rhimes, the creator and producer of hit TV shows, tweeted, “I think teachers should be paid a billion dollars a year. Or a week.” Another parent forced into homeschooling joked, “Is there any way I can get one of my children transferred to someone else’s class?”

Most parents don’t feel qualified to teach their children at home, especially since museums, libraries, and other public spaces are also closed. They don’t long to be home schoolers; they long for schools to reopen. It turns out that parents and students alike really appreciate their local schools, really respect their teachers, and can’t wait for schools to restart.

Among the sweetest videos on Twitter these days are the teacher parades, such as the one in Lawrence, Kan., where elementary school teachers drive their cars in a slow line around the neighborhood, waving to their children, who stand on their porches and wave back to their teachers. Teachers in other places have launched their own parades, to send a message of love to their students.

I predict that when school resumes—and it probably won’t be until September in most places—teacher-bashing and public-school-bashing will be definitely out of place. The billionaires who have been funding the anti-public-school campaign for the past decade might even have the decency to find other hobbies.

This hiatus in schooling might be a good time for the “reformers” who have made war on the nation’s public schools to reassess why they continue to attack democratically governed public schools and to promote privately managed alternatives. The so-called reformers also might consider why they belittle experienced public school teachers.

As I show in my recent book, Slaying Goliath: The Passionate Resistance to Privatization and the Fight to Save America’s Public Schools, the public in general does not support either charters or vouchers. When voters in Massachusetts and Georgia were asked to approve the expansion of charters in 2016, they voted overwhelmingly against the measures. Whenever voters in any state have been asked to approve vouchers for religious schools, they have uniformly opposed these referenda. The most recent referendum was in Arizona in 2018, where vouchers were rejected by a vote of 65 percent to 35 percent in a conservative state.

Poll after poll shows that the public has negative feelings about public schools in general, which is unsurprising after nearly four decades of bad-mouthing by politicians and other public figures. But when asked about their own school—the one their child attends—parents’ views are strongly positive. They like their public schools and they respect their teachers.

In most parts of the nation, public schools are the center of community life. They provide free meals, a nurse (usually), and instruction by certified teachers (unlike some charters and many of the religious schools that accept vouchers). Across America, public schools are woven into the lives of families. The schools have trophy cases with the names of parents, aunts, uncles, cousins, even grandparents. They sponsor performances where the community can see its children act, dance, sing, play sports, and show their talents.

The so-called “reform movement” wants to replace public schools with schools that are run by private organizations, corporations, or religious groups. They believe that the private sector does everything better than the public sector. They make dramatic promises about the success of schools run by private entities.

But, as I show in my book, none of their promises has come true. Charters, on average, get about the same test scores as public schools, and some (like those in Nevada and Ohio) are among the lowest-scoring schools in the state. In Louisiana, nearly half the charters in all-charter New Orleans earned failing grades on the state’s 2019 school report card. Typically, the charters that get astonishing test scores are also known for excluding the students with disabilities and English-language learners or pushing them out. Vouchers fare worse than charters; studies in the District of Columbia, Louisiana, Indiana, and Ohio show that students in voucher schools perform worse on tests than their peers in public schools.

Other “reform” strategies have also failed to improve education. Evaluating teachers by the test scores of their students (that is, value-added assessment) has been found ineffective. The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation launched an experiment in several districts and charter chains to test the theory that tougher teacher evaluations would improve student results, and a 2018 evaluation of their project by the RAND Corp. and the American Institutes of Research concluded that it made no difference.

The wave of teachers’ strikes that began in February 2018 in West Virginia exposed the basic truth about American education, which the “reformers” had denied: Our public schools are underfunded, and teachers are underpaid. Some states were spending less in 2018 than they had been spending in 2008.

Across the country, some parents have gone up against state legislators to stop school takeovers by charters and privatization. Some parents have fought against the misuse and overuse of standardized tests. Anyone who claims that such tests help students and will someday close achievement gaps is badly misinformed. Standardized tests are normed on a bell curve, which ensures we’ll always see poor performers on such tests. The bottom half of the curve is dominated by kids who are poor, have disabilities, or are English language learners. The top half is dominated by advantaged kids, whose parents make sure they have medical care and are well-nourished. Every standardized test is highly correlated with family income and education.

Pro-public-school activists understand that the tests and A-F state report cards for schools based on those tests are used to advance privatization. The activists realize that on the whole the private sector does not provide better education than the public sector. Charter schools have a high rate of closure, either for academic or financial reasons or because of fraudulent activities by their operators. Voucher schools—schools where parents use vouchers for tuition–in most states tend to be low-cost religious schools where academic quality is far inferior to public schools’.

Charters and vouchers divert badly needed funds from public schools. The competition for students and resources has meant that public schools have had to cut their budgets, lay off teachers, increase their class sizes, and eliminate electives. Most state legislatures have not been willing to increase the real dollars spent on education, and there is not enough money to fund two or three sectors. In the zero-sum game, students and teachers in regular public schools, which enroll between 80 and 90 percent of all students, suffer grievous harm.

When someday our schools reopen, we must renew our efforts to fund them so they are able to meet the needs of students and to pay teachers as professionals. We’ve seen once again in this crisis that Americans value their public schools. But a fact that stands out from the past decade is this: A society that is unwilling to pay what it costs so that all children have a good education is sacrificing its future.

Diane Ravitch has been a historian of American education for 45 years and served as an assistant U.S. secretary of education under President George H. W. Bush. She is a graduate of the Houston public schools.

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Corporate Reformers, Education Industry, Education Reform, For-Profit, Privatization, Testing, Vouchers

National Education Leaders Worry That Students Will Fall Behind During School Closures

By dianeravitch
April 13, 2020 //
44

The Washington Post reports that education leaders are worried that students are falling behind due to school closures and extraordinary measures must be taken so they can “catch up.”

Of course, there is good reason to worry about children who have experienced months without formal schooling. Many, however, do have access to emergency remote teaching. The children likeliest you have no educational opportunities are those who are already farthest behind, those with no access to a computer or the internet, those who get no academic support or direction at home.

When school ultimately reopens, the children who need the most help should have extra-small classes and intensive time with experienced teachers. That requires more money, however, and states are unlikely to increase spending when their revenues are plummeting. The poor kids are likely to get testing and lamentations, not the small classes and instruction they need.

Here is the latest:

Only weeks after the coronavirus pandemic forced American schools online, education leaders across the country have concluded that millions of children’s learning will be severely stunted, and are planning unprecedented steps to help them catch up.

In Miami, school will extend into the summer and start earlier in the fall, at least for some students.

In Cleveland, schools may shrink the curriculum to cover only core subjects. In Columbia, Mo., this year’s lessons will be woven into next year’s.


Some experts [i.e. Mike Petrilli of the conservative Thomas B. Fordham Institute] suggest holding back more kids, a controversial idea, while others propose a half-grade step-up for some students, an unconventional one. A national teachers union [i.e., the AFT] is proposing a massive national summer school program.




Graduates from the Class of 2020 shared how they’re coping after the coronavirus outbreak brought senior year to an abrupt ending.

The ideas being considered will require political will and logistical savvy, and they are already facing resistance from teachers and parents. They’ll also require money, and lots of it, at a time when a cratering economy is devastating state and local budgets, with plunging tax collections and rising costs.

As Congress considers another coronavirus spending package, schools’ ability to make up ground may hinge on how much more they can pry from Washington.


The $2.2 trillion stimulus package approved last month included $13.5 billion for K-12 education. In the next round, a coalition of school administrators and teachers unions is seeking more than $200 billion, citing those depleted state budgets.

In New York state, for instance, schools were poised for deep cuts, with the state anticipating revenue losses as high as $10 billion. The stimulus package will reverse those cuts, but without more bailout money, schools won’t get any extra funding to deal with the crisis.


Just a month ago, most American children were attending school as normal. Today, virtually every U.S. school building is closed. Seventeen states have ordered campuses shuttered through this academic year, another three recommend it, and educators and parents across the country are bracing for a lost spring — and maybe more.



Dr. Anthony S. Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, said last week that he expects schools can reopen in the fall. But he can’t be sure, he said.


Whenever schools return, researchers say, the likely result is a generation of students forced to play catch-up, perhaps for years to come. Most vulnerable are those who are always the most vulnerable: homeless children, those living in deep poverty and students with disabilities. While some students are adapting to distance learning, others are struggling to find quiet spaces to study, lack reliable Internet access or must care for younger siblings during the day, among other barriers.


“ This may be the biggest challenge public education has had to face in the four-plus decades I’ve been doing this work,” said Michael Casserly, executive director of the Council of the Great City Schools, a nonprofit coalition of 76 of the nation’s largest urban public school systems. He said that online learning is likely failing many low-income families and that without “substantial” new spending, schools won’t have the money to reverse the damage. “We are facing an educational catastrophe.”


In some districts, the problem is just getting kids to show up.
In the Los Angeles Unified School District, the country’s second-largest system, 1 in 4 students has not logged on at all. Older students were more likely than elementary children to be connected, but on any given day in one recent week, a quarter of high school students didn’t log in.




Before the coronavirus crisis, only about 1 in 4 students in the high-poverty Baltimore City Public Schools had computers. More Chromebooks are on order, but for now teachers are trying to reach families by phone and Instagram, and the district is broadcasting lessons over its television station.
“What we are providing now is not going to make up fully for all of the time lost,” chief executive Sonja Brookins Santelises said.


In Atlanta’s public schools, about 6,000 children still don’t have computers, and about 10 percent of students have not yet logged in to the remote-learning system, Superintendent Meria Joel Carstarphen said.
One recent day, Carstarphen visited the home of a family whose children had not logged in. She found their mother struggling to provide food, and discovered the house was in an Internet “dead zone.” She also realized she knew the family’s oldest child, a “super sweet kid,” from her visits to his high school football team.
“He’s the man of the house and he’s only a junior right now,” Carstarphen said. “He has not been doing his work and neither have his siblings for three weeks.”


Even when students have computers, parents and caregivers fear that minimal learning is underway. Billie Stewart is raising her 8-year-old grandson, Tony, on Detroit’s east side. She’s received little direction from his school, she said, and trying to keep up with the school’s online offerings has been “almost overwhelming.”
Stewart, 73, has worked hard to lay out a daily schedule for Tony but finds herself unable to keep up. “If I get asked for another password, I don’t know what I’ll do.”




In Philadelphia’s public schools, teachers have been told not to teach new material, due to concerns that lessons cannot be equitably provided to all. Philadelphia plans to begin remote education later this month, but for weeks families have been left largely on their own.


“

We’ve been looking for guidance from teachers, but they don’t really know what they’re supposed to be doing,” said Stacy Stewart, who has two children in a North Philadelphia elementary school, plus 1-year-old twins. “Ever since they’ve been out of school, there’s been no structured virtual learning. It’s just been flying by the seat of their pants.”
The school provided a study packet for Mikail, a second-grader, but no direction for Abdul Malik, who’s in kindergarten, other than links to a few education websites. There’s only one computer in the house, which Stewart needs for work, and it’s been a struggle to keep her kids engaged in anything that looks like learning. “I mean, I’m not really a teacher,” she said.


To understand how deep the setbacks may be, researchers are examining data on the so-called “summer slide,” in which students, particularly those in low-income families, lose months of reading and math knowledge. Research differs on the magnitude of the loss, but there’s broad agreement that this year’s losses will be greater than normal.

Categories Accountability, Education Reform, Testing

Tom Ultican: Two Books You Will Enjoy Reading

By dianeravitch
April 8, 2020 //
3

In this post, Tom Ultican reviews two recent books.

One is Mercedes Schneider’s guide to sleuthing through online records and following the money. It is called A Practical Guide to Digital Research: Getting the Facts and Rejecting the Lies.

Schneider is an expert at “following the money,” and she reveals the secrets of her craft in this book. The book grew out of a presentation that Schneider gave at an NPE conference in Indianapolis in collaboration with Darcie Cimarusti and Andrea Gabor. As Tom Ultican explains, the purpose of the session was to teach a seminar in doing the kind of research that these three have mastered. When Mercedes was asked to summarize her presentation, she realized that it would require a book to do it, and this is that book.

So if you want to dig up the tax records of a pseudo-reform organization, here is the place to start.

The other book that Tom reviews is one that I co-write with veteran educator Nancy E. Bailey. Regular readers of this blog know Bailey as a blogger whose views are grounded in long experience and knowledge. She and I discovered that we both had a fascination with the language now used to misrepresent teaching, schools, and education. And from our online conversations came this book called EdSpeak and Doubletalk: A Glossary to Decipher Hypocrisy and Save Public Schooling.

The book is a glossary with a pro-public education attitude. It aims to identify and describe the lingo of corporate education reform and to decipher the many faux groups that are funded by billionaires to advance privatization. Of course, we think it is an invaluable tool for parents and educators who want to stop the billionaires before they get a foothold. It will help you find your way through the vacant and deceptive vocabulary used by faux reformers to grab your public schools.

As Tom points out, the book has another advantage:

Thanks to the authors and the facilities at Teachers College, this is a living book. At the book’s cyber address, there is a link to a 58 page downloadable supplement as well as an updates tab.

In other words, as new organizations, new flimflam, and new jargon emerges, it will be added to the book online and available to arm you with knowledge.

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Common Core, Corporate Reformers, Education Industry, Education Reform, For-Profit, Privatization, Testing, Vouchers

New York: Regents’ Exams Canceled This Year

By dianeravitch
April 6, 2020 //
13

At a meeting of the New York State Board of Regents, Chancellor Betty Rosa announces that the Regents exams required for high school graduation will be canceled this year.

This is a wise decision. The exams cannot be given in person. If delivered online, there is no way to know who is taking the exam.

The next year should be a time to rethink the current policy of requiring all students to take the Regents. In the long history of the exams, this policy is fairly recent. The Regents used to be only for students who were college bound or who wanted the distinction of taking and passing them. Making them universal made it necessary to water them down. At the same time, they were an unnecessary hurdle for some students, who did not care about having a Regents diploma.

Categories Accountability, New York, Testing
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