Archives for category: U.S. Department of Education
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The Republicans in Senate Did Something Right!

By dianeravitch
March 9, 2017 //
31

Give credit where credit is due: Even though the Republican majority in the Senate seems eager to privatize public schools, for fun and credit and to satisfy their inner Ayn Rand, they did something right: they eliminated former Secretary of Education John King’s regulations to measure the effectiveness of teacher education. King wanted to judge teacher education institutions by student test scores. It was likely if not inevitable that teachers who went to affluent districts would get better results than those who taught in the neediest schools.

Teacher educators lambasted King’s effort to micromanage teacher education and warned that his demands would drive teachers away from high-needs schools.

This is one example where deregulation was necessary and didn’t make matters worse.

The Senate also voted to roll back an Obama administration rule to “hold schools accountable,” which passed by only 50-49, over vociferous Democratic opposition. Frankly, I don’t know which rule this is. If it was the Obama-Duncan-King test-based accountability, then I think its repeal or elimination is a step forward. As we saw again and again over the past eight years, the Obama Department of Education had an obsessive devotion to test-based accountability that harmed students, teachers, and schools. If this is what the Senate knocked down, count me in. Even the znational Academy of Sciences issued a report critical of test-based accountability, but Duncan was as smitten with standardized testing as DeVos is smitten with vouchers.

Categories Accountability, John King, Teacher Education, Teacher Evaluations, Testing, U.S. Department of Education

NPE Action Reports on Fight Against School Privatization

By dianeravitch
March 9, 2017 //
20

NPE Action exists to fight school privatization and to demand better resourced, more equitable schools.

Here is the latest news on the privatization front.


Good News! House Bill HR 610, the School Choice Act, Appears to Have Stalled

HR 610 was written to eliminate the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965, which was passed as a part of Lyndon B. Johnson’s “War on Poverty,” and to create block grants to “distribute a portion of funds to parents who elect to enroll their child in a private school or to home-school their child.” It would also lower nutritional standards for free or reduced priced lunches.

Thanks to your efforts, the Network for Public Education generated over 32,000 emails to members of the U.S. House of Representatives in opposition to this bill. That is a job well done, members!

Be our Eyes and Ears in Your State

Voucher bills and bills that expand charter schools are popping up in nearly every state. When we learn of such bills, we create an action alert that produces a barrage of emails to lawmakers. We need your help in keeping us up to date.

Become a member of our state alert system. If you know of a bill in your state that would promote vouchers, so-called education savings accounts, or tax credit funded “scholarships” to private schools, let us know using the form below. If there is a bill that would expand charter schools or reduce their governing regulations, tell us.

You can find the sign-up form here. Please be sure to save it in your favorites for easy access.

We will then investigate the bill and help mobilize activists in your state.

NPE Action Welcomes Tina Andres to its Board of Directors

Tina Andres has been a public school teacher for 30 years in Santa Ana, California. She has taught elementary special education classes and middle school mathematics for 25 years. She has served as a math curriculum specialist, and mentored over 50 student teachers from public universities throughout her career. Tina is married with two children who attend Santa Ana schools. She is an active member of NEA and CTA and serves on the State Council. Tina is also a member of the BATs Board of Directors. She is a proud advocate for public schools. We welcome Tina to our NPE Action Board.

Are you a School Board Member? It’s Time to Organize!

NPE Action is creating a nationwide Grassroots School Board Members Network. If you are a member of a board of education, please sign up to join​.

https://npeaction.org/2017/03/03/7286/

This new grassroots group will provide a means by which you can share resolutions, actions, and communicate with like-minded board members who are intent on supporting and preserving public education.

We believe that School Boards are vital for democratically goverend public schools, and we want to fight with you to make sure that the public understands their importance. We will also provide resources and information.

There is no cost to you–our only motivation is to help you find like-minded board members with whom you can communicate in this important struggle to save our public schools from privatization.

If you would like to join, please fill out our short form that you can find here. If you are not a school board member, please share the form with a school board member.

https://npeaction.org/2017/03/03/7286/

Categories Accountability, Betsy DeVos, Charter Schools, Corporate Reformers, Education Industry, Networkfor Public Education Action Fund, Privatization, U.S. Department of Education, U.S. education, Vouchers

Gene V. Glass: The Department of Education’s “Gold Standard” Produces “Fool’s Gold”

By dianeravitch
February 21, 2017 //
13

Gene V. Glass is one of our nation’s most distinguished education researchers.

This post is an important analysis of the failure of the U.S. Department of Education’s Institute of Education Sciences, which was reorganized during the George W. Bush administration.

As a new administration moves into the US Department of Education, the opportunity arises to review and assess the Department’s past practices. A recent publication goes to the heart of how US DOE has been attempting to influence public education. Unfortunately, in an effort to justify millions of dollars spent on research and development, bureaucrats pushed a favorite instructional program that teachers flatly rejected.

The Gold Standard

There is a widespread belief that the best way to improve education is to get practitioners to adopt practices that “scientific” methods have proven to be effective. These increasingly sophisticated methods are required by top research journals and for federal government improvement initiatives such as Investing in Innovation (i3) Initiative to fund further research or dissemination efforts. The US DOE established the What Works Clearinghouse (WWC) to identify the scientific gold-standards and apply them to certify for practitioners which programs “work.” The Fed’s “gold standard” is the Randomized Comparative Trial (RCT). In addition, there have been periodic implementations of US DOE policies that require practitioners to use government funds only for practices that the US DOE has certified to be effective.

However, an important new article published by Education Policy Analysis Archives, concludes that these gold-standard methods misrepresent the actual effectiveness of interventions and thereby mislead practitioners by advocating or requiring their use. The article is entitled “The Failure of the U.S. Education Research Establishment to Identify Effective Practices: Beware Effective Practices Policies.”

The Fool’s Gold

Earlier published work by the author, Professor Stanley Pogrow of San Francisco State University, found that the most research validated program, Success for All, was not actually effective. Quite the contrary! Pogrow goes further and analyzes why these gold-standard methods can not be relied on to guide educators to more effective practice.

Researchers have told us that we need “randomized comparative trials” to reach “research-based conclusions.”

In fact, says Glass and the article he cites, this is not what happens. And the results of these trials turn out to be easily manipulated and falsified.

He writes:

Key problems with the Randomized Comparative Trial include (1) the RCT almost never tells you how the experimental students actually performed, (2) that the difference between groups that researchers use to consider a program to be effective is typically so small that it is “difficult to detect” in the real world, and (3) statistically manipulating the data to the point that the numbers that are being compared are mathematical abstractions that have no real world meaning—and then trying to make them intelligible with hypothetical extrapolations such the difference favoring the experimental students is the equivalent of increasing results from the 50th to the 58th percentile, or an additional month of learning. The problem is that we do not know if the experimental students actually scored at the 58th or 28th percentile. So in the end, we end up not knowing how students in the intervention actually performed, and any benefits that are found are highly exaggerated.

The sad part of the story is that we now have a new administration that is both ignorant of research and indifferent to it. DeVos has seen the failure of school choice in her own state, which has plummeted in the national rankings since 2003, and it has had no impact on her ideology. Ideology is not subject to testing or research. It is a deep-seated belief system that cannot be dislodged by evidence.

Categories Betsy DeVos, Data, Research, U.S. Department of Education

The Nation: How Activists in Alaska Turned Senator Murkowski Around

By dianeravitch
February 2, 2017 //
12

This is a heartening story in The Nation about the effective activism of Alaskans, who persuaded Senator Lisa Murkowski to oppose DeVos.

They bombarded her with calls, emails, etc.

The question for Senator Murkowski and Senator Collins–who say they will vote against DeVos on the Senate floor–is why they didn’t vote against her in committee. If her nomination had been voted down in committee, it would never have reached the Senate as a whole. She was endorsed by the HELP committee by vote of 12-11. If only one of them had voted no, DeVos would now be history.

But they cannily approved her in committee, then announced they would vote no when their vote no longer was pivotal.

If every Republican votes for DeVos except for these two, the Senate will have a tie, 50-50. Mike Pence will then cast the tiebreaker and DeVos will be confirmed.

DeVos will become the first candidate for a Cabinet position in history to be endorsed by a tie-breaking vote by the Vice President.

I am not ready to offer any awards to Murkowski or Collins. Either one of them could have put an end to her candidacy in committee, and they didn’t. These are not profiles in courage.

Categories Alaska, Betsy DeVos, Republicans, U.S. Department of Education

Network for Public Education Vows to Carry Fight Against DeVos to Senate Floor!

By dianeravitch
January 31, 2017 //
23

The Network for Public Educations vows to carry the fight for a qualified Secretary of Education to the Senate floor.

We now have more than 300,000 members, located in every state.

We will fight for a Secretary of Education who will uphold the laws, support the right to an education for all children, and strengthen our public schools.

http://networkforpubliceducation.org/2017/01/devos-nomination-moves-senate-npes-300000-will-continue-fight/

NPE just released this statement:

Although disappointed by the decision of the HELP committee to send the vote on Betsy DeVos to the Senate floor, The Network for Public Education (NPE) was pleased by the strong opposition to DeVos. All Democrats voted against DeVos. Senators Collins of Maine and Murkowski of Alaska while voting to move her nomination forward, would not commit to voting for her when the vote comes to the full Senate.

“Betsy DeVos put a spotlight on the threat to public education that charters-both online and brick and mortar, and private voucher schools pose to our democratically governed, community public schools. Public school advocates across the nation spoke out. Our campaign against DeVos generated over 600,000 emails and thousands of phone calls and letters to the Senate. Most Americans do not want an unregulated, privatized school system paid for by American taxpayers. That is what DeVos represents,” said NPE Executive Director, Carol Burris.

NPE President, Diane Ravitch, believes the massive political donations by DeVos was the driving factor behind her appointment. “We are disappointed but not surprised that Betsy DeVos was approved by the Senate HELP committee, despite the fact that she is completely unqualified for the job by experience or knowledge or any other criteria. As she has acknowledged, she and her family have given millions of dollars to the Republican party, including to members of the committee that just approved her. We weep for the children of America, knowing that this woman will launch an assault on their community public schools, as she did in Michigan. Since her choice theology was implemented in Michigan, that state’s rankings on national tests have plummeted, and Detroit–now flooded with charters–remains the lowest performing urban district on national tests. We will continue to fight this nomination as it moves forward.“

NPE Executive Board member, Phyllis Bush, lives in Indiana, a state the embraces the DeVos philosophy. “While the members of the HELP committee can talk about the importance of using a business model to reform public schools, the ultimate cost to Indiana is landing on the backs of students. Privatization reform has resulted in larger class sizes, tests that provide little useful information, school letter grades that reward zip codes, the elimination of essential services in public schools, and a critical teacher shortage.”

The Network for Public Education intends to mobilize its over 300,000 supporting members to continue the fight against DeVos’ appointment.

“When it comes to our fight for adequately funded, democratically-governed public schools, we make ‘no excuses’.” Our neighborhood schools made our country great. We will not allow them to be destroyed,” Burris said.

Categories Betsy DeVos, Education Reform, Network for Public Education, Networkfor Public Education Action Fund, Supporting public schools, U.S. Department of Education

Teacher at a Rally in DC Asks a Good Question

By dianeravitch
January 30, 2017 //
21

I found this picture on the Twitter feed of the Alt_DeptofED:

https://mobile.twitter.com/Alt_DeptofED/status/825746591344631808/photo/1

“If I have to be highly qualified to serve my students, why doesn’t DeVos?”

Categories Betsy DeVos, U.S. Department of Education

Laura Chapman on the Mysterious Non-Evaluation of ED Department Charter Funding

By dianeravitch
January 22, 2017 //
12

Laura Chapman, retired educator and crack researcher, comments on the strange case of the millions (billions?) of dollars awarded to charter schools that have never been evaluated as to their use, misuse, or effectiveness:

 

 

I doubt if you will ever find an evaluation report for our charter school investments, from USDE or IES.
USDE shoved money out the door for anything charter–startup, replication (franchising), and facilities and facilities financing.

 
Negative reviews of the grant applications were ignored. I read some of these reviews. Even the questions for the reviewers were rigged to minimize “accountability.”

 
We paid federal dollars for absurdities, including advertising for charter students; cross-country junkets to recruit teachers and leaders; uniforms for the students including backpacks with logos, various goodies for “awards.”

 
I have yet to find any reports from states back to USDE on what happened to the money channeled to states. No federal reports on schools opened, closed, etc. No credible peer-reviewed independent studies on student outcomes.

 
USDE let the charter authorizers and franchisers call the shots. Some of the grant applications had redacted information–unreadable chunks of text blacked out because this information was “proprietary” and might “leak,” offering a competitive advantage to other charters. USDE rolled over on that request from the grant applicants. What was redacted? Test scores and enrollments were redacted.

 
I just checked the 2016 active contracts of USDE bearing on charters. Only two are there, and both have been granted extensions from the original contracts.

 
WESTAT, INC. The purpose of this procurement is to obtain technical services for the U.S. Department of Education Charter Schools Program to support the Credit Enhancement Program with grantee monitoring. Monitoring grant projects means examining policies, systems, and procedures to ensure compliance with Federal statutes, regulations, Guidance, grant applications, and performance agreements.

Dates: 9/25/15 to 9/24/17 extended to 9/24/19
Amount: $514,554. This is a very small contract for WESTAT: It is a major subcontractor for many federal agencies.

 
SAFAL PARTNERS, INC. The purpose of this contract is to obtain technical assistance for the U.S. Department of Education Charter Schools Program for a range of activities, including online assistance, meetings, reports, studies, and assistance in a variety of focus areas, that COULD include human capital resources, facilities, authorizing, accountability, students with disabilities, English learners, military-connected children, and others.
Dates: from 9/27/13 to 9/26/17 extended to 9/26/18-
Amount: $12,872,533.
SAFAL Partners leads the National Charter School Resource Center, which hosts other USDE subcontractors. SAFAL Partners appears to be the go-to outfit for charter-friendly research. Clients include the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, Laura and John Arnold Foundation, Education Pioneers, George W. Bush Institute, Teach for America Houston among others.

 
A 2016 report from SAFAL Partners titled “Student Achievement in Charter Schools: What the Research Shows” is a very limited and dubious “comparison” of five studies, with caveats dismissed (e.g., fewer ELL and special education students in charter schools, only math and reading scores, test scores not from the same tests, and more). This report is more PR more than credible research.

Categories Charter Schools, Funding, Research, U.S. Department of Education

Betsy DeVos Refuses to Divest From “Brain Enhancement” Corporation

By dianeravitch
January 22, 2017 //
43

 

The New York Times reports that billionaire Betsy DeVos refuses to sell her interest in Neurocore, a company that uses biofeedback to enhance brain functioning. She has a direct conflict of interest. Will that stop her nomination? I wouldn’t bet on it. It didn’t faze Republicans that she knows nothing about federal law regarding children with disabilities. Why should they care that she will use her position to enrich herself? When is enough enough?

 

The committee vote on DeVos will take place on January 31. Call your Senators’ offices. Speak to his or her aides. Urge them to vote NO on this unqualified, uninformed party debutante. She is not entitled to be Secretary of Education as payback for hundreds of millions of donations to the Republican Party.

 

 

“Betsy DeVos, the billionaire school choice advocate selected by President Donald J. Trump to serve as education secretary, is a strong supporter of using biofeedback technology to help children and teenagers enhance their performance in school.

 
“Ms. DeVos and her husband, Richard DeVos Jr., are major financial backers of Neurocore, a Michigan company that operates drug-free “brain performance centers” that claim to have worked with 10,000 children and adults to overcome problems with attention deficit disorder, autism, sleeplessness and stress.

 
“In an agreement with the Office of Government Ethics made public Friday, Ms. DeVos said that she had stepped down from the Neurocore board but that she would retain her financial interest in the company. She valued that stake at $5 million to $25 million in her financial disclosure statement.

 
“On Friday evening, Senator Lamar Alexander of Tennessee, the Republican chairman of the Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee, said he would delay the initial vote on Ms. DeVos’s nomination by a week, until Jan. 31, as Democrats argued that the process had been rushed through, without enough time to answer remaining questions about her financial disclosures.

 
“Ms. DeVos and her husband promote Neurocore heavily on the website for Windquest Group, a family office the couple use to manage some of their many investments. The website, for instance, includes a link to a Washington Post article about Kirk Cousins, a Washington Redskins quarterback who describes how he “retrained” his brain to better perform on the field by going to a Neurocore center.

 
“But the claims that Neurocore’s methods can help children improve their performance in school could present a conflict for Ms. DeVos if she is confirmed as education secretary — especially given that the company is moving to expand its national reach.

 
“Neurocore, founded about a decade ago, operates seven of the brain performance centers in Michigan and recently opened two in Florida. It has said it has plans to open as many as seven other centers across the country this year. Ms. DeVos’s financial disclosure shows that she and her husband have an indirect interest in the company through a family partnership.

 
“Richard W. Painter, a White House ethics adviser under President George W. Bush, said he was familiar with Neurocore and applauded the business and education concepts behind it — but he said the DeVoses would be better off selling their interests in the company.”

 

California teacher Jack Covey sent the following comment on this news story:

 

“I am very sensitive to the needs of students
with disabilities.”
— Betsy Devos, at her confirmation hearing,
in response to a question from Senator Murray.

 

I think we now may have a little clarity as to what
she meant by that remark … as in when such needs
benefit her investment portfolio.

 

QUICK BACKGROUND:

 

Neurocore — a totally unscientific, quack medical
“bio-feedback” company that claims to cure autism, ADHD, etc.
where it operates nine “brain performance centers,” where
the controversial “drug free” cures offered there are not recognized by
any entity or anyone in the mainstream medical establishment.
Despite its grandiose claims of success, Neurocore has never consented
to have these practices tested or investigated in peer-reviewed
studies.

 

… “snake oil” is how Jennifer “Edushyster” Berkshire
referred to it in a recent tweet:
https://twitter.com/EduShyster/status/822793877614710788

 

 

Indeed, the Michigan Dept. of Insurance has upheld
insurance company denials of coverage for any Neurocore
“cures” on the grounds that there is zero evidence supporting
the efficacy of any of their treatments. These repeated
denials and upholding of these denials contradict
Neurocore’s website, which claims that their treatments
are covered by insurance carriers.

 

Betsy and her husband are two of Neurocore’s main investors
via their umbrella company Windcrest, which also is the
main backer of that Boxed Water being peddled to
the struggling citizens of Flint, Michigan. (a photo
of Betsy at a school site, included a product placement
for this “Boxed Water.”)

 

Her stock ownership and membership on Neurocore board of directors
was discovered two days ago — alas, after her confirmation
hearings.”

 

Categories Betsy DeVos, Billionaires, Education Industry, Ethics, For-Profit, U.S. Department of Education

Pay-to-Play: DeVos Has Funded 10 of 12 Republicans on Senate HELP Committee

By dianeravitch
January 12, 2017 //
29

The Center for American Progress has researched the many DeVos political action committees and discovered that they have given campaign cash to 10 of the 12 Republicans on the Senate Health,  Education, Labor and Pensions Committee. This is the Committee that will pass judgment on her fitness to be US Secretary of a Education.

 

“A number of media outlets and researchers have described the hundreds of millions of dollars the DeVos family has poured into right-wing causes for many years. A few have noted their pattern of giving to members of the Senate. But none have revealed a complete and up-to-date tally of her financial sway over the Senate that will consider her nomination.

 
“DeVos has taken this pay-for-play approach before. Just consider the impact she had in her home state of Michigan last year. As a reward for passing a no-accountability charter school law in the state, the DeVos family once gave state Republicans $1.45 million in a seven-week period. That’s about an average of $25,000 a day. “A filthy, moneyed kiss” is how the Detroit Free Press’ editorial page editor described the lobbying effort.”

 

The Senate hearings should be a love fest, with senators scrambling to praise her long experience as a friend of private and religious schools and lobbyist for vouchers.

 

Categories Betsy DeVos, Republicans, U.S. Department of Education

Rebecca Mead: Betsy DeVos and the Plan to Break Public Education

By dianeravitch
December 16, 2016 //
24

Rebecca Mead, staff writer at The anew Yorker, outlines the advantages that Betsy DeVos offers:

 

She has no ties to Vladimir Putin; she hasn’t spread fake news; she apparently has no plans to dismantle the U.S. Department of Education. Of these three “advantages,” I feel confident only about the first one. Her persistent lambasting of public schools is fake news. And it remains to be seen whether she will close down the ED Department.

 

Of this we can be confident: she is the first Secretary of Education who is actively hostile to public education. She is an extremist ideologue. She is unfit to manage a large government agency that is responsible not only for aid to poor children in K-12 but for aid to higher education, student debt, aid to special education, education research, and a variety of other programs about which she is inexperienced and uninformed.

 

Mead writes:

 

“DeVos has never taught in a public school, nor administered one, nor sent her children to one. She is a graduate of Holland Christian High School, a private school in her home town of Holland, Michigan, which characterizes its mission thus: “to equip minds and nurture hearts to transform the world for Jesus Christ.”

 

How might DeVos seek to transform the educational landscape of the United States in her position at the head of a department that has a role in overseeing the schooling of more than fifty million American children? As it happens, she does have a long track record in the field. Since the early nineteen-nineties, she and her husband, Dick DeVos, have been very active in supporting the charter-school movement. They worked to pass Michigan’s first charter-school bill, in 1993, which opened the door in their state for public money to be funnelled to quasi-independent educational institutions, sometimes targeted toward specific demographic groups, which operate outside of the strictures that govern more traditional public schools. (Dick DeVos, a keen pilot, founded one of his own: the West Michigan Aviation Academy, located at Gerald Ford International Airport, which serves an overwhelmingly white, overwhelmingly male population of students.)”

 

DeVos has a long record of promoting choice, that is, seeking alternatives to public schools. She doesn’t like public schools. She believes in choice without accountability. As Mead points out, the dire situation in Detroit reflects her ideology. Detroit has been Her Petrilli dish. It is a colossal failure. Despite what is right before her, she still believes that choice is all that is needed to produce excellence. Except it doesn’t, never has, never will. In DeVos’s mind, ideology trumps all, evidence doesn’t matter. She thinks that public schools are passé, finished, so yesterday.

 

Mead writes:

 

“Missing in the ideological embrace of choice for choice’s sake is any suggestion of the public school as a public good—as a centering locus for a community and as a shared pillar of the commonweal, in which all citizens have an investment. If, in recent years, a principal focus of federal educational policy has been upon academic standards in public education—how to measure success, and what to do with the results—DeVos’s nomination suggests that in a Trump Administration the more fundamental premises that underlie our institutions of public education will be brought into question. In one interview, recently highlighted by Diane Ravitch on her blog, DeVos spoke in favor of “charter schools, online schools, virtual schools, blended learning, any combination thereof—and, frankly, any combination, or any kind of choice that hasn’t yet been thought of.” A preëmptive embrace of choices that haven’t yet been thought of might serve as an apt characterization of Trump’s entire, chaotic cabinet-selection process. But whether it is the approach that will best serve current and prospective American school students is another question entirely.”

 

 

Categories Betsy DeVos, Charter Schools, Trump, U.S. Department of Education, Virtual Charter Schools, Vouchers
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