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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

Gary Rubinstein: What TFA Said about the DeVos Appointment

By dianeravitch
November 29, 2016 //
11

Gary Rubinstein entered teaching via Teach for America, but unlike most TFA recruits, he made teaching his career. He is also TFA’s most incisive critic, sometimes a critical friend, other times a critic of TFA hypocrisy.

In this post, Gary deconstructs TFA’s statement on Trump’s nomination of choice zealot Betsy DeVos. TFA, like other reform organizations, is in a dilemma because they want to be on the side of social justice, but they also want to be on the side of the new administration, which will be very good indeed for TFA. More charters mean more jobs for young recruits. Billions of dollars for school choice are heading the way of the “reformers,” and it is hard for them to seem sad about that. Gary wishes the TFA statement had included a few good words on behalf of public schools and on behalf of teachers. It didn’t.

The TFA statement includes 11 policy priorities, and Gary analyzes each of them. He wishes TFA had called on DeVos to stop the teacher bashing. It didn’t. He wishes it had called on DeVos to protect the funding of public schools while promoting choice. It didn’t.

Read the whole post for links and analysis.

Gary concludes:

Accountability has been used as a weapon to fire teachers and close schools throughout the country based on highly flawed metrics. Obama and Duncan did a lot of damage with this one and maybe TFA feels that they used it in a fair way, even if I don’t. But that same weapon in the hands of Trump and DeVos should be something that TFA should be concerned about. I don’t think that this was something that TFA needed to ask the new Secretary to be vigilant. Based on the contempt she has shown for public schools and teachers over the years, it’s pretty clear that DeVos will use her power to try to make it even easier to fire teachers and close schools. This could have a negative effect on not just all the TFA alumni who are still working in public schools, but also for the ones who are at the few charter schools that try to keep their most needy students and whose test scores suffer for it. In the bigger picture, I think that having DeVos too strong on accountability will negatively affect so many students in this country.

Finally there’s policy number nine about using “evidence and data” to ‘drive’ “teacher improvement and development over time.” This is code for trying to use test scores and value-added metrics to rate teachers, no matter how inaccurate those metrics are.

More telling than the policies TFA chose to include on this list is the ones they chose to exclude. Knowing that DeVos is planning to use her power to divert funds from the public schools (and charter schools too) for vouchers for private schools, perhaps TFA could have asked that she not cut funding to schools. Knowing how much contempt DeVos has shown toward public school teachers, TFA could asked her not to bash teachers so much. Knowing that DeVos has funded reform propaganda sites like Campbell Brown’s The Seventy Four, TFA could have suggested that she spend time in public schools and see what great work is being done.

There’s a lot they could have said to help stave off the at least four year battle everyone in non-charter schools is going to have to fight daily. Instead they padded their valid concerns about discrimination with a bunch of reform code.

Of their nine policies that TFA is urging DeVos to consider (three of the eleven are basically saying, make schools safe for all students), six of them are things that she was already on board with. It’s the TFA way of saying “We are already in agreement with you on most things so you can trust us and work with us to help you out in general.” They seem to care more about their own survival and the continuation of Duncan’s reform strategies than they do about the potential damage that the Trump / DeVos duo can wreak on the children of this country.

Categories Accountability, Betsy DeVos, Charter Schools, Teach for America, Testing, U.S. Department of Education, Vouchers

Mercedes Schneider: Jerry Falwell Jr. Was Offered the Job Before Betsy DeVos

By dianeravitch
November 28, 2016 //
24

Mercedes Schneider reports that Jerry Falwell Jr. was offered the job as Secretary of Education before Betsy DeVos.

Trump, never known in the past to be a man of religious faith, shows how little importance he attaches to education.

First, the unqualified Falwell, then the unqualified DeVos.

Categories Trump, U.S. Department of Education

Mitchell Robinson: From Michigan, This is the Real Betsy DeVos

By dianeravitch
November 23, 2016 //
24

Mitchell Robinson is a professor of music education at Michigan State University. He writes here about the Betsy DeVos that the people of Michigan know, the one who wants to monetize education spending and voucherize the schools so that families can spend their education dollars wherever they want.

 

Robinson writes:

 

The news that Donald Trump has named Betsy DeVos as his choice for Secretary of Education is just another brick in the wall for Mr. Trump’s plan to turn the US into a giant flea market, selling off the bits and pieces of a once great nation for parts to the highest bidders.

 

I had to laugh in recent weeks as folks set off alarms at the rumors of Michelle Rhee or Eva Moskowitz being appointed to this position. The truth is Rhee and Moskowitz are mere amateurs at this school privatization scheme. For Pete’s sake, Ms. Moskowitz still spends her days actually stepping foot in to schools in NYC, terrorizing students and teachers. And Rhee, a former Teach for America recruit, whose “go to” classroom management technique was taping the mouths of her reluctant “scholars”, has been in hiding after a disastrous run as Superintendent of DC’s schools, an experiment that ended in failure for all concerned, and threatened to dim the rising star of the corporate reform movement–until recently, when she and her icky hubby reemerged for a photo op at Trump Tower.

 

Betsy DeVos, on the other hand, is a pro at this game. And unlike Rhee and Moskowitz, who depend on the kindness–and financial backing–of others, Betsy has the financial wherewithall to bankroll her own plans. Like her new boss, Ms. DeVos–allegedly–won’t be beholden to any “special interests” in her efforts to turn our public education system into a Sotheby’s auction.

 

Rest assured, also, that unlike Ms. Moskowitz, Betsy DeVos hasn’t been spending any of her valuable time in…”schools” lately, and certainly hasn’t been close enough to a real, live student to tape them up–even though I’m sure she approves of Ms. Rhee’s approach to building a safe and welcoming classroom learning environment. No, Ms. DeVos has been busy dreaming up new ways to capitalize on the billions of taxpayer dollars currently being wasted on children, teachers, and schools, and helping her puppet in the Michigan governor’s residence with his plan to destroy the state’s schools.

 

Remember, Michigan is the state where the Governor poisoned the water in one of the city’s largest cities, and more than 400 days later has still refused to replace a single water pipe. And the state whose lawyers recently claimed–and I swear I’m not making this up–that the state’s children had no “fundamental right to literacy.”

 

This is Betsy DeVos’ and Rick Snyder’s dream for how a state should govern–that a state and its elected officials have no responsibility to provide clean drinking water or a quality education for its children. It’s a dystopian vision of the future that absolves a state’s leaders and institutions from providing, maintaining, repairing, and supporting its schools, roads, water systems, and infrastructure, or protecting its most vulnerable citizens from the permanent damage caused by a poisoned water supply.

 

So, if you want to know what our new federal education policy is going to look like under Secretary DeVos, what has happened in Michigan under Gov. Snyder–and bankrolled and supported by the DeVos family–provides perhaps the best example of what to expect…

 

Robinson tells the story of the “skunk works,” which was a secret gathering of Snyder allies intent on turning public schools into “a virtual bonanza for profiteers.”

 

The idea behind the “skunk works” plan was to radically increase the use of technology (i.e., virtual charters, online classes) to dramatically reduce the number of teachers needed, and to decouple tax dollars from schools by providing every student in the state with an “education debit card” that could be used for a wide range of educational experiences (i.e., music lessons, art classes, sports teams).

 

The ultimate goal here was to create a new “value school” model in the state, delivering schooling at a per-student cost of roughly $5000, over $2000 less than the average reimbursement provided by the state for each child enrolled in a district’s schools–with “edupreneurs” pocketing the balance. For Snyder and DeVos, the purpose of education is not to help develop a more informed and educated citizenry, or to help children to become more fully human by providing a comprehensive, high quality curriculum, including music, art, and physical education in addition to the rest of the disciplines. The purpose of education under Snyder and DeVos is to turn the state’s once excellent system of public schools into an educational WalMart, boasting “low, low prices” in place of quality instruction….

 

Ms. DeVos is the perfect ideological mate for Mr. Trump: neither seems concerned with allowing petty little things like rules, regulations, or ethics get in the way of them pursuing their agendas. The Constitution only applies to the “little people,” not the billionaire “deciders” who will make the rules in the Trump administration.

 

Betsy DeVos was the absolute worst possible choice for Secretary of Education, so it’s no surprise that Trump chose her for this cabinet post. Her appointment is much closer to Trump’s choice of Steve Bannon as Chief Strategist than it is to his choice of Reince Preibus as Chief of Staff. One is a party insider who will make the “trains run on time”: the other is an arsonist who would happily burn the train station to the ground.

 

Betsy DeVos’ mission is no less than the total destruction of public education. Her apparent support for charters is merely a head fake to the right to distract us from for her ultimate goal of “decoupling” state and federal dollars from supporting schools of any type.

 

Under Secretary of Education DeVos we will see the emergence of a two-tiered educational system:

 

One, a system of elite private and religious schools for well-to-do, mostly White parents with the means to afford expensive tuition payments, staffed by qualified, certified teachers, with a rich curriculum based on face-to-face instruction in clean, safe, well-maintained schools…

 

The other, a parallel system of “fly by night” virtual and online “schools” that open and close seemingly at random, and for-profit charters operated by scam artists like Northern Michigan’s Dr. Steve Ingersoll, with little to no state or federal regulation or oversight, and a bare bones, “back to the basics” curriculum delivered by unqualified and uncertified “teachers”.

 

I’m guessing that the leadership at Teach for America is practically salivating today.

 

For the rest of us, welcome to the Hunger Games of public education….

 

Betsy DeVos needs to hear, loudly and clearly, that her cynical, selfish, profit-focused vision of public education isn’t constitutional; it’s predatory.

 

Her approach is not that of an educational leader; it’s that of a vandal.

 

Tell her that these are OUR public schools, and we value them and need them. And that we won’t let her, and her new Boss, destroy them.

 

Categories Accountability, Corporate Reformers, Education Industry, For-Profit, Michigan, Privatization, Trump, U.S. Department of Education

News Flash! I Withdraw My Support for Betsy DeVos as Secretary of Education; I Support Bill Evers!

By dianeravitch
November 23, 2016 //
16

A few days ago, I said that I support Michigan billionaire and hard-right voucher advocate Betsy DeVos, because she would show the world that “reformers” are out to destroy our public schools. No ambiguity there. She would demonstrate the close link between “reform” and the rightwing.

 

But I hereby formally withdraw my support for DeVos’s candidacy. To be sure, it was meant in jest, but many readers failed to see the humor in supporting someone who would totally privatize education.

 

Why am I withdrawing my support? Well, I just learned that DeVos has more flaws than I thought. Not only does she want all children to have vouchers (charters apparently are a fall-back form of privatization for her), she opposes any regulation or oversight for the private schools she supports. When the Michigan legislature made an attempt to create some oversight for charter schools, DeVos spent over $1 million to block the effort, and she won. In Michigan, 80% of the charters operate for-profit, without regulation or oversight, and DeVos is happy with that. The scandals and waste of taxpayers’ dollars don’t concern her. I also object to her because she supports the Common Core. My reasons for opposing the Common Core are different from that of people on the Trump team. I oppose them because they were imposed without a field trial, without any evidence that they were good standards. I oppose them because I oppose standardization in education. I oppose developmentally inappropriate demands on young children. If any teacher loves them, use them, but they are not and never will be national standards, nor will they reduce achievement gaps. If anything, they increase  the gaps and reduce achievement.

 

So, sorry, Betsy, you are not my choice.

 

Who is my choice? Glad you asked that question. I support Williamson (Bill) Evers, whom I have known for nearly 20 years. He is not mean, unlike some of the other candidates. He is at heart a libertarian and won’t shove federal policies down everyone’s throats. He is the only choice Trump might make that would do the least harm.

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Common Core, Corporate Reformers, Education Industry, Michigan, Privatization, Trump, U.S. Department of Education, Vouchers

Politico: Indiana is the Template for Trump Education Policies

By dianeravitch
November 18, 2016 //
17

Reading politico.com’s daily education brief today is like being trapped in a nightmare and wishing you could wake up. In this case, it is not a bad dream, it is an ugly reality with familiar faces intent on giving public dollars to private and for-profit schools. Add to that the reports of students fearful for their future, and the outlines of an frightening new world emerge.

Politico reports that Indiana’s approach to school reform–based on privatization–will guide the Trump education reformers. The key to Trump reform is diverting public dollars to charters–including for-profit charters and virtual charters–and vouchers for religious schools.

http://www.politico.com/tipseets/morning-education/2016/11/hoosier-policies-head-to-washington-217478

HOOSIER POLICIES HEAD TO WASHINGTON: The same players who sparked intense education battles in Indiana – and transformed schools in the Hoosier State – are poised to enact those policies on a national stage. Just as George W. Bush brought Texas-style accountability to the Education Department and President Barack Obama tapped Chicago basketball buddy Arne Duncan, Donald Trump’s education policies are expected to reflect the Indiana imprint of Vice President-elect Mike Pence. Already, three Hoosiers key in shaping Indiana’s school choice landscape are considered contenders to serve as Trump’s education secretary: Former Indiana Gov. Mitch Daniels, president of Purdue University; former Indiana Superintendent Tony Bennett; and Rep. Luke Messer, a former state representative who served as executive director for School Choice Indiana when the state’s 2011 school choice law was passed under Daniels’ watch. Indiana ties also played a role in Trump’s selection of the campaign staffer who helped him craft his $20 billion school choice plan that encourages vouchers and charter schools: Robert Goad, an aide on loan from Messer.

– Pence used his platform as Indiana governor to aggressively expand a voucher program that allows taxpayer money to flow to religious private schools. Pence also pushed for more charter schools, and choice has now become a defining element of Trump’s vision for education. Indiana’s voucher program allows nearly 33,000 students to go to private school on the public’s dime – making it the single largest voucher program of any state in the country. John Jacobson, dean of Teachers College at Ball State University, said the state’s voucher program hasn’t been around long enough to fully understand the long-term impact. Because of that, Jacobson said, “I would hope they are cautious at the national level.” Has Indiana’s voucher program been a positive change for families? “If you were to ask a parent who received a voucher to a school of their choice, they would say yes,”Jacobson said. “For the general public, I think it’s been difficult for the public to accept, taking public dollars and allocating that to private entities.”

Bennett, you may recall, was at the center off a grade-fixing scandal. The grades of a charter school founded by a major campaign contributor were mysteriously increased by adjusting the formula for calculating grades. Bennett was defeated in his bid for re-election as state chief in Indiana, but quickly hired by Florida as chief (he is a protege of Jeb Bush). He resigned as chief in Florida after the grade-fixing scandal broke.

Categories Charter Schools, Corporate Reform, Education Industry, For-Profit, Funding, Home Schooling, Indiana, U.S. Department of Education, Vouchers

Peter Greene Reviews a Report that Asks: Did Race to the Top “Work”?

By dianeravitch
November 14, 2016 //
16

For many of us who believe in the importance of public education, the Obama administration was a great disappointment. The President is a man of great dignity, but he gave the Department of Education to the Gates Foundation, the Broad Foundation, and John Podesta’s Center for American Progress. Race to the Top prioritized truly dreadful policies that closed schools, evaluated teachers by test scores (because Bill Gates liked the idea, not because of any evidence that it was right to do so), encouraged states to open more privately managed charter schools, and made data and test scores the heart and soul of education. President Obama may have been great in many other policy arenas, but on education, his Race to the Top was (in my view) a flop. With the support of the Obama administration, the public became familiar with the claim that school choice advances civil rights, despite clear evidence that school choice accelerates segregation by race, religion, and social class.

Now the U.S. Department of Education has commissioned a study to evaluate Race to the Top. Peter Greene here reviews this study by two of our leading research institutes that asks and answers the question: Did Race to the Top Work?

Of course, your reading of the study depends on what “work” mean?

Did RTTT succeed in getting most states to authorize charter schools or increase the number of charter schools in the state? The answer is yes.

Did it incentivize most states to adopt a test-based evaluation of their public school teachers? Well, yes, it did.

Did it encourage states to close schools and fire teachers and principals when test scores were low? Yes indeed.

Did RTTT make high-stakes testing the central way of measuring American education and the ultimate goal of education? Yes.

Voila! It “worked.”

But Peter wonders if implementation of bad ideas is really the best way to define “works”?

He begins:

Did Race To The Top Work?

Not only is this a real question, but the Department of Education, hand in hand with Mathematica Policy Research and American Institutes for Research, just released a 267-page answer of sorts. Race to the Top: Implementation and Relationship to Student Outcomes is a monstrous creature, and while this is usually the part where I say I’ve read it so you don’t have to, I must confess that I’ve only kind of skimmed it. But what better way to spend a Saturday morning than reviewing this spirited inquiry into whether or not a multi-billion-dollar government program was successful in hitting the wrong target (aka getting higher scores on a narrow, poorly-designed standardized reading and math tests).

Before We Begin

So let’s check a couple of our pre-reading biases before we walk through this door. I’ve already shown you one of mine– my belief that Big Standardized Test scores are not a useful, effective or accurate measure of student achievement or school effectiveness, so this is all much ado about not so much nothing as the wrong thing.

We should also note the players involved. The USED, through its subsidiary group, the Institute of Educational Sciences, is setting out to answer a highly loaded question: “Did we just waste almost a decade and a giant mountain of taxpayer money on a program that we created and backed, or were we right all along?” The department has set out to answer a question, and they have a huge stake in the answer.

So that’s why they used independent research groups to help, right? Wellll….. Mathematica has been around for years, and works in many fields researching policy and programs; they have been a go-to group for reformsters with policies to peddle. AIR sounds like a policy research group, but in fact they are in the test manufacture business, managing the SBA (the BS Test that isn’t PARCC). Both have gotten their share of Gates money, and AIR in particular has a vested interest in test-based policies.

[As someone who worked in the U.S. Department of Education many moons ago, I know that the folks who get millions to evaluate federal government programs tend not to be overly critical or they might deal themselves out of future contracts for evaluations. There is a large number of inside groups in D.C. who live for government grants, known as Beltway Bandits.]

He continues:

And right up front, the study lets us know some of the hardest truth it has to deliver. Well, hard of you’re a RTT-loving reformster. For some of us, the truth may not be so much “hard” as “obvious years ago.”

The relationship between RTT and student outcomes was not clear. Trends in student outcomes could be interpreted as providing evidence of a positive effect of RTT, a negative effect of RTT, or no effect of RTT.

Bottom line: the folks who created the study– who were, as I noted above, motivated to find “success”– didn’t find that the Race to the Top accomplished much of anything. Again, from the executive summary:

In sum, it is not clear whether the RTT grants influenced the policies and practices used by states or whether they improved student outcomes. RTT states differed from other states prior to receiving the grants, and other changes taking place at the same time as RTT reforms may also have affected student outcomes. Therefore, differences between RTT states and other states may be due to these other factors and not to RTT. Furthermore, readers should use caution when interpreting the results because the findings are based on self-reported use of policies and practices.

Hmm. Well, that doesn’t bode well for the upcoming 200 pages.

Peter then proceeds in his jolly and inimitable fashion to evaluate the evaluation. And it does it for free!

Did it misdirect the goals of American education? Did it cause a national teacher shortage? Did it demoralize experienced teachers and cause an exodus of talented teachers? Did it help grow the charter movement? Did the charter movement sap resources from public schools? Those question were not part of the “scope of work.”

Categories Race to the Top, U.S. Department of Education
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