David Berliner, Et Al: How Public Schools Can Save Millions of Dollars

By dianeravitch
February 20, 2023 //
112

David Berliner and two colleagues wrote an article proposing a simple and research-based way that public schools can save millions of dollars annually: Stop testing every student every year. Test every third year or every other year. They explain why this makes sense in an article posted on Valerie Strauss’s blog The Answer Sheet.

Strauss begins:

States spend millions of dollars every year to purchase standardized tests in an exercise that has come under strong criticism in recent years for reasons including the quality of the exams and the often invalid ways that districts and states use the scores.


While the billion-dollar testing industry is undergoing changes, with a bigger share of its spending going to the purchase of digital exams, the same questions remain, including: Are states wasting money?

The federal government requires annual statewide tests in reading/language arts and mathematics for all students in grades three through eight and once in high school, and some states tack on other standardized exams. A decade ago, one analysis found that states spent a combined $1.7 billion on these exams, and experts say the total has only gone up.


This post argues that the states are wasting money, and it explains an alternative to save money and increase instructional time. It was written by David C. Berliner, Norman P. Gibbs and Margarita Pivovarova.


Berliner, Regents’ professor emeritus at the Mary Lou Fulton College of Education, is a past president of the American Educational Research Association who has published extensively about educational psychology, teacher education and educational policy. Gibbs is a program evaluator for the Mesa Unified School District in Arizona whose research focuses on assessment and accountability, comparative and international education, and inclusive and participatory decision-making. Pivovarova is an associate professor in the Mary Lou Fulton Teachers College at Arizona State University whose research focuses on the relationship between student achievement, teacher quality and school contextual factors.


This post argues that the states are wasting money, and it explains an alternative to save money and increase instructional time. It was written by David C. Berliner, Norman P. Gibbs and Margarita Pivovarova.


Berliner, Regents’ professor emeritus at the Mary Lou Fulton College of Education, is a past president of the American Educational Research Association who has published extensively about educational psychology, teacher education and educational policy. Gibbs is a program evaluator for the Mesa Unified School District in Arizona whose research focuses on assessment and accountability, comparative and international education, and inclusive and participatory decision-making. Pivovarova is an associate professor in the Mary Lou Fulton Teachers College at Arizona State University whose research focuses on the relationship between student achievement, teacher quality and school contextual factors.


By David C. Berliner, Norman P. Gibbs, and Margarita Pivovarova


Could state educational policymakers do with a few million extra dollars? Surely, America’s teachers can help us all think of something to do with that money. We know how they can do it.

We explain below how this is done, as we did more extensively in a just-published article in Education Policy Analysis Archives, a respected, peer-reviewed educational research journal.


We presented data suggesting a remarkably easy and substantially cheaper way for each state to get the information it desires about the academic performance of its schools from the standardized tests it uses. In addition, following the advice offered in this article, there would also be an increase in instructional time for students. Let us set the stage for this research first.


Suppose a set of nonidentical triplets are identified at age 5. One is tall for his age, one is of medium height, and one is short for his age. At age 6, what is the chance that these children have changed the order of their heights? Sure, they will probably be a little taller, but the order is highly likely to be the same, almost every year. Certainly, if one of the triplets takes special hormones, or one contracts a lengthy disease, the order might change. But without an unusual event, these triplets are quite likely to grow into adulthood as they were — one relatively short, one medium, and one tall. Their rank order, not their height itself, will almost assuredly remain the same.


If we used statistics and did year-to-year rank order correlations for the triplets’ height, the result would likely be a correlation of 1.00, indicating a perfect correlation. This would inform us that the rank order of the triplets is always the same, even if their heights do actually change a bit until they are well past puberty. But even then, regardless of their actual height, their relative height is likely to be constant, and thus it probably need not be measured frequently at all. We “know” that year after year, when we measure their heights, the triplets are almost assuredly still going to be tall, medium, and short in comparison to each other, Eventually, it simply wouldn’t be worth the effort to measure their heights frequently.


Well, it turns out that the hundreds of schools in a state line up in scores just as do as the triplets. Their relative test scores — whether low, medium or high — barely change at all, year after year, regardless of the scoring system used by the standardized testing company. If the relative scores don’t change much year after year, except under some unusual circumstances, why would you need to test the students in those schools to learn how they are doing, year after year?

Here, for example, are the correlations between test scores in mathematics, from one year to the next, for every elementary school in Nebraska, for the years 2014 to 2018. Those year-to-year correlations are .93, .95, .94, .90, .95. These data inform us that if you know this year’s scores in mathematics for each Nebraska school, you know almost perfectly how those schools will test the following year. It’s the equivalent of knowing the order of the heights of the triplets this year, and thus being quite sure you would know the order of their heights were you to measure them the next year. Similarly, if you already know the standardized test scores for every elementary school in Nebraska, you don’t really need to test the next year. Next year’s ordering of Nebraska’s schools will look very much like this years’ ordering of its schools. So why not skip a year or two of testing, and save millions of dollars and millions of instructional hours?


With correlations in the .90’s between last year’s test scores and this year’s test scores, as was empirically obtained, you certainly don’t need to test every year to know how the schools in Nebraska are performing. If big changes in a school’s performance did occur, you’d certainly pick that up through testing every other year. Apparently, unless a schools catchment area changes, or is rezoned so it has a big shift in population, or it must deal with a natural (earthquake) or man-made disaster (a school shooting) that upends the school community, a school’s standing in a pool of standardized test scores will not change much from year to year.


We repeated our analyses in another state, at other grade levels, and for other subject matters. For example, here are the correlations for one year’s standardized achievement test scores in reading, with the following years’ achievement test scores in reading, for all of Texas’s middle schools, over five years: .92, .91, .91, .93, .93. As in Nebraska, knowing this year’s standardized test score informs us almost perfectly what next year’s test score will be. We know how each school will perform because of its previous score. The rank order of a school, vis-a-vis every other school in the state, is quite stable. Mandated achievement tests in Nebraska and Texas need not be given every year to answer the question: How is this school doing? Testing every other year in Nebraska and Texas, and we suspect in all other states, would yield the same information desired by those concerned about how the schools are doing academically.


But it gets better, and thus even more millions of dollars might be saved! Presented next are the correlations between tests of reading given two years apart on Texas’s middle school reading test (.89, .89, .89, 90). And here are the correlations between tests of reading given two years apart for Nebraska middle schools (.92, .95, .91, .97). In other words, almost the same rank order of schools will be present in Nebraska and in Texas if you tested every third year, saving the states a gazillion dollars in money and time, and it would also reduce the annual surge in the test anxiety of thousands of U.S. students, teachers, and parents.

Testing every third, or every second year, results in virtually no loss of information for district, state or federal agencies. We are not recommending doing away with the assessment of student achievement by means of standardized achievement tests, but we are pointing out that we seem to have overdone it. Testing annually eats up a great deal of instructional time and a large amount of money but yields little new information for states, districts and schools.

To those who say that “the teachers need the standardized test results to know how their students are doing,” we have two answers. First, experienced teachers already know how their students are doing in relation to their states’ recommended curriculum, and they don’t need a standardized test to provide them with that information. Research evidence informs us that experienced teachers are quite good at predicting the rank order of each of their students on their own states’ standardized achievement tests.
The other answer to this tired rationale for standardized testing is related to scheduling. The tests are typically given in spring. Test results are, therefore, usually analyzed over the summer months. Test results, by necessity, are given back in the fall of the calendar year, to teachers who have already passed their students on to teachers in the next grade! The information about student achievement, when teachers no longer have those students, comes too late to make any midcourse corrections in their instruction.


And some have argued that achievement testing has value for school administrators, who might then be able to identify exemplary and ineffective teachers from the test performance of the students those teachers had the previous year. But that is no easy identification to make, since each year’s classroom level achievement test data is greatly affected by the kinds of students a teacher was assigned. Substantial differences in achievement test scores occur for teachers depending on the numbers of second-language learners, or students with high absentee rates or special-education students who were assigned to their classrooms. In fact, even classes with slightly more girls than boys generally score higher on tests than classes with more boys than girls. So, inferring teacher competence from standardized test results is quite problematic.


Now that this research article has been published in a peer-reviewed journal, we wonder which state will be first to petition the federal government for a waiving of the current testing requirements? Will the federal government grant such waivers, or are its policies immutable? We are pretty sure that a state choosing to test every third year, or every other year, will save millions of dollars and millions of instructional hours, with no loss of the information it believes to be useful. A reconsideration of our nation’s assessment policies is surely warranted.

Categories Education Reform, Funding, NCLB (No Child Left Behind), Standardized Testing

Wisconsin: The Most Important Election of 2023

By dianeravitch
February 20, 2023 //
6

Here is the most important election of 2023: Control of the Wisconsin Supreme Court. The election is April 4, 2023.

The current Court is 4-3, with a Republican majority. A win by Democrats will reverse the balance and be crucial on issues of abortion, gerrymandering, and schools. It is also a chance to reverse the damage done by Republican Scott Walker.

Charlie Sykes writes in The Bulwark, a site established by Never-Trumpers:

The election that the media has dubbed “the most important election nobody’s ever heard of,” is just weeks away, and has already drawn international attention.

The “Stakes are monstrous,” declared Britain’s Guardian. “Wisconsin judicial race is 2023’s key election.”

Voting is under way in an under-the-radar race that could wind up being the most important election in America this year.

The NYT headlined: “2023’s Biggest, Most Unusual Race Centers on Abortion and Democracy.” Within weeks, the Times reported, “Wisconsin will hold an election that carries bigger policy stakes than any other contest in America in 2023.”

The state’s high court now has a 4-3 conservative majority, but one of the conservative members is retiring, which has created an opening for progressives to flip the high court for the first time in decades.

And everything is on the line: from Act 10, which limited public employee collective bargaining rights, to gerrymandering, abortion, and the way presidential elections are decided.

“If you change control of the Supreme Court from relatively conservative to fairly liberal, that will be a big, big change and that would last for quite a while,” said David T. Prosser Jr., a conservative former justice who retired from the court in 2016.

The contest will almost certainly shatter spending records for a judicial election in any state, and could even double the current most expensive race. Wisconsinites are set to be inundated by a barrage of advertising, turning a typically sleepy spring election into the latest marker in the state’s nonstop political season.

The Wapo reports that the election “will have sweeping consequences, as the court in the coming years is likely to decide whether to uphold the state’s near-total ban on abortion. It also could wade into disputes over gerrymandering and the outcome of the next presidential election.”

The Bulwark’s headline also captured the stakes “Wisconsin Supreme Court Race a Test for Democracy.”

On paper, the contest is non-partisan, but nobody even bothers to pretend anymore. Next Tuesday’s free-for-all primary includes four candidates: two progressives: Janet Protasiewicz and Everett Mitchell; and two conservatives: Dan Kelly and Jennifer Dorow.

The conventional wisdom (which is likely correct) is that the primary will set up a contest between left and right. The same conventional wisdom (on both sides of aisle) thinks that Protasiewicz is the strongest progressive candidate, while Dorow — who achieved a sort of media stardom for presiding over a high-profile criminal case — is the most electable conservative. Kelly, who was named to the Court by former Governor Scott Walker at the urging of the Federalist Society, has already lost a statewide election — a rare defeat for an incumbent justice.

**

But now we get to the strangest twist in this high-stakes story: After decades of ignoring or downplaying crucial judicial elections like this one, Democrats and their allies are very much focused on the Wisconsin contest.

Meanwhile, Wisconsin conservatives have chosen this moment to crack up.

While progressive dollars pour into the state, Republicans have launched a bitter, high-stakes, and often quite personal, civil war that seems designed to take out the candidate who may give them the best chance to hold onto control of the state’s high court…

To finish the article, subscribe to The Bulwark.

Categories Accountability, Democracy, Democrats, Education Industry, Education Reform, Elections, Republicans, Unions, Vouchers, Walker, Scott, Wisconsin

Florida: Pregnant Woman Learns Her Fetus Has a Fatal Condition, But No Doctor Will Perform an Abortion

By dianeravitch
February 19, 2023 //
11

This is a tragic story, but it will surely please the inhumane governor and legislature in Florida. What could be more satisfying than to compel a woman to carry a doomed fetus to term? They should be ashamed, but that’s unlikely.

The Washington Post reported:

LAKELAND, Fla. — Deborah Dorbert is devoting the final days before her baby’s birth to planning the details of the infant’s death.

She and her husband will swaddle the newborn in a warm blanket, show their love and weep hello even as they say goodbye. They have decided to have the fragile body cremated and are looking into ways of memorializing their second-born child.

“We want something permanent,” Deborah said. Perhaps a glass figurine infused with ashes. Or an ornament bearing the imprint of a tiny finger. “Not an urn,” she said, cracking one of the rare smiles that break through her relentless tears. “We have a 4-year-old. Things happen.”

Nobody expected things to happen the way they did when halfway through their planned and seemingly healthy pregnancy, a routine ultrasound revealed the fetus had devastating abnormalities, pitching the dazed couple into the uncharted landscape of Florida’s new abortion law.

Deborah and Lee Dorbert say the most painful decision of their lives was not honored by the physicians they trust. Even though medical experts expect their baby to survive only 20 minutes to a couple of hours, the Dorberts say their doctors told them that because of the new legislation, they could not terminate the pregnancy.

“That’s what we wanted,” Deborah said. “The doctors already told me, no matter what, at 24 weeks or full term, the outcome for the baby is going to be the same.”

Florida’s H.B. 5 — Reducing Fetal and Infant Mortality — went into effect last July, soon after the U.S. Supreme Court overturned a half-century constitutional right to abortion.

The new law bans abortion after 15 weeks with a couple of exceptions, including one that permits a later termination if “two physicians certify in writing that, in reasonable medical judgment, the fetus has a fatal fetal abnormality” and has not reached viability.

It is not clear how the Dorberts’ doctors applied the law in this situation. Their baby has a condition long considered lethal that is now the subject of clinical trials to assess a potential treatment.
Neither Dorbert’s obstetrician nor the maternal fetal medicine specialist she consulted responded to multiple requests for comment.

A spokesman for Lakeland Regional Health, the hospital system the doctors are affiliated with, declined to discuss Dorbert’s case or how it is interpreting the new law. In an emailed statement, Tim Boynton, the spokesman, said, “Lakeland Regional Health complies with all laws in the state of Florida.”

The combination of a narrow exception to the law and harsh penalties for violating it terrifies physicians, according to Autumn Katz, interim director of litigation at the Center for Reproductive Rights, who has been tracking the implementation of abortion bans across the country.

Florida physicians who violate the new law face penalties including the possibility of losing their licenses, steep fines and up to five years in prison. As a result, Katz said, they “are likely to err on the side of questioning whether the conditions are fully met.”


The Dorberts’ hopes of having a second child came closer to reality last August when Deborah, 33, discovered she was pregnant.

“Everything was great,” Deborah said, recalling how she exercised regularly, ate well and watched in excitement as her pregnancy blossomed. A scan at 11 weeks, 6 days shows a recumbent fetus, buoyed in her womb.

At a mid-November appointment with her obstetrician, Deborah listened to the whoosh whoosh of her baby’s heartbeat and scheduled her next ultrasound for the following week — the anatomy scan that checks the development of fetal organs.

The day before Thanksgiving, Deborah drove with her son to the strip of medical offices across from the hospital where Kaiden had been born four years earlier and parked outside the low-slung, ocher Women’s Care building.

She was ready to introduce Kaiden to his younger sibling.

Deborah pulled up her T-shirt and folded down her yoga pants, baring her skin for a daub of warm gel. The technician slid her wand across Deborah’s swelling abdomen, calling out the baby’s features so that Kaiden could follow along on the black-and-white screen: There’s the baby’s head. There are the hands.

Then her expression changed. The technician excused herself and left the room. When she returned with the obstetrician, Deborah braced herself.

More pictures. More worried frowns. And then a wrenching explanation.

The baby was no longer buoyed in ample amniotic fluid, Deborah’s doctor gently told her. The kidneys were not developing properly, failing to produce the liquid that protects the fetus and promotes the development of vital organs. She didn’t think the baby would survive without a transplant, and she urged Deborah to follow up quickly with a specialist in maternal fetal medicine.

Deborah left carrying the scan stamped with the fetus’s gestational age — 23 weeks, 0 days. The ultrasound report lists a range of abnormalities, not only of the kidneys but also of the heart and stomach consistent with the diagnosis of “oligohydramnios,” or lack of amniotic fluid.

Deborah called Lee away from his new job as an noninjury adjuster for an insurance agency and met him at a park by one of the many lakes that dot Polk County. They cried and walked and wondered whether there could be some simple explanation. Perhaps Deborah’s water had broken prematurely.

Deborah was admitted later that day to Lakeland Regional Hospital for tests, including another ultrasound that showed the fetus had no kidneys.

On the Wednesday after Thanksgiving, Deborah had an appointment with a maternal fetal medicine specialist. A third ultrasound, now at 24 weeks gestation, confirmed the earlier findings, Deborah said, and the specialist told them that the condition was incompatible with life. This doctor also gave the diagnosis its common name: Potter syndrome.
He told them that some parents choose to continue to full term; others terminate the pregnancy through surgery or by inducing preterm labor, she recalled. He said he would begin contacting health-system administrators about the new law, and stepped out of the room to give the couple privacy to mull over their options.

Before they left, Deborah and Lee decided they would like to terminate the pregnancy as soon as they could. She recalls the doctor saying the termination, which would be performed by her obstetrician, might be possible between 28 and 32 weeks.

Ever since the condition was identified more than 75 years ago by Edith Potter, a pioneering perinatal specialist, Potter syndrome has been considered a doubly lethal diagnosis. Without working kidneys, newborns are unable to rid their bodies of deadly toxins and go into renal failure. Without amniotic fluid in the womb, they are born unable to breathe.

“The real problem is underdeveloped lungs,” said Jena L. Miller, a specialist in fetal intervention at Johns Hopkins Hospital and principal investigator in the clinical trial investigating treatment of the syndrome. In healthy fetuses, she said, the spongelike organs expand in the womb, practicing breathing by inhaling amniotic fluid.

Babies with Potter syndrome often die before they are born when their umbilical cords become trapped between their bodies and the wall of their mother’s uterus. Those that survive the birth process typically suffocate within minutes or a matter of hours.

The choices are stark for parents whose babies’ severe defects are typically detected on anatomy scans midway through pregnancy. Apart from the clinical trial, which closed enrollment last July before Deborah discovered she was pregnant, and a few physicians who are experimenting with replacing amniotic fluid, there are no treatment options.

Florida is one of those states where kindness and decency go to die.

Categories Accountability, DeSantis, Extremism, Florida, Gender, Health

Chicago Mayoral Election: Parent Says NO, NO, NO to Paul Vallas

By dianeravitch
February 19, 2023 //
15

The Chicago mayoral election is February 28. Nine candidates are running. If no candidate wins a majority, there will be a runoff on April 4. You can read about the candidates here.

One of the candidates who is faring well in the polls is Paul Vallas. He is of interest to parents and educators because most of his professional career has been spent as a leader of school districts, although he is not an educator. He introduced a bold experiment in privatization in Philadelphia, which failed. After Vallas left Philly, the district was taken over by the state. He lost his position as superintendent in Bridgeport, Connecticut, because of his lack of credentials. If Vallas should win, the charter crowd would descend on Chicago to reap their rewards.

Julie Vassilatos is the parent of two students who graduated from the Chicago Public Schools in 2017 and 2021. She was outraged that the Chicago Tribune endorsed Vallas. (The tribune is behind a paywall.) She wrote a response to the editorial. The Tribune was impressed by Vallas’ long resume, but Julie writes that he left behind chaos and budget deficits wherever he was in charge of a school district.

She writes:

It’s unclear to me exactly what motivated the members of the Chicago Tribune editorial board to endorse Paul Vallas for mayor in our upcoming election.

Vallas has run for mayor before. In 2018 I wrote about why he was not a good candidate, and these reasons all hold true today. I could simply re-run that piece today on its own and that would be nearly sufficient as a response to the Tribune’s endorsement. (Notably, they didn’t endorse him last time around.) But there are specifics in Sunday’s editorial that require a response, so I will do that here, with the former piece, from my now-disappeared blog “Chicago Public Fools,” appended below.


The Tribune editorial board gave their reasons. But they’re poor reasons at best, and at worst, wrong or disingenuous. Let’s go through their claims.

I. First, the Tribune editorial highlights Vallas’s “expertise in city financing, policing, and public education.” Expertise can mean, I suppose, “someone did a thing, maybe a lot.” But doing it well and successfully should be inherent in the word. “Expertise” in this case is absurdly unsupported by facts. Cities he’s worked in—rapidly, and left rapidly—were left with complicated budget problems, vast deficits, and controversy. He was superintendent of schools in Philadelphia for 5 years (ousted after causing ballooning budget deficits, OR he resigned in order to gallop to New Orleans, you pick), New Orleans for 4 (he left in order to run unsuccessfully for Cook County Board President), and Bridgeport, CT for 2 (ousted because he did not meet the job qualification of being an educator, OR he resigned to run unsuccessfully with IL gubernatorial candidate Pat Quinn, you pick). A quick recap of each stint:

In Philadelphia

Vallas’s record here is complicated. From The Notebook in 2007:

One thing is certain – Paul Vallas certainly shook up the Philadelphia School District.

Full of energy and confident that he could solve any problem, Vallas’s five-year tenure was a whirlwind of bold initiatives and dramatic changes in policy.

At the same time, he is leaving a district in tumult, with the same deep financial problems that he inherited – running a large deficit, and still without stable, reliable funding that meets the extraordinary needs of the city’s students.

His legacy here has much to do with the Broad Institute’s brand of “reformers.” Recapping the history of “reform” in Philadelphia, Thomas Ultican writes of Vallas in 2018’s “Philadelphia Story: Another School Choice Failure”:

He also opened the door for billionaire Eli Broad to infest Philadelphia with administrators trained at his unaccredited Broad Academy.

Broad believes that leaders of school district need financial and business management skills but require little or no experience in education. He also says that the best way to reform education is through competition and market forces.

Vallas is an example of the kind of school leader Broad sought to foster. He was someone who had little to no experience in education but understood finance.

We have some experience of the Broad Academy here in Chicago. You remember. Barbara Byrd-Bennett was a Broadie. [She was convicted of taking kickbacks and sent to prison.]

In New Orleans:

Even those who accept the rising test scores narrative know there are vast problems in New Orleans post Vallas, as recounted in a 2015 New York Times article. “The rhetoric of reform often fails to match reality.” Privatization here, as elsewhere, hurts the most disadvantaged students.

“We don’t want to replicate a lot of the things that took place to get here,” said Andre Perry, who was one of the few black charter-school leaders in the city. “There were some pretty nefarious things done in the pursuit of academic gain,” Mr. Perry acknowledged, including “suspensions, pushouts, skimming, counseling out, and not handling special needs kids well.”

Privatization, writes teacher, scholar, and author Mercedes Schneider, was not a better way to run schools. Schneider has researched and written substantially on this topic, speaking of expertise; if you have any interest in the long-term effects of school privatization, do yourself a favor and learn from her.

Has Vallas’s brand of reform been sustainable in New Orleans? In a 2008 piece in nola.com, a principal presciently considered this question:

Cheryllyn Branche, the principal of Bannecker Elementary School, wonders about sustainability. ‘I have a vested interest in this community. No matter what, it will always be home,’ she said. ‘If we don’t have people who have a commitment to this place in the long term, it won’t come back.’

‘Sometimes I want to ask him, “What happens when you are gone?”’


In Bridgeport CT:

Vallas was hired shortly after the state takeover of Bridgeport, CT public schools, subject to his fulfilling CT law that he be trained as an educator. A special condition was created just for him, non-trained-educator that he was: that he complete an educational leadership program. Instead of doing this he took a single independent study course that was later deemed not to fulfill the special condition. The whole thing ended in a tangled lawsuit, explained in this 2013 piece in the Stamford (CT) Advocate:

[I]t is a case study about the arrogance and abuse of power that have become the hallmark of the so-called reform movement.

The Vallas saga is the story of how an infamous reformer broke the law — a law written expressly for him — and how senior officials put personal and political connections above the law and welfare of Bridgeport’s children.

The court ruled against Vallas, but later reversed the decision in an appeal; Vallas had already left to join Pat Quinn’s IL campaign for governor. His short tenure in Bridgeport was largely colored by this controversy.

It’s clear that the expertise the Tribune touts, based largely on his school district leadership, is fraught with complications and possibly wildly overrated. The parts that worry me in this history include the rapid fire breaking and destruction coupled with simultaneous rapid spending and rapid budget slashing. The failure to listen to constituents. The repeated disadvantaging of already-disadvantaged children.

I know reformers like Vallas do not see that the upshot of their work turns out to be racist. But oddly, districts subjected to the Vallas type of reform somehow get a whole lot whiter—from administrators, through teachers, and on down to students. Saying “choice is the civil rights issue of our time” over and over like a magic spell does not make it true. School choice has never, and will never, increase equity in a school district. School choice originates in the racist response to Brown v. Board of Education and the creation of schools not subject to federal oversight. Today choice is instrumental in breaking down democracy in our communities. [These claims were the subject of my blog that ran for 7 years; though I want to go on and on about this, we’ve got to keep moving or I’ll never get through this post!]

Just on a practical level, Vallas’s plans for keeping schools open on nights and weekends baffle me. How does he propose to pay for all that staffing? Our schools don’t even have libraries. They have hardly any extracurriculars. Some of them are lacking in utter basics. What is he talking about? I can’t even imagine the epic Godzilla versus Mothra battles that would ensue between him and the CTU over this.

No, Chicago Tribune. No. No to someone who is a serial privatizer. No to someone who set corporate ed reform in motion in Chicago decades ago. No to someone who blows things up and leaves. No to someone who’s left increased racial inequity in his wake. We don’t need a mayor who has this kind of proven track record on education.

II. Next, the Tribune loves that Vallas “has the ear of rank and file police officers on the street.”What they mean by this is that he is very cozy—one could say uncomfortably cozy—with FOP president and disgraced cop John Catanzara. Last month the FOP endorsed Vallas; this week Vallas spoke at an FOP event for retired police officers alongside Catanzara; and he recently accepted a $5K donation from a retired policeman involved in the Laquan McDonald murder. When WBEZ reported on that connection, his campaign acknowledged that, and rather than returning the money, they gave $10K to Parents for Peace and Justice.

His public safety plan is full of dog whistles, like so: “Our city has been surrendered to a rogue element who act with seeming impunity in treating unsuspecting, innocent people as prey.” Kicking CPD Superintendent David Brown to the curb is Job One. Bypassing Kim Foxx when necessary is key. And adding thousands of police officers is a priority, so that CPD is staffed “like it was under Rahm Emanuel.” Said new cops would be recruited from military bases (?!), the fire department, retirees, and private security forces; residency requirements would be waived (but wait, didn’t he say having cops from the local community was best?). Every CTA station would be staffed with cops. In a just and good world, these are not inherently problematic proposals. In the world we live in, with out of control, hostile, already overly militarized cops, these ideas would implement a semi-privatized dystopian police state with watchful cops on every corner trying to snatch the city back from the rogue element. Of course rank and file cops like these ideas.

The Tribune is hopeful that Vallas would use the trust of the police “to improve police conduct.” Again with the saying it/wishing it connection. I think the next mayor needs more concrete proposals about improving police conduct than we see in Vallas’s plan.


III. In discussing some of Vallas’s challengers, the Tribune is “troubled by [their] associations”(in this case, Chuy Garcia’s connection to Madigan). But how can the editorial board overlook Vallas’s own troubling associations? Let me detail a few.

He spoke at an Awake IL event this past summer. Days later, after he was roundly criticized for joining forces with the group, he walked back his connection with them, assuring folks that he, himself, is not in any way homophobic or racist. It would have taken a 5 second internet search to see that Awake IL has a history of being unhinged about covid restrictions, threatens trans people regularly, refers to the governor as a “groomer,” was instrumental in the vandalism of UpRising Bakery, and is connected to the Proud Boys. But Vallas didn’t make a 5 second internet search when he was invited to serve on a panel that Awake IL leader Shannon Adcock called “the Continental Congress of school choice.”

He received a $7.5K donation from disgraced former CPS Board of Ed member Deborah Quazzo, whose notoriety derives chiefly but not solely from the large profits she secured as a result of contracts obtained while serving on the Board of Ed. Her husband threw in another $10K for good measure. Interestingly, in his last at-bat for mayor, Vallas received a much smaller donation from Quazzo, then returned it after he was asked about it by WBEZ. Time heals all wounds, apparently. Vallas now says, 4 years ago there were allegations being made about her that didn’t seem great, and his campaign was wary. Now he thinks “nothing came of those investigations” into what Quazzo did on the Board, and besides, “She has a reputation for being very active in school reform.” (Again, a 5 second internet search would yield the CPS Inspector General’s report on all matters Quazzo. Allegations sustained.)

I’ve already mentioned the deeply problematic John Catenzara. At least the $5K donation of the Laquan McDonald-involved cop, Richard Hagen, did cause a twinge of conscience.

Disgraced Barbara Byrd-Bennett partner in crime Gary Solomon was also an associate of Vallas’s—for years. Solomon went with Vallas to Philadelphia, then New Orleans. “In a series of letters to Louisiana officials who oversaw the New Orleans district, Vallas vouched for Synesi Associates,” Gary Solomon’s education consulting firm. “Synesi landed two no-bid contracts worth nearly $893,000 in New Orleans during Vallas’ time running the Recovery School District from 2007 to 2011, records obtained by the Chicago Sun-Times show.” Solomon’s prison term for his involvement in the Barbara Byrd-Bennett kickback scandal ended early because of covid. He’ll be released from home confinement in October.

Vallas owes one of his jobs to yet another shady connection, former governor Bruce Rauner, who set him up as Chief Administrative Officer of Chicago State University, in hopes of turning it around. This scenario didn’t end well—CSU cut ties with Vallas when he announced his run for mayor in the middle of his tenure. “I find it unfortunate that he would attempt to use Chicago State University as a platform to run for the mayor of the city of Chicago,” [Board Vice President Nicholas] Gowen said. “It is not the role of Mr. Vallas to try to use Chicago State University to try to bolster his bona fides to the black community.”


IV. The Tribune touts the need for “turnaround specialists” like Vallas and hopes others join him. But what is this? Do we want this? What does a turnaround actually do beyond slash-and-burn destruction of communities and gentrification outcomes that turn out looking quite racist? Educator and author Larry Cuban asks if turnaround “experts” are what struggling school districts (and presumably by extension, cities) really require.

Vallas is (or was) the premier “turnaround specialist.” Whether, indeed, Vallas turned around Chicago, Philadelphia, and New Orleans is contested. Supporters point to more charter schools, fresh faces in the classroom, new buildings, and slowly rising test scores; critics point to abysmal graduation rates for black and Latino students, enormous budget deficits, and implementation failures.

“Turnarounds” as a school strategy have been notorious, and notoriously ineffective. On the school level, a turnaround means every staff member of a school is fired, down to the last lunch lady, and replaced with new staff members. These supposedly higher quality (and perplexingly, usually way whiter) staff members are supposed to fix everything. Break it all fast. Rebuild it fast. Voila! It is fixed. On the district level, it means replacing traditional public schools with charters, lots of firing, much slashing of budgets. Poof! District is fixed, and it is a miracle! Until said turnaround experts leave town with the district and city holding the bag—and the bag is usually empty.

What in the world does a “turnaround expert” do in charge of a whole city? What parts are going to be dismantled? What parts remade? What parts gentrified? What budgets slashed and burned?

I can’t picture it. More significantly, Vallas hasn’t really articulated it.

The Tribune lauds Vallas for his expertise in education—which is questionable—and his rapport with CPD—which is dubious. It overlooks some super sketchy connections and wants to bring down the cursed turnaround upon Chicago. You know, and I know, that Paul Vallas is not the mayor we Chicagoans need—not in 2019 and not now.

If you want to read the author’s appraisal of Vallas in 2018, when he captured a little more than 5% of the vote, open the link. It follows this post.

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Chicago, Closing schools, Corporate Reform, Democracy, Disruption, Education Industry

John Thompson Sees Hope that Oklahoma Educators and Legislators Will Stand Up Against Destructive “Reforms”

By dianeravitch
February 19, 2023 //
0

John Thompson sees some hopeful signs that educators and legistors—especially Republican legislators—are willing to speak out against the attacks on public schools. Perhaps they saw the recent poll that showed that 75% of the public is opposed to vouchers. Perhaps they read in one of my books that merit pay has repeatedly failed and that it discourages collaboration and teamwork.

He writes:

Oklahoma schools have faced a long history of ideology-driven attacks that produced a “culture of compliance” where educators learned to keep their heads low, and avoid being targets. The two biggest exceptions were the1990 teacher rally at the Capitol and the passage of HB 1017’s funding increases, and the 2018 teacher walkout. But today’s MAGA-driven assaults have put previous threats on steroids, seeking to cripple or destroy public education and other public services. After this year’s reelection of Gov. Kevin Stitt and State Superintendent Ryan Walters, a worst case scenario seemed to be unfolding. It now looks like brazen falsehoods being spread by corporate powers such as the Koch brothers and ALEC, and local MAGAs have energized a diverse, bipartisan coalition of truth tellers.

Frankly, I’ve never seen so many education supporters opening up like they have this February. And as the legislature convened, more and more allies of public education have begun to say what’s on their minds.

In his latest tantrum, Ryan Walters further spurred the pushback by threating the accreditation of the Oklahoma City and Putnam City school systems for making “a pornographic book called ‘Let’s Talk About It’” available to students. Both districts deny they have the book. Walters’ source was a rightwing social media account, “Libs of TikTok.”

The Tulsa World’s Ginnie Graham challenged Walters’ attacks on diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI), writing, “DEI is not a euphemism for race, affirmative action or critical race theory. It is not a liberal indoctrination to make white people feel shame. It is neither Marxism nor socialism.” Graham also explains that only 26% of Oklahomans have a bachelors degree, but within five years, “two-thirds of the top 100 critical professions will require a college degree.” And as Chancellor Allison Garrett explains, DEI is an essential tool for meeting that challenge.

The head of the Oklahoma City Public School Foundation, Mary Melon-Tully, editorialized in the Oklahoman, “A lot of the headlines and media attention have been focused on these divisive bills.” She then wrote in support of pro-education Republicans’ bills, like those of Sen. Adam Pugh and Rep. Rhonda Baker who have focused on “a multi-level pay raise,” paid maternity leave, creation of an Oklahoma Teacher Corps, mentoring, changes to the A-F report card, STEM preparedness, updating the funding formula, and better accountability for virtual and in-person charter schools, as well as “funding literacy instructional teams,” career-readiness, modernizing state graduation requirements, modifying the computer science curriculum, and “adding definition for English Language Learners.”

Similarly, Dr. Pam Deering wrote in the Oklahoman that it’s time to stop being “dominated by divisive culture war talking points,” [and] “focus on the true issues at hand.” Dr. Deering gave an overview of successes in schools, such as Lawton’s Life Ready Center, northwest Oklahoma’s High Plains Technology Center and Technical Applications Programs, Oklahoma City’s STEM academy, Norman’s Oklahoma Aviation Academy, and Sand Spring’s hybrid and virtual programs.”

Then the Stillwater News Press editorialized:

It would be nice to see the focus go to pumping more of that money into public schools, the ones that can’t refuse a child based on disability or who their parents are or how bad they are at basketball.

It would be good if the money wasn’t eventually going to be funneled to a for-profit lobbyist.

It would be great if the focus was on hiring and retention of dedicated teachers and staff.

As Walters pushes for pay-for-performance, the press has displayed a candor that previously would have usually been seen as too risky to articulate bluntly. For instance, the Enid News reported on the thoughts of Erika Wright, founder of the Oklahoma Rural Schools Coalition, who said, that the “politicizing a pay scale and a pay raise for teachers that are college-educated that are educating our children is ridiculous.” … “That is just an effort to add more divisiveness and inflammatory rhetoric.”

Bixby’s School Superintendent Rob Miller’s Tulsa World editorial was even blunter. He described teacher merit pay as “one of the more persistent and seemingly indestructible zombie ideas related to education.” It’s been “tried again and again since the 1920s.” And it’s only been 12 years since “the $12 billion merit pay experiment failed once more.” He also cited W. Edwards Deming, who “argued that merit pay ‘nourishes short-term performance, annihilates long-term planning, builds fear, demolishes teamwork, and nourishes rivalry and politics.’”

Our last pay-for-performance experiment, as was predicted, started by corrupting school data. Now, Miller adds, the teachers “who are supposed to reap the rewards” … “know that merit pay undermines collaboration and teamwork. They understand that it would corrupt the culture of their school.”

And it is especially encouraging that bipartisan collection of legislators, and Republicans like Sen. Dave Rader, chairman of the Senate Finance Committee and Rep. Jeff Boatman, are making such thoughtful arguments against Walters’ and Stitt’s plans. The Tulsa World reports, Sen. Rader says “the state’s tax structure is being reviewed but that he feels no great urgency to make sudden, drastic changes. The state “is in a good position,” he said, with “a nice surplus and a relatively low tax burden.”

Moreover, Rep. Boatman “said there are ways to return value to taxpayers besides just cutting taxes.” He said, “Sure, there’s going to be some tax cuts,” but “there’s going to be some things we invest in through agencies and through services we do as a state. We can give money back that way.” Then Boatman suggested using some of the reserves to fund “some pretty incredible” community projects.

Finally, the Tulsa World’s Carmen Foreman reports, “House Speaker Charles McCall, R-Atoka, recently reiterated his opposition to school vouchers.” But she also reports, “House Republicans are expected to unveil an education plan that would expand school choice options in Oklahoma without vouchers.”

And, as Oklahoma Watch’s Jennifer Palmer explains, the Statewide Virtual Charter School Board “is set to consider a Catholic charter school this week in what is viewed as a national test case for publicly-funded religious education.”

Given Oklahoma’s Republican majority, and the unconscionable number of Republicans who have remained largely silent regarding the assaults on democracy and public institutions during the Trump era, our future requires more conservatives and Republicans to embrace the wisdom and values of their colleagues and other supporters who are making a stand for our schools. The future remains uncertain, it’s looking more likely that the legislature will come together and at least stop the most destructive rightwing campaigns.

Categories Accountability, Corporate Reform, Courage, Disruption, Education Industry, Merit pay, Oklahoma, School Choice

Schneider & Berkshire: A Reverse Robin Hood Plan: Stealing from the Poor to Pay the Tuition of the Rich

By dianeravitch
February 19, 2023 //
11

Historian Jack Schneider and journalist Jennifer Berkshire call out the hidden secret of vouchers: they steal from the public schools of the poor to fund the private and religious schools of the affluent. In state after state, 75-80% of the kids who use voucher money are already enrolled in nonpublic schools.

In an article in The Nation, Schneider and Berkshire write:

The assault on public education currently unfolding in state legislatures across the United States stands to annually transfer tens of billions of dollars from public treasuries to the bank accounts of upper-income families. Those dollars, which otherwise would have gone to public schools, will instead reimburse parents currently paying private school tuition. It’s a reverse Robin Hood scheme that Americans would hate if they fully understood what was going on.

That’s not the sales pitch, of course. As Betsy DeVos and her allies like to put it, their cause is “education freedom.” They want American families to have “options” beyond their local public schools. And their plan for creating those options is to push various forms of school vouchers. The money that otherwise would have gone to local schools, instead, would be given to families. Families could then take those dollars—sometimes loaded on an actual debit card—and spend them at whatever kind of school, or on whatever kind of educational product, they want.

There are many reasons to dislike this plan. Public schools are open to all, meaning that they can’t turn students away on the basis of characteristics like ability or identity. And public schools serve the public good. That’s why we fund them with our tax dollars—because we expect them to serve all of us.

Private schools, by contrast, can turn students away for nearly any reason, including that they have disabilities that make them more expensive to educate. As more states adopt programs that use taxpayer dollars to fund private schools, taxpayers are increasingly footing the bill for discrimination.

In Florida, for instance, a religious school that notified families this fall that LGBTQ students were no longer welcome and would be asked to leave immediately still receives more than $1.6 million a year in public funds through the state’s private school voucher program.

But school voucher plans are a raw deal not just for public schools and the students who attend them but also for taxpayers. Programs like the one jammed through by the Republican legislature in Iowa this week stand to immediately transfer massive amounts of cash directly from state treasuries to the families that least need it.

While proponents, like Iowa Governor Kim Reynolds, sold the plan as a way to give choices to poor and middle-class families, the program will chiefly subsidize the parents who already send their kids to private schools. The cost of that subsidy is significant—an estimated $340 million each year once the plan is fully phased in—and will be borne by the 500,000 students who attend the state’s underfunded public schools.

And it’s not just in Iowa that Republicans are pulling off this reverse Robin Hood maneuver. In Arizona, where lawmakers recently made all students eligible for school vouchers, 75 percent of the students who applied for the new subsidy never attended public school. The same dynamic is playing out in New Hampshire, where GOP legislators enacted an “education freedom” program over stiff public opposition. At Laconia Christian Academy, for instance, all but two families in the school took advantage of the program, pulling roughly half a million dollars out of the public treasury.

Please open the link and finish reading the entire article. It nails the essential outcome of vouchers, which may also be their purpose. They subsidize the students who never attended public schools at the expense of the public schools of the poor.

Categories Accountability, Betsy DeVos, Education Industry, Education Reform, Hoax, Hypocrisy, Inequality, Shame, Vouchers

Heather Cox Richardson: No One at FOX News Believed Trump’s Lies But Broadcast Them

By dianeravitch
February 18, 2023 //
38

Heather Cox Richardson picks out the money quotes from the legal filing in the case of Dominion Voting Systems against the Fox Bew Coroiration. The pundits at Fox gave hours and hours of air time to election deniers, yet none of the Fox hosts believed the nonsense they broadcast to millions of people. Fox gave their viewers support for their misguided belief that the 2020 election was stolen. Yet, all of them said in emails that they were broadcasting lies.

A legal filing today in the case of Dominion Voting Systems against the Fox News Corporation provides a window into the role of disinformation and money in the movement to deny that President Joe Biden won the 2020 presidential election.

Dominion Voting Systems is suing FNC for defamation after FNC personalities repeatedly claimed that the company’s voting machines had corrupted the final tallies in the 2020 election. The filing today shows that those same personalities didn’t believe what they were telling their viewers, and suggests that they made those groundless accusations because they worried their viewers were abandoning them to go to channels that told them what they wanted to hear: that Trump had won the election.

The quotes in the filing are eye-popping:

On November 10, 2020, Trump advisor Steven Bannon wrote to FNC personality Maria Bartiromo: “71 million voters will never accept Biden. This process is to destroy his presidency before it even starts; IF it even starts…. We either close on Trumps [sic] victory or del[e]gitimize Biden…. THE PLAN.”

FNC’s internal fact checks on November 13 and November 20 called accusations of irregularities in the voting “Incorrect” and said there was “not evidence of widespread fraud.”

On November 15, Laura Ingraham wrote to Tucker Carlson and Sean Hannity: “Sidney Power is a bit nuts. Sorry, but she is.”

On November 16, Carlson wrote to his producer, Alex Pfeiffer, “Sidney Powell is lying.”

On November 19, FNC chair Rupert Murdoch wrote: “Really crazy stuff.”

Hannity later testified: “[T]hat whole narrative that Sidney was pushing. I did not believe it for one second.”

Fox Politics Editor Chris Stirewalt later testified, “[N]o reasonable person would have thought that,” when asked if it was true that Dominion rigged the election.

The filing claims that FNC peddled a false narrative of election fraud to its viewers because its pro-Trump audience had jumped ship after the network had been the first to call Arizona for Biden, and its ratings were plummeting as Trump loyalists jumped to Newsmax. “I’ve never seen a reaction like this, to any media company,” Carlson wrote to Suzanne Scott, chief executive officer of Fox News, on November 9. “Kills me to watch it.” On November 12, Hannity told Carlson and Ingraham, “In one week and one debate they destroyed a brand that took 25 years to build and the damage is incalculable.”

They went to “war footing” to “protect the brand.” For example, when FNC reporter Jacqui Heinrich accurately fact checked a Trump tweet, correcting him by saying that “top election infrastructure officials” said that “[t]here is no evidence that any voting system deleted or lost votes, changed votes, or was in any way compromised,” Carlson told Hannity: “Please get her fired. Seriously…. What the f*ck? I’m actually shocked…. It needs to stop immediately, like tonight. It’s measurably hurting the company. The stock price is down. Not a joke.”

Heinrich deleted her tweet.

The filing says that not a single witness from FNC testified they believed any of the allegations they were making about Dominion. An FNC spokesperson today said, “Dominion has mischaracterized the record, cherry-picked quotes stripped of key context and spilled considerable ink on facts that are irrelevant under black-letter principles of defamation law.”

Today, part of the report of the special purpose grand jury investigating possible criminal interference in the 2020 election in Georgia was released under court order. It explained that 26 Fulton County, Georgia, residents, three of whom were alternates, made up the grand jury, and 16 of them made up a quorum, enabling the jury to conduct business. Beginning on June 1, 2022, the grand jury heard testimony from or involving 75 witnesses, almost all of it in person and under oath. It also heard testimony from investigators and got digital and physical media.

The grand jury found “by a unanimous vote that no widespread fraud took place in the Georgia 2022 presidential election.” It also reported that “[a] majority of the Grand Jury believes that perjury may have been committed by one or more witnesses testifying before it,” and it asked the district attorney to “seek appropriate indictments for such crimes where the evidence is compelling.”

Also today, in the wake of the inauspicious first hearing of the House Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government on November 9, a bipartisan group of 28 former officials who were part of the Church Committee wrote an open letter to Representative Jim Jordan (R-OH). Republicans have claimed Jordan’s new subcommittee is a modern version of the 1975–1976 committee, chaired by Senator Frank Church (D-ID), that discovered illegal wiretapping of U.S. citizens, CIA operations to assassinate foreign leaders, drug testing on government personnel, discrediting of civil rights and anti-war activists, and so on.

The letter’s authors reminded Jordan that while the chair of the committee had been a Democrat, its work had been carefully bipartisan, and its members investigated both Republican and Democratic administrations. They had rigorously reported facts in context, “resisting political temptations to assemble misleading mosaics from isolated tidbits.” They had also protected ongoing intelligence and law enforcement operations.

The committee’s 2,700 pages of exhaustive research were also bipartisan and resulted in the creation of Senate and House intelligence committees to provide congressional oversight of intelligence, as well as the establishment of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court.

The former staffers of the Church Committee advised Jordan to follow the model he claimed, remaining objective, grounding the committee’s findings in relevant evidence and applicable laws.” They urged the subcommittee to “consider in good faith whether [Trump attorney general William] Barr and [John] Durham,” whom Barr appointed to discredit the investigation into the Trump campaign’s ties to Russian operatives, “themselves may have strayed into such weaponization.”

The Church Committee staffers warned Jordan that if he wanted to claim the mantle of that committee, he would need to move forward with the “same spirit of cooperation and bipartisanship.”

To see the sources, open the link.

Anyone who believes that Jim Jordan might run a bipartisan investigation believes in unicorns. He is one of the nastiest partisans in Congress.

Categories Accountability, Fake News, Hoax, Lies, Media, Trump

Florida: State Officials Consider “Classical, Christian” Test as Replacement for the SAT

By dianeravitch
February 18, 2023 //
79

Governor DeSantis is unhappy with the College Board Because it had the nerve to disagree with him. He said he might find an alternative for the Board’s products, the SAT and AP courses. The Miami Herald says that the state is in discussions with a new test vendor whose was designed for Christian schools and home schools.

As Gov. Ron DeSantis and Florida Republican leaders explore alternatives to the College Board’s AP classes and tests, top state officials have been meeting with the founder of an education testing company supporters say is focused on the “great classical and Christian tradition.”

The Classic Learning Test, founded in 2015, is used primarily by private schools and home-schooling families and is rooted in the classical education model, which focuses on the “centrality of the Western tradition.”

The founder of the company, Jeremy Tate, said the test is meant to be an alternative to the College Board-administered SAT exam, which he says has become “increasingly ideological” in part because it has “censored the entire Christian-Catholic intellectual tradition” and other “thinkers in the history of Western thought.”

As DeSantis’ feud with the College Board intensified this week, Tate had several meetings in Tallahassee with Ray Rodrigues, the state university system’s chancellor, and legislators to see if the state can more broadly offer the Classic Learning Test to college-bound Florida high school students.

“We’re thrilled they like what we’re doing,” Tate said. “We’re talking to people in the administration, again, really, almost every day right now.”

Will there be another test for students who are not Christian?

Read more at: https://www.miamiherald.com/news/local/education/article272526392.html#storylink=cpy

Categories Accountability, DeSantis, Education Industry, Extremism, Home Schooling, Privatization, Religion, Separation of church and state, Standardized Testing

BBC: UK Sports Officials Propose That Transgender Athletes Compete in Men’s Sports

By dianeravitch
February 18, 2023 //
16

The BBC reported that British sports officials have proposed that transgender women (born male) compete in the men’s division in sports, to protect women’s sports.

UK Athletics wants a change in legislation to ensure the women’s category is lawfully reserved for competitors who are recorded female at birth.

The governing body says all transgender athletes should be allowed to compete with men in an open category.

Chair Ian Beattie said the governing body wanted athletics to be a “welcoming environment for all”, but added it had a responsibility to “ensure fairness” in women’s competition.

However, the Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC) said it was “disappointed” UKA chose to publicise “inaccurate advice” and questioned its interpretation of the Equality Act 2010.

UKA disagrees with the use of testosterone suppression for transgender women, saying there is “currently no scientifically robust, independent research showing that all male performance advantage is eliminated”.

UKA added it has seen “no evidence that it is safe for transgender women to reduce their hormonal levels by testosterone suppression”, and that there is “insufficient research to understand the effects on transgender women if such testosterone suppression is carried out suddenly”.

Therefore it would instead like to reserve the female category for those who were recorded female at birth and have not undergone transition.

UKA does not believe the ‘sporting exemption’ introduced in the Equality Act 2010 allows them to lawfully exclude transgender women in possession of a Gender Recognition Certificate from competing.

However, the UK government disagrees with UK Athletics’ stance that the law does not allow it to ban transgender women from female events on fairness grounds.

It believes the 2010 Equality Act does allow sports to protect the female category by putting restrictions on the participation of transgender athletes.

What do you think? My view is unformed. I don’t know enough. My bedrock view is that the tiny number of people who are transgender should not be demonized nor used as a political pawn.

Categories Gender, Health, International, Sports

“Democracy”: The Myths of AP Courses

By dianeravitch
February 18, 2023 //
19

A reader who calls him/herself “Democracy” writes a thoughtful comment on the Advanced Placement courses offered by the College Board, responding to the controversy over the College Board’s retreat from its AP African American studies course. The College Board excised content to placate rightwing critics.

Democracy writes:

Well-established myths die hard. Very hard. Scientific evidence doesn’t always sway minds. Parents and students and educators – and reporters – assume that Advanced Placement (AP) courses are inherently superior to other high school classes. The assumption is that AP are more rigorous, offer deeper conceptual knowledge and lead to better performance in college. The problem with the assumption is that it is largely perception; there is little research to support it.

Michael Hiltzik’s column ought to be one of the final nails in the coffin of the College Boards Advanced Placement courses. But it will not be. Hiltzik’s criticisms of the College Board are sound, and calling the College Board “cowards” is more than just a little bit accurate. It’s spot on. But Hiltzik perpetuates the College Board mythology.

A 2002 National Research Council study of AP courses and tests concluded that they were a “mile wide and an inch deep” and they did not comport with well-established, research-based principles of learning. The study was an intense two-year, 563-page detailed content analysis, and the main study committee was comprised of 20 members who were not only experts in their fields but also top-notch researchers who wrote also about effective teaching and learning.

The main finding of the 2004 Geiser and Santelices study was that “the best predictor of both first- and second-year college grades” is unweighted high school grade point average, and a high school grade point average “weighted with a full bonus point for AP…is invariably the worst predictor of college performance.”

Klopfenstein and Thomas (2005) found that AP students “…generally no more likely than non-AP students to return to school for a second year or to have higher first semester grades.” Moreover, they write that “close inspection of the [College Board] studies cited reveals that the existing evidence regarding the benefits of AP experience is questionable,” and “AP courses are not a necessary component of a rigorous curriculum.

College Board-funded research is more than simply suspect. The College Board continues to perpetrate the fraud that the SAT actually measures something important other than family income (for perhaps the single best read on this, see: http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2005/11/the-best-class-money-can-buy/4307/). A favorite of mine is the College Board-produced “study” that claimed PSAT scores predicted AP test scores. A sidebar comment in the study, however, undermined its validity. The authors noted that “the students included in this study are of somewhat higher ability than…test-takers” in the population to which they generalized. Upon further scrutiny, however, that “somewhat higher ability” actually meant students in the sample were a full standard deviation above those 9th and 10th graders who took the PSAT. And even then, the basic conclusion was that students who scored well on the PSAT had about a 50-50 chance of getting a “3” on an AP test, the most common score. Holy moly!

In the ‘ToolBox Revisited’ (2006) Clifford Adelman noted that “a spate of recent reports and commentaries on the Advanced Placement program claim that the original ToolBox demonstrated the unique power of AP course work in explaining bachelor’s degree completion. To put it gently, this is a misreading.”

A 2006 MIT faculty report noted “there is ‘a growing body of research’ that students who earn top AP scores and place out of institute introductory courses end up having ‘difficulty’ when taking the next course.” Two years prior, Harvard “conducted a study that found students who are allowed to skip introductory courses because they have passed a supposedly equivalent AP course do worse in subsequent courses than students who took the introductory courses at Harvard” (Seebach, 2004). Students admit that ““You’re not trying to get educated; you’re trying to look good,” and, “the focus is on the test and not necessarily on the fundamental knowledge of the material.”

The Sadler- and Klopfenstein-edited book, “AP” A Critical Examination” (2010) lays out the research that makes clear AP has become “the juggernaut of American high school education,” but “ the research evidence on its value is minimal.”

A 2013 study from Stanford noted that “increasingly, universities seem
to be moving away from awarding credit for AP courses.” The study pointed out that “the impact of the AP program on various measures of college success was found to be negligible.” And it adds this: “definitive claims about the AP program and its impact on students and schools are difficult to substantiate.”

But you wouldn’t know that by reading any of the current articles — including that by Michael Hiltzik — about the “controversial” AP Black History course or by listening to the College Board, which derives more than half of its income from AP.

AP may work well for some students, especially those who are already “college-bound to begin with” (Klopfenstein and Thomas, 2010). As Geiser (2007) notes, “systematic differences in student motivation, academic preparation, family background and high-school quality account for much of the observed difference in college outcomes between AP and non-AP students.” The Texas, College Board-funded studies Mathews salivates over do not control well for these student characteristics (even the College Board concedes that “interest and motivation” are keys to “success in any course”).
Klopfenstein and Thomas (2010) find that when these demographic characteristics are controlled for, the claims made for AP disappear.

Do some students “benefit” from taking AP courses and tests? Sure. But, students who benefit the most are “students who are well-prepared to do college work and come from the socioeconomic groups that do the best in college are going to do well in college.”

So, why do students take AP? Because they’ve been told they have to. Because they’re “trying to look good” to colleges in the “increasingly high-stakes college admission process,” and because “high schools give extra weight to AP courses when calculating grade-point averages, so it can boost a student’s class rank.”

One student who got caught up in the AP hype cycle –– taking 3 AP courses as a junior and 5 as a senior –– and only got credit for one AP course in college, reflected on his AP experience. He said nothing about “rigor” or “trying to be educated” or the quality of instruction, but remarked “if i didn’t take AP classes, it’s likely I wouldn’t have gotten accepted into the college I’m attending next year…If your high school offers them, you pretty much need to take them if you want to get into a competitive school. Or else, the admissions board will be concerned that you didn’t take on a “rigorous course load.” AP is a scam to get money, but there’s no way around it. In my opinion, high schools should get rid of them…”

But what do students actually learn from taking these “rigorous” AP tests?

For many, not much. One student remarked, after taking the World History AP test, “dear jesus… I had hoped to never see “DBQ” ever again, after AP world history… so much hate… so much hate.” And another added, “I was pretty fond of the DBQ’s, actually, because you didn’t really have to know anything about the subject, you could just make it all up after reading the documents.” And another AP student related how the “high achievers” in his school approached AP tests:

“The majority of high-achieving kids in my buddies' and my AP classes couldn’t have given less of a crap. They showed up for most of the classes, sure, and they did their best to keep up with the grades because they didn’t want their GPAs to drop, but when it came time to take the tests, they drew pictures on the AP Calc, answered just ‘C’ on the AP World History, and would finish sections of the AP Chem in, like, 5 minutes. I had one buddy who took an hour-and-a-half bathroom break during World History. The cops were almost called. They thought he was missing.”

An AP reader (grader) noted this: “I read AP exams in the past. Most memorable was an exam book with $5 taped to the page inside and the essay just said ‘please, have mercy.’ But I also got an angry breakup letter, a drawing of some astronauts, all kinds of random stuff. I can’t really remember it all… I read so many essays in such compressed time periods that it all blurs together when I try to remember.”

Students, parents, teachers, and school leaders –– not to mention politicians and reporters –– would do well to heed the research and ignore the propaganda and lies spewed by the College Board.

Belief is a powerful thing. Sadly, people too easily believe things that are not true. And public education — not to mention American democratic governance — suffers for it.

Editor’s note: All standardized tests reflect family income. Those whose families have the highest income have the highest scores. Some rich kids score poorly. Some poor kids get high scores. They are outliers that do not change the overall trend.

Categories Accountability, Democracy, Education Industry, Standardized Testing
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