Shawgi Tell: Charters Open and Close Like Day Lilies

By dianeravitch
November 14, 2019 //
18

Shawgi Tell is a professor of education at Nazareth College in New York.

He points out that “More than 765 Charter Schools Have Closed in Three Years.”

This is what Disrupters refer to as “high-quality seats.” Here today, gone tomorrow.

Currently, about 3.2 million students are enrolled in roughly 7,000 privately-operated charter schools across the country. This represents less than 7% of all students and 7% of all schools in the country.

According to the National Center for Education Statistics, more than 765 charter schools closed between 2014-15 and 2016-2017, leaving thousands of families stressed, abandoned, dislocated,and angry. This figure represents more than one out of ten charter schools in the country by today’s numbers. The real closure figure is likely higher. To be sure, more than 3,000 charter schools have closed in under three decades.

The top three reasons privately-operated charter schools close are financial malfeasance, poor academic performance, and low enrollment.

With regard to academic performance, the Washington Post (November 1, 2019) reminds us that:

When you take all charters and all public schools into consideration, students at charters do worse than those at public schools. According to the Department of Education’s National Assessment of Educational Progress, public school students in fourth, eighth and 12th grades outperform charter school students in math, reading and science.

It is also worth recalling that the vast majority of high-performing nations do not have charter schools.

Today, nearly 60% of charter schools are in urban settings where schools tend to be under-funded, over-tested, constantly-shamed, and attended mostly by poor and low-income minority students. Charter school advocates prefer to target urban schools because this is where they can make the most profit given economies of scale and other factors.

While “choice” has worked out well for major owners of capital, what good is “choice” when it cannot deliver stable, reliable, high-quality education free of corruption, segregation, and overpaid administrators? How does funneling billions of dollars annually from public schools to unstable privately-operated charter schools that frequently perform poorly help the economy, education, or society? Do pay-the-rich schemes like charter schools advance the national interest?

There is no justification for the existence of privately-operated non-profit and for-profit charter schools. They do not provide a net public benefit. Endless news reports show that charter schools are always mired in scandal and controversy. It is time to stop bashing public education, reject the hype surrounding charter schools, fully fund all public schools, and vest real decision-making power in the hands of the public. The rich must be deprived of their ability to privatize public education with impunity. The content, purpose, and direction of education must not be in the hands of privatizers, neoliberals, and corporate school reformers.

 

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Closing schools, Disruption, Education Industry, Education Reform, Privatization

Justin Parmenter: Why N.C. Governor Cooper Vetoed a Pay Raise for Teachers: It Was a Sham!

By dianeravitch
November 14, 2019 //
14

 

Justin Parmenter, an NBCT teacher in North Carolina, explains in this article why Democratic Governor Roy Cooper vetoed a pay raise for educators passed by the ultra-conservative state legislature. 

He begins:

Asheville City Schools full-time instructional assistant Angel Redmond is in her 4th year with the school system and her 21st year in education. Angel has a degree in psychology, and her duties include teaching math and reading to small groups, handling discipline issues, proctoring standardized tests, and substitute teaching when needed. Her current salary is just $22,000 per year, which means that she has to put in 15 hours a week at her second job in order to make ends meet.

Under a General Assembly plan for educator pay which was vetoed last week by Gov. Roy Cooper, Angel would have seen an increase of only $18.26 per month. That’s enough for roughly half a tank of gas.

Cooper’s veto of the poorly-named “Strengthening Educators’ Pay Act” came at the request of public school educators and advocates. On the surface it might seem like a peculiar move for a governor who has vowed to bring much-needed improvements to public education in our state, and Senate leader Phil Berger wasted no time framing Cooper as an enemy of teachers.

However, the legislation would have provided little more than table scraps from a General Assembly majority that has consistently underfunded public education and deprived our schools of billions in potential revenue via massive tax rate cuts since taking control of the House and Senate nearly a decade ago.

Under the bill, teachers with 0-15 years experience would not have received any raise this year. Teachers with 16-20 years would see only $50 more a month before taxes. Teachers from 21-24 years of experience would get $150 more a month, while our most dedicated veterans with 25 years or higher would have salaries raised $60 a month.  For school year 2020-21, teachers with 0-15 years would again get nothing, and teachers with 16 years or more would all get another $50 a month.

These measly raises were promised, not funded.

Governor Cooper was right to veto what amounted to an insult, not a pay raise.

Teachers deserve a living wage. Teachers deserve to be paid as valued professionals.

 

 

Categories Education Reform, Hoax, North Carolina, Teacher Pay

CNN: Deval Patrick Will Enter the Democratic Primary Contest

By dianeravitch
November 13, 2019 //
25

CNN reports that former Governor Deval Patrick of Massachusetts will throw his hat in the ring. 

After leaving government, Patrick entered the private sector and was employed by Bain Capital, the same firm where Mitt Romney made his fortune.

Patrick’s entry, like potential candidate Bloomberg, will weaken Joe Biden, the current front-runner in most states.

 

Categories Education Reform

Nancy Bailey: Who Is to Blame for Poor NAEP Reading Scores? Here Are Their Names

By dianeravitch
November 13, 2019 //
75

Nancy Bailey read a list of organizations who were blaming teachers for not adhering to the “science” of reading and thus blaming teachers for NAEP reading scores.

She got steamed and pointed out that none of these individuals or organizations criticizing teachers are known as teachers themselves.

She got so steamed that she names names in this post. 

These are the organizations, she says, that have the sheer audacity to blame teachers for what they themselves can’t do!

They write the policies that constrain teachers but take no responsibility when their policies fail.

Busybodies! When are they held accountable?

After listing the groups, she concludes:

This conversation should take place, because something is wrong when parents are unhappy with their child’s schooling. It isn’t a debate that will be won by yelling at each other on social media, but by working together at the school level.

It should include a state department of education in each state that investigates problems and isn’t about getting rid of public education. The U.S. Department of Education should also be working to better address the controversy surrounding reading and what’s behind denying students with reading disabilities their IDEA rights.

Universities should review how they teach reading, but they also shouldn’t be forced by these groups to destroy reading practices that have worked for years.

It is, however, difficult to do this at this time. Education Secretary Betsy DeVos, and the previous education secretaries, never taught, never studied reading in a university setting or worked to remediate student difficulties, and have themselves been about the business of destroying schools and de-professionalizing the teaching profession.

If you think the NAEP scores are poor, look at the groups mentioned here. It has been a rigged game for years!

Categories Accountability, Education Industry, NAEP, Privatization

See This Documentary: “American Factory”

By dianeravitch
November 13, 2019 //
18

Reader David Kristofferson recommended this documentary, which is streaming on Netflix. I regret putting any money in Reed Hastings’ coffers, but this is a very compelling program.

“American Factory” tells the story of a GM factory in Ohio that closed, putting thousands of workers out of work.

A few years after the closing, a large Chinese company named Fuyao arrives to revive the factory, dedicated now to producing glass for automobiles.  The CEO comes from China to show his dissatisfaction with the quality of American workers. The American workers are happy to have a job, but note that their pay of $12 an hour doesn’t compare with the $29 an hour they earned as GM employees.

The Chinese managers are so dissatisfied with the American workers that they bring a team of American managers to China to see how Chinese workers perform at the Fuyao factory. The Americans watch bug-eyed as workers describe their work habits: a 12-hour day; one or two days off each month. The workers line up to show their deference to the boss. They perform with precision at a company festival, praising their employer. They act like automatons.

Back home in Ohio, the American workers try to form a union. Some risk their livelihood, trying to organize as a UAW union.

I won’t tell you how the vote goes.

I will tell you that the Chinese owners fire the American managers.

There is a culture clash.

More than that, there is a depressing realization that America no longer leads the world in manufacturing.

And there is a frightening realization that the Chinese owners will eagerly replace human workers with machines to cut costs and increase efficiency.

This is a very different, very sobering view of the American future.

A possible subtitle: The Screwing of the American Working Class.

 

Categories Economy, Education Reform, Unions

Laura Chapman: The Disrupters Refuse to Slink Away Despite Massive Failure

By dianeravitch
November 13, 2019 //
9

Last night there was a grand event at the Kennedy Center where veterans of the Bush and Obama education world joined together to wring their hands about the crisis at hand. The crisis is not the mess they made of American education for the past 20 years. The crisis is that the tests are not hard enough, the punishments are not tough enough, and the nation needs to buckle down and keep on testing and firing and demanding more from everyone. Except them. Of course.

Our reader Laura Chapman explains what was behind the big party:

“I wanted to look past the PR for this one event. The event is a launch for a new campaign capitalizing on “stagnating” NAEP scores and persistent gaps among students “who have been underserved.”

“The reformists are calling for “evidence based” methods of teaching using only “high quality, standards-aligned, content-rich curriculum.” Suddenly these reformists think “deficits in content-knowledge” matter. But these reformists are really fans of the Common Core and have a lonh history of ignoring much else worthy of study, content in the arts and humanities for example.

“In addition to being sponsored by the Collaborative for Student Success, this “new literacy campaign” is sponsored by Achieve, The Alliance for Excellent Education, The Thomas B. Fordham Institute, Learning Heroes, Literacy Now, National Association of Elementary School Principals, National Council on Teacher Quality, National Urban Alliance, National Urban League, Military Child Coalition, and The Education Trust. These have been supporters of the Common Core, and many love high-stakes tests.

“The Collaborative for Student Success is a multi-faced project of the New Venture Fund. It is supported by: Bloomberg Foundation, Carnegie Corporation of New York, ExxonMobil, Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, The Charles and Lynn Schusterman Family Foundation. The website markets three of the Collaborative’s favorite math programs, but it also features “campaigns” of the Collaborative. Each campaign has a separate website. All campaigns are based on the premise that states are not living up to the requirements of ESSA. Truly, the sponsors of the Literacy Initiative are die-hard defenders of the Common Core and ESSA. Here are the camaigns in progress.

“A web-based “Assessment HQ” offers test scores and demographic breakouts for test scores “for more than half of states in grades 3-8.” This campaign is designed to claim that state assessments are not tough enough or fully reported to parents. The Collaborative scoops up state assessment results in math and ELA and puts these together in an interactive map. The Assessment HQ is actually sluggish and out of date. It is presenting data from the 2014-15 school year and it was designed to push PARCC and Smarter Balanced tests.

“The “Check State Plans” campaign offers ratings of the state plans for ESSA based on their strict conformity to ESSA. The Collaborative asked 45 reviewers to judge state plans, back in 2017, at about the same time that Bellwether Education Partners also put together a panel to review state ESSA plans. The Collaborative wanted to see “the following principles” honored in state plans. “Set the bar high for what students need to know and understand; Focus on closing the achievement gap in math and English; Ensure that parents and communities have access to meaningful data; Have a real plan for helping those schools that have been historically failing.”

“The “Educators for High Standards” campaign has offered about 12 fellowships to teachers willing to voice enthusiasm for ESSA, along with “partners” from the following groups, all known to push for high-stakes tests and the Common Core: The National Network of State Teachers of the Year, Smarter Balanced Assessment Consortium, PARCC, Teach Plus, Student Achievement Partners (Achieve the Core), National Board of Professional Teaching Standards, Council of Chief State School Officers (CCSSO), Hope Street Group, The New Teacher Project (TNTP), Teach for America, Center for Teacher Quality, and Educators4Excellece.
The” Military Families for High Standards” campaign features the work of advocates for schools serving military families. Among the resources is an article from the Center for American Progress titled “How the Common Core Improves Education for Military-Connected Children.”

“The Honesty Gap” campaign asserts that states must take NAEP’s definition of “proficiency” as the standard for judging the “honesty” in state tests. State tests that claim students are “proficient “are dishonest unless the state standard is the same as for NAEP tests. The “honesty gaps” for each state are shown on an interactive map. The explicit message is that schools are often lying to parents about student achievement. The website should be called Arne Duncan’s BS. https://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=246201831
The “Understanding ESSA” campaign provides news about USDE activities (up-to-date) and links to state actions that comply with ESSA.

The whole website is devoted to belligerent judgments of states, districts, and schools while bolstering advocacy groups who will insist on “strict fidelity” to ESSA in state plans.

These birds of a feather intent on repeating the misery of two decades of top down reform.

 

 

Categories Accountability, Duncan, Arne, Education Industry, Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA), Failure, NAEP, NCLB (No Child Left Behind)

Leonie Haimson: Why NAEP Scores Went Flat or Declined

By dianeravitch
November 13, 2019 //
54

Leonie Haimson explains here why NAEP scores have been flat or declined for the past decade: the combination of the recession of 2008 (and its aftermath) and the Common Core was a hard blow to students and teachers.

She writes:

The poor results are most likely a consequence of several factors, including the damaging double whammy experienced by schools in 2009-2011 – when the great recession hit, which led to thousands of teacher jobs lost and class sizes increasing sharply, and the imposition of the Common Core standards…

Many states and districts, including NYC, still have not recovered from the sharp increase in class size that occurred starting in 2008.   Just as class size reduction benefits students of color and from low income families the most, increases in class size hurt their opportunities to learn the most, helping to explain the widening achievement gap over this period.

In addition, the corporate-style policies that proponents claimed would help narrow the achievement gap, including the Common Core standards and state exams aligned with those standards, adopted in nearly all states starting in 2010, likely contributed to the decline in performance on the NAEPs as well.

The Common Core emphasizes informational text rather than literature, and  “close reading” strategies, with students assigned to analyze short passages, often excerpts from literature, in isolation from any larger context.

In essence, Common Core led to a curriculum designed for test prep, but devoid of engaging relevance and content for many students. To make things worse, the assigned texts are often two or three Lexile grade levels above the actual reading level of the students to whom the reading is assigned, in a misplaced intent to provide more “rigor.”

Close reading involves analyzing and re-analyzing individual passages, focusing on details and interpreting the author’s particular choice of words, structure, and intent, without any reference to anything in the student’s own experience or prior knowledge: “Students go deeper in the text, explore the author’s craft and word choices, analyze the text’s structure and implicit meaning” etc..  It is a process that is more suited to a graduate seminar in literary criticism than elementary or even high school English classrooms, and has been imposed upon classrooms throughout the United States in a misguided effort to sharpen their analytic “skills”.  It is hard to imagine anything more boring, and more likely to turn off a young reader.

Haimson then quotes several teachers who explain how the CCSS has ruined instruction for their students.

She continues:

Strangely enough, the NY Times story on the NAEPs mentioned neither the recession nor the Common Core in attempting to explain why there has been no  progress since 2009. In a Twitter exchange with one of the reporters, she said no one had mentioned Common Core to her in years.   

I don’t doubt that few if any of its original proponents now mention Common Core  – given its abysmal failure to improve results in our schools — but that doesn’t mean that millions of students and teachers aren’t still wrestling with its flaws every day in classrooms throughout the nation, as evidenced by the above tweets.

In any case, the last quote in the Times article was from Jim Cowen, the executive director of the Collaborative for Student Success, an organization established to promote the Common Core standards, decrying how the state tests — those explicitly aligned with the standards — have become too easy and there was a need for “accountability” — but not apparently for those who promoted the flawed standards themselves.

Digital reading may also have contributed to the NAEP score debacle.

All in all, Haimson concludes that the scores are a damning indictment of the Gates/David Coleman/Arne Duncan agenda. Add to that the NCLB agenda.

But you can be sure that there will be no accountability for any of them.

 

 

Categories Education Reform

Campbell Brown’s “The 74” Does Not Like Elizabeth Warren

By dianeravitch
November 13, 2019 //
10

Campbell Brown was a CNN anchor. Then she became the new face of the Education Disruption movement after the disappearance of Michelle Rhee. Brown advocated for charters and vouchers and she opposed teachers’ unions and teacher tenure. She claimed in various articles in the New York City press that the schools were overrun by teachers who were sexual predators, protected by the union. She created a news site called “The 74” to express her views; it was funded by the usual cast of billionaires (Walton, Bloomberg, Gates, Broad, etc.). She is anti-public school, anti-union, anti-tenure and pro-privatization. When Betsy DeVos was chosen as Secretary of Education, Campbell Brown acknowledged that she was a personal friend and that Betsy funded “The 74,” while Brown served on the board of Betsy’s pro-voucher American Federation for Children.

Those with a longish memory might recall that Brown started the “Partnership for Educational Justice” to file court cases in several states in an effort to destroy teacher tenure–a copycat of the Vergara lawsuit in California, which was eventually tossed out by the state’s highest court. Thus far, all of the PEJ lawsuits have also been thrown out by state judges who said that teacher tenure was unrelated to test scores. (There are probably more tenured teachers in affluent districts than in low-performing, high-poverty districts.)

Then Campbell Brown was chosen by Mark Zuckerberg to be in charge of media relations for Facebook.

Popular Information revealed the multiple roles that Campbell Brown is now playing.

The 74 = has heaped scorn on Elizabeth Warren since she released her K-12 plan, which proposes an end to federal support for new charter schools.

The 74 has (not surprisingly) lavished praise on Betsy DeVos.

Now Brown is in charge of deciding what news gets featured on Facebook.

While Brown served as editor-in-chief of The 74, the site featured at least 11 pieces from Eric Owens, an editor at The Daily Caller. Owens “has a long history of penning racially insensitive, sexist, and transphobic attacks on students and teachers.” 

Owens, for example, wrote in The Daily Caller that white privilege is a “radical and bizarre political theory that white people enjoy a bunch of wonderful privileges while everyone else suffers under the yoke of invisible oppression.” In another Daily Caller column, Owens called college students “delicate, immature wusses who become traumatized, get the vapors and seek professional counseling any time they face adversity.”

Owens is also obsessed with female teachers who sexually assault male students, repeatedly writing exploitative stories about the incidents.

After Brown joined Facebook, The Daily Caller was named an official Facebook fact-checking partner, despite The Daily Caller’s history of inaccurate reporting. 

Brown thinks Breitbart is a “quality” news source

Brown’s role with The 74 raises further questions about the ideological underpinnings of Facebook’s nascent news tab, which has not been rolled out to all users. Brown’s team elected to include Breitbart — an unreliable and noxious right-wing site that was literally caught laundering white nationalist talking points —  among the 200 “quality” sources included in the launch. 

Of course, Mark Zuckerberg hates Elizabeth Warren too, because she has talked about breaking up the big tech monopolies, such as Facebook, and taxing the personal wealth of billionaires.

Categories Accountability, Betsy DeVos, Charter Schools, Economy, Education Industry, Media, Privatization, Vouchers

Gary Rubinstein: Eva Moskowitz’s Success Academy Grows But Continues to Have High Attrition Rates

By dianeravitch
November 13, 2019 //
32

Gary Rubinstein read a story in the local Rupert Murdoch newspaper saluting Eva Moskowitz’s charter chain for its high SAT scores, but then noticed how many students were in the senior class. (Billionaire media mogul Rupert Murdoch is a multimillion-dollar donor to the  Success Academy charter chain.)

What school advertises its SAT scores? Success Academy!

Gary noticed that of the students who started in second grade, nearly 70% did not make it to the senior year.

He writes:

The New York Post recently ran an editorial about the SAT scores of the Success Academy senior class of 2020.  Of all the different numbers they referenced, one that I took note of was 114 — the apparent number of students in the senior class.

The class of 2020 is the third graduating class of Success Academy.  The class of 2018 had 17 seniors out of a cohort of 73 first graders in 2006-2007.  The class of 2019 had 26 seniors out of a cohort of 83 kindergartners in 2006-2007.  Some of the class of 2019 were students who had been held back from the class of 2018 — probably in a comparable number to the number of 2019 students who will graduate this year.  So the 26 out of 83, or 31% persistence rate probably accounts for students who take an extra year to graduate.

For the class of 2020, things get a bit more complicated since in 2008 Success Academy did its first expansion and grew from one school, now called Harlem 1, into four schools now including Harlem 2, Harlem 3, and Harlem 4.  Some of the past records are incomplete for these schools, but when the 2020 cohort was in 2nd grade in 2009-2010, I find that there was a combined 353 students in the cohort.  By 6th grade, they were down to 263 students and by 9th grade it was 191.  In 10th grade they were 161 students and in 11th grade, 146.  And now, according to the New York Post article based on a Success Academy press release, they have 114 seniors.  So only 32% of the students who were there in second grade made it through their program.

Better test scores through attrition, a surefire formula for success!

I have had a long-running exchange with a wealthy pundit who gives six-figure amounts to Success Academy. He says they have found the secret sauce for educating all children in the New York City public schools, and for all schools everywhere. I ask him what should be done about the majority of students they accept who don’t survive. He seems to think they don’t matter. Only the strong survive. Or deserve to survive.

Categories Accountability, Harlem Success Academy, High School Graduation, New York City

The Secret to Trump’s Alliance with Turkey

By dianeravitch
November 12, 2019 //
13

A fascinating story appeared on the New York Times website tonight. The relationship is based on Jared Kushner’s friendships with Turkish sons-in-law. Guys like him.

Read this:

By David D. Kirkpatrick and Eric Lipton

ISTANBUL — Behind President Trump’s accommodating attitude toward Turkey is an unusual back channel: a trio of sons-in-law who married into power and now play key roles in connecting Ankara with Washington.

One, Turkey’s finance minister, is the son-in-law of its strongman president and oversees his country’s relationship with the United States.

Another is the son-in-law of a Turkish tycoon and became a business partner to the Trump Organization. Now he advocates for Turkey with the Trump administration.

And the third is Jared Kushner, who as the son-in-law of and senior adviser to Mr. Trump has a vague if expansive foreign policy portfolio.

Categories Education Reform
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