From Education Weeks, Bridging Differences
By Diane Ravitch
As I write, thousands of teachers are staging a protest in the state capitol in Wisconsin. Others stand with them, including the Green Bay Packers, other public-sector workers, and even public-sector workers who are not affected by the proposed legislation, namely, firefighters and police. The teachers and other public-sector employees are speaking out against Gov. Scott Walker's effort to destroy their collective-bargaining rights. Gov. Walker demanded that the teachers pay more for their health benefits and their pension benefits, and they have agreed to do so. But that's not all he wants. He wants to destroy the union.
I wrote an article about this contretemps for CNN.com, not realizing that the teachers had already conceded the governor's demands on money issues. The confrontation now is solely about whether public employees have the right to bargain collectively and to have a collective voice. Monday's New York Times made clear, both in a column by Paul Krugman and in its news coverage, that the union is fighting for its survival, not benefits.
It's time to ask: Why should teachers have unions? I am not a member of a union, and I have never belonged to a union, but here is what I see. From the individual teacher's point of view, it is valuable to have an organization to turn to when you feel you have been treated unfairly, one that will supply you with assistance, even a lawyer, one that advocates for improvement in your standard of living. From society's point of view, it is valuable to have unions to fight for funding for public education and for smaller class sizes and for adequate compensation for teachers. I recently visited Arizona, a right-to-work state, and parents there complained to me about classes of 30 for children in 1st and 2nd grades, and even larger numbers for older students; they complained that the starting salary for teachers was only $26,000 and that it is hard to find strong college graduates to enter teaching when wages are so low.
I have often heard union critics complain that contracts are too long, too detailed, too prescriptive. I have noticed that unions don't write their own contracts. There are always two sides that negotiate a contract and sign it. If an administration is so weak that it signs a contract that is bad for kids, bad for the district's finances, or bad for education, then shame on them.
The fight in Wisconsin now is whether public-sector unions should have any power to bargain at all. The fight is not restricted to Wisconsin; it is taking place in many other states, including New Jersey, Ohio, Tennessee, Pennsylvania, Florida, and Illinois. The battle has already been lost in other states.
I have been wondering if advocates of corporate school reform, such as Bill Gates, Eli Broad, and Michelle Rhee will come to the aid of the teachers in Wisconsin. I have been wondering if President Obama and Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, who were quick to applaud the firing of teachers in Central Falls, R.I., will now step forward to support the teachers in Wisconsin. I have been wondering if Secretary Duncan, who only a few days earlier had led a much-publicized national conversation in Denver about the importance of collaboration between unions and management, will weigh in to support the teachers. I am ever hopeful, but will take care not to hold my breath.
If there is no organized force to advocate for public education in the state capitols of this nation, our children and our schools will suffer. That's the bottom line. And that's why I stand with the teachers of Wisconsin. I know you do, too.
http://blogs.edweek.org/edweek/Bridging-Differences/2011/02/i_stand_with_the_teachers_of_w.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+BridgingDifferences+%28Education+Week+Blog%3A+Bridging+Differences%29
Showing posts with label Diane Ravitch. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Diane Ravitch. Show all posts
Tuesday, February 22, 2011
Monday, February 14, 2011
Education is on a race to the bottom
From in these times.com
By Roger Bybee
Diane Ravitch, author of The Death and Life of the Great American School System.
President Barack Obama and Education Secretary Arne Duncan have
formed an alliance with billionaire "school reformers" whose agenda
is to downgrade U.S. public education and blame its shortcomings on
"bad teachers," warns educational historian Diane Ravitch.
Ravitch spoke Thursday night before a crowd of more than 1,000 education professors, students, public school teachers, and community activists at the
University of Wisconsin.
"These corporate reformers are pursuing a strategy based on ideology, not on evidence," she charged. "It is demoralizing teachers and setting up public schools to be de-legitimized, as they are called upon to meet impossible goals. This is not an improvement strategy, it is a privatization strategy."
Ravitch, once assistant secretary of education under George W.
Bush, has undergone a remarkable transformation after observing how
the education system became fixated on test results, the scapegoating of teachers and the promoting of a privatized approach to education.
She has now emerged as one of the leading critics of the Obama-Duncan approach to public education, which has been driven by funding from several huge foundations--the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the Eli and Edith Broad Foundation, and the Walton Family foundation.
The essence of this corporatized approach to public education is "choice, competition, deregulation, accountability, and data-based decision-making," as Joanne Barkan summarizes it an important Dissent article.
With progressive reforms for education generating little attention, the corporate model has managed to make surprising inroads among some liberals who have become persuaded that a market-driven education system is key to America's future.
The corporate style of reform began with "No Child Left Behind" enacted under George W. Bush, which promoted a preoccupation with standardized testing and the conclusion that children's failure to measure up was a direct result of inferior teachers.
This was followed by Duncan's "Race to the Top" program which embraced the same core beliefs, including the closing of "failed schools." Duncan and Obama, for example, applauded the decision of the Central Falls, Rhode Island School Board to close the high school and fire all 91 staff members, absurdly including the cafeteria and maintenance staff, based on the assumption that low test scores reflected the failures of the teachers.
The poverty of the students and the fact that a high percentage were immigrants learning English were seen as irrelevant to the low test scores. Eventually, both Duncan and the local school system were forced to back off due to public outcry.
But Duncan, along with the three huge foundations, is still pressing ahead with imposing what Ravitch calls their "punitive" and "market-based" assumptions on the nation's schools.
However, as both Ravitch and Barkan have pointed out, all the major studies show that the key elements of corporate-style education reform are simply not working:
No improvement in learning: The most comprehensive study of de-regulated "charter" schools, conducted by conservative economists at Stanford University, examined education results among students at 2,400 charter schools nationally. They found 83% of charter schools perform either worse or no better than public schools.
Merit pay: The new wave of corporate reformers have argued that
merit pay is vital to incentivize" and reward better-performing teachers. But a 2010 Vanderbilt University study clearly demonstrated that merit pay does not generate higher standardized testing.
A National Research Council report, backing up numerous other studies, found that standardized test scores fail to effectively measure student learning The main result observed by Ravitch has been the tendency of school curriculums to get narrower and narrower, focusing almost exclusively on "teaching to the test" in reading and math. Supposed "success" stories of market-based, mayor-driven "reform" in Chicago and New York quickly unraveled once newspapers began independently evaluating the test scores of students.
Nonetheless, the combined PR clout of the Gates, Broad, and Walton
foundations has generated a massive wave of favorable publicity for
their crusade against what Ravitch called "the Bad Teacher Syndrome. This included a cover story in Newsweek, a weeklong series on NBC that "celebrated privatization and scapegoating teachers," as Ravitch put it, and two segments of Oprah devoted to discussing Waiting for Superman, which Ravitch called a badly-biased documentary.
All of these high-profile attacks on teachers, their unions, and union-won rights avoid the real causes of poor school performance. "Most of the nations that the US is comparing itself with have much lower rates of poverty among their children. It's 20% nationally here, and I know it's much higher in this community." (32 percent of children in Milwaukee are poor.)
"Poor performance is mostly due to poverty and racial isolation," Raitch said. Barkan further illuminated this point in Dissent:
The most recent results (2006) showed the following: students in US schools where the poverty rate was less than 10% rnked first in reading, first in cience, and third in math. But as the poverty rate rose till higher, students ranked lower and lower.
Twenty percent of all U.S. schools have poverty rates over 75%. The problem is not public schools; it is poverty.
And as dozens of studies have shown, the gap in cognitive, physical, and social development between children in poverty and middle-class children is set by age three.
The over-emphasis on testing, the targeting of teachers, the senseless closing of schools, and the substitution of a market model for the basic democratic right of public education are all generating an increasingly vocal backlash from both teachers and parents.
"Teachers are going to be marching on Washington D.C. July 28 to 30 to protest the 'testing and punishment' regime in education," Ravitch announced.
The top-down corporate-style reform championed by Obama and the billionaires threatens a further deterioration of education for poor kids, and is an imminent threat to America's democratic traditions, Ravitch concluded.
http://www.inthesetimes.com/working/entry/6939/obama_sides_with_corporate_attack_on_teachers_instead_of_new_war_on_po/
By Roger Bybee
Diane Ravitch, author of The Death and Life of the Great American School System.
President Barack Obama and Education Secretary Arne Duncan have
formed an alliance with billionaire "school reformers" whose agenda
is to downgrade U.S. public education and blame its shortcomings on
"bad teachers," warns educational historian Diane Ravitch.
Ravitch spoke Thursday night before a crowd of more than 1,000 education professors, students, public school teachers, and community activists at the
University of Wisconsin.
"These corporate reformers are pursuing a strategy based on ideology, not on evidence," she charged. "It is demoralizing teachers and setting up public schools to be de-legitimized, as they are called upon to meet impossible goals. This is not an improvement strategy, it is a privatization strategy."
Ravitch, once assistant secretary of education under George W.
Bush, has undergone a remarkable transformation after observing how
the education system became fixated on test results, the scapegoating of teachers and the promoting of a privatized approach to education.
She has now emerged as one of the leading critics of the Obama-Duncan approach to public education, which has been driven by funding from several huge foundations--the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the Eli and Edith Broad Foundation, and the Walton Family foundation.
The essence of this corporatized approach to public education is "choice, competition, deregulation, accountability, and data-based decision-making," as Joanne Barkan summarizes it an important Dissent article.
With progressive reforms for education generating little attention, the corporate model has managed to make surprising inroads among some liberals who have become persuaded that a market-driven education system is key to America's future.
The corporate style of reform began with "No Child Left Behind" enacted under George W. Bush, which promoted a preoccupation with standardized testing and the conclusion that children's failure to measure up was a direct result of inferior teachers.
This was followed by Duncan's "Race to the Top" program which embraced the same core beliefs, including the closing of "failed schools." Duncan and Obama, for example, applauded the decision of the Central Falls, Rhode Island School Board to close the high school and fire all 91 staff members, absurdly including the cafeteria and maintenance staff, based on the assumption that low test scores reflected the failures of the teachers.
The poverty of the students and the fact that a high percentage were immigrants learning English were seen as irrelevant to the low test scores. Eventually, both Duncan and the local school system were forced to back off due to public outcry.
But Duncan, along with the three huge foundations, is still pressing ahead with imposing what Ravitch calls their "punitive" and "market-based" assumptions on the nation's schools.
However, as both Ravitch and Barkan have pointed out, all the major studies show that the key elements of corporate-style education reform are simply not working:
No improvement in learning: The most comprehensive study of de-regulated "charter" schools, conducted by conservative economists at Stanford University, examined education results among students at 2,400 charter schools nationally. They found 83% of charter schools perform either worse or no better than public schools.
Merit pay: The new wave of corporate reformers have argued that
merit pay is vital to incentivize" and reward better-performing teachers. But a 2010 Vanderbilt University study clearly demonstrated that merit pay does not generate higher standardized testing.
A National Research Council report, backing up numerous other studies, found that standardized test scores fail to effectively measure student learning The main result observed by Ravitch has been the tendency of school curriculums to get narrower and narrower, focusing almost exclusively on "teaching to the test" in reading and math. Supposed "success" stories of market-based, mayor-driven "reform" in Chicago and New York quickly unraveled once newspapers began independently evaluating the test scores of students.
Nonetheless, the combined PR clout of the Gates, Broad, and Walton
foundations has generated a massive wave of favorable publicity for
their crusade against what Ravitch called "the Bad Teacher Syndrome. This included a cover story in Newsweek, a weeklong series on NBC that "celebrated privatization and scapegoating teachers," as Ravitch put it, and two segments of Oprah devoted to discussing Waiting for Superman, which Ravitch called a badly-biased documentary.
All of these high-profile attacks on teachers, their unions, and union-won rights avoid the real causes of poor school performance. "Most of the nations that the US is comparing itself with have much lower rates of poverty among their children. It's 20% nationally here, and I know it's much higher in this community." (32 percent of children in Milwaukee are poor.)
"Poor performance is mostly due to poverty and racial isolation," Raitch said. Barkan further illuminated this point in Dissent:
The most recent results (2006) showed the following: students in US schools where the poverty rate was less than 10% rnked first in reading, first in cience, and third in math. But as the poverty rate rose till higher, students ranked lower and lower.
Twenty percent of all U.S. schools have poverty rates over 75%. The problem is not public schools; it is poverty.
And as dozens of studies have shown, the gap in cognitive, physical, and social development between children in poverty and middle-class children is set by age three.
The over-emphasis on testing, the targeting of teachers, the senseless closing of schools, and the substitution of a market model for the basic democratic right of public education are all generating an increasingly vocal backlash from both teachers and parents.
"Teachers are going to be marching on Washington D.C. July 28 to 30 to protest the 'testing and punishment' regime in education," Ravitch announced.
The top-down corporate-style reform championed by Obama and the billionaires threatens a further deterioration of education for poor kids, and is an imminent threat to America's democratic traditions, Ravitch concluded.
http://www.inthesetimes.com/working/entry/6939/obama_sides_with_corporate_attack_on_teachers_instead_of_new_war_on_po/
Friday, February 11, 2011
Parents, wake up... please...
From School Matters
by Judy Rabin
Hailed as a “hero” by supporters who came to hear her give the keynote address, Diane Ravitch took the stage for almost an hour as she spoke to parents, teachers, and activists from across the country Monday night at PS/IS 89 in New York City. They came from Seattle, Florida, Rochester, New York City, New Jersey, New Orleans, Chicago, and elsewhere, for the kickoff of the nationwide organization Parents Across America (PAA) and a call to action to take back public education.
PAA is a grassroots effort and political campaign spearheaded by parent activists and local organizations joining forces nationally against corporate interests who have hijacked public education and against the politicians who have turned their backs on the voices of parents and professional educators. “Since the top-down forces that are imposing their will on our schools have become national in scope, we need to be as well,” according to the PAA website.
Ravitch told the audience at this auspicious gathering, there is a perfect storm brewing in which those who have delegitimized public education are taking advantage of a bad economy and deep budget cuts to implement their own ideological agenda. She criticized President Obama’s Race to the Top by saying “education is not a race – education is not a competition. Good schools depend on collaboration, not on teachers competing for dollars. ” She said the punishments and remedies instituted under No Child Left Behind have escalated under the current administration and closing of schools destroys the social capital which consists of the relationships in the community essential for good, strong schools and a quality education.
The passion, excitement, determination and anger in the room were palpable as speaker after speaker got up to discuss how the current education reform is damaging their own communities, their schools and any chance of real learning opportunities for their children. They spoke of communities being torn apart in New York City and other urban areas where parents and teachers are pitted against each other. Members of the national board of PAA urged the audience to contact their local legislators and work to educate parents in their local communities by providing them with the tools and research-based evidence that illustrates why merit pay, charter schools and testing are failed policies that have not improved education or closed the achievement gap. In fact, with 20 percent of children living in poverty, Ravitch says poverty is the elephant in the room and it is an issue.
Up until now, parents have had very little say as the corporate reformers “move children around like checkers on a checkerboard” in their mindless pursuit of test scores, explained Ravitch. That’s why PAA hopes to galvanize parents and empower them to channel their frustration by working together with teachers and lobbying state legislatures and Congress to enact real, genuine education reform that will improve public schools, not close them. Some of the alternatives and ideas advocated by PAA include common sense solutions such as: high quality early childhood programs; parent education programs; reasonable limits on class size: medical clinics in schools: more professionalism in teaching: and more support and better working conditions for teachers; and acknowledging what every teacher and educator already knows -- test scores have been and still are closely correlated with the socioeconomic status of a school’s population.
Ravitch ended on a note of optimism. “There is hope even though all the power and all the money is on one side, and on the other side there is no one standing up for teachers. Parents are the sleeping giants of this debate. If the sleeping giant awakens you can take back American education and the time to start is today.”
For more information on Parents Across America go to: www.parentsacrossamerica.org and join -- today.
http://www.schoolsmatter.info/2011/02/sleeping-giant-is-awakening-as-parents.html
by Judy Rabin
Hailed as a “hero” by supporters who came to hear her give the keynote address, Diane Ravitch took the stage for almost an hour as she spoke to parents, teachers, and activists from across the country Monday night at PS/IS 89 in New York City. They came from Seattle, Florida, Rochester, New York City, New Jersey, New Orleans, Chicago, and elsewhere, for the kickoff of the nationwide organization Parents Across America (PAA) and a call to action to take back public education.
PAA is a grassroots effort and political campaign spearheaded by parent activists and local organizations joining forces nationally against corporate interests who have hijacked public education and against the politicians who have turned their backs on the voices of parents and professional educators. “Since the top-down forces that are imposing their will on our schools have become national in scope, we need to be as well,” according to the PAA website.
Ravitch told the audience at this auspicious gathering, there is a perfect storm brewing in which those who have delegitimized public education are taking advantage of a bad economy and deep budget cuts to implement their own ideological agenda. She criticized President Obama’s Race to the Top by saying “education is not a race – education is not a competition. Good schools depend on collaboration, not on teachers competing for dollars. ” She said the punishments and remedies instituted under No Child Left Behind have escalated under the current administration and closing of schools destroys the social capital which consists of the relationships in the community essential for good, strong schools and a quality education.
The passion, excitement, determination and anger in the room were palpable as speaker after speaker got up to discuss how the current education reform is damaging their own communities, their schools and any chance of real learning opportunities for their children. They spoke of communities being torn apart in New York City and other urban areas where parents and teachers are pitted against each other. Members of the national board of PAA urged the audience to contact their local legislators and work to educate parents in their local communities by providing them with the tools and research-based evidence that illustrates why merit pay, charter schools and testing are failed policies that have not improved education or closed the achievement gap. In fact, with 20 percent of children living in poverty, Ravitch says poverty is the elephant in the room and it is an issue.
Up until now, parents have had very little say as the corporate reformers “move children around like checkers on a checkerboard” in their mindless pursuit of test scores, explained Ravitch. That’s why PAA hopes to galvanize parents and empower them to channel their frustration by working together with teachers and lobbying state legislatures and Congress to enact real, genuine education reform that will improve public schools, not close them. Some of the alternatives and ideas advocated by PAA include common sense solutions such as: high quality early childhood programs; parent education programs; reasonable limits on class size: medical clinics in schools: more professionalism in teaching: and more support and better working conditions for teachers; and acknowledging what every teacher and educator already knows -- test scores have been and still are closely correlated with the socioeconomic status of a school’s population.
Ravitch ended on a note of optimism. “There is hope even though all the power and all the money is on one side, and on the other side there is no one standing up for teachers. Parents are the sleeping giants of this debate. If the sleeping giant awakens you can take back American education and the time to start is today.”
For more information on Parents Across America go to: www.parentsacrossamerica.org and join -- today.
http://www.schoolsmatter.info/2011/02/sleeping-giant-is-awakening-as-parents.html
Tuesday, February 8, 2011
Closing schools, truly a bad idea
New York City and Florida have similar solutions to similar issues. -cpg
From Education Weeks, Bridging Differences
by Diane Ravitch
Last week, the New York City Department of Education received permission from the city's Panel on Educational Policy, or PEP, to close an additional two dozen public schools because their scores are too low. The city has now closed more than 100 schools and opened hundreds of new ones. The consent of the PEP was never in doubt. New York City has a governance system for its public schools in which Mayor Michael Bloomberg has complete, unlimited power over every decision. He not only appoints the chancellor of schools, but appoints eight of the 13 members of the PEP, who serve at his pleasure. The mayor has made clear that he will fire any member of the PEP who defies his orders. Thus, when the department of education, which the mayor controls, makes a recommendation to the PEP, which the mayor controls, the outcome is predetermined.
Our mayor is now in his ninth year, in his third term, and his education policies are grounded completely in the idea of numbers, data, and accountability. Every school gets a letter grade, and schools that get a D or F more than once are on track to be closed. The letter grades themselves are based mainly on state test scores, which are unreliable. Only last June, the state education department acknowledged that its tests were too easy, and it deflated scores across the state, wiping out almost all of New York City's allegedly historic gains. Even though it is obvious that the state scores have no scientific validity, they determine which schools will live and which will die.
Since the mayor took control, the school system has been reorganized three or four times. At first, the schools were centrally controlled, with lockstep expectations for every minute of every class; now all supervision and middle management have been abolished; each school is on its own (this is called "empowerment") and is judged almost entirely by those dubious test scores.
Some years back, the mayor decided to stake everything on small schools and charter schools, and his department of education has been conscientiously undermining and killing off big high schools. Small schools and charter schools are permitted in their first few years to limit the enrollment of students with disabilities and students who are English-language learners. Thus the most challenging students are shuffled from school to school, the favored schools thrive, and the larger schools—which get disproportionate numbers of low-scoring students—are set up to fail by the department of education. The very process of identifying a school as "failing" is enough to frighten away many parents, thus hastening the school's certain death.
A study of the closing schools by the city's independent budget office found that these schools have disproportionate numbers of the city's neediest students. One begins to get the sense that students who are homeless, who don't speak English, who receive special education, or who have other high needs, are bounced around from school to school.
As the small and charter schools proliferate, the idea of choice takes root. The concept of the neighborhood school becomes obsolete. Parents and students are supposed to become smart shoppers, although quite honestly it must be hard for them to know how to choose between the High School for Leadership, the High School for Integrated Studies, the High School for Peace and Justice, the High School for Academic Success, the High School for Excellence, and hundreds of similarly named schools (these are made-up names, but not so different from the real ones).
Today, almost nine years into this era of business-style management, some of the new small schools are failing and being closed. The mayor's press people say this shows that he takes accountability seriously and is prepared to shut down every low-performing school, including those authorized on his watch. But to many parents, it just shows a high tolerance for chaos and a complete indifference to students' need for stability and the role of the school as an anchor in the community.
When the PEP held hearings on school closings, thousands of students, parents, and teachers turned out to protest the closing of their schools. Large numbers of students and parents from charter schools also turned out; they had been bused in by charter sponsors to urge the panel to close the schools so that charters could get their space. (I have trouble understanding why the children and parents from charters came to seek additional charters since they were already enrolled in them.) At these meetings, which were akin to show trials, it was clear that the panel intended to endorse the mayor's wish. Although technically the event was a "hearing," the audience understood that the majority of the panel was not listening, and nothing they might say would change the outcome. This parody of democracy enraged the audience, which became rowdy. As we have seen recently in Egypt, people who are denied a legitimate role in the democratic process get angry and make noise. As the closings continue, it seems likely they will make even more noise. How else will they be heard? Who is affected more by the closings than the students and their parents and teachers?
I oppose the closing of public schools (except for under-enrollment) for a simple reason. Public schools are not chain stores. They are not shoe stores that can be closed when they don't turn a profit and be relocated elsewhere. They are a public service, a public good. It is the obligation of public officials to provide good public schools in every neighborhood, not to privatize them or to act as an umpire whose role is to judge them defective and shut them down. If those who are in charge can't help struggling schools, shame on them. (Charter schools are a different matter, as they sign a contract and agree to meet certain goals or close.)
Every time a public school is closed, it should be considered a failure of the central administration. The leaders who close the most public schools are the biggest failures. They should be held accountable for their incompetence. Good leadership in education means taking responsibility for making things better, rather than sitting back and monitoring how schools perform. Good leaders should be recognized for the schools they improve. Bad leaders close schools because they are incapable of helping them.
Schools with low test scores are mostly schools that enroll large numbers of students who are struggling to keep up. Closing the school does nothing to help the students. District leaders should do whatever is necessary to help the school improve. Those who can't, or won't, should be replaced by better leaders. Educational euthanasia is unethical.
http://blogs.edweek.org/edweek/Bridging-Differences/2011/02/closing_public_schools_a_truly.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+BridgingDifferences+%28Education+Week+Blog%3A+Bridging+Differences%29
From Education Weeks, Bridging Differences
by Diane Ravitch
Last week, the New York City Department of Education received permission from the city's Panel on Educational Policy, or PEP, to close an additional two dozen public schools because their scores are too low. The city has now closed more than 100 schools and opened hundreds of new ones. The consent of the PEP was never in doubt. New York City has a governance system for its public schools in which Mayor Michael Bloomberg has complete, unlimited power over every decision. He not only appoints the chancellor of schools, but appoints eight of the 13 members of the PEP, who serve at his pleasure. The mayor has made clear that he will fire any member of the PEP who defies his orders. Thus, when the department of education, which the mayor controls, makes a recommendation to the PEP, which the mayor controls, the outcome is predetermined.
Our mayor is now in his ninth year, in his third term, and his education policies are grounded completely in the idea of numbers, data, and accountability. Every school gets a letter grade, and schools that get a D or F more than once are on track to be closed. The letter grades themselves are based mainly on state test scores, which are unreliable. Only last June, the state education department acknowledged that its tests were too easy, and it deflated scores across the state, wiping out almost all of New York City's allegedly historic gains. Even though it is obvious that the state scores have no scientific validity, they determine which schools will live and which will die.
Since the mayor took control, the school system has been reorganized three or four times. At first, the schools were centrally controlled, with lockstep expectations for every minute of every class; now all supervision and middle management have been abolished; each school is on its own (this is called "empowerment") and is judged almost entirely by those dubious test scores.
Some years back, the mayor decided to stake everything on small schools and charter schools, and his department of education has been conscientiously undermining and killing off big high schools. Small schools and charter schools are permitted in their first few years to limit the enrollment of students with disabilities and students who are English-language learners. Thus the most challenging students are shuffled from school to school, the favored schools thrive, and the larger schools—which get disproportionate numbers of low-scoring students—are set up to fail by the department of education. The very process of identifying a school as "failing" is enough to frighten away many parents, thus hastening the school's certain death.
A study of the closing schools by the city's independent budget office found that these schools have disproportionate numbers of the city's neediest students. One begins to get the sense that students who are homeless, who don't speak English, who receive special education, or who have other high needs, are bounced around from school to school.
As the small and charter schools proliferate, the idea of choice takes root. The concept of the neighborhood school becomes obsolete. Parents and students are supposed to become smart shoppers, although quite honestly it must be hard for them to know how to choose between the High School for Leadership, the High School for Integrated Studies, the High School for Peace and Justice, the High School for Academic Success, the High School for Excellence, and hundreds of similarly named schools (these are made-up names, but not so different from the real ones).
Today, almost nine years into this era of business-style management, some of the new small schools are failing and being closed. The mayor's press people say this shows that he takes accountability seriously and is prepared to shut down every low-performing school, including those authorized on his watch. But to many parents, it just shows a high tolerance for chaos and a complete indifference to students' need for stability and the role of the school as an anchor in the community.
When the PEP held hearings on school closings, thousands of students, parents, and teachers turned out to protest the closing of their schools. Large numbers of students and parents from charter schools also turned out; they had been bused in by charter sponsors to urge the panel to close the schools so that charters could get their space. (I have trouble understanding why the children and parents from charters came to seek additional charters since they were already enrolled in them.) At these meetings, which were akin to show trials, it was clear that the panel intended to endorse the mayor's wish. Although technically the event was a "hearing," the audience understood that the majority of the panel was not listening, and nothing they might say would change the outcome. This parody of democracy enraged the audience, which became rowdy. As we have seen recently in Egypt, people who are denied a legitimate role in the democratic process get angry and make noise. As the closings continue, it seems likely they will make even more noise. How else will they be heard? Who is affected more by the closings than the students and their parents and teachers?
I oppose the closing of public schools (except for under-enrollment) for a simple reason. Public schools are not chain stores. They are not shoe stores that can be closed when they don't turn a profit and be relocated elsewhere. They are a public service, a public good. It is the obligation of public officials to provide good public schools in every neighborhood, not to privatize them or to act as an umpire whose role is to judge them defective and shut them down. If those who are in charge can't help struggling schools, shame on them. (Charter schools are a different matter, as they sign a contract and agree to meet certain goals or close.)
Every time a public school is closed, it should be considered a failure of the central administration. The leaders who close the most public schools are the biggest failures. They should be held accountable for their incompetence. Good leadership in education means taking responsibility for making things better, rather than sitting back and monitoring how schools perform. Good leaders should be recognized for the schools they improve. Bad leaders close schools because they are incapable of helping them.
Schools with low test scores are mostly schools that enroll large numbers of students who are struggling to keep up. Closing the school does nothing to help the students. District leaders should do whatever is necessary to help the school improve. Those who can't, or won't, should be replaced by better leaders. Educational euthanasia is unethical.
http://blogs.edweek.org/edweek/Bridging-Differences/2011/02/closing_public_schools_a_truly.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+BridgingDifferences+%28Education+Week+Blog%3A+Bridging+Differences%29
Wednesday, February 2, 2011
Diane Ravitch talks Education Reform
Posted on the e-veritas, news for U of M's faculty and staff
With two years of service in the Teach for America program under her belt, Shahrzad Daneshvar settled into her seat in the University of Miami’s Storer Auditorium, anxious to hear what one of the nation’s top educational analysts and historians had to say about what is being done in the name of school reform.
For Daneshvar, a UM graduate student in the School of Education’s Community and Social Change Program, what she heard couldn’t have been more clear, direct, and unmistakable: Poor academic performance in the nation’s public schools is not a result of bad teachers but poverty, and to evaluate teacher effectiveness based on the test scores of their students will not help improve ailing school systems, but only hurt them.
That was the message delivered by Diane Ravitch, former assistant secretary of education in the George H.W. Bush administration, who delivered the Northern Trust 2011 Lecture “Testing the Limits of Education Reform.” Northern Trust and UM’s School of Education sponsored the lecture.
“I think it’s a scary time,” said Ravitch, explaining that teachers across the nation are feeling “very demoralized” because of critics who blame them for low-performing public schools, the mediocre test scores of students, and the achievement gaps among children of different races.
“They’re demoralized because the level of criticism has become uncivil. There’s a lot of finger-pointing, and it’s very unfair,” Ravitch continued, a standing room-only audience listening to her every word, with dozens more watching the lecture on a video feed broadcast to a study room at the School of Business Administration.
“Our schools have always had critics, but never has there been such fierce criticism directed at educators and public education itself.”
Ravitch decried those detractors who call for firing teachers and principals and closing low-performing public schools and replacing them with privately managed schools.
She had harsh words for the movie Waiting for ‘Superman,’ saying the 2010 documentary that is critical of American public schools is “propaganda that mixes fact and fiction.” The documentary’s claim, she said, that 70 percent of eighth graders read below grade level is untrue. In fact, based on federal testing data, that number is actually 25 percent, which is a figure, she said, that includes English-language learners and children with disabilities.
“Poor academic performance,” said Ravitch, “is mostly the consequence and result of poverty, not bad teachers and not bad schools.”
Her comments on the current education reform movement were far reaching. A professor of education at New York University and a nonresident senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, Ravitch also addressed the often controversial topic of charter schools, asserting that ailing public schools could perform just as effectively as successful charter-school models like the Harlem Children’s Zone if they had the same academic resources.
She said many charter schools are rife with faults, noting that many lack oversight and enroll limited numbers of homeless and minority students.
She also took a critical stance on Obama’s Race to the Top initiative, saying the $4.3 billion program designed to spur education reform is flawed in that it awards more funding to schools that meet certain conditions such as allowing teachers to be rated based on the test scores of students.
Saying she wasn’t defending the status quo, Ravitch also offered solutions, calling for an increase in strong pre-kindergarten programs, balanced curricula, teacher recruitment and retention, and parent education.
UM graduate student Daneshvar said she agreed with everything Ravitch spoke about.
During her two years as a Teach for America instructor, Daneshvar taught first graders at two of Miami’s poorest inner city schools, motivating her students by making home visits and establishing relationships with their parents.
“I joined Teach for America because I had witnessed the inequities of tracking in my high school and I wanted to join the movement to change that,” said Daneshvar, standing on the Storer Auditorium steps after the Ravitch lecture had concluded.
She is starting a nonprofit intended to address many of the issues identified by Ravitch to improve public schools, including encouraging parent-child bonding. Said Daneshvar, “Despite the fact that I no longer teach, my experience as a corps member inevitably changed my life. It has redirected my future career plans into the direction of social work and public service.”
http://everitas.univmiami.net/2011/01/28/diane-ravitch-takes-critics-of-public-education-to-task-over-education-reform/
With two years of service in the Teach for America program under her belt, Shahrzad Daneshvar settled into her seat in the University of Miami’s Storer Auditorium, anxious to hear what one of the nation’s top educational analysts and historians had to say about what is being done in the name of school reform.
For Daneshvar, a UM graduate student in the School of Education’s Community and Social Change Program, what she heard couldn’t have been more clear, direct, and unmistakable: Poor academic performance in the nation’s public schools is not a result of bad teachers but poverty, and to evaluate teacher effectiveness based on the test scores of their students will not help improve ailing school systems, but only hurt them.
That was the message delivered by Diane Ravitch, former assistant secretary of education in the George H.W. Bush administration, who delivered the Northern Trust 2011 Lecture “Testing the Limits of Education Reform.” Northern Trust and UM’s School of Education sponsored the lecture.
“I think it’s a scary time,” said Ravitch, explaining that teachers across the nation are feeling “very demoralized” because of critics who blame them for low-performing public schools, the mediocre test scores of students, and the achievement gaps among children of different races.
“They’re demoralized because the level of criticism has become uncivil. There’s a lot of finger-pointing, and it’s very unfair,” Ravitch continued, a standing room-only audience listening to her every word, with dozens more watching the lecture on a video feed broadcast to a study room at the School of Business Administration.
“Our schools have always had critics, but never has there been such fierce criticism directed at educators and public education itself.”
Ravitch decried those detractors who call for firing teachers and principals and closing low-performing public schools and replacing them with privately managed schools.
She had harsh words for the movie Waiting for ‘Superman,’ saying the 2010 documentary that is critical of American public schools is “propaganda that mixes fact and fiction.” The documentary’s claim, she said, that 70 percent of eighth graders read below grade level is untrue. In fact, based on federal testing data, that number is actually 25 percent, which is a figure, she said, that includes English-language learners and children with disabilities.
“Poor academic performance,” said Ravitch, “is mostly the consequence and result of poverty, not bad teachers and not bad schools.”
Her comments on the current education reform movement were far reaching. A professor of education at New York University and a nonresident senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, Ravitch also addressed the often controversial topic of charter schools, asserting that ailing public schools could perform just as effectively as successful charter-school models like the Harlem Children’s Zone if they had the same academic resources.
She said many charter schools are rife with faults, noting that many lack oversight and enroll limited numbers of homeless and minority students.
She also took a critical stance on Obama’s Race to the Top initiative, saying the $4.3 billion program designed to spur education reform is flawed in that it awards more funding to schools that meet certain conditions such as allowing teachers to be rated based on the test scores of students.
Saying she wasn’t defending the status quo, Ravitch also offered solutions, calling for an increase in strong pre-kindergarten programs, balanced curricula, teacher recruitment and retention, and parent education.
UM graduate student Daneshvar said she agreed with everything Ravitch spoke about.
During her two years as a Teach for America instructor, Daneshvar taught first graders at two of Miami’s poorest inner city schools, motivating her students by making home visits and establishing relationships with their parents.
“I joined Teach for America because I had witnessed the inequities of tracking in my high school and I wanted to join the movement to change that,” said Daneshvar, standing on the Storer Auditorium steps after the Ravitch lecture had concluded.
She is starting a nonprofit intended to address many of the issues identified by Ravitch to improve public schools, including encouraging parent-child bonding. Said Daneshvar, “Despite the fact that I no longer teach, my experience as a corps member inevitably changed my life. It has redirected my future career plans into the direction of social work and public service.”
http://everitas.univmiami.net/2011/01/28/diane-ravitch-takes-critics-of-public-education-to-task-over-education-reform/
Wednesday, January 26, 2011
Testing troubles
From the New York Times
by Diane Ravitch
Diane Ravitch is the author of "The Death and Life of the Great American School System: How Testing and Choice Are Undermining Education."
President Obama's address contained no surprises about education policy. His goals are unarguable: He wants Americans to be better educated. He wants schools to encourage creativity, innovation and imagination. He wants teachers to be treated with respect.
The centralized Race to the Top discourages creativity, innovation and imagination..Unfortunately, his Race to the Top program, which he called "the most meaningful reform of our public schools in a generation," undermines these goals. It is not a repudiation of the unpopular No Child Left Behind law, but a continuation. Like No Child Left Behind, Race to the Top places high priority on tests of reading and mathematics.
The president wrongly asserted that Race to the Top is not a "top-down mandate, but the work of local teachers and principals, school boards and communities." Instead, the U.S. Department of Education designed it and specified criteria that states had to meet to be eligible to win $4.3 billion in federal funds.
States had to agree to increase the number of privately managed charter schools; to evaluate teachers by student test scores; to award merit pay to teachers if student scores rose; and to "turn around" low-scoring schools by firing principals and teachers, closing schools or handing them over to private management.
No teachers or school boards proposed these ideas. Teachers feel unfairly blamed for low scores. None of these ideas is supported by research or has a record of success.
These "reforms" are not likely to improve U.S. education. Charter schools on average do not perform better than regular public schools. By emphasizing testing of basic skills, this program guarantees that students will have less time for science, history, the arts or foreign language and thus will be less likely to obtain an education that encourages creativity, innovation and imagination.
http://www.nytimes.com/roomfordebate/2011/01/26/grading-the-education-president/tests-from-the-top-down
by Diane Ravitch
Diane Ravitch is the author of "The Death and Life of the Great American School System: How Testing and Choice Are Undermining Education."
President Obama's address contained no surprises about education policy. His goals are unarguable: He wants Americans to be better educated. He wants schools to encourage creativity, innovation and imagination. He wants teachers to be treated with respect.
The centralized Race to the Top discourages creativity, innovation and imagination..Unfortunately, his Race to the Top program, which he called "the most meaningful reform of our public schools in a generation," undermines these goals. It is not a repudiation of the unpopular No Child Left Behind law, but a continuation. Like No Child Left Behind, Race to the Top places high priority on tests of reading and mathematics.
The president wrongly asserted that Race to the Top is not a "top-down mandate, but the work of local teachers and principals, school boards and communities." Instead, the U.S. Department of Education designed it and specified criteria that states had to meet to be eligible to win $4.3 billion in federal funds.
States had to agree to increase the number of privately managed charter schools; to evaluate teachers by student test scores; to award merit pay to teachers if student scores rose; and to "turn around" low-scoring schools by firing principals and teachers, closing schools or handing them over to private management.
No teachers or school boards proposed these ideas. Teachers feel unfairly blamed for low scores. None of these ideas is supported by research or has a record of success.
These "reforms" are not likely to improve U.S. education. Charter schools on average do not perform better than regular public schools. By emphasizing testing of basic skills, this program guarantees that students will have less time for science, history, the arts or foreign language and thus will be less likely to obtain an education that encourages creativity, innovation and imagination.
http://www.nytimes.com/roomfordebate/2011/01/26/grading-the-education-president/tests-from-the-top-down
Saturday, January 8, 2011
Money not children's needs, drives the Ed reform movement
By Barbara Miner
The Ultimate $uperpower • Supersized Dollars Drive Waiting for ‘Superman’ Agenda
In 1972, two young Washington Post reporters were investigating a low-level burglary at the Watergate Hotel and stumbled upon a host of unexplained coincidences and connections that reached to the White House.
One of the reporters, Bob Woodward, went to a high-level government source and complained: “The story is dry. All we’ve got are pieces. We can’t seem to figure out what the puzzle is supposed to look like.”
To which the infamous Deep Throat replied: “Follow the money. Always follow the money.”
Sidestepping Democracy
For nearly 40 years, “follow the money” has been an axiom in both journalism and politics—although, as Shakespeare might complain, one “more honour’d in the breach than the observance.”
It is useful to resurrect the axiom in analyzing the multimedia buzz and policy debates swirling around the movie Waiting for “Superman.” In education, as in so many other aspects of society, money is being used to squeeze out democracy.
Waiting for “Superman” and its surrounding campaign reflect an influential trend that has proven adept at dominating education policy in both Republican and Democratic administrations. This bipartisan alliance unites 20th-century conservatives closely aligned with the Republican Party, who made the bulk of their money before the dawn of the digital era, and 21st-century billionaires more loosely aligned with the Democratic Party, who generally made their fortunes through digitally based technology. These two groups can be described as analog conservatives and digital billionaires.
Despite their differences, both groups embrace market-based reforms, entrepreneurial initiatives, deregulation, and data-driven/test-based accountability as the pillars of educational change. Under the banner of challenging bureaucracy and promoting innovation, both groups chafe at public oversight and collective bargaining agreements. Above all, both rely on money to get their way.
Two decades ago, challenges to public schools were spearheaded by groups such as the Christian Coalition, a grassroots, church-based phenomenon that sought to abolish the U.S. Department of Education and to elect religious conservatives to take over local and state school boards. Today’s bipartisan corporate reformers tend to sidestep democracy altogether by abolishing school boards, promoting mayoral control, and hiring corporate-style CEOs who answer to a city’s power elite. No longer preoccupied with abolishing the U.S. Department of Education, they instead use their wealth to effectively control it and to dictate reform.
Hedge Funds Bullish on Charter Schools
This developing alliance is evident in Waiting for “Superman” and in the transformation of the charter school movement that the film champions. Originally, charter school reform emerged out of progressive and union-sponsored efforts to promote innovation that could improve public schools, particularly in urban areas. But in the past decade privatizers, including fabulously wealthy hedge fund managers, have come to dominate the charter school movement and shape its policy agenda.
But first about hedge funds—those masters of the universe known for their financial speculation and insane levels of compensation. (The top 25 hedge fund managers took in an average of $1 billion each in 2009—enough to pay for 658,000 entry-level teachers.) Encompassing the lower and east side of Manhattan and extending north to Greenwich, Conn., is a kingdom that New York magazine has dubbed “Greater Hedgistan.” Of the world’s hedge funds with more than $1 billion in assets, a significant majority is based in Greater Hedgistan.
Smack dab in the middle of Greater Hedgistan is Harlem.
These two worlds—one rich, white, and powerful; the other poor, African American, and Latino but located on prime real estate—meet in the charter school world, although not as equal partners.
“Charters have attracted benefactors from many fields,” a New York Times article noted almost a year ago. “But it is impossible to ignore that in New York, hedge funds are at the movement’s epicenter.”
Charters are edging out traditional public schools in Harlem and other poor neighborhoods—and the charters are overwhelmingly controlled by hedge fund directors and finance capitalists who sit on the boards of directors that are legally responsible for running the charter and establishing its financial, educational, and personnel policies. (There is more than a little irony that New York, home to one of the fiercest battles for community control of schools in the 1960s, is now a prime example of rich white billionaires controlling the education of low-income children of color.)
Take the board of trustees of the Success Charter Network, which, along with the Harlem Children’s Zone, is featured prominently in the film. Of its nine members, seven are involved in hedge funds or investment companies. The eighth is CEO of the Institute for Student Achievement, and the ninth is a managing partner at the NewSchools Venture Fund, involved in both for-profit and nonprofit charters across the country. No community, parent, or teacher representatives sit on the Success Charter Network board of trustees.
There is no single reason why charter schools have become the must-be-involved cause among the hedge fund and finance capital crowd. Real estate obviously plays a role, as Harlem and the South Bronx are the poor neighborhoods most ripe for gentrification now that so much of Brooklyn has come under the reach of condos, trendy restaurants, Trader Joe’s, and Ikea. (In New York City, no deal ever goes down that doesn’t involve real estate.) And, just as clearly, there’s old-fashioned altruism and missionary zeal at work. “What you’re seeing is for the under-40 set, education reform is what feeding kids in Africa was in 1980,” an education reformer said in explaining Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg’s $100 million donation to the Newark public schools in September.
Another explanation is that the hedge fund crowd is comfortable with the charter way of doing business—overwhelmingly nonunion, which means that management gets to call all the shots; a guaranteed cash flow in the form of public dollars per student; minimal public oversight; lots of data and test scores; and an educational ideology based on a free-market model of schooling.
The minimal public transparency and oversight of charters is particularly in sync with the hedge fund culture. Infamous for their secrecy, hedge funds operate largely beyond public scrutiny. Their securities tend to be issued in “private offerings” that are not registered with the Securities and Exchange Commission, whose regulations were established in 1933 during the banking crises of the Great Depression. Nor are they required to make periodic reports under the Securities Exchange Act of 1934. And, to play the game, you have to be rich, with millions of dollars to invest.
Charter schools are the type of entrepreneurial initiative that “electrifies” hedge fund managers, according to Whitney Tilson, a finance capitalist, founding member of Teach for America, and board member of the Knowledge Is Power Program (KIPP). “With the state providing so much of the money, outside contributions are insanely well leveraged,” he told the New York Times.
Ravenel Boykin Curry IV of the money management firm Eagle Capital Management, who helped found the Girls Prep charter schools in New York, told the Times that charter schools are “exactly the kind of investment people in our industry spend our days trying to stumble on, with incredible cash flow, even if in this case we don’t ourselves get any of it.”
Charter schools have also become a way to network and hobnob with elite powerbrokers and celebrities (who knows what deal might emerge from such networking)—all in the name of helping poor people.
And, of course, there is money to be made. Harlem Children’s Zone (HCZ), for instance, is one of the most financially well-endowed education reform efforts in the country. Following the film, in which its founder, Geoffrey Canada, emerged as the most charismatic of those featured, HCZ received millions—including $20 million from Goldman Sachs in mid-September. New York City is also contributing $60 million toward a $100 million new school.
HCZ had net assets of $194 million listed on its 2008 nonprofit tax report. Almost $15 million was in savings and temporary investments, and another $128 million was invested at a hedge fund. Given that most hedge funds operate on what is known as a 2-20 fee structure (a 2 percent management fee and a 20 percent take of any profits), some lucky hedge fund will make millions of dollars off HCZ in any given year.
Politics and Profits Make Reliable Bedfellows
Historically, charter and voucher initiatives have received their most consistent support from pro-Republican, traditional conservatives such as the Walton Foundation of Wal-Mart fame and the Bradley Foundation, based on the fortune of the Allen-Bradley Company in Milwaukee. This was especially true under the Reagan and both Bush administrations, when vouchers for private schools seemed the stronger of the voucher/charter “school choice” reforms. Vouchers were never popular with voters, however, and so much of the emphasis shifted to the more politically palatable charter reform—with corporate-oriented Democrats and digital billionaires jumping on to the school choice/charter bandwagon. Take away the Gates, Walton, and Broad foundations, Teach for America alumni, Democrats for Education Reform (DFER), and a few essential hedge fund and investment managers, and the pro-corporate charter movement would shrink significantly.
DFER is a national political action committee that promotes charter and other “school choice” options. The movie’s central narrative metaphor—highly emotional public lotteries—turns out to have been perfected during a political strategy and public relations campaign engineered by Success Charter Network and DFER. A look at DFER and its relationship to Success Charter Network uncovers how the politics of charters operate in the real world rather than in the sanitized Hollywood version.
First, there are the personal connections—rich people rarely leave their fate to ping-pong balls and lotteries. John Petry, for instance, is on the boards of DFER, its nonprofit arm, Education Reform Now, and the Success Charter Network. Joel Greenblatt is on the DFER board of advisors and is chair of the Success Charter Network board.
Flooding the Zone, Bamboozling the Media
More interesting are the joint political efforts of the organizations, such as the 2008 effort “Flooding the Zone.” This campaign makes clear that the charter lotteries have more to do with political propagandizing than with serving the needs of children and families.
The Flooding the Zone campaign was jointly decided upon by the leaders of Success Charter Network and DFER (and, allegedly, a group of parent activists that appears to be moribund now that this year’s lottery is over). The campaign’s purpose was to “go ‘on offense’ to provide political cover” to increase the number of charters in Harlem, create a hospitable climate for charters to take over space in public schools, and promote the concept of parent choice.
The strategy was to create a groundswell of publicity for the charter lotteries and to “flood the zone” in Harlem with pro-school choice messages. No effort was spared, with hundreds of thousands of leaflets, multiple mailings to families, ads at bus stops, posters, and literature drops. Lacking a membership base, DFER used “an army of field workers, many high school students who were hired to blanket the neighborhood with materials.” Success Charter Network coordinated the information and DFER coordinated the political rally.
A recent article in the New York Daily News reported that Success Charter Network spent $1.3 million on marketing between 2007 and 2009, with most of that going to the leaflets, posters, and mailings that were part of the Flooding the Zone campaign.
Flooding the Zone makes clear that the Success Charter School lottery was a conscious public relations effort. Given the political and economic clout behind DFER and Success Charter Network, and the inherent drama of a winner-take-all lottery, it’s not surprising that Waiting for “Superman” used the lottery as its dramatic heart.
DFER’s “Done Waiting” campaign, meanwhile, is a partner in the film’s social action campaign, along with a who’s who of traditional conservatives and digital-age billionaires including the Walton Family Foundation, the Broad Foundation, and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. (On the local level, groups such as the United Way and Stand for Children are coordinating efforts.) The Done Waiting partners, meanwhile, include not just charter organizations but also groups focused on vouchers for private and religious schools.
DFER prefers to play a behind-the-scenes role. The same is not true of the foundations that have emerged as the forces behind the corporate reform agenda that now dominates education policy discussions.
Although names like Rockefeller, Ford, Annenberg, and Carnegie traditionally have dominated foundation-funded education reform, in recent years a new group of foundations has emerged—Gates, Walton, and Broad, in particular. And all three are deeply involved in campaigns promoting the educational perspectives of Waiting for “Superman.” (Gates is featured as an education “expert” in the film, which does not include an interview with a single public school teacher.)
Gates—whose education grants in the last decade approach the $3 billion mark—has been so dominant that he has been dubbed the country’s education czar. Given the imperial nature of foundation-driven reform, the czar moniker is particularly appropriate. (Gates, with a net worth of about $53 billion, saw his worth increase by $13 billion alone last year, according to Forbes magazine.) Foundations, although benefiting from their status as nonprofits and thus essentially subsidized by U.S. taxpayers, are private institutions with private boards, able to make behind-the-scenes decisions and sidestep public accountability for the success or failure of their programs.
Given the realities of school funding, with public dollars focused on essential services, schools and districts—and even the U.S. Department of Education—often look to foundations to fund new initiatives. Add in grants to organizations such as Teach for America or the Charter School Growth Fund (which received $12 million from Gates this July), and the foundations have inordinate power in determining the future of public education.
“What we’ve done is create a new nobility, where basically the lords and ladies decide who gets the money,” argues Barbara Dudley, head of the Veatch Foundation in the early 1990s, former director of Greenpeace, former president of the National Lawyers Guild, and currently an adjunct professor at Portland State University. “It is not democratic and you can’t pretend that it is.”
Education’s role in strengthening our democratic institutions is a long-standing tradition in this country; it isn’t a mistake that the right to a free public education is enshrined in every state constitution in the country. Yet many charter school promoters don’t feel the need to make even a rhetorical nod toward democratic concerns.
The NewSchools Venture Fund, for instance, issued a 10-year report on its $100 million investment in nonprofit and for-profit initiatives and called the report “Investing in a Revolution.” Although the words “entrepreneur,” “entrepreneurs,” and “entrepreneurial” show up 84 times in the report, the words “democracy” or “democratic” do not appear even once.
Which leads to a fundamental and unaddressed question: Should the American people put their faith in a white billionaire boys club to lead the revolution on behalf of poor people of color?
As educational historian Diane Ravitch notes, the corporate-based reform agenda undermines community and democracy and is subject “to the whim of entrepreneurs and financiers.” The obsession with schools as a business, she notes, “threatens to destroy public education.”
“Who will stand up to the tycoons and politicians and tell them so?”
http://www.rethinkingschools.org/archive/25_02/25_02_miner.shtml
The Ultimate $uperpower • Supersized Dollars Drive Waiting for ‘Superman’ Agenda
In 1972, two young Washington Post reporters were investigating a low-level burglary at the Watergate Hotel and stumbled upon a host of unexplained coincidences and connections that reached to the White House.
One of the reporters, Bob Woodward, went to a high-level government source and complained: “The story is dry. All we’ve got are pieces. We can’t seem to figure out what the puzzle is supposed to look like.”
To which the infamous Deep Throat replied: “Follow the money. Always follow the money.”
Sidestepping Democracy
For nearly 40 years, “follow the money” has been an axiom in both journalism and politics—although, as Shakespeare might complain, one “more honour’d in the breach than the observance.”
It is useful to resurrect the axiom in analyzing the multimedia buzz and policy debates swirling around the movie Waiting for “Superman.” In education, as in so many other aspects of society, money is being used to squeeze out democracy.
Waiting for “Superman” and its surrounding campaign reflect an influential trend that has proven adept at dominating education policy in both Republican and Democratic administrations. This bipartisan alliance unites 20th-century conservatives closely aligned with the Republican Party, who made the bulk of their money before the dawn of the digital era, and 21st-century billionaires more loosely aligned with the Democratic Party, who generally made their fortunes through digitally based technology. These two groups can be described as analog conservatives and digital billionaires.
Despite their differences, both groups embrace market-based reforms, entrepreneurial initiatives, deregulation, and data-driven/test-based accountability as the pillars of educational change. Under the banner of challenging bureaucracy and promoting innovation, both groups chafe at public oversight and collective bargaining agreements. Above all, both rely on money to get their way.
Two decades ago, challenges to public schools were spearheaded by groups such as the Christian Coalition, a grassroots, church-based phenomenon that sought to abolish the U.S. Department of Education and to elect religious conservatives to take over local and state school boards. Today’s bipartisan corporate reformers tend to sidestep democracy altogether by abolishing school boards, promoting mayoral control, and hiring corporate-style CEOs who answer to a city’s power elite. No longer preoccupied with abolishing the U.S. Department of Education, they instead use their wealth to effectively control it and to dictate reform.
Hedge Funds Bullish on Charter Schools
This developing alliance is evident in Waiting for “Superman” and in the transformation of the charter school movement that the film champions. Originally, charter school reform emerged out of progressive and union-sponsored efforts to promote innovation that could improve public schools, particularly in urban areas. But in the past decade privatizers, including fabulously wealthy hedge fund managers, have come to dominate the charter school movement and shape its policy agenda.
But first about hedge funds—those masters of the universe known for their financial speculation and insane levels of compensation. (The top 25 hedge fund managers took in an average of $1 billion each in 2009—enough to pay for 658,000 entry-level teachers.) Encompassing the lower and east side of Manhattan and extending north to Greenwich, Conn., is a kingdom that New York magazine has dubbed “Greater Hedgistan.” Of the world’s hedge funds with more than $1 billion in assets, a significant majority is based in Greater Hedgistan.
Smack dab in the middle of Greater Hedgistan is Harlem.
These two worlds—one rich, white, and powerful; the other poor, African American, and Latino but located on prime real estate—meet in the charter school world, although not as equal partners.
“Charters have attracted benefactors from many fields,” a New York Times article noted almost a year ago. “But it is impossible to ignore that in New York, hedge funds are at the movement’s epicenter.”
Charters are edging out traditional public schools in Harlem and other poor neighborhoods—and the charters are overwhelmingly controlled by hedge fund directors and finance capitalists who sit on the boards of directors that are legally responsible for running the charter and establishing its financial, educational, and personnel policies. (There is more than a little irony that New York, home to one of the fiercest battles for community control of schools in the 1960s, is now a prime example of rich white billionaires controlling the education of low-income children of color.)
Take the board of trustees of the Success Charter Network, which, along with the Harlem Children’s Zone, is featured prominently in the film. Of its nine members, seven are involved in hedge funds or investment companies. The eighth is CEO of the Institute for Student Achievement, and the ninth is a managing partner at the NewSchools Venture Fund, involved in both for-profit and nonprofit charters across the country. No community, parent, or teacher representatives sit on the Success Charter Network board of trustees.
There is no single reason why charter schools have become the must-be-involved cause among the hedge fund and finance capital crowd. Real estate obviously plays a role, as Harlem and the South Bronx are the poor neighborhoods most ripe for gentrification now that so much of Brooklyn has come under the reach of condos, trendy restaurants, Trader Joe’s, and Ikea. (In New York City, no deal ever goes down that doesn’t involve real estate.) And, just as clearly, there’s old-fashioned altruism and missionary zeal at work. “What you’re seeing is for the under-40 set, education reform is what feeding kids in Africa was in 1980,” an education reformer said in explaining Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg’s $100 million donation to the Newark public schools in September.
Another explanation is that the hedge fund crowd is comfortable with the charter way of doing business—overwhelmingly nonunion, which means that management gets to call all the shots; a guaranteed cash flow in the form of public dollars per student; minimal public oversight; lots of data and test scores; and an educational ideology based on a free-market model of schooling.
The minimal public transparency and oversight of charters is particularly in sync with the hedge fund culture. Infamous for their secrecy, hedge funds operate largely beyond public scrutiny. Their securities tend to be issued in “private offerings” that are not registered with the Securities and Exchange Commission, whose regulations were established in 1933 during the banking crises of the Great Depression. Nor are they required to make periodic reports under the Securities Exchange Act of 1934. And, to play the game, you have to be rich, with millions of dollars to invest.
Charter schools are the type of entrepreneurial initiative that “electrifies” hedge fund managers, according to Whitney Tilson, a finance capitalist, founding member of Teach for America, and board member of the Knowledge Is Power Program (KIPP). “With the state providing so much of the money, outside contributions are insanely well leveraged,” he told the New York Times.
Ravenel Boykin Curry IV of the money management firm Eagle Capital Management, who helped found the Girls Prep charter schools in New York, told the Times that charter schools are “exactly the kind of investment people in our industry spend our days trying to stumble on, with incredible cash flow, even if in this case we don’t ourselves get any of it.”
Charter schools have also become a way to network and hobnob with elite powerbrokers and celebrities (who knows what deal might emerge from such networking)—all in the name of helping poor people.
And, of course, there is money to be made. Harlem Children’s Zone (HCZ), for instance, is one of the most financially well-endowed education reform efforts in the country. Following the film, in which its founder, Geoffrey Canada, emerged as the most charismatic of those featured, HCZ received millions—including $20 million from Goldman Sachs in mid-September. New York City is also contributing $60 million toward a $100 million new school.
HCZ had net assets of $194 million listed on its 2008 nonprofit tax report. Almost $15 million was in savings and temporary investments, and another $128 million was invested at a hedge fund. Given that most hedge funds operate on what is known as a 2-20 fee structure (a 2 percent management fee and a 20 percent take of any profits), some lucky hedge fund will make millions of dollars off HCZ in any given year.
Politics and Profits Make Reliable Bedfellows
Historically, charter and voucher initiatives have received their most consistent support from pro-Republican, traditional conservatives such as the Walton Foundation of Wal-Mart fame and the Bradley Foundation, based on the fortune of the Allen-Bradley Company in Milwaukee. This was especially true under the Reagan and both Bush administrations, when vouchers for private schools seemed the stronger of the voucher/charter “school choice” reforms. Vouchers were never popular with voters, however, and so much of the emphasis shifted to the more politically palatable charter reform—with corporate-oriented Democrats and digital billionaires jumping on to the school choice/charter bandwagon. Take away the Gates, Walton, and Broad foundations, Teach for America alumni, Democrats for Education Reform (DFER), and a few essential hedge fund and investment managers, and the pro-corporate charter movement would shrink significantly.
DFER is a national political action committee that promotes charter and other “school choice” options. The movie’s central narrative metaphor—highly emotional public lotteries—turns out to have been perfected during a political strategy and public relations campaign engineered by Success Charter Network and DFER. A look at DFER and its relationship to Success Charter Network uncovers how the politics of charters operate in the real world rather than in the sanitized Hollywood version.
First, there are the personal connections—rich people rarely leave their fate to ping-pong balls and lotteries. John Petry, for instance, is on the boards of DFER, its nonprofit arm, Education Reform Now, and the Success Charter Network. Joel Greenblatt is on the DFER board of advisors and is chair of the Success Charter Network board.
Flooding the Zone, Bamboozling the Media
More interesting are the joint political efforts of the organizations, such as the 2008 effort “Flooding the Zone.” This campaign makes clear that the charter lotteries have more to do with political propagandizing than with serving the needs of children and families.
The Flooding the Zone campaign was jointly decided upon by the leaders of Success Charter Network and DFER (and, allegedly, a group of parent activists that appears to be moribund now that this year’s lottery is over). The campaign’s purpose was to “go ‘on offense’ to provide political cover” to increase the number of charters in Harlem, create a hospitable climate for charters to take over space in public schools, and promote the concept of parent choice.
The strategy was to create a groundswell of publicity for the charter lotteries and to “flood the zone” in Harlem with pro-school choice messages. No effort was spared, with hundreds of thousands of leaflets, multiple mailings to families, ads at bus stops, posters, and literature drops. Lacking a membership base, DFER used “an army of field workers, many high school students who were hired to blanket the neighborhood with materials.” Success Charter Network coordinated the information and DFER coordinated the political rally.
A recent article in the New York Daily News reported that Success Charter Network spent $1.3 million on marketing between 2007 and 2009, with most of that going to the leaflets, posters, and mailings that were part of the Flooding the Zone campaign.
Flooding the Zone makes clear that the Success Charter School lottery was a conscious public relations effort. Given the political and economic clout behind DFER and Success Charter Network, and the inherent drama of a winner-take-all lottery, it’s not surprising that Waiting for “Superman” used the lottery as its dramatic heart.
DFER’s “Done Waiting” campaign, meanwhile, is a partner in the film’s social action campaign, along with a who’s who of traditional conservatives and digital-age billionaires including the Walton Family Foundation, the Broad Foundation, and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. (On the local level, groups such as the United Way and Stand for Children are coordinating efforts.) The Done Waiting partners, meanwhile, include not just charter organizations but also groups focused on vouchers for private and religious schools.
DFER prefers to play a behind-the-scenes role. The same is not true of the foundations that have emerged as the forces behind the corporate reform agenda that now dominates education policy discussions.
Although names like Rockefeller, Ford, Annenberg, and Carnegie traditionally have dominated foundation-funded education reform, in recent years a new group of foundations has emerged—Gates, Walton, and Broad, in particular. And all three are deeply involved in campaigns promoting the educational perspectives of Waiting for “Superman.” (Gates is featured as an education “expert” in the film, which does not include an interview with a single public school teacher.)
Gates—whose education grants in the last decade approach the $3 billion mark—has been so dominant that he has been dubbed the country’s education czar. Given the imperial nature of foundation-driven reform, the czar moniker is particularly appropriate. (Gates, with a net worth of about $53 billion, saw his worth increase by $13 billion alone last year, according to Forbes magazine.) Foundations, although benefiting from their status as nonprofits and thus essentially subsidized by U.S. taxpayers, are private institutions with private boards, able to make behind-the-scenes decisions and sidestep public accountability for the success or failure of their programs.
Given the realities of school funding, with public dollars focused on essential services, schools and districts—and even the U.S. Department of Education—often look to foundations to fund new initiatives. Add in grants to organizations such as Teach for America or the Charter School Growth Fund (which received $12 million from Gates this July), and the foundations have inordinate power in determining the future of public education.
“What we’ve done is create a new nobility, where basically the lords and ladies decide who gets the money,” argues Barbara Dudley, head of the Veatch Foundation in the early 1990s, former director of Greenpeace, former president of the National Lawyers Guild, and currently an adjunct professor at Portland State University. “It is not democratic and you can’t pretend that it is.”
Education’s role in strengthening our democratic institutions is a long-standing tradition in this country; it isn’t a mistake that the right to a free public education is enshrined in every state constitution in the country. Yet many charter school promoters don’t feel the need to make even a rhetorical nod toward democratic concerns.
The NewSchools Venture Fund, for instance, issued a 10-year report on its $100 million investment in nonprofit and for-profit initiatives and called the report “Investing in a Revolution.” Although the words “entrepreneur,” “entrepreneurs,” and “entrepreneurial” show up 84 times in the report, the words “democracy” or “democratic” do not appear even once.
Which leads to a fundamental and unaddressed question: Should the American people put their faith in a white billionaire boys club to lead the revolution on behalf of poor people of color?
As educational historian Diane Ravitch notes, the corporate-based reform agenda undermines community and democracy and is subject “to the whim of entrepreneurs and financiers.” The obsession with schools as a business, she notes, “threatens to destroy public education.”
“Who will stand up to the tycoons and politicians and tell them so?”
http://www.rethinkingschools.org/archive/25_02/25_02_miner.shtml
Thursday, December 30, 2010
Fed Up with the Unintended Consequences of NCLB
From the blog, In the Trenches with School Reform
The name for this post can’t be A Nation at Risk. That’s already been done, but as Diane Ravitch points out in The Death and Life of the Great American School System, sound recommendations stemming from A Nation at Risk (1983) got lost or watered down in the political fray. Now it’s 2010 and we’re all floundering in the aftermath of NCLB. I should call my first post A Nation in Crisis — because I believe that’s where we are as a result of the last 30+ years of educational reform.
I don’t have to write a blog. Diane Ravitch has said everything that needs to be said. And John Merrow warns us where we’re headed in his latest book, Below C Level: How American Education Encourages Mediocrity — and What We Can Do About It. Not only does he discuss how school reform has led to mediocrity, but he warns about the unintended consequences of school reform on our democratic way of life.
But until Arne Duncan reads their books and pays attention — and until President Obama instructs Arne to listen — meaning: stop talking and really listen to educators when they’re trying to educate him on the realities of school reform, I will keep this blog up and running. My hope is that you will leave a comment above, spread the word and get educators and parents to come to this blog, find their state on the map,and leave comments about their specific experiences with NCLB. If enough of you who serve in the trenches are willing to share, we may be able to get our policymakers to take notice. If teachers from 50 states + D.C. reiterate the same concerns over and over, perhaps some policymaker of influence and importance will finally listen.
I could be wrong and all of you will tell me what a delightful, meaningful time you’ve had with NCLB the last nine years. But if I’m right and enough concern is revealed in your comments . . . I’ll categorize your comments and get them available in some kind of organized shape. (I’ll reveal only your username and state.) If you too have been blogging, let me know and I will make sure that others visiting this site know about you. (See bottom of page for who some of these committed and very professional people are.)
Feel free to comment on Race to the Top, the Core Standards and so on.
Then we’ll move on to proposing solutions. (I am adapting Dr. Treffinger’s model for creative problem solving to our problem.) Along the way we’ll try as educators to come to consensus about important topics related to school reform, such as the goals of American education. Let’s try to get the train back on the track before it completely derails. We’d better hurry because sometime in late 2010 or early 2011, decisions about school reform will be made in Washington and will be, as they have these last nine years, out of our control.
Unintended Consequences of NCLB
Every change always seems to have unintended consequences — some good, some pesky, and some totally undesirable. Think of just about any change you’ve made in your classroom or your school. Most times you’ve had to pause and tweak a bit — or a lot. That’s what I’m calling for. Congress needs to pause and assess. It just makes good sense, especially with the sweeping, monumental reform our schools have undergone since NCLB. Once this assessment has taken place, it will be clear to Congress that the unintended consequences have been disastrous. President Obama and Arne Duncan refuse to listen. As for me, I’ve given up on the two of them. Congress is our last hope.
My recommended course of action for Congress: Do not reauthorize NCLB and, along with it, Blueprint for Reform. Reauthorize ESEA as it stood under Title 1. Fully fund IDEA. Then sponsor a Continental Congress on school reform. Give a voice to those in the trenches — educators and parents — and listen to them. They will do what you did not do when NCLB was so quickly passed as President Bush’s first bill. They will start with the end in mind: what are the goals of American education? What are the barriers that have kept us from meeting these goals? You will then begin to see proposals for meaningful reform — but not one set of reforms that must be applied to every school in the nation. And then at the end, where it belongs, you will see addressed what NCLB is largely about — accountability. It’s a worthy and necessary issue. No one is denying that.
My own recommendation: The federal government’s role in school reform should be only to provide direction and clarity of purpose. Support? Yes. Leadership? No. NCLB sent a shock wave throughout the country. It continues to reverberate with unintended consequences that no one could have foreseen. Federal legislation applies to all states and all districts. Interstate commerce, highways and bridges, the military — federal legislation can work in a coherent way. But schools and the populations they serve are diverse, and one law can not fit all. NCLB is the proof.
Teachers, other educators, and parents: go to the map above and record your own comments about your experiences serving in the trenches under NCLB. Explore this website to see what it’s about and what I hope it can help accomplish. Your voice, along with the voices of every educator we can get to this site, can make a difference. Go to my first blog, which is the first of several about my own experiences with school reform as a principal over the last 15 years in Arizona. Anything there sound familiar?
Regardless, before you leave this website, click on your state and leave your comments about school reform. Time is of the essence. It looks now as if Congress will deal with reauthorization of NCLB in January 2011. American Enterprise Institute held a hearing on November 9, 2010, with Congressional aides who are working to reauthorize NCLB. Watch the hearing. You’ll get an idea where things are headed.
Who Else is Trying to Get the Word Across? Where Else Can You Go to Help?
Anthony Cody, who began Teachers’ Letters to Obama on Facebook, writes an excellent blog for Teacher Magazine (edweek.org). Facebook also has a section on “School Reform.” Read teacherken’s posts, called “diaries” at Daily Kos and read his comments there as well as his posts on Huffington Post.org. Read Nancy Flanagan’s comments and many others, on Teachers’ Letters to Obama on Facebook. Nancy Flanagan also has a blog on edweek.org. More and more groups are forming. Go to Uniting 4 Kids and Jesse Turner’s Children are More than Test Scores on Facebook. Join Jesse and Christopher Janotta’s rally July 28-31, including the Save Our Schools Million Teacher March July 30 in Washington, D.C. So many of you are trying to get the word out. I continue to update a list of blogs on the sidebar to the right. If I’ve overlooked you, let me know.
http://www.inthetrencheswithschoolreform.com/
The name for this post can’t be A Nation at Risk. That’s already been done, but as Diane Ravitch points out in The Death and Life of the Great American School System, sound recommendations stemming from A Nation at Risk (1983) got lost or watered down in the political fray. Now it’s 2010 and we’re all floundering in the aftermath of NCLB. I should call my first post A Nation in Crisis — because I believe that’s where we are as a result of the last 30+ years of educational reform.
I don’t have to write a blog. Diane Ravitch has said everything that needs to be said. And John Merrow warns us where we’re headed in his latest book, Below C Level: How American Education Encourages Mediocrity — and What We Can Do About It. Not only does he discuss how school reform has led to mediocrity, but he warns about the unintended consequences of school reform on our democratic way of life.
But until Arne Duncan reads their books and pays attention — and until President Obama instructs Arne to listen — meaning: stop talking and really listen to educators when they’re trying to educate him on the realities of school reform, I will keep this blog up and running. My hope is that you will leave a comment above, spread the word and get educators and parents to come to this blog, find their state on the map,and leave comments about their specific experiences with NCLB. If enough of you who serve in the trenches are willing to share, we may be able to get our policymakers to take notice. If teachers from 50 states + D.C. reiterate the same concerns over and over, perhaps some policymaker of influence and importance will finally listen.
I could be wrong and all of you will tell me what a delightful, meaningful time you’ve had with NCLB the last nine years. But if I’m right and enough concern is revealed in your comments . . . I’ll categorize your comments and get them available in some kind of organized shape. (I’ll reveal only your username and state.) If you too have been blogging, let me know and I will make sure that others visiting this site know about you. (See bottom of page for who some of these committed and very professional people are.)
Feel free to comment on Race to the Top, the Core Standards and so on.
Then we’ll move on to proposing solutions. (I am adapting Dr. Treffinger’s model for creative problem solving to our problem.) Along the way we’ll try as educators to come to consensus about important topics related to school reform, such as the goals of American education. Let’s try to get the train back on the track before it completely derails. We’d better hurry because sometime in late 2010 or early 2011, decisions about school reform will be made in Washington and will be, as they have these last nine years, out of our control.
Unintended Consequences of NCLB
Every change always seems to have unintended consequences — some good, some pesky, and some totally undesirable. Think of just about any change you’ve made in your classroom or your school. Most times you’ve had to pause and tweak a bit — or a lot. That’s what I’m calling for. Congress needs to pause and assess. It just makes good sense, especially with the sweeping, monumental reform our schools have undergone since NCLB. Once this assessment has taken place, it will be clear to Congress that the unintended consequences have been disastrous. President Obama and Arne Duncan refuse to listen. As for me, I’ve given up on the two of them. Congress is our last hope.
My recommended course of action for Congress: Do not reauthorize NCLB and, along with it, Blueprint for Reform. Reauthorize ESEA as it stood under Title 1. Fully fund IDEA. Then sponsor a Continental Congress on school reform. Give a voice to those in the trenches — educators and parents — and listen to them. They will do what you did not do when NCLB was so quickly passed as President Bush’s first bill. They will start with the end in mind: what are the goals of American education? What are the barriers that have kept us from meeting these goals? You will then begin to see proposals for meaningful reform — but not one set of reforms that must be applied to every school in the nation. And then at the end, where it belongs, you will see addressed what NCLB is largely about — accountability. It’s a worthy and necessary issue. No one is denying that.
My own recommendation: The federal government’s role in school reform should be only to provide direction and clarity of purpose. Support? Yes. Leadership? No. NCLB sent a shock wave throughout the country. It continues to reverberate with unintended consequences that no one could have foreseen. Federal legislation applies to all states and all districts. Interstate commerce, highways and bridges, the military — federal legislation can work in a coherent way. But schools and the populations they serve are diverse, and one law can not fit all. NCLB is the proof.
Teachers, other educators, and parents: go to the map above and record your own comments about your experiences serving in the trenches under NCLB. Explore this website to see what it’s about and what I hope it can help accomplish. Your voice, along with the voices of every educator we can get to this site, can make a difference. Go to my first blog, which is the first of several about my own experiences with school reform as a principal over the last 15 years in Arizona. Anything there sound familiar?
Regardless, before you leave this website, click on your state and leave your comments about school reform. Time is of the essence. It looks now as if Congress will deal with reauthorization of NCLB in January 2011. American Enterprise Institute held a hearing on November 9, 2010, with Congressional aides who are working to reauthorize NCLB. Watch the hearing. You’ll get an idea where things are headed.
Who Else is Trying to Get the Word Across? Where Else Can You Go to Help?
Anthony Cody, who began Teachers’ Letters to Obama on Facebook, writes an excellent blog for Teacher Magazine (edweek.org). Facebook also has a section on “School Reform.” Read teacherken’s posts, called “diaries” at Daily Kos and read his comments there as well as his posts on Huffington Post.org. Read Nancy Flanagan’s comments and many others, on Teachers’ Letters to Obama on Facebook. Nancy Flanagan also has a blog on edweek.org. More and more groups are forming. Go to Uniting 4 Kids and Jesse Turner’s Children are More than Test Scores on Facebook. Join Jesse and Christopher Janotta’s rally July 28-31, including the Save Our Schools Million Teacher March July 30 in Washington, D.C. So many of you are trying to get the word out. I continue to update a list of blogs on the sidebar to the right. If I’ve overlooked you, let me know.
http://www.inthetrencheswithschoolreform.com/
Tuesday, November 30, 2010
Ravitch answers Gates
By Valerie Strauss
In a paean to Bill Gates, Newsweek's Jonathan Alter calls Diane Ravitch the Microsoft founder's "chief adversary."
It's the world's richest (or second richest) man vs. an education historian and New York University research professor.
Gates, through his philanthropic foundation, has invested billions of dollars in education experiments and now has a pivotal role in reform efforts. Ravitch, the author of the bestselling The Death and Life of the Great American School System, has become the most vocal opponent of the Obama administration's education policy. She says Gates is backing the wrong initiatives and harming public schools.
In the Newsweek piece, Gates poses some questions aimed at Ravitch. I asked her to answer them. Below are the questions Gates asked, in bold, and the answers, in italics, that Ravitch provided in an email.
Gates: “Does she like the status quo?"
Ravitch: "No, I certainly don't like the status quo. I don't like the attacks on teachers, I don't like the attacks on the educators who work in our schools day in and day out, I don't like the phony solutions that are now put forward that won't improve our schools at all. I am not at all content with the quality of American education in general, and I have expressed my criticisms over many years, long before Bill Gates decided to make education his project. I think American children need not only testing in basic skills, but an education that includes the arts, literature, the sciences, history, geography, civics, foreign languages, economics, and physical education.
"I don't hear any of the corporate reformers expressing concern about the way standardized testing narrows the curriculum, the way it rewards convergent thinking and punishes divergent thinking, the way it stamps out creativity and originality. I don't hear any of them worried that a generation will grow up ignorant of history and the workings of government. I don't hear any of them putting up $100 million to make sure that every child has the chance to learn to play a musical instrument. All I hear from them is a demand for higher test scores and a demand to tie teachers' evaluations to those test scores. That is not going to improve education."
Gates: "Is she sticking up for decline?"
Ravitch: "Of course not! If we follow Bill Gates' demand to judge teachers by test scores, we will see stagnation, and he will blame it on teachers. We will see stagnation because a relentless focus on test scores in reading and math will inevitably narrow the curriculum only to what is tested. This is not good education.
"Last week, he said in a speech that teachers should not be paid more for experience and graduate degrees. I wonder why a man of his vast wealth spends so much time trying to figure out how to cut teachers' pay. Does he truly believe that our nation's schools will get better if we have teachers with less education and less experience? Who does he listen to? He needs to get himself a smarter set of advisers.
"Of course, we need to make teaching a profession that attracts and retains wonderful teachers, but the current anti-teacher rhetoric emanating from him and his confreres demonizes and demoralizes even the best teachers. I have gotten letters from many teachers who tell me that they have had it, they have never felt such disrespect; and I have also met young people who tell me that the current poisonous atmosphere has persuaded them not to become teachers. Why doesn't he make speeches thanking the people who work so hard day after day, educating our nation's children, often in difficult working conditions, most of whom earn less than he pays his secretaries at Microsoft?"
Gates: "Does she really like 400-page [union] contracts?"
Ravitch: "Does Bill Gates realize that every contract is signed by two parties: management and labor? Why does management agree to 400-page contracts? I don't know how many pages should be in a union contract, but I do believe that teachers should be evaluated by competent supervisors before they receive tenure (i.e., the right to due process).
"Once they have due process rights, they have the right to a hearing when someone wants to fire them. The reason for due process rights is that teachers in the past have been fired because of their race, their religion, their sexual orientation, or because they did not make a political contribution to the right campaign, or for some other reason not related to their competence.
"Gates probably doesn't know this, but 50% of all those who enter teaching leave within the first five years. Our biggest problem is not getting rid of deadbeats, but recruiting, retaining, and supporting teachers. We have to replace 300,000 teachers (of nearly 4 million) every single year. What are his ideas about how to do this?"
Gates: "Does she think all those ‘dropout factories’ are lonely?"
Ravitch: "This may come as a surprise to Bill Gates, but the schools he refers to as "dropout factories" enroll large numbers of high-need students. Many of them don't speak or read English; many of them enter high school three and four grade levels behind. He assumes the schools created the problems the students have; but in many cases, the schools he calls "dropout factories" are filled with heroic teachers and administrators trying their best to help kids who have massive learning problems.
"Unless someone from the district or the state actually goes into the schools and does a diagnostic evaluation, it is unfair to stigmatize the schools with the largest numbers of students who are English-language learners, special-education, and far behind in their learning. That's like saying that an oncologist is not as good a doctor as a dermatologist because so many of his patients die. Mr. Gates, first establish the risk factor before throwing around the labels and closing down schools."
Gates: "If there’s some other magic way to reduce the dropout rate, we’re all ears.”
Ravitch: "Here's the sad truth: There is no magic way to reduce the dropout rate. It involves looking at the reasons students leave school, as well as the conditions in which they live. The single biggest correlate with low academic achievement (contrary to the film Waiting for Superman) is poverty. Children who grow up in poverty get less medical care. worse nutrition, less exposure to knowledge and vocabulary, and are more likely to be exposed to childhood diseases, violence, drugs, and abuse. They are more likely to have relatives who are incarcerated. They are more likely to live in economic insecurity, not knowing if there is enough money for a winter coat or food or housing. This affects their academic performance.
They tend to have lower attendance and to be sick more than children whose parents are well-off.
"The United States today has a child poverty rate of over 20%, and it is rising. This is a national scandal. The film compares us to Finland, but doesn't mention that their child poverty rate is under 5%. Mr. Gates, why don't you address the root causes of low academic achievement, which is not 'bad teachers,' but poverty. It won't involve magic, but it would certainly require the best thinking that you can assemble. And if anyone can afford to do it, surely you can.
I don't mean to suggest that schools as they are now are just fine: They are not. Every school should have a rich and balanced curriculum; many don't. Every child should look forward to coming to school, for his or her favorite studies and activities, but those are the very studies and activities likely to lose out to endless test preparation. Schools need many things: Some need more resources and better conditions for teaching and learning; all need a stable, experienced staff. Teachers need opportunities for intellectual growth and colleagueship. Tests should be used diagnostically, to help students and teachers, not to allocate bonuses and punishments. Teachers, principals, administrators, parents, and local communities should collaborate to create caring communities, and that's happening in many places. I know that none of this is the "magic way" that you are looking for, Mr. Gates, but any educator will tell you that education is a slow, laborious process that requires good teachers, able leadership, willing students, a strong curriculum, and willing students. None of that happens magically."
I also asked Ravitch about her reaction to the strange comparison Alter made in calling her "the Whittaker Chambers of school reform." She wrote:
"I wondered if Alter knows much about history. Whittaker Chambers renounced Communism and embraced American patriotism. Was Alter suggesting that Bill Gates is the Alger Hiss of school reform? I thought it was a weird analogy.
Taken from the Washington Post: http://voices.washingtonpost.com/answer-sheet/diane-ravitch/ravitch-answers-gates.html
In a paean to Bill Gates, Newsweek's Jonathan Alter calls Diane Ravitch the Microsoft founder's "chief adversary."
It's the world's richest (or second richest) man vs. an education historian and New York University research professor.
Gates, through his philanthropic foundation, has invested billions of dollars in education experiments and now has a pivotal role in reform efforts. Ravitch, the author of the bestselling The Death and Life of the Great American School System, has become the most vocal opponent of the Obama administration's education policy. She says Gates is backing the wrong initiatives and harming public schools.
In the Newsweek piece, Gates poses some questions aimed at Ravitch. I asked her to answer them. Below are the questions Gates asked, in bold, and the answers, in italics, that Ravitch provided in an email.
Gates: “Does she like the status quo?"
Ravitch: "No, I certainly don't like the status quo. I don't like the attacks on teachers, I don't like the attacks on the educators who work in our schools day in and day out, I don't like the phony solutions that are now put forward that won't improve our schools at all. I am not at all content with the quality of American education in general, and I have expressed my criticisms over many years, long before Bill Gates decided to make education his project. I think American children need not only testing in basic skills, but an education that includes the arts, literature, the sciences, history, geography, civics, foreign languages, economics, and physical education.
"I don't hear any of the corporate reformers expressing concern about the way standardized testing narrows the curriculum, the way it rewards convergent thinking and punishes divergent thinking, the way it stamps out creativity and originality. I don't hear any of them worried that a generation will grow up ignorant of history and the workings of government. I don't hear any of them putting up $100 million to make sure that every child has the chance to learn to play a musical instrument. All I hear from them is a demand for higher test scores and a demand to tie teachers' evaluations to those test scores. That is not going to improve education."
Gates: "Is she sticking up for decline?"
Ravitch: "Of course not! If we follow Bill Gates' demand to judge teachers by test scores, we will see stagnation, and he will blame it on teachers. We will see stagnation because a relentless focus on test scores in reading and math will inevitably narrow the curriculum only to what is tested. This is not good education.
"Last week, he said in a speech that teachers should not be paid more for experience and graduate degrees. I wonder why a man of his vast wealth spends so much time trying to figure out how to cut teachers' pay. Does he truly believe that our nation's schools will get better if we have teachers with less education and less experience? Who does he listen to? He needs to get himself a smarter set of advisers.
"Of course, we need to make teaching a profession that attracts and retains wonderful teachers, but the current anti-teacher rhetoric emanating from him and his confreres demonizes and demoralizes even the best teachers. I have gotten letters from many teachers who tell me that they have had it, they have never felt such disrespect; and I have also met young people who tell me that the current poisonous atmosphere has persuaded them not to become teachers. Why doesn't he make speeches thanking the people who work so hard day after day, educating our nation's children, often in difficult working conditions, most of whom earn less than he pays his secretaries at Microsoft?"
Gates: "Does she really like 400-page [union] contracts?"
Ravitch: "Does Bill Gates realize that every contract is signed by two parties: management and labor? Why does management agree to 400-page contracts? I don't know how many pages should be in a union contract, but I do believe that teachers should be evaluated by competent supervisors before they receive tenure (i.e., the right to due process).
"Once they have due process rights, they have the right to a hearing when someone wants to fire them. The reason for due process rights is that teachers in the past have been fired because of their race, their religion, their sexual orientation, or because they did not make a political contribution to the right campaign, or for some other reason not related to their competence.
"Gates probably doesn't know this, but 50% of all those who enter teaching leave within the first five years. Our biggest problem is not getting rid of deadbeats, but recruiting, retaining, and supporting teachers. We have to replace 300,000 teachers (of nearly 4 million) every single year. What are his ideas about how to do this?"
Gates: "Does she think all those ‘dropout factories’ are lonely?"
Ravitch: "This may come as a surprise to Bill Gates, but the schools he refers to as "dropout factories" enroll large numbers of high-need students. Many of them don't speak or read English; many of them enter high school three and four grade levels behind. He assumes the schools created the problems the students have; but in many cases, the schools he calls "dropout factories" are filled with heroic teachers and administrators trying their best to help kids who have massive learning problems.
"Unless someone from the district or the state actually goes into the schools and does a diagnostic evaluation, it is unfair to stigmatize the schools with the largest numbers of students who are English-language learners, special-education, and far behind in their learning. That's like saying that an oncologist is not as good a doctor as a dermatologist because so many of his patients die. Mr. Gates, first establish the risk factor before throwing around the labels and closing down schools."
Gates: "If there’s some other magic way to reduce the dropout rate, we’re all ears.”
Ravitch: "Here's the sad truth: There is no magic way to reduce the dropout rate. It involves looking at the reasons students leave school, as well as the conditions in which they live. The single biggest correlate with low academic achievement (contrary to the film Waiting for Superman) is poverty. Children who grow up in poverty get less medical care. worse nutrition, less exposure to knowledge and vocabulary, and are more likely to be exposed to childhood diseases, violence, drugs, and abuse. They are more likely to have relatives who are incarcerated. They are more likely to live in economic insecurity, not knowing if there is enough money for a winter coat or food or housing. This affects their academic performance.
They tend to have lower attendance and to be sick more than children whose parents are well-off.
"The United States today has a child poverty rate of over 20%, and it is rising. This is a national scandal. The film compares us to Finland, but doesn't mention that their child poverty rate is under 5%. Mr. Gates, why don't you address the root causes of low academic achievement, which is not 'bad teachers,' but poverty. It won't involve magic, but it would certainly require the best thinking that you can assemble. And if anyone can afford to do it, surely you can.
I don't mean to suggest that schools as they are now are just fine: They are not. Every school should have a rich and balanced curriculum; many don't. Every child should look forward to coming to school, for his or her favorite studies and activities, but those are the very studies and activities likely to lose out to endless test preparation. Schools need many things: Some need more resources and better conditions for teaching and learning; all need a stable, experienced staff. Teachers need opportunities for intellectual growth and colleagueship. Tests should be used diagnostically, to help students and teachers, not to allocate bonuses and punishments. Teachers, principals, administrators, parents, and local communities should collaborate to create caring communities, and that's happening in many places. I know that none of this is the "magic way" that you are looking for, Mr. Gates, but any educator will tell you that education is a slow, laborious process that requires good teachers, able leadership, willing students, a strong curriculum, and willing students. None of that happens magically."
I also asked Ravitch about her reaction to the strange comparison Alter made in calling her "the Whittaker Chambers of school reform." She wrote:
"I wondered if Alter knows much about history. Whittaker Chambers renounced Communism and embraced American patriotism. Was Alter suggesting that Bill Gates is the Alger Hiss of school reform? I thought it was a weird analogy.
Taken from the Washington Post: http://voices.washingtonpost.com/answer-sheet/diane-ravitch/ravitch-answers-gates.html
Tuesday, November 2, 2010
Let’s all push back as hard as we can
By Diane Ravitch
Many people have asked what they can do to try to change the conditions and misguided policies that I describe in my book. Wherever I go, the same question comes up: What can we do? How do we stop these bad policies and programs? Whether they are parents, teachers, administrators, or citizens concerned about the future of our children and our society, they want ideas about how to persuade our elected officials to change course.
Education used to be a state and local function. Unfortunately, since the passage of No Child Left Behind in 2001–02, the levers of power now are in the hands of federal officials. With both Republicans and Democrats now advocating policies that endanger the future of public education, the situation seems dire indeed. Unfortunately, many of our nation’s wealthiest philanthropies and individuals embrace the misuse of testing and accountability and the advance of privatization.
The odds against us seem overwhelming, but we cannot afford to do nothing. We must take action. At present, the Obama administration is embarked on a course of action that many find repugnant. The Race to the Top is built on the foundation of No Child Left Behind. It emphasizes high-stakes testing, judging teachers by their students’ test scores, closing low-performing schools instead of helping them improve, and promoting a huge increase in private management of public schools. As I explain in the book, these approaches will narrow the curriculum and promote teaching to the test, which will rob children of the opportunity for a good education. Furthermore, none of these strategies has a solid research base, none has been proven effective in practice, all have the potential to disrupt students’ education, demoralize teachers, and shatter communities. The burden of these policies will fall heavily on low-income, minority communities, but many other communities will be affected as well.
What we need to improve education in this country is a strong, highly respected education profession; a rich curriculum in the arts and sciences, available in every school for every child; assessments that gauge what students know and can do, instead of mindless test prepping for bubble tests. And a government that is prepared to change the economic and social conditions that interfere with children’s readiness to learn.
We cannot improve education by quick fixes. We will not fix education by turning public schools over to entrepreneurs. We will not improve it by driving out experienced professionals and replacing them with enthusiastic amateurs. We will not make our schools better by closing them and firing teachers and entire staffs. No high-performing nation in the world follows such strategies. We cannot be satisfied with the status quo, which is not good enough for our children, nor can we satisfied with the Bush-Obama-Duncan “reforms” that have never been proven to work anywhere.
This is what I suggest:
Write your elected officials. Find out whether any Congressmen or Senators from your state are on the education committee in their House of Congress. Write the members of the education committees even if you don’t live in their state. Ask your colleagues to write letters to them. Write letters to the editor. Comment on education blogs. Call in to talk shows. Speak up at school and community meetings. Speak up, speak out.
As the great Southern writer Flannery O’Connor wrote in a letter to a friend, “You have to push as hard as the age that pushes against you.”
This age is pushing mighty hard against children, against educators, and against the very concept of good education.
Let’s all push back as hard as we can.
From: http://dianeravitch.com/action.html
Many people have asked what they can do to try to change the conditions and misguided policies that I describe in my book. Wherever I go, the same question comes up: What can we do? How do we stop these bad policies and programs? Whether they are parents, teachers, administrators, or citizens concerned about the future of our children and our society, they want ideas about how to persuade our elected officials to change course.
Education used to be a state and local function. Unfortunately, since the passage of No Child Left Behind in 2001–02, the levers of power now are in the hands of federal officials. With both Republicans and Democrats now advocating policies that endanger the future of public education, the situation seems dire indeed. Unfortunately, many of our nation’s wealthiest philanthropies and individuals embrace the misuse of testing and accountability and the advance of privatization.
The odds against us seem overwhelming, but we cannot afford to do nothing. We must take action. At present, the Obama administration is embarked on a course of action that many find repugnant. The Race to the Top is built on the foundation of No Child Left Behind. It emphasizes high-stakes testing, judging teachers by their students’ test scores, closing low-performing schools instead of helping them improve, and promoting a huge increase in private management of public schools. As I explain in the book, these approaches will narrow the curriculum and promote teaching to the test, which will rob children of the opportunity for a good education. Furthermore, none of these strategies has a solid research base, none has been proven effective in practice, all have the potential to disrupt students’ education, demoralize teachers, and shatter communities. The burden of these policies will fall heavily on low-income, minority communities, but many other communities will be affected as well.
What we need to improve education in this country is a strong, highly respected education profession; a rich curriculum in the arts and sciences, available in every school for every child; assessments that gauge what students know and can do, instead of mindless test prepping for bubble tests. And a government that is prepared to change the economic and social conditions that interfere with children’s readiness to learn.
We cannot improve education by quick fixes. We will not fix education by turning public schools over to entrepreneurs. We will not improve it by driving out experienced professionals and replacing them with enthusiastic amateurs. We will not make our schools better by closing them and firing teachers and entire staffs. No high-performing nation in the world follows such strategies. We cannot be satisfied with the status quo, which is not good enough for our children, nor can we satisfied with the Bush-Obama-Duncan “reforms” that have never been proven to work anywhere.
This is what I suggest:
Write your elected officials. Find out whether any Congressmen or Senators from your state are on the education committee in their House of Congress. Write the members of the education committees even if you don’t live in their state. Ask your colleagues to write letters to them. Write letters to the editor. Comment on education blogs. Call in to talk shows. Speak up at school and community meetings. Speak up, speak out.
As the great Southern writer Flannery O’Connor wrote in a letter to a friend, “You have to push as hard as the age that pushes against you.”
This age is pushing mighty hard against children, against educators, and against the very concept of good education.
Let’s all push back as hard as we can.
From: http://dianeravitch.com/action.html
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