Dumpster diving for compliments

So State Superintendent of Education John White went dumpster diving for compliments, and emerged from the pile waving this affidavit from former Washington, DC school superintendent Michelle Rhee. It certifies that Louisiana is the best state in the nation at punishing public school teachers for all the faults of a society that ranks last in nearly every indicator of a decent quality of life.

Not in so many words, of course. Rhee’s press release actually ranks Louisiana first in the nation for what she calls “policies that prioritize the interests of children.” Those happen to include the punitive new rules that link nearly every aspect of a teacher’s professional life to the results of standardized tests.

Louisiana and Florida rank the highest in the nation, according to Rhee’s organization, StudentsFirst. States that rank beneath Louisiana include every state with higher student achievement and standards of living.

That prompted education curmudgeon Diane Ravitch to tweet, “Does anyone move to Louisiana or Florida for their schools?”

As Ravitch put it, “Rhee wants teachers to be evaluated and fired by test scores; she wants schools to be closed by test scores. But when she ranked the states, she didn’t look at test scores. If she had, her number-one state—Louisiana—would have been at the bottom of her rankings.”

No state in the StudentsFirst survey received a grade of A – Louisiana earned a B+. Among the 11 states to be graded F was California. That state’s chief deputy education superintendent, Richard Zeiger, called Rhee’s rating a “badge of honor.”

Zeiger told the New York Times that StudentsFirst “is an organization that frankly makes its living by asserting that schools are failing. I would have been surprised if we had got anything else.”

He is on to something. One Web site pointed out that among the states rated by Rhee’s organization, “the higher the StudentsFirst grade the lower the students’ performance.”

As it turns out, StudentsFirst is not so much an education organization as a right-wing, anti-tax group dedicated to privatizing public education.

Which explains Gov. Jindal’s glowing response to the big wet kiss from Michelle Rhee. “This report confirms that Louisiana is now leading the nation in education reform,” Jindal wrote in the prepared statement that he provided instead of talking to reporters, “because of our commitment to put a great teacher in every classroom and give every child the opportunity to get a great education.”

That’s the same Gov. Jindal who loves children so much that he is slashing a mental health program for children with behavioral health problems. In the same state whose commitment to children earned us a D from the Pew Center on the States because we don’t “provide crucial dental care to low-income children,” according to this story by NOLA.com reporter Laura Maggi.

For lots more on Michelle Rhee and her faux-grassroots organization, check out Tom Aswell’s Louisiana Voice post on the subject: “The report confirms nothing and it validates nothing and it’s highly doubtful if the people of this state are truly excited at what this administration passes off as reform. The courts certainly are not as three separate courts have knocked down various aspects of the education reform measures.”

You might not be a public school if...

Education curmudgeon Diane Ravitch has a new post online in which she asks the question, "Are charter schools public schools?"

After an introduction in which she gives Albert Shanker, the late president of the American Federation of Teachers, credit as a founder of the charter school movement, Ravitch questions the direction that charter schools have taken.

Shanker, she says, thought "that charter schools should be created by teams of teachers who would explore new ways to reach unmotivated students. He envisioned charter schools as self-governing, as schools that encouraged faculty decision making and participatory governance...He never thought of charters as non-union schools where teachers would work 70-hour weeks and be subject to dismissal based on the scores of their students."

Ravitch says that the vision of Shanker and others has been corrupted by charter schools run by "for-profit corporations or by nonprofit corporations with private boards of directors...Most charters are non-union and rely on young teachers who work long hours and leave after a few years, thus keeping costs low."

While charter schools are ostensibly public, Ravitch wonders if  the corporate model followed by so many schools is in keeping with the spirit of public education.

So with apologies to comedian Jeff Foxworthy, here are some indications that some charter schools might not really be public schools if...

Charter schools might not be public schools if...a non-profit charter holder subcontracts operation of the school to a for-profit corporation, it might not be a public school.

Charter schools might not be public schools if..."a charter sponsor is involved in complicated real-estate transactions that profit the sponsor," it might not be a public school.

Charter schools might not be public schools if...courts can rule that a charter school is not a public school when it comes to protecting the rights of teachers and other employees, it might not be a public school.

Charter schools might not be public schools if..."a privileged group of schools called charters...can select their students and exclude the ones that are hardest to educate; and the remaining schools are composed of students who couldn't get into the charters or got kicked out" they might not be public schools.

Ravitch ravages Jindal agenda

Fresh from her appearance at the Louisiana School Boards Association convention, historian/educator Diane Ravitch has penned a column for Education Week that eviscerates Gov. Bobby Jindal's education agenda.

In this column, she writes that the governor's plan "is as punitive as possible with respect to public education and teachers. It says nothing about helping to improve or support them. It's all about enabling students to leave public schools and creating the tools to intimidate and fire teachers. This 'reform' is not conservative. I would say it is radical and reactionary."

Ravitch was also a guest on Jim Engster's radio program on WRKF-FM in Baton Rouge today. On that show Ravitch, who served as Assistant Secretary of Education under both George W. Bush and Barack Obama, opined that the governor's agenda is to privatize public education as much as possible and to strip the dignity and professionalism from teaching.

Listen to a podcast of the show by clicking here, and then click "Listen to Podcasts," and the March 6 program.

Ravitch in Lafayette: Education gimmicks don't work

The Louisiana School Boards Association got a good dose of Diane Ravitch at their convention in Lafayette last week. As reported here by Mike Hasten in the Lafayette Advertiser, Ravitch told the gathered school board members that school reform gimmicks like vouchers, charter schools and high-stakes testing "don't work."

Ravitch is a veteran educator, established researcher and former official in both the George W. Bush and Obama education departments. Once a supporter of those education options, she has come to believe that they are unworkable fads or, worse, tricks aimed at privatizing education and funneling public funds into corporate coffers.

She obviously touched a nerve with Louisiana's new State Superintendent of Education, the relatively inexperienced John White.

His response to her comments - "It's an insult to talk about educators and parents as though they were corporate pawns" - misses the point. Nobody's accusing parents and educators of being corporate pawns. It could be said that those who promote vouchers and other forms of privatization are corporate shills, however.

So-called education "reform" is a failure and scam

If the proper goals of education reform are the privatization of public schools, the enrichment of education corporations and the de-professionalization of teaching, then Louisiana's effort to remake public education is a screaming success.

But if the goals are to educate children and create a more knowledgeable citizenry, then not so much.

That is the conclusion drawn by Diane Ravitch in this Reuters blog entry. "The reformers," she writes, "believe that the way to 'fix' our schools is to fire more teachers, based on the test scores of their students; to open more privately-managed charter schools; to reduce the qualifications for becoming a teacher; and to remove job protections for senior teachers."

Those are the wrong prescriptions for what ails education in America. The single best way to improve education in our nation is to reduce poverty.

The so-called reformers scoff at that, saying that public education supporters are simply trying to shift the blame onto society at large.

But the facts do not support that viewpoint. In the most recent international comparisons, Ravitch writes, "low-poverty U.S. schools (where fewer than 10% of the students were poor) had scores that were higher than those of the top nations in the world. In schools where as many as 25% of the students were poor, the scores were equal to those of Finland, Japan and Korea. As the poverty rate of the schools rose, the schools’ performance declined."

Citing research with unquestionable pedigrees, Ravitch demonstrates that the nostrums prescribed by the current crop of reformers don't work. Charter schools do not perform any better than their fully public counterparts. Family life plays a greater role in student achievement than even the best teachers.

"Typically," Ravitch writes, "economists estimate that teachers account for 10-15% of student performance; non-school factors influence about 60%."

Her conclusion, and her sad prediction for the current wave of reform, is here:

If we are serious about improving education, we would work to improve both
schools and society. We would invest in the recruitment and preparation of
career teachers and make sure that every child has a curriculum that includes
the arts, history, civics, foreign languages and other subjects. We would also
invest in prenatal care so that every child is born healthy and invest in
high-quality early childhood education, so that children arrive in school ready
to learn. We would stop the budget cutting that is now increasing class sizes
and reducing needed services to children.

Unfortunately, such research-based strategies are not part of today’s
reform movement, which is why it will most assuredly end up in the dustbin of
history, like so many others.

Are "vulture philanthropists" taking charge?

The new superintendent of the State Recovery school District, and Gov. Jindal's pick to be the next state superintendent, is 35-year old John White.

We know a bit about White's background, detailed in this EdLog post, including the fact that he is certified by the Broad Superintendents Academy (it's pronounced "Brode").

But most people know very little about the academy, which has churned out superintendents with business backgrounds for 21 of the nation's 75 largest school systems, according to this Education Week article by reporter Christina A. Samuels.

The scrutiny provided by Education Week and in The Broad Report by blogger Sharon Higgins is disturbing. The blog includes this motto: "Make no mistake, What is happening in large urban districts today has been carefully orchestrated by vulture philanthropists."

The EdWeek article has a comment from one expert who says that the Broad Academy is designed to provide "superintendents who are trained how to use their power to hand over their systems to the Business Roundtable."

The academy is part of a worrisome movement that education policy professor James Horn calls "venture philanthropy," and includes the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the Milken Family Foundation, the Walton Family Foundation and others

Worrisome, Horn says, because "What venture philanthropy is doing seems to me to be wielding influence not to help public institutions, but to destroy public institutions, or take control of them. This is a dangerous place, where corporations and government get mixed up.”

The academy certifies superintendents after a 10-month fellowship season, during which they spend six extended weekends at seminars, with expenses paid by the academy.

Education writer Diane Ravitch has issues with the academy, saying that graduates "have a preference towards privatization."

If "reform" seems so good to be true, it probably is!

Thank God for Diane Ravitch! In this op-ed for the New York Times, the prickly professor punctures the bubble of so-called "reform," convincingly demonstrating that many success stories "are the result of statistical legerdemain. "

Ravitch takes aim at the No Child Left behind mandate that all children must be proficient in either reading or math by 2014. Teachers understand that to be an impossible goal, she writes, because of the "enormous variation among students and the impact of family income on academic performance."

Even so, she writes, many politicians and the snake-oil salesmen who've hijacked the education agenda claim "that the right combination of incentives and punishments will produce dramatic improvement. Anyone who objects to this utopian mandate, they maintain, is just making an excuse for low expectations and bad teachers."

With assistance from former LSU professor and Baton Rouge School Board member Noel Hammatt, Ravitch proceeds to demolish extravagant claims for success in some reconstituted schools.

Taking particular aim at two schools mentioned by President Barack Obama in his State of the Union address, Ravitch says "the only miracle at these schools was a triumph of public relations."

One of those claimed a high graduation rate, but its published ACT scores were far below the state average. Another, which Obama said had "skyrocketed" since firing the principal and half the faculty, actually ranks 430th out of 469 high schools in math.

In conclusion, Ravitch urges the public to meet inflated claims of educational improvement with skepticism - a lesson yet to be learned in Louisiana, where credulous news media uncritically report bogus gains in the State Recovery School District.

The answer simply is not as easy as firing teachers or reconstituting schools because, as Ravitch puts it,

If every child arrived in school well-nourished, healthy and ready to
learn, from a family with a stable home and a steady income, many of our
educational problems would be solved. And that would be a miracle.

A preemptive strike on Superman...

On Tuesday night, Governor Bobby Jindal and leaders of the legislature will host a screening of the documentary film Waiting for Superman, as dishonest an attack on public education as has ever been committed to celluloid.

Don't take our word for that. Education historian Diane Ravitch wrote a devastating critique of the film for the New York Review of Books last November, in which she said "The message of the film is clear. Public schools are bad, privately managed charter schools are good."

As a piece of anti-public school propaganda, the film succeeds nicely. But it only does so by skirting or ignoring inconvenient facts that don't fit its preconceived agenda.

As Ravitch puts it, "Some fact-checking is in order, and the place to start is with the film's quiet acknowledgement that only one in five charter schools is able to get the 'amazing results' that it celebrates. Nothing more is said about this astonishing statistic."

Here is that statistic, from the well researched CREDO study. After surveying math tests in half of the nation's 5,000 charter schools, the report found that:

• 46% had academic gains no different than those of a similar public school
• 37% were worse than a similar public school
• Only 17% were superior to a similar public school

The dishonesty of Superman goes beyond willful ignorance, all the way to deliberate distortion and, the ultimate sin of a documentary film, a faked scene. Washington Post writer Valerie Strauss revealed the quackery in this article, which gives the likely reason why Waiting for Superman was not nominated for an Academy Award.

Strauss wrote, "The snub to Davis Guggenheim’s tendentious film was well-deserved, given that classic documentaries are factual and straightforward, and don’t, as did Superman, fake scenes for emotional impact."

In another column, Strauss reprinted a point-by-point refutation of Waiting for Superman's anti-public school agenda.

There is no doubt that public education has its problems. Those problems are overwhelmingly associated with poverty and lack of opportunity in too many of our urban and rural school districts.

The solution to these problems does not lie in demonizing teachers and their unions, or in funneling public school funds to entrepreneurial enterprises that have captured the fancy of billionaire dilettantes.

If there is a silver lining to Superman's cloud, it is that the film may motivate people to support real solutions to help all children - not just those lucky enough to win a lottery - receive the education they deserve.

Those solutions include:

• Developing great teachers through revamping preparatory programs for teachers and overhauling teacher development and evaluation programs.
• Ensuring supportive educational leaders
• Creating robust curricula
• Creating conditions that promote learning for all children
• Ensuring shared responsibility and mutual accountability that holds everyone responsible for fixing our schools, not just teachers.

(You might also be interested in this article, "Inside Job or Superman: Which one better explains the School crisis," by Kevin Welner. Inside Job, which did win the Oscar for best documentary, explains how Wall Street greed, deregulation and the inequality of wealth in the nation led to the great recession of 2000. Those same issues, Welner argues, play a big role in the "bleak educational future" faced by too many American families.)

Ravitch versus the corporatists

In this Washington Post interview with Valerie Strauss, education historian Diane Ravitch takes on billionaire Bill Gates' corporatist approach to education reform.

It's an important exchange of ideas. Gates is representative of a group that apparently wants to support public education, and has the appropriate liberal credentials, yet winds up siding with right wingers whose goal is the privatization of our schools. It's an area explored by Strauss in an October column discussed in EdLog.

In her interview with Strauss, Ravitch demolishes several of Gates' canards about public education, teachers and their unions.

Answering the argument that opposing corporate reform is tantamount to endorsing the status quo, Ravitch succinctly criticizes the business model's bean counting approach:

"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."

Ravitch is an important truth-teller and diagnostician. The real problem with so-called "failing schools" lies in the growing gap between rich and poor in American society:

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.

Charter movement blinded by free-market ideology?

There is a gathering pushback to the idea of charter schools as some sort of magic bullet that can fix the troubles of public education. In this new post, education curmudgeon Diane Ravitch states it as plainly as it gets: "Charters are not a silver bullet. They are a lead bullet. Their target is American public education."

Ravitch begins with yet another criticism of the documentary Waiting for Superman, the cinematic wet kiss to the charter movement that she pegs as "a one-sided, propagandistic attack on public education which echoes the prescriptions of those who have devoutly wished for the privatization of education."

Then Ravitch describes a laundry list of recent charter school failures. Two recurring themes emerge in the list: charter schools are susceptible to financial shenanigans, and they tend to marginalize students who would pull down their scores. One of her examples is the recent Newsweek article about New Orleans charters' discrimination against special needs students.

Ravitch is right on target about fiscal mismanagement. Most of the charters in Louisiana that were forced to close failed because of shoddy bookkeeping.

Which leads us to this post in The Lens, an investigative journalism blog in New Orleans. The article is most critical of charter school boards that violate the state's open meetings and public records laws, making it difficult if not impossible for parents and the public to know how the schools are being run:

In response to three months of requests from The Lens, a surprisingly large
number of New Orleans charter school boards failed to comply with even basic
requests for information. Many didn’t respond at all. Of the officials who did
answer, some provided only partial information – and still others claimed they
aren’t public officials or required to do their work in public, even though
state law says otherwise.

Even if a charter school is on the up-and-up, transparency is an issue. Because each charter school has its own board, it's just not possible for the news media to cover them as they do traditional public school boards. That makes charter schools less accountable to the public, even though the schools are funded by the same public dollars as other schools in the district.

And that is just an invitation to mischief.

A wrong turn down the road to merit pay

Now that the U.S. Department of Education has announced that eight Louisiana school districts will split $36.5 million to experiment with merit pay for teachers, does that mean it's already too late to talk about whether or not merit pay really makes a difference in the classroom?

Hopefully, not. Because the data, while not yet conclusive, tends to show that there is little if any connection between performance-based pay and student achievement.

As Sarah Sparks writes here, the Department of Education is spending money before there is evidence that it is well spent. Says Sparks, "More than ever, the department needs a large, rigorous, comprehensive evaluation to dig into the details of whether and how performance-pay programs work."

Within a week of the Department's announcement of the grants, she notes, two different studies in Chicago and Nashville "have found few benefits for student achievement in merit-pay programs."

Despite a lack of evidence that these incentives accomplish their goal, the U.S. Department, as well as state and local education agencies around the country, are bound and determined to ram them down the throats of classroom teachers.

Why?

Education curmudgeon Diane Ravitch hits on an answer to that question in this article.

The problem is that merit pay has been touted loudly and long, albeit without evidence, by conservative advocates. After some 30 years, it is taken as an article of faith that it must work.

Ravitch says that the almost religious belief in merit pay is based on a business model: "They believe in competition, and they believe that financial rewards can be used to incentivize better performance, so it seems natural for them to conclude that merit pay or performance pay would incentivize teachers to produce better results."

While that may seem a rational conclusion, it is not empirical - the data just don't back it up.

So the conservatives rely on another article of faith, based on their generally low opinion of people in general. As Savitch puts it,

(T)hey assume that most people—in this case, teachers—are lazy and need a
promise of dollars to be incentivized to get higher scores for their students.
It never seems to occur to them that many people are doing their best (think
people who play sports, always striving to do their best without any expectation
of payment) and continue to do so because of intrinsic rewards or because of an
innate desire to serve others. Teachers should certainly be well compensated,
but not many enter the classroom with money as their primary motivation.

Her conclusion? "Ideology trumps evidence. The enduring puzzle is why the Obama administration clings so fiercely to the GOP philosophy of incentives and sanctions as the levers for change, despite lack of evidence for their efficacy."

Ravitch tackles fads, movements and reforms

Diane Ravitch started out as a supporter of President George W. Bush's No Child Left Behind Act. But she, like most teachers who have encountered the beast, now lumps it with the other "fads, movements and reforms" that distract us from real educational improvement.

In a USA Today article, education reporter Greg Toppo writes about Ravitch's conversion from a NCLB supporter to an extreme skeptic. And it's not just NCLB that raises Ravitch's hackles - the charter school movement, she says, is a "far cry" from the vision of the late AFT President Al Shanker, who saw the potential of charters as "laboratories of innovation within existing public schools."

As reported by Toppo, Ravitch says that charter schools "cherry-pick a neighborhood's best students and kick out under-performers, forcing surrounding public schools to teach a depleted talent pool."

Ravitch, whose blog is on EdLog's list of interesting links, has a new book on the market, The Death and Life of the Great American School System: How Testing and Choice are Undermining Education. It promises to be a great read.

Weingarten shakes up the establishment

American Federation of Teachers President Randi Weingarten shook the education establishment last week when she announced to the national Press Club that AFT is launching its own massive school reform effort.

She laid out a new approach to teacher evaluation, saying that a strong teacher
development and evaluation system is crucial to improving teaching, and is
essential for a fair and efficient due process system. Weingarten said the union
is prepared to work with any district willing to take both steps: to create and
implement a real evaluation system, and to establish a due process system
aligned to it.

Critics immediately pounced on Weingarten's speech. From the right, union bashers decried her initiative as a fake reform aimed at appeasing reform advocates.

But even teachers reacted with concern when the news media portrayed her speech as an admission that teachers should be evaluated based on their students' test scores.

That was an oversimplification that undervalued Weingarten's effort. Leave it to an actual reformer, Diane Ravitch, to put Weingarten's speech in context and explain what it really means:

She laid out a far-ranging plan for evaluating teachers, which I suspect most
teachers would find fair and reasonable. Here is what she said:
First, states should set out clear professional standards that describe clearly what teachers should know and be able to do. Then, to determine whether teachers meet these standards, districts should use "multiple means of evaluation," including
classroom observations, self-evaluations, portfolio reviews, appraisal of lesson
plans," and a variety of other tools, including student test scores. But the
scores should be based on "valid and reliable assessments" and they should not
be derived "by comparing the scores of last year's students with the scores of
this year's students, but by assessing whether a teacher's students show real
growth while in his classroom."

In her speech, Weingarten gave a nod to the "value added" approach to evaluation that is favored by U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, President Obama and Louisiana Superintendent of Education Paul Pastorek.

Thanks to efforts by the Louisiana Federation of Teachers, our state's Race to the Top application describes multiple means of evaluation. Those include a value-added model as well as a Learning Environment Index that considers conditions outside a teacher's control, such as student poverty and school resources.

Ravitch says Obama and Duncan are wrong about charters

Education gadfly/watchdog Diana Ravitch has this to say about "education reform" in her blog: "The Obama administration is using its unprecedented billions to advance a strategy of deregulation and deprofessionalization. This strategy will push American schools into untested waters, with thousands of untried leaders, and with results that are far from certain. This is not a reform strategy, but a risky strategy."

And this: "Overall, public schools continue to outperform charter schools. The public schools' performance is significantly better overall and in cities, and among students who are not eligible for free or reduced-price lunch (the federal measure of poverty in school data). Among other groups—those eligible for free or reduced-price lunch, whites, blacks, and Hispanics—the test scores of public schools and charter schools are not significantly different."

She doesn't like the fact that the federal government is violating the promise of the 1965 Elementary and Secondary Education Act (which morphed into the No Child Left Behind Act under President Bush): "the federal government would never interfere with state and local control of schools."

Is Race to the Top a bum's rush with no basis in research?

Before U.S. Secretary if Education Arne Duncan and our own Superintendent of Education Paul Pastorek wax too enthusiastic about the charter schools and merit pay that comprise too much of the federal Race to the Top plan, they should read this article in Education Week (free registration required).

The main thrust of the article is that, for leaders who pride themselves on basing programs on facts and research, Race to the Top comes up short on both counts:

“What is extraordinary about these regulations is that they have no credible
basis in research. They just happen to be the programs and approaches favored by
the people in power,” writes Diane Ravitch, a research professor of education at New
York University, in her blog, Bridging
Differences, which is hosted by edweek.org.

Ravitch and several other experts quoted in the article all agree that "two priorities at the heart of the program...lack research evidence: evaluating teachers based on students’ standardized test scores and promoting the growth of charter schools."

Before Louisiana's schools get hustled into yet another bureaucratic bum's rush, shouldn't we ask the intelligent questions, and then base policy on real research and data?

Diane Ravitch: the interview

You have to love Diane Ravitch. She's the go-to gal for an honest, refreshing and intelligent, if acerbic, take on education reform.

Take this interview with John Merrow from Learning Matters, posted in his Taking Note blog.

Here's what she has to say about No Child Left Behind: "I would say, sorrowfully, that NCLB has failed. It did nothing to raise standards, because it left decisions about standards to the states."

About the type of "reform" embodied in the charter school movement: "Deregulation nearly destroyed our economy in the past decade, and we better be careful that we don’t destroy our public schools too."

About President Obama's $4 billion Race to the Top program: "What if Washington doesn’t know best? What if the 'reform' ideas are wrong?...There is a ton of evidence that evaluating teachers based solely on student test scores is a bad idea"

About U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan: "If Arne Duncan knows exactly how to reform American education, why didn’t he reform Chicago’s schools?"