Opt-out parents have a point - AEI

Opt-out parents have a point - AEI:

Opt-out parents have a point

Middle-class parents are right to question whether today's education reforms will help their kids.

A new phrase has rapidly become familiar in schooling: “opt-out.” Across the nation, hundreds of thousands of students are refusing to take state reading and math tests, usually at the behest of their parents. In New York, 200,000 students have opted out of this spring’s state tests. Some New York districts have had more than half of their students refuse to take the tests. Polling suggests that half of all New York voters say they support the families that have opted out of the tests. Meanwhile, more localized opt-out pushes are bubbling up in states including New Jersey, Colorado and California.

Opt-out is partly antipathy for the Common Core standards and the new Common Core-aligned tests. It’s partly a sense that students are taking too many tests. It’s partly due to agitation by teachers irate that the test results will count heavily under New York’s new evaluation system. While there’s really no way to know whether we’re witnessing the leading edge of a national wave or a temporary, localized backlash, New York officials and their allies have generally raced to dismiss opt-outs as a blip.

They’ve chalked the situation up to the imaginings of conspiracy theorists, the ravings of malcontents, parental ignorance and teacher union machinations. This all sounds familiar. It was the same reaction that greeted initial concerns about the Common Core or, more than a decade ago, those raised about No Child Left Behind. In fact, this familiar diagnosis may tell us less about opt-out than it does about the myopic nature of contemporary education reform. By and large, education reformers have seemingly concluded that it’s fine to ignore or alienate middle-class families.

After all, today’s school reform agenda was crafted with the troubles of the inner-city in mind. It focuses on ensuring that low-income and minority children who had been “left behind” would master essential skills and graduate high school. The overriding mission has been to take dysfunctional schools and make them functional. The goal is admirable. However, the diagnosis and remedies are configured for a particular set of schools and students.

It turns out that many suburban and middle-class parents have issues when those reforms are extended to the schools that educate their children. This has been taken as a sign that these parents are ignorant or selfish. As U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan has put it, “Pushback is coming from, sort of, white suburban moms who – all of a sudden – their child isn’t as brilliant as they thought they were and their school isn’t quite as good as they thought they were, and that’s pretty scary.”

Reformers see parental skepticism as irrational. The fact that 70 percent of the nation’s parents consistently give their child’s school an A or a B simply shows how blind they are. The fact that 68 percent of parents don’t believe standardized tests help teachers teach or that just 31 percent think it’s a good idea to use test results to evaluate teachers serves only to underscore their ignorance.

But there’s another possibility. It’s that these parents are being reasonable when they worry that the reform agenda, whatever its merits when it comes to schools steeped in dysfunction, does more harm than good for their kids. Reformers have tended to dismiss this possibility, while seeking to convince middle-class parents that their schools are much worse than they may realize.

Oddly enough, suburban parents seem oddly ungrateful for these efforts to help them see that their children’s schools actually stink. When reformers wonder why these parents don’t get it, the usual culprit is “messaging.” And the usual solution is better PR.

But maybe the parents do get it. Maybe they figure that having their child sit for a dozen hours of testing, as part of an effort that seems to be narrowing their school’s curriculum, doesn’t add a lot of value. Maybe these parents aren’t convinced that the results of these tests will be used in ways that benefit their kids. Using those test results to identify “effective” teachers so that these teachers can be more “equitably” distributed (e.g. moved from middle-class schools to low-income schools) sure doesn’t seem designed to help middle-class kids. It’s no great wonder that middle-class families can regard the reform agenda as hostile, when it doesn’t feel irrelevant.

Maybe the solution is not to berate these parents, but to ask what they want for their children, find ways to help make that happen and seek opportunities to promote reform that benefits a broad coalition of low-income and middle-class families. Here are three simple ideas to start.

State officials can be vastly more transparent about whether and how state tests results are used to improve the education of all children. This would include a much more aggressive effort to solicit parental concerns about test length and content, take those concerns seriously and address them.

Those designing accountability systems and teacher evaluation should champion a vision of school excellence that stretches beyond reading and math scores. Amid the focus on reading and math scores, much of what parents want for their children can get lost. Reformers would do well to celebrate a vision of excellence that more consciously includes the arts, world languages, citizenship and history.

Reformers should spend less time scheming how to redistribute good teachers and more on growing the number of great teachers. Today, there are extensive efforts to recruit teachers into impoverished schools but almost none in recruiting promising teachers who want to teach in other environs. It’s not an either-or. We can recruit both the missionaries and those who just want to teach calculus.

Historically, in the American system, the social reforms that last have been those that also serve the broad middle class. The nation has tended to be far less generous with reforms that pit the middle class against the poor. Today’s school reformers have been slow to learn this lesson, and have suffered for it. Opt-out offers a chance to start getting this right.Opt-out parents have a point - AEI:

"Funky Monkey" and Pearson Fail the Test | Alan Singer

"Funky Monkey" and Pearson Fail the Test | Alan Singer:

"Funky Monkey" and Pearson Fail the Test

John Oliver nailed Pearson on his HBO Last Week Tonight show on Standardized Testing. If you have not seen it yet, clink the link and watch it. I laughed a lot but can't really say I enjoyed the show; it was too disturbing. It won't be funny until companies like Pearson are brought down, especially given how they keep failing our children and schools by failing their own tests.

Oliver broadcast videos being used to promote high-stakes standardized testing as fun and showed one particularly bizarre elementary school testing rally in Texas that featured a dancing "Funky Monkey" test mascot. He even had an ersatz "Funky Monkey" live on the show that he banned for bad behavior

During the HBO program Oliver systematically took apart both the national testing regime and Pearson. According to Oliver, American students take on the average over 100 high-stakes standardized tests during their school careers. Often the tests are so upsetting to students that the test instructions actually alert teachers to what to do if students vomit on the test booklets. And a big problem is that despite more than a decade of increased testing and test-aligned curriculum, U.S. students are not performing any better on international benchmark exams.

In one of the best segments of the show, Oliver described how the computer algorithm used to evaluate student performance on high-stakes tests and teacher effectiveness is based on mathematical formulas developed for breeding cattle. If you doubt Oliver, Professor Stephen Caldas of Manhattanville College in Purchase, New York did a careful analysis of the New York State "2013-2014 Growth Model for Educator Evaluation Technical Report." Pages 65-67 show the mystery equations used to calculate the future of New York State children. I have a PHD in history and I used to be pretty good in math. The only part of the equations I understood was repeated use of the term matrix which appears six times in the report and three times in that section. I don't want to be alarming, but the movie may be right. We may all be living in "The Matrix."

But there is some hope on the horizon.

Nationally, although final numbers will not be available for a few months, hundreds of thousands of student probably opted-out of the last round of high-stakes standardized tests. In some schools and districts where parents and students were well-organized opt-out rates were well above 50%. In addition, Pearson's contract to write, "Funky Monkey" and Pearson Fail the Test | Alan Singer:

As Obama Admin Seeks More Funding for Charter Schools, Questions Raised over Billions Already Spent | Democracy Now!

As Obama Admin Seeks More Funding for Charter Schools, Questions Raised over Billions Already Spent | Democracy Now!:

As Obama Admin Seeks More Funding for Charter Schools, Questions Raised over Billions Already Spent

 As the Obama administration asks Congress to increase funding for charter schools by almost 50 percent, a new report claims charter schools are spending billions of dollars with nearly no oversight, regulation, or accountability. The Center for Media and Democracy argues the federal government has spent more than $3 billion over the past two decades on the charter school industry, but there is no comprehensive database showing how these funds are spent and what results they produce. The new report analyzes materials obtained from open records requests regarding independent audits of how states interact with charter schools and their authorizers. It concludes that the anti-regulatory environment around charter schools coupled with their lack of financial transparency warrants a moratorium rather than increased charter funding. We are joined by Lisa Graves, executive director of the Center for Media and Democracy. The group’s new report is "New Documents Show How Taxpayer Money Is Wasted by Charter Schools."

TRANSCRIPT

This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Well with the Obama administration asking Congress to increase funding for charter schools by almost 50 percent, we turn to a major new report that claims charter schools are already spending billions of dollars of federal money with nearly no oversight, regulation, or accountability. The report was released by the Center for Media and Democracy and it’s called, "New Documents Show How Taxpayer Money is Wasted by Charter Schools." According to the report, the federal government has spent more than $3 billion over the past two decades on the charter school industry, but there is no comprehensive database showing how those funds are spent and what results they produce.

AMY GOODMAN: The new report analyzes materials obtained from open records requests regarding independent audits of how states interact with charter schools and their authorizers. It concludes that the anti-regulatory environment around charter schools, coupled with their lack of financial transparency, warrants a moratorium, rather than increased charter funding. Well for more, we go to Denver, Colorado, to Denver Open Media, where we’re joined by Lisa Graves, Executive Director of the Center for Media and Democracy. Their new report is called, "New Documents Show How Taxpayer Money is Wasted by Charter Schools." Lisa, welcome to Democracy Now! Lay out the key findings of your report.

LISA GRAVES: Thank you so much. We spent quite a bit of time trying to figure out how much money has even been spent by the federal government fueling this industry. And it turned out the sum is $3.3 billion. And so we thought, with that much money at stake, there’d be tremendous controls on that spending. But our open records request showed time after time in which the federal government and the state governments have no idea how that money’s being spent. And that, in part, is due to the design of those schools. The design at the state level, driven by ALEC, the American Legislative Exchange Council’s, policies and a number of sort of extreme policies represent a real hostility to government schools, to the idea of public schools and government oversight. And so what we saw in our records request was, time after time, in which no one really knew how much money was being spent by the schools, how much of those tax dollars was being spent on executive pay, how much money was being outsourced to for-profit corporations.As Obama Admin Seeks More Funding for Charter Schools, Questions Raised over Billions Already Spent | Democracy Now!:

Big Education Ape: Feds Spent $3.3 Billion Fueling Charter Schools but No One Knows What It's Really Bought | PR Watch http://bit.ly/1JUhhDp

Big Education Ape: Gonzalez: Feds failed to keep tabs on $3B in school aid to launch new charter schools - NY Daily... http://bit.ly/1cdxB3E

SHOW FULL TRANSCRIPT ›

What Are Appropriate Roles for Companies in Education Reform? - Bridging Differences - Education Week

What Are Appropriate Roles for Companies in Education Reform? - Bridging Differences - Education Week:

What Are Appropriate Roles for Companies in Education Reform?

Today Deborah Meier and Joe Nathan discuss the role of corporations in improving schools. Deborah Meier begins, followed by a response from Joe.

Deborah Meier writes:

Dear Joe,

I always hesitate to turn any help down. One of the best grants we ever got at CPE was from EXXON for a longitudinal study of our grads in the 1980s. I've never been able to get another for this purpose.  

For me it's about power. Who has power over who?

There was a time when corporate giving to schools was truly "charity" in the best sense.  Plus a little good will of the PR sort. Today the money kind of power (vs the people kind) ) is running too many things, setting the agenda with a grand political purpose: to demonstrate that education would work better, as would a lot of other public institutions, if they followed a free marketplace business model.

I think this ideology is putting democracy at further risk as an idea and a reality.  

Buyer beware.

Deb

Joe responds:

Deb, for decades, corporate involvement in public schools has varied. Some corporations have provided cash, volunteers, and other contributions as part of their effort to be, and be seen as good citizens. Some corporations have tried to influence public policy. And the policy changes companies recommend vary. 

For what it's worth, I grew up in Wichita, Kan. (graduating from a public, district high school in 1966) and have known of the Koch brothers and their efforts for many years. They may have become more active (or more well known nationally). Unquestionably they have been promoting a voucher agenda for a long time, which you and I oppose. They have been joined by some others such as ALEC, which is funded by various individuals and corporations. 

These differences are part of why I think the phrase "corporate education reform" is meaningless.  Corporations have and do vary in their approach to improving public schools. But even more important, I don't see how labeling people increases achievement.

Staying with policy issues for a moment, corporate, union and community influence varies from state to state, city to city, town to town. You mentioned that you think some corporations "drive" education.  But I don't think any single group "drives" public ed.  I think many groups have a significant influence.

My special interest is what can be done by various groups (including companies) to increase student learning (measured in various ways).  

What do you think educators should do to encourage constructive corporate activity in education?

Dear Joe,

I used to tell corporate "allies"—when together on panels—that I'd appreciate it if they'd just pay their fair share in taxes so that public schools would have access to the kind of funding that is available to the schools that their own kids' attend.

I call them "corporate reformers" because roughly 95 percent of the funds being pumped into the current reform movement comes from corporations, corporate leaders, and rich individuals with corporate ties. It's no more pejorative than the label  "union reformers."  It's just descriptive.  

They honestly believe that the market place&mdashunencumbered by regulation&mdashis the best way to operate most of life's business, including the business of education. They believe that marke choice is at the heart of democracy. I disagree with them.  

And they are, indisputably (I think) the primary organizers and funders of the current reform movement in education. For them test scores are the currency for assessing the market value of schools. They oppose unions, minimum wages, and federal/state regulations which, they believe, should be decided by the invisible hand of the market.

They are also driving a number of other reforms (both in the U.S. and other western democracies) that seek to unfund public institutions, turn them over to private entrepreneurs—like prisons and post offices—and, in general, deregulate private enterprise.

The attack on "public institutions" is part and parcel of the unsecret plan of the Koch brothers, Walton family et al. to redefine democracy. They seek to dismantle the reforms that defined the New Deal and the Great Society, not to mention those that go back the progressive politics of Teddy Roosevelt  (like the progressive income tax and the inheritance tax).  

I think their self-interest and mine conflict—in ways more fundamental than the conflicts I have with union leaders, school bureaucrats, parents and colleagues.  I hold this belief without demonizing them as human beings—just as I did toward colleagues with Communist sympathies in my younger days!   If we both want the same thing (e.g. small class sizes,  more self-governing schools) I'd happily join with them to make that possible just as I happily accepted Communist support for social security. 

Joe responds:

Sorry Deb, I think there are several over-generalizations in what you wrote above. For example you wrote, "I call them 'corporate reformers' because roughly 95 percent of the funds being pumped into the current reform movement comes from corporations, corporate leaders and rich individuals with corporate ties." 

There are many, many efforts to improve schools. Some are being promoted by unions, some by colleges, some by certain companies and foundations. For example:

• Project-based learning being promoted by the George Lucas Education Foundation viaEdutopia 
• Charters and vouchers being promoted by Walton and the Koch brothers, among others 
• Teacher-led district schools  being promoted by Minnesota Business Partnership and the Minneapolis, St. Paul and Lakeville, Minn. teacher unions
• Improving reading instruction promoted by Target
• Improved science education promoted by Siemens Corporation, among others 

I could go on and on. My point this week has been that I don't think we help students by making generalizations about "corporate education reform." I think it's more helpful to students to work with those we agree with, and question those whose efforts we oppose.  Making generations generally does not help students.What Are Appropriate Roles for Companies in Education Reform? - Bridging Differences - Education Week:

What Really Happened to Atlanta's Students When Their Teachers Cheated - The Atlantic

What Really Happened to Atlanta's Students When Their Teachers Cheated - The Atlantic:

What Really Happened to Atlanta's Students When Their Teachers Cheated

Eight educators have been sentenced to prison for the decade-long testing scandal. But was the tampering even necessary?

A Georgia judge just finalized prison sentences for eight Atlanta educators, the latest development in a drama that has transfixed the city since 2011. That year, state investigators found that nearly 180 teachers and principals had illegally tampered with scores on state tests, both by telling students the right answers and by secretly correcting the work students handed in.

Once held up as a model of urban school reform, Atlanta now  gets cited as an example of everything wrong with test-based accountability. Under intense pressure to meet impossible targets, as well as the guidance of a superintendent who fostered what investigators called "a culture of fear," educators cracked—or so the story goes.

But Atlanta students, who are overwhelmingly African American and low-income, may have actually made genuine academic progress over the decade when the cheating took place. "It is possible that if they did cheat, they didn't have to cheat because they were really were improving," said Peggy Carr, the acting commissioner of the National Center for Education Statistics.

"I wouldn't be surprised at all if kids were improving. It's just that some of the gains were not legitimate."

Since 2002, test scores in Atlanta have steadily risen on a federal test that doesn't have a lot of stakes and is hard to game. It's called the National Assessment of Educational Progress, or NAEP, and it's been used since the 1970s just to track data on national trends in math and reading proficiency. "It's sort of an outside indicator, almost a second opinion," said Carr, whose office administers the test.

During the period in which the cheating took place—which could date back to 2001—Beverly Hall, who was superintendent at the time, implemented an array of school-reform strategies. She expanded charter schools, broke large high schools into small, themed academies, and raised millions of philanthropic dollars to support schools lacking in resources.

She also set up an aggressive system focused on accountability that revolved around state test scores. Her administration set academic targets for every school in the district, doled out bonuses when those benchmarks were met, and humiliated and intimidated educators when they failed to fulfill goals. Schools were expected to higher benchmarks each year; the administration would not accept failure. Hall, who was among the educators indicted in connection with the cheating scandal but she died before she could stand trial, later told investigators that the federal No Child Left Behind law compelled her to set ambitious targets.

Slowly but surely, school leaders started to encourage cheating. "Teachers who conducted themselves ethically but failed to achieve required results were sanctioned," the state investigation found in 2011.

Early in her tenure, Hall also signed up Atlanta to pilot a new NAEP test designed for urban school districts. She later told investigators that she wanted external validation of the district's progress. "We wanted an independent third party," she said—an assessment that the district did not administer, grade, or proctor, and that students were randomly assigned to take.

The NAEP data shows mixed success. Atlanta fourth- and eighth-graders still score below the national average in math and reading. The achievement gap between black and white students remains as wide today as it was aWhat Really Happened to Atlanta's Students When Their Teachers Cheated - The Atlantic:

CREDO: Trying Hard to Shape Urban Charter Success from Shoddy Research | deutsch29

CREDO: Trying Hard to Shape Urban Charter Success from Shoddy Research | deutsch29:

CREDO: Trying Hard to Shape Urban Charter Success from Shoddy Research

In December 2014, Margaret Raymond, founding director of the Center for Research on Education Outcomes, (CREDO), made the following remarks about charter performance at the City Club of Cleveland (Ohio):

I’ve studied competitive markets for much of my career. That’s my academic focus for my work. And it’s [education] the only industry/sector where the market mechanism just doesn’t work. I think it’s not helpful to expect parents to be the agents of quality assurance throughout the state.

As one might expect, these words coming from the CREDO director shocked some in attendance at this pro-charter-funded, Ohio event. As blogger and attendee Stephen Dyer reported:

Considering that the pro-market reform Thomas B. Fordham Foundation paid for this study and Raymond works at the Hoover Institution at Stanford — a free market bastion, I was frankly floored, as were most of the folks at my table.

Thus, it is with raised eyebrow that I learned of a new CREDO study released in spring 2015 and that supposedly demonstrates urban charter school superiority. The study also caught the attention of Baruch College researcher/journalist Andrea Gabor, who informed me of her painstaking invesrigation of the “new” CREDo study. As Gabor noted to me in an email:

…After years of researching schools on the ground in charter-heavy districts like New Orleans and New York City, I was skeptical about the [new CREDO] study’s approach and its findings. So, I hired Kaiser Fung, a respected statistician, to help me analyze the study. I then asked CREDO’s director, Macke (Margaret)Raymond, several questions via email; her answers raised more concerns. In the end, Fung and I found several major problems with the study; in the case of its analysis of New Orleans charter schools, the study even violated its own methodology. The problems go well beyond technical quibbles and suggest that any generalizations drawn from the study about the quality of traditional public schools relative to charter schools would be a big mistake.  

 Gabor wrote a post regarding her findings, New CREDO Study, New Credibility Problems: from New Orleans to Boston, which I feature here, in part:

Last month, Stanford University’s Center for Research on Education Outcomes (CREDO) released a new study on urban charter schools, which purports to show, for the first time, that charters outperform city public schools, at least on standardized-test scores. If true, the study’s findings are a potential bombshell since, thus far, studies have shown no meaningful difference between charter and public schools.

The new study, Urban Charter School Study Report on 41 Regions claims to show that “urban charter schools in the aggregate provide significantly higher levels of annual growth in both math and reading compared to their TPS [public school] peers.”

The years I’ve spent researching schools on the ground in charter-heavy districts like New Orleans and New York City made me skeptical of such an outcome. But because I am not an expert in research methodology, I decided to hire a respected statistician, Kaiser Fung, author of Numbersense and an adjunct professor of statistics at New York University who has no connection to the education-reform movement (and thus no axe to grind), to help me analyze the CREDO study.

After combing through the study and its accompanying technical document, and after exchanging a series of emails with Macke Raymond, Director of CREDO, we found significant problems with the CREDO study. The problems go well beyond technical quibbles and suggest that any generalizations drawn from the study about the quality of traditional public schools relative to charter 

CREDO: Trying Hard to Shape Urban Charter Success from Shoddy Research | deutsch29:

NYC Public School Parents: Class Size Matters 7th Annual "Skinny" Awards Dinner

NYC Public School Parents: Class Size Matters 7th Annual "Skinny" Awards Dinner:

Class Size Matters 7th Annual "Skinny" Awards Dinner

Leonie Haimson and Diane Ravitch,

Patrick Sullivan and Monica Major

Emily Horowitz, and Cynthia Wachtell

invite you to

Class Size Matters 7th Annual "Skinny" Awards Dinner

When: Tuesday, June 9 at 6:30 PMWhere: Il Bastardo/Bocca Di Bacco
191 7th Ave (21st St)
New York, NY 10011

A fundraiser for Class Size Matters

This year we are honoring the NY leaders of the Opt-Out movement:

Change the Stakes

NYC Opt Out

New York State Allies for Public Education

Please join us for an opportunity to enjoy a four course dinner to celebrate three organizations that led a historic movement resulting in 200,000 students refusing to take the NY state tests this year.

Ticket Information:

http://www.nycharities.org/events/EventLevels.aspx?ETID=8217

$250 - Defender of Public Education

$150 - Patron

$75 – Supporter

Thank you for your support and we hope to see you there!

If you can't attend, please consider making a tax-deductible donation to Class Size Matters, to help support our work

Gates Foundation: Time to Declare an End to EdReform 2.0 - Living in Dialogue

Gates Foundation: Time to Declare an End to EdReform 2.0 - Living in Dialogue:

Gates Foundation: Time to Declare an End to EdReform 2.0

 By Anthony Cody.

This coming week I will be back in Seattle, a few months shy of the third anniversary of my first visit to the Gates Foundation. I will give a talk at the University of Washington, introduced by Jesse Hagopian and several Teachers of Conscience from the area, who have refused to give high stakes tests to their students.

The world of education has shifted since that visit. Then I was in conversation. The Gates Foundation said they wanted to hear how their work was being received. In the online dialogue that followed,however, we were unable to resolve the biggest differences between us. Since then, the Gates Foundation has continued on its path, largely undeterred by mounting evidence of major errors.

It would be great if representatives from the Gates Foundation would join us at UW on May 15. There is a new CEO there, Sue Desmond-Hellmann, and she has voiced a willingness to learn, and spoken of the need for humility in the Foundation’s work. I sent her my book, The Educator and the Oligarch, a Teacher Challenges the Gates Foundation, last month, and it would be remarkable indeed to see this influential institution show a capacity to learn and change direction.

Bill Gates entered the field of education about fifteen years ago with some interesting ideas. Starting around the year 2000, his foundation invested about $650 million in promoting small schools. On the positive side, this was a concept with some basis in how students learn best. There was an understanding that human relationships were improved when schools and class sizes were smaller. Schools like High Tech High were able to experiment with project based learning and other innovative approaches. On the negative side, the foundation was determined to “scale up” this approach, and so there was a tendency to give money to anyone willing to go through the motions.

The small schools that Deborah Meier had created in the decades preceding this were carefully developed, with staff that was devoted to working closely together, solving problems in a democratic way. When the Gates small schools money came to Oakland, where I was working at the time, we saw large schools broken up into smaller ones left and right, with little time or expertise to develop coherent and sustainable practices. While some succeeded, many were not much better than the larger schools they replaced, and they came with a high price tag for increased administrative costs. Oakland is still burdened with too many schools long after the Gates funding disappeared, and a number of the small schools have been re-combined in recent years.

In 2009, there was huge shift in focus for the Gates Foundation. They drew some unfortunate lessons from their small schools work:

Many of the small schools that we invested in did not improve students’ achievement in any significant way. These tended to be the schools that did not take radical steps to change the culture, such as allowing the principal to pick the team of teachers or change the curriculum. We had less success trying to change an existing school than helping to create a new school. Even so, many schools had higher attendance and graduation rates than their peers. While we were pleased with these improvements, we are trying to raise college-ready graduation rates, and in most cases, we fell short.

But a few of the schools that we funded achieved something amazing. They replaced schools with low expectations and low results with ones that have high expectations and 

Gates Foundation: Time to Declare an End to EdReform 2.0 - Living in Dialogue: 

Remember the String - Badass Teachers Association

Badass Teachers Association:
Remember the String 
By Anthony Griffin, a Long Island Teacher and Co-founder of Lace to the Top

Originally published on the Lace to the Top Blog: https://lacetothetop.wordpress.com/2015/05/08/remember-the-string/

The only tangible thing I give students in my English 12 class is a piece of bakery string. I don't give them tests. I don't give them jobs. I give them a piece of string they tie around their fingers. Today affirmed for me why it is the only thing many of my students have and will care about.

When he walked into the resource center in his Marine uniform, my memory of of his high school self, blood-shot eyes, huge curly hair, and sleepy laugh, made me half uncertain I knew who had walked in. I rose to shake his hand, but it turned into a hug. It was him; a confident, calm diamond that was hidden in a cloud just a few years earlier.

As we spoke, I was proud of his transformation, yet I knew the change I saw was the result of Basic, not the classroom activities he respectfully endured in my class.

I asked if he remembered anything from high school. "No, sir. It's all down the drain," he replied without the giggle he once had in high school, yet was still the direct, honest person he was in class. "But I kept your string."

A hot fuzzy ball filled my throat.

On his first day in my class, he participated in the string exercise which I use to learn students' names, create a class culture, and demonstrate the lessons I focus on for the year: collaboration, problem solving, reflection, planning, communication, lateral thinking to name a few. For the string exercise, students stand in a circle state their names, share something they love with the group, tie the piece of the string around a finger, then pass the string to someone else in the circle. By the end, every student is attached to every other student by the piece of string and the middle of the circle usually looks like a spider web.

The lesson ends with the instruction, "Return the string to me." He took the initiative to wrap the string around a pencil so it wouldn't get tangled.

For the following 40 weeks, he was often late, seldom quiet, and usually high, but managed to pass.

On the last day of class, after dozens of projects, assignments, but not one test, his class went outside for the last lesson. "Here is the string from the first day of class," I said. "Each person must have a piece tied to a finger. Cover as much ground as possible. Go."

It took time for his class to untangle the string, but eventually, they made a large oval. "Is this the most ground you can cover?" I asked. I spoke about their year, shared how proud I was of all they had done, and took out a pair of scissors. I explained the metaphor as I cut the string connecting them. The message was simple. It's relationships Badass Teachers Association:

Feds Spent $3.3 Billion Fueling Charter Schools but No One Knows What It's Really Bought | PR Watch

Feds Spent $3.3 Billion Fueling Charter Schools but No One Knows What It's Really Bought | PR Watch:

Feds Spent $3.3 Billion Fueling Charter Schools but No One Knows What It's Really Bought -

(Madison, WI)–The federal government has spent more than $3.3 billion over the past two decades creating and fueling the charter school industry, according to a new financial analysis and reporters' guide by the Center for Media and Democracy (CMD). (The new guide can be downloaded below.)

Despite the huge sums spent so far, the federal government maintains no comprehensive list of the charter schools that have received and spent these funds or even a full list of the private or quasi-public entities that have been approved by states to "authorize" charters that receive federal funds. And despite drawing repeated criticism from the Office of the Inspector General for suspected waste and inadequate financial controls within the federal Charter Schools Program—designed to create, expand, and replicate charter schools—the U.S. Department of Education (ED) is poised to increase its funding by 48% in FY 2016.

CMD’s review of internal audits reveals that ED did not act quickly or effectively on numerous reports that state education officials had no idea where the federal funds ended up. The documents also show that ED knowingly awarded grants to states with no statutory oversight over charter authorizers and schools as the grant applications are evaluated based on how much "flexibility" from state laws charter schools have.

As a result of lax oversight on the federal level, combined with many state laws that hide charter finances from the public eye, taxpayers are left in the dark about how much federal money each charter school has received and what has been wasted or spent to enrich charter school administrators and for-profit corporations who get lucrative outsourcing contracts from charters, behind closed doors.

"The Department of Education is pushing for an unprecedented expansion of charter schools while paying lip service to accountability, but independent audit materials show that the Department's lofty rhetoric is simply not backed up by its actions," noted Jonas Persson, a writer for the Center for Media and Democracy, a national watchdog group that publishes PRWatch.org, ALECexposed.org, and SourceWatch.org, adding, "the lack of tough financial controls and the lack of public access to information about how charters are spending federal tax dollars has almost inevitably led to enormous fraud and waste."

CMD's guide, "New Documents Show How Taxpayer Money Is Wasted by Charter Schools—Stringent Controls Urgently Needed as Charter Funding Faces Huge Increase," analyzes materials obtained from open records requests about independent audits of how states interact with charter school authorizers and charter schools.

These documents, along with the earlier Inspector General report, reveal systemic barriers to common sense financial controls. Revealing quotes from those audit materials, highlighted in CMD's report, show that too often states have had untrained staff doing unsystematic reviews of authorizers and charter schools while lacking statutory authority and adequate funding to fully assess how federal money is being spent by charters.

In many instances, states have no idea how charter schools actually spent federal monies and they have no systematic way of obtaining that information or making sure it is accurate.

Meanwhile, charter school advocates within state agencies and private entities have sought to prevent strong financial controls and reporting systems backed up by government oversight.

"It is astonishing that the federal government has spent more than $3 billion dollars directly on charter schools and is poised to commit another $350 million on their expansion this year, even though charters have failed to perform better than traditional public schools overall and have performed far worse when it comes to fraud and waste," noted Lisa Graves, CMD's Executive Director.

She added: "This result is not surprising since many charter school advocates have pushed to create a system that allows charters to get federal funds without federal controls on how that money is spent--but it should not be acceptable for so much of taxpayers' money to be spent this way, with no requirement that the public be told how much money each and every charter school receives, how much each spends on high-paid charter executives, how much money makes it to the classroom, and how much is outsourced to for-profit firms."

In CMD's view, "There is no doubt that American school children and American taxpayers are getting short-changed by the charter school system that is siphoning money away from traditional public schools."

Download a copy of CMD's full report below. You can also read excerpts of responses to open records requests via CMD's SourceWatch, such as the corrective action plan imposed by the ED Office of the Inspector General after a scathing 2012 audit.

- See more at: http://www.prwatch.org/news/2015/04/12799/new-documents-show-how-federal-taxpayer-money-wasted-charter-schools#sthash.7s4RgutO.6FunRi4N.dpuf



H/T Jonathan Pelto Wait What? Website

You can get the full report at: http://www.prwatch.org/news/2015/04/12799/new-documents-show-how-federal-taxpayer-money-wasted-charter-schools#sthash.7s4RgutO.dpuf

Additional background at: http://www.prwatch.org/files/5-8-15_final_cmd_reporters_guide_on_charter_waste_and_lack_of_accountability.pdf  and  

Also don’t forget the following

 (2015) The Tip of the Iceberg: Charter School Vulnerabilities To Waste, Fraud, And Abuse (Center for Popular Democracy)

Along with these others

(2015) New York City charters leave thousands of seats unfilled despite exploding demand, study finds

(2015) California charter schools vulnerable to fraud, report says and Risking Public Money: California Charter School Fraud

(2015)  Report Slams Virtual Charter Schools That Graduate Just 36% Of Students

(2015) Virtual Schools in the U.S. 2015: Politics, Performance, Policy, and Research Evidence 

(2014) New report cites $100 million-plus in waste, fraud in charter school industry and Fraud, waste and abuse cases totaling over $100 million exposed in new report on charter schools warns that lack of regulation indicates that the real cost is doubtless much higher

(2014)  Report critical of charter school oversight and Public Accountability for Charter Schools

(2014) When Charter Schools Are Nonprofit in Name Only

(2014) Fraud and Financial Mismanagement in Pennsylvania’s Charter Schools

(2014) Schoolhouse Commercialism Leaves Policymakers Behind

(2014) Virtual Schools in the U.S. 2014: Politics, Performance, Policy, and Research Evidence

(2013) Profiles of For-Profit and Nonprofit Education Management Organizations: Fourteenth Edition – 2011-2012

Not to Mention the Dark Money Used to Elect Politicians that Set Up State Laws that Don't Hold Charter Schools Accountable 

Not to Mention That the:

National Association of Charter School Authorizers (NACSA) Group: 1 in 5 charter schools not doing well enough to stay open

A group that oversees more than half of the nation's 5,600 charter schools said as many as one in five U.S. charter schools should be shut down because of poor academic performance. 

http://seattletimes.com/html/nationworld/2019784379_charterschools29.htm

Discrimination against students of color rampant in Louisiana school district | Southern Poverty Law Center

Discrimination against students of color rampant in Louisiana school district | Southern Poverty Law Center:

Discrimination against students of color rampant in Louisiana school district

Three years after a Southern Poverty Law Center complaintsparked a U.S. Department of Education (DOE) investigation into the disproportionate number of African-American students arrested for minor rule violations in Louisiana’s Jefferson Parish Public School System, the problem has worsened, the SPLC told federal authorities this week.

The SPLC is now asking the Department of Justice to intervene.

The proportion of African-American children arrested for school-based misbehavior is now higher than when the initial complaint was filed, according to a supplemental SPLC complaint.

One black eighth-grader spent six days in juvenile detention after being arrested for throwing Skittles candy at another student.

“The Jefferson Parish Public School System has continued its destructive practice of arresting and jailing children for minor, and often trivial, violations of school rules and decorum,” said Eden Heilman, managing attorney for the SPLC’s Louisiana office. “It’s nothing less than a racially biased system of criminalizing African-American children. It must stop now.”

The SPLC’s complaint urges federal officials to take action, noting that the district’s arrest and law enforcement practices violate Titles VI and IV of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. It states that there has been “little to no movement” since the DOE launched its investigation three years ago.

The school district maintains contracts with local law enforcement agencies, including the Jefferson Parish Sheriff’s Office, that give officers stationed at district middle and high schools the authority to stop, frisk, detain, question, search and arrest schoolchildren on and off school grounds. 

“If law enforcement officers are on school grounds at all, they should be there in a very limited capacity – to protect children in the unlikely event of some kind of violent attack,” Heilman said. “But, as in many other places across the country, school authorities have inappropriately handed off their responsibility to administer routine school discipline to the police.” 

Jefferson Parish stands out in Louisiana as the school district with, far and away, the most school-based arrests and law enforcement referrals. The overwhelming majority of these arrests are for nonviolent, minor student misbehavior. African-American students are disproportionately targeted.

The supplemental complaint describes how 80 percent of the district’s school-based arrests during the 2013-14 school year were African-American students – even though they are only 41.5 percent of the student population. When the SPLC filed its initial complaint in 2012, African-American students comprised 76 percent of school-based arrests despite being 46 percent of the student population.

“The Jefferson Parish Public School System is needlessly derailing young lives with these arrests,” said Sara H. Godchaux, an SPLC staff attorney. “Far too many school children have been pushed out of class and into the justice system.”

 

The latest complaint describes how one eighth-grader was arrested at school after allegedly throwing Skittles candy at another student on a bus. The boy was charged with simple battery and handcuffed in front of his class by an officer. When he cried out as the officer twisted his arm, the officer said he was going to also charge him with resisting arrest. The boy was held at Rivarde Juvenile Detention Center for six days.

The complaint also describes how a 10-year-old African-American student diagnosed with autism ended up handcuffed and face down on the ground with a police officer’s knee in her back. Police were called after the girl had an outburst in class and began running around the classroom, jumping on desks, and knocking down chairs. She climbed out a classroom window and up a tree. The police dragged her away from the tree by her ankles and handcuffed her. Several officers were on the scene.

When the girl’s grandmother arrived, she found a police officer pressing her granddaughter’s face so close to the ground that she was having difficulty breathing. Officers eventually released the girl. Since the incident, the girl has said the police are not her friends and has asked, “Why do they hate me?”

Another Jefferson Parish student, a seventh-grader, became upset during a conference with school officials and her mother this year. After arguing with her mother, she was handcuffed and charged with “interference with an educational facility,” according to the latest complaint. She was held overnight at Rivarde Juvenile Detention Center and suspended from school. 

The supplemental complaint was filed with both the U.S. Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights in Washington as well as its local office in Dallas. It also was filed with the Educational Opportunities Section of the U.S. Department of Justice Civil Rights Division.

The original complaint was filed in January 2012 on behalf of four students and their families, and all other similarly situated students, with the U.S. Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights in Dallas. The office informed the SPLC in March 2012 that an investigation had been launched.Discrimination against students of color rampant in Louisiana school district | Southern Poverty Law Center: