Just Try to Catch Diane Ravitch's blog | A site to discuss better education for all

Diane Ravitch's blog | A site to discuss better education for all

Just Try to Catch Diane Ravitch's blog 

A site to discuss better education for all

Will Bunch: Why Bloomberg Cannot Win

by dianeravitch / 5min

Former NYC Mayor Michael Bloomberg has officially entered the Democratic primaries . He will skip the first four primaries and join the race on Super Tuesday, focusing on the states holding their primaries then. One of the world’s richest men, with a net worth estimated by Forbes to be $53 billion, Bloomberg is positioned to be a force to counter the candidates who emerge from the first four nomi

Great Hearts Charter Schools Target Middle-Class and Affluent Students

by dianeravitch / 2h

The original idea behind charter schools was that they would help the neediest, most disadvantaged students, including those who were disengaged or failing in their public schools. Some charters have been criticized for selecting the most compliant students. One charter chain stands out for ignoring the neediest, the poorest, the most disadvantaged: Great Hearts. This charter chain was repeatedly

Carol Burris and Kevin Welner: In Defense of Warren’s K-12 Plan

by dianeravitch / 2h

After Elizabeth Warren released her bold K-12 education plan, with massive funding increases for poor students (Title1) and for students with disabilities, the charter lobby reacted with outrage because she also announced that she would eliminate the federal Charter Schools Program. The CSP has been not only wasteful and ineffective but has been used by Betsy DeVos as her personal slush fund, to

Parents: Beware of the Mind Trust!

41by dianeravitch / 3h

The Mind Trust is funded by billionaires to advocate for privatization of public funds and public schools. Now it is going after parents. Of course, the best person to make the case to parents is an education entrepreneur. Dear Friends, I deeply believe that those most impacted by systemic injustice are also the people who are best positioned to lead the fight to create a more just and equitable

YESTERDAY

Breaking News! Pennsylvania Voucher Bill Blocked, for Now!

37by dianeravitch / 19h

You read it here first. It has not appeared online. Pennsylvania Speaker of the House Turzai did not have the votes to bring his voucher bill up for a vote. Your emails, phone calls, and letters made a difference! Stay alert! He may bring his zombie bill back in the future. The Network for Public Education Action Fund will keep watch.

Legal Organizations Join to Support Education Equity and Rights

by dianeravitch / 21h

This is good news for everyone who cares about the constant encroachment of Big Money and Dark Money into American education. The school choice movement has been an effort to substitute changes in school governance for equitable and adequate funding. Diverting funding from public schools to support charters and vouchers injures the vast majority of students, who are enrolled in public schools. Ab

Watch Fiona Hill Testify: She Is Riveting!

by dianeravitch / 22h

Dr. Fiona Hill, the government’s top Russia expert, was born in England, the daughter of a coal miner. She said in introducing herself that if she had stayed in England, her accent would have marked her and her opportunities would have been limited. She didn’t mention it, but in the US, her British accent makes her sound upper-class, not a coal miner’s daughter. Her testimony was, to me, the most

Oakland: Stop the School Closings! Students Need Stability!

by dianeravitch / 23h

School closings in Oakland are accelerating. These closures disproportionately affect the lives and well-being of black and brown students. They need stability, not disruption and constant churn. Black communities across the nation have suffered disinvestment in their communities because of school closings. Reply-To: “Kwesi Chappin, Color Of Change” info@colorofchange.org > Tell Acting School Boa

Massachusetts: Legislature Unanimously Passes $1.4 Billion for Education

by dianeravitch / 1d

Both houses of the Massachusetts legislature unanimously passed a major funding bill f or education, directing $1.5 billion mainly to the neediest districts. Massachusetts has long had the most successful public schools in the nation. The state is poised to build on its record of success. The majority of the $1.5 billion set aside in the bill will go to lower-performing and underfunded school dis

Angie Sullivan: Nevada Must Increase Education Funding by $1 Billion!

by dianeravitch / 1d

Angie Sullivan regularly writes blast emails to every member of the state legislature and to the state’s journalists. Here is her latest: CCEA members voted at a General Meeting yesterday to raise dues. Those teacher union dues will be used to campaign for a billion dollars. Yes, billion. Yes, dollars. We need to think big to win big. Teachers need those funds to fund class-size reduction. We nee

Bill Phillis: It is Wrong for Ohio to Require Public Schools to Pay for Transportation Costs of Charters and Vouchers

43by dianeravitch / 1d

Bill Phillis asks a reasonable question: Why should public schools in Ohio be required to take money from their budget to pay the transportation costs of charters and vouchers? School district transportation costs increase with the 

Diane Ravitch's blog | A site to discuss better education for all

CURMUDGUCATION: The Waltons Try To Disrupt Elizabeth Warren

CURMUDGUCATION: The Waltons Try To Disrupt Elizabeth Warren

The Waltons Try To Disrupt Elizabeth Warren

Elizabeth Warren was in Atlanta at Clark Atlanta University to talk to black voters, when the rally was disrupted by a group of charter school supporters, angry about the hard line stance Warren has staked out on the charter school industry.

The group of grass roots charter supporters had, they said, "come from all over the country," and if that doesn't send up a little red flag, then perhaps their perfectly matching t-shirts and signs might.

Intercept reporter Ryan Grim was there, and with some interviewing and online searches, he unraveled the whole thing pretty quickly in a series of tweets that are collected in this write-up.

The group said they raised money on GoFundMe, which turned out to be true-- however, the funding was stacked with  anonymous $1,000 donors.

The group is Memphis Lift Parent Institute, Sarah Carpenter is the founder and chief exec, but she didn't do it alone. The group was aided by Strategy Redefined, a Nashville education consulting firm, and Natasha Kamrani, head of Tennessee's chapter of Democrats for Education Reform and the wide of Chris Barbic, the original head of Tennessee's ill-fated Achievement School District. Grim says that the group is 100% funded by the Waltons; published reports say they've given Memphis Lift $1.5 million since 2015. Since their 2017 filing shows $375, 200, with $200 coming from public CONTINUE READING: CURMUDGUCATION: The Waltons Try To Disrupt Elizabeth Warren

CURMUDGUCATION: The One And Only Lesson To Be Learned From NAEP Scores

CURMUDGUCATION: The One And Only Lesson To Be Learned From NAEP Scores

The One And Only Lesson To Be Learned From NAEP Scores

It has been almost a month since the NAERP scores have dropped, and some folks are still trying to torture some sort of useful insights from the numbers (here's Mike Petrilli at Fordham writing a piece that should be entitled "What to learn about being better a hitting the wrong target").

The world of education is a fuzzy one, with some declaring that teaching is more art than science. But then the National Assessment of Educational Progress is issued. “The Nation’s Report Card” is greeted as a source of hard data about the educational achievement of fourth and eighth graders (and in some years, high school students), theoretically neither biased nor tweaked as state tests might be. 

NAEP scores were released three weeks ago, and they have been percolating down through pundits, ed writers, ed bureaucrats, and ordinary ed kibitzers. So now that we have had weeks to absorb and process, what have some folks offered as important lessons, and what’s the only lesson that really counts?

Some have offered lessons that are simply misreadings of the data. The three NAEP levels (basic, proficient, and advanced) do not necessarily mean what folks think they mean, which is why Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos was incorrect when she claimed that NAEP showed two thirds of students don’t read at grade level. NAEP’s “proficient” is set considerably higher than grade level, as noted on the NAEP site. (This is a lesson that has to be relearned as often as NAEP scores are released.)

It’s worth noting that there is some debate about whether or not NAEP data says what it claims to CONTINUE READING: CURMUDGUCATION: The One And Only Lesson To Be Learned From NAEP Scores

Unequal Access and Denial of Opportunity: the Collateral Damage of Portfolio School Reform | janresseger

Unequal Access and Denial of Opportunity: the Collateral Damage of Portfolio School Reform | janresseger

Unequal Access and Denial of Opportunity: the Collateral Damage of Portfolio School Reform

Last week, after New York City’s former mayor, Michael Bloomberg, expressed an interest in running for President, this blog reviewed the history of the school reform scheme he imposed during his three term tenure as mayor. In 2002, he convinced the state legislature to grant him mayoral governance of the city’s schools.  He and Joel Klein, the prominent attorney he appointed as his schools chancellor, imposed what was—nearly two decades ago—a new kind of school governance scheme.

The New York City Schools were among the early so-called “portfolio school districts,” and the district remains part of the Portfolio School Reform Network, big city school districts which adopted portfolio governance theory from the Center on Reinventing Public Education, a Gates-funded think tank at the University of Washington, Bothell.

Mayor Michael Bloomberg and Joel Klein launched this scheme in New York City by creating district-wide school choice, breaking up large comprehensive high schools into small schools with curricular specialties, encouraging the opening of a large number of charter schools, co-locating many schools—small specialty public schools along with charter schools—into the same buildings.  Those running the school district would consider all of these schools of choice as if they were investments in a stock portfolio. The district would hold on to the successful investments and phase out those whose test scores were low or which families didn’t choose.

Portfolio school reform has created collateral damage across the school districts which have experimented with the idea. After the Chicago Public Schools, another district managed by portfolio school reform theory, closed 50 schools at the end of the 2013 school year, the University of Chicago’s Consortium on School Research, and separately a University of Chicago sociologist, Eve Ewing tracked widespread community grieving when neighborhoods lost the public school institutions that had anchored their neighborhoods.

But there have been other kinds of collateral damage beyond the tragedy of school closures. In CONTINUE READING: Unequal Access and Denial of Opportunity: the Collateral Damage of Portfolio School Reform | janresseger

Um, that’s not what Warren actually said about charter schools - The Washington Post

Um, that’s not what Warren actually said about charter schools - The Washington Post

Um, that’s not what Warren actually said about charter schools

No, this isn’t about Wednesday night’s debate among the Democratic presidential candidates, which, incidentally, did not have a single substantive discussion about education. The moderators didn’t ask a single question about it, but then again, that’s happened in most of the Democratic debates too this year.

This post is about Sen. Elizabeth Warren’s (Mass.) recently announced her preK-12 school reform plan, or, rather, the reaction to it. Last month, candidate Warren unveiled her reform, which calls for spending hundreds of billions of dollars to improve public schools from prekindergarten through 12th grade — and getting America’s wealthiest individuals to pay for it.

Elizabeth Warren calls for billions of new dollars to reform pre-K-12 schools and fight privatization. Here’s how she plans to pay for it.

One of the features in that plan is ending federal funding for the U.S. Charter Schools Program. The program provides money to states to create new charter schools, which are publicly funded but privately operated. In recent years, the charter movement, which once enjoyed bipartisan support, has become controversial, with many Democrats pulling back from it even as Education Secretary Betsy DeVos has made expanding school “choice” her top priority.

Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), a Democratic presidential candidate, also included the same feature in his expansive K-12 plan, which was released well before Warren’s. But she’s the one who became the target of tough criticism, which I wrote about here, at a time when she was rising in the polls and leading some of them.

This post looks at the problem with some of the criticism, which is being increasingly repeated as truth. It was written by Kevin Welner, director of the National Education Policy Center at the University of Colorado at Boulder and a professor of education policy there. He was among the researchers consulted by Warren’s policy team as they drew up her education plan — but they had no involvement in, or awareness of, this commentary.

Carol Burris is the executive director of the nonprofit Network for Public Education, an advocacy group. A former award-winning school principal, she was the lead author of “Asleep at the Wheel,” the report about fraud in the charter school sector that was cited in Warren’s plan.

A report that detailed up to $1 billion in wasted federal funds on bad charter schools may have underestimated the problem

By Kevin Welner and Carol Burris

When Sen. Elizabeth Warren’s (D-Mass.) education plan was released a few weeks ago, one part drew strident criticism from some vested interests: her proposal to end the federal Charter Schools Program (CSP). Since 1995, that program has disbursed over $4.1 billion taxpayer dollars to people eager to open new charter schools or expand existing charter schools.

A shocking amount of this money was squandered, according a 2019 report released by the nonprofit advocacy group, the Network for Public Education. In her plan, Warren cites that report, saying that “the federal government has wasted up to $1 billion on charter schools that never even opened, or opened and then closed because of mismanagement and other reasons."

The pushback to Warren from advocates of charter schools was immediate and intense. A flurry of CONTINUE READING: Um, that’s not what Warren actually said about charter schools - The Washington Post

Louisiana’s COMPASS Teacher Eval System Still Down Following Statewide Cyberattack | deutsch29

Louisiana’s COMPASS Teacher Eval System Still Down Following Statewide Cyberattack | deutsch29

Louisiana’s COMPASS Teacher Eval System Still Down Following Statewide Cyberattack

On Monday, November 18, 2019, Louisiana’s state office computer systems experienced a cyberattack. As a precaution, the state shut down those systems, with the expectation that computers in some offices would be back in operation the same day, and others, within days.

However, as of this writing (Thursday evening), Louisiana’s teacher evaluation system, the Compass Information System (CIS), is still not in operation.

The Louisiana Department of Education (LDOE) website is up, as is the la.gov email system. On November 21, 2019, at 4:52 a.m., LDOE curriculum supervisor, Jackie Bobbett, was able to send the following email to Louisiana’s curriculum review team regarding the cyberattack:

Please be advised that the LDOE has been affected by the cyber attack that began Monday. We apologize for any delays in responses.

We appreciate your patience during this time and will update you as we have more information.

LDOE Academic Content Team

In a November 19, 2019, update, the governor’s office did say it might take “several days” to restore service, and the November 21, 2019, Shreveport Times reports that Louisiana’s Department of Motor Vehicles (DMV) is closed until Monday, November 25, 2019, and that according to Governor Edwards, “the ransomware attack was ‘largely unsuccessful’ because the state didn’t lose its data and didn’t pay a ransom.”

From the Office of the Governor, dated November 19, 2019:

“While it is nearly impossible to prevent all cyber attacks, because we have prioritized improving Louisiana’s cybersecurity capabilities, we were able to quickly neutralize the threat. The majority of the service interruption seen by employees and the public yesterday was due to our aggressive actions to combat the attack,” Commissioner of CONTINUE READING: Louisiana’s COMPASS Teacher Eval System Still Down Following Statewide Cyberattack | deutsch29

Seattle Schools Community Forum: Bellevue SD Dumps Check Yourself Mental Health Screener

Seattle Schools Community Forum: Bellevue SD Dumps Check Yourself Mental Health Screener

Bellevue SD Dumps Check Yourself Mental Health Screener

My email to the Board this morning:

Dear Directors,

(Yes, I know - how can you miss me if I won't go away. Soon.)

I just wanted to make you aware of a couple of changes that have come in the use of the Check Yourself mental health screener for middle school students.

1) Bellevue SD has dropped it completely. They are now using this SOS model in which the screener is an appropriate length (about 6-8 questions) AND where the teacher talks to kids about mental health issues in the classroom and the students learn about recognizing issues both for themselves AND classmates. Plus, a lot less personal student data going out into the world.

My understanding is that Bellevue made the change because they were worried about student data privacy issues.
2) The person I am working with on this issue believes that both districts and King County are NOT being clear to parents that using of the Check Yourself screener when it is given in schools by school staff then make the results fall under FERPA, not HIPAA. That needs to be made explicitly clear to parents and no one should just say, "It's HIPAA compliant" when it simply does not fall under HIPAA.

3) I remind you that SPS and other districts know that they had been violating federal education regulation PPRA via the Department of Education and were forced to change the notification procedure.

I urge you to follow Bellevue's lead and switch to a less invasive screener that allows kids to not just think of themselves but to watch out for friends and classmates.

Sincerely,
Melissa Westbrook
Seattle Schools Community Forum blog

Seattle Schools Community Forum: Bellevue SD Dumps Check Yourself Mental Health Screener

Time to Panic? The NAEP Scores Didn’t Go Up! | Live Long and Prosper

Time to Panic? The NAEP Scores Didn’t Go Up! | Live Long and Prosper

Time to Panic? The NAEP Scores Didn’t Go Up!

The NAEP scores are in and the “reformers,” or as Diane Ravitch has taken to calling them, the “Disrupters” are up in arms because the scores haven’t improved. The disrupters promised all of us that charter schools, testing, vouchers, and other “reforms” would solve the low achievement scores, but as we now can see, that didn’t happen. Perhaps there’s something else that might be affecting the achievement of the students in our classrooms…

When reading through the articles noted below it’s important to remember two things.

First, the National Reading Panel did not support heavy phonics instruction despite what “phonics-first” partisans might tell you. It’s true, the National Reading Panel Summary said that a phonics-based approach was supported, however, that was different than what was actually in the full National Reading Panel report! (See also I Told You So! The Misinterpretation and Misuse of The National Reading Panel Report by NRP Panel member, Joanne Yatvin and More Smoke and Mirrors: A Critique of the National Reading Panel (NRP) Report on “Fluency” by Stephen Krashen.)

The actual National Reading Panel Report says (p. 2-97),

…it is important to emphasize that systematic phonics instruction should be integrated with other reading instruction to create a balanced reading program. Phonics instruction is never a total reading program. [emphasis added]

So…the NRP recommends something akin to Balanced Literacy…something the “phonics-firsters” decry as “unscientific.”

Second, as Steven Singer (Gadfly on the Wall Blog) reminds us, NAEP proficient level isn’t the same as grade-level. Diane Ravitch, who served on the NAEP Governing Board for seven years explains it this way…

Proficient is akin to a solid A. In reading, the proportion who were  CONTINUE READING: 

Time to Panic? The NAEP Scores Didn’t Go Up! | Live Long and Prosper

The Supreme Court Is Considering Forcing You To Fund Religious Education | Americans United for Separation of Church and State

The Supreme Court Is Considering Forcing You To Fund Religious Education | Americans United for Separation of Church and State
The Supreme Court Is Considering Forcing You To Fund Religious Education

One of the most important things that separation of religion and government does is ensure that Americans are free to give financial support only to the faiths of their choosing – or support none at all.

That’s the ideal, anyway. Sadly, the Supreme Court has been drifting away from that principle, and during this term, the high court might even rule that under certain circumstances, taxpayers can be compelled to support religious schools.

In a pending case, Espinoza v. Montana Department of Revenue, the justices will consider an appeal of a ruling handed down in December 2018 by the Montana Supreme Court.

The state high court struck down a private school voucher program that used tax credits to divert public funds to private religious schools, finding that it violated the clear language of the Montana Constitution, which protects religious freedom by barring “direct or indirect appropriation or payment from any public fund or monies … for any sectarian purpose or to aid any church, school, academy, seminary, college, university, or other literary or scientific institution, controlled in whole or in part by any church, sect, or denomination.”

Religious freedom protection language like this is found in three-quarters of the state constitutions. It’s designed to ensure that no one is taxed, directly or indirectly, to pay for someone else’s religion.

Opposition to church taxes, no matter what they may be called or what form they may take, has a long history in the United States. As James Madison once argued, if the government can force you to pay even a minuscule amount to support religion, it can compel you to conform in other ways.

“Who does not see that the same authority which can establish Christianity, in exclusion of all other Religions, may establish with the same ease any particular sect of Christians, in exclusion of all other Sects?” Madison wrote in 1785. “That the same authority which can force a citizen to contribute three pence only of his property for the support of any one establishment, may force him to conform to any other establishment CONTINUE READING: The Supreme Court Is Considering Forcing You To Fund Religious Education | Americans United for Separation of Church and State

CURMUDGUCATION: Yes And

CURMUDGUCATION: Yes And

Yes And

Akil Bello@akilbello

Why do I see such a profound lack of “yes and” in education conversations?

“YES we can criticize bad data AND advocate for preparing students for the jobs of the future.”

“YES we can advocate for abolishing the the tests AND argue to improve education.”

184

11:32 AM - Nov 13, 2019

Twitter Ads info and privacy

37 people are talking about this

This tweet (shared with permission) really hit me where I live. Because defenders of public education have too often let themselves be pushed into a one-part argument when a two-part argument is what's called for.

Blame No Child Left Behind. It was educational baloney, but rhetorical genius. Every attempt to discuss the empty baloniness of it was met by the same response; "Well, then, which children do you want to leave behind."

Ever since, this has been the ed disruptors' framing for everything. If you want Goal A, then you must support Method Z. If you want accountability, you must support high stakes testing. If you don't like bad schools, you must support privately run charter schools (also, if you support freedom, you must support charter schools).

When pressed, reformsters double down on descriptions of the awfulness of the problem.

Reformster: Look at these test results. Look at these x-rays. You definitely have a brain tumor, and if it's not fixed, you'll soon lose feeling in your limbs and your legs will stop working properly.  CONTINUE READING: CURMUDGUCATION: Yes And

A Model Of Mismanagement In Sacramento Schools (Opinion) | Sacramento, CA Patch

A Model Of Mismanagement In Sacramento Schools (Opinion) | Sacramento, CA Patch

A Model Of Mismanagement In Sacramento Schools (Opinion)
COMMENTARY: Sacramento is by no means the only Californian school district in financial and political meltdown.

California's extra budget cash could soon top $26 billion, analysts say - Los Angeles Times - https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2019-11-20/californias-state-budget-excess-cash by @johnmyers on @latimes

By Dan Walters,  (BLAME EVERYTHING ON TEACHERS)
Originally published on Monday, November 18

Two years ago, with teachers in Sacramento's school district on the verge of striking, the city's mayor stepped in to mediate a compromise contract.

"Forty-three thousand students, parents, teachers and our entire community can breathe easy this afternoon," Mayor Darrell Steinberg declared after the Sacramento City Unified School District and the Sacramento City Teachers Association agreed to a new contract giving teachers an 11% raise over three years.

"Let this be the beginning of a new day of partnership that puts old wounds behind," Steinberg added, referring to long-running acrimony between the union and the district's administration.

However, the ink was scarcely dry on the agreement before the district's politics and finances began to go south again.

It was soon revealed that the salary increases would drain a reserve account set aside to pay the district's fast-increasing pension fund payments, leaving its budget even more imbalanced. And the war of words between the union and Superintendent Jorge Aguilar resumed, becoming even bitterer.

In 2018, less than a year after Steinberg hailed the new contract, Sacramento County's school superintendent, David Gordon, began rejecting district budgets that fell short of minimum reserve requirements.

California's Fiscal Crisis and Management Assistance Team (FCMAT), a sort of rescue squad for troubled school systems, also became involved in 2018, issuing a very critical report and predicting that the district would run out of cash in 11 months unless it closed a $30 million budget gap. "The fiscal risk is real, imminent, and serious, FCMAT wrote. "Without action, state intervention is certain."

However, the labor-management acrimony escalated even further. The union staged a one-day strike last April and a state takeover of the district's operations was averted only by a last-minute fiscal bandage.

Sacramento City's fundamental problems remained unaddressed and Gordon, the county superintendent, continued to reject its imbalanced budgets, most recently in October, calling again for spending reductions.

The administration wants to reduce employee health care costs, while the union insists that spending cuts be made in the administration, citing "bureaucratic bloat."

Sacramento is by no means the only California school district in financial and political meltdown and if it can't resolve its issues CONTINUE READING: A Model Of Mismanagement In Sacramento Schools (Opinion) | Sacramento, CA Patch

Education Through Friendship: One Man’s Story (Part 4) | Larry Cuban on School Reform and Classroom Practice

Education Through Friendship: One Man’s Story (Part 4) | Larry Cuban on School Reform and Classroom Practice

Education Through Friendship: One Man’s Story (Part 4)

Parts 1, 2, and 3 trace the arc of my close friendship with a small group of Pittsburghers beginning in the late-1940s. Far beyond the schooling I have had, my friendship with these “buddies” of mine has educated me and made possible my living a full life.

Turning Points in the Group’s History

Moving from a bunch of teenage boys in high school and college who had learned over years to accept both strengths and flaws in each other to a group of husbands and wives coming together monthly was a huge leap. Most adolescent friendships that survive college, I would guess, founder as couples form and marriages occur.   

In our group, many wives did not know one another well before they married into the group. It was a Pittsburgh Jewish community divided into Oakland, East Liberty, and Squirrel Hill where different B’nai Brith youth groups straddled neighborhoods so some wives had met and knew of one another but not as close friends. Surely, many of us knew the wives when they were dating one of the guys especially as dating evolved into engagements and then marriage. Our annual New Year’s Eve parties brought the women we dated together. For example, I brought Barbara to her first New Year’s Eve party in 1957, a year before we got married.

Wives expand group. Why did the group of close pals accept wives as integral members of the group and make it a joint venture in forming the book club in CONTINUE READING: Education Through Friendship: One Man’s Story (Part 4) | Larry Cuban on School Reform and Classroom Practice