Monday, June 6, 2011

Larry Ferlazzo: Shortcuts, School Reform and Private Foundations

Larry Ferlazzo

Shortcuts, School Reform and Private Foundations

Author Bob Sutton recently wrote about a report commissioned by the Annie Casey Foundation that examined one of its major funding initiatives related to school reform (the report is titled The Path of Most Resistance).

Here is an excerpt from Mr. Sutton's post:

This weekend, I read an old (1993) but excellent study commissioned by the Casey foundation on what it takes comprehensive school reform in large school systems. I was taken with its counter-intuitive title "The Path of Most Resistance"....[the authors] argued that taking the easy way out -- expecting instant results; not taking the time to engage with parents, students, administrators, local politicians and other key crucial actors; doing it on the cheap; expecting everything to go smoothly-- and a host other "easy solutions" -- simply weren't realistic or wise for would-be change agents. The examples of successful large scale change they examined all took pretty

School Finance through Roza-Tinted Glasses: 5 School Funding Myths from a single Misguided Source « School Finance 101

School Finance through Roza-Tinted Glasses: 5 School Funding Myths from a single Misguided Source

by schoolfinance101

I’ve reached a point after these past few years where I feel that I’ve spent way too much time critiquing poorly constructed arguments and shoddy analyses that seem to be playing far too large a role in influencing state and federal (especially federal) education policy. I find this frustrating not because I wish that my own work got more recognition. I actually think my own work gets too much recognition as well, simply because I’ve become more “media savvy” than some of my peers in recent years.

I find it frustrating because there are numerous exceptional scholars doing exceptional work in school finance and the economics of education whose entire body of rigorous disciplined research seems drowned out by a few prolific hacks with connections in the current policy debate (see: The Handbook do Research on Education Finance and Policy). It may come as a surprise to readers of popular media, but individuals like Rick Hess (AEI) or Bryan Hassel (Public Impact) wouldn’t remotely be considered as credible scholars in the field by those who are actually credible scholars. I’d perhaps have less concern – and be able to blow this off – if the assertions

Schooling in the Ownership Society: New Gates palace opens in Seattle

New Gates palace opens in Seattle

by Mike Klonsky

Symbol of unchecked foundation power

New Gates 900,000 sq. ft. "campus" cost $.5 billion in tax-exempt dollars.

In order to keep its tax-exempt status, the Gates foundation has to give away about $3 billion a year. Stacy Palmer, editor of the Chronicle of Philanthropy, says the foundation's influence goes far beyond that.

"They're influencing governments in lots of different ways — and

Schooling in the Ownership Society: Merrow says Klein was the architect of current corporate reform

Merrow says Klein was the architect of current corporate reform

by Mike Klonsky

In Sunday's Daily News, John Merrow claims that, "Love or loathe him, Joel Klein is the person most responsible for shaping U.S. schools today." Improbable as it may sound, Merrow is probably right. Corporate lawyer Klein, now hustling school district contracts for Rupert Murdoch's News Corp., was a totally unqualified, yet major player in the disaster they now call public school reform. The fawning Merrow even credits Klein with nurturing Michelle Rhee.

His critics — and there are many — discount the academic achievements

Schools Matter: Intended Consequences?

Intended Consequences?

by Ken Libby

From the New York Times:

In measuring its success, Mr. Berk added, Participant sometimes resorts to an unusual standard: On losers, the company assesses whether Mr. Skoll could have exerted more impact simply by spending his money philanthropically.

By that measure, “Waiting for Superman,” about the failures of public education, was a hit, Mr. Berk said. It had just over $6 million in worldwide ticket sales, but managed to put the issue of

ASCD Inservice: Help Families, Don't Hype Miracles, Says Ravitch

Help Families, Don't Hype Miracles, Says Ravitch

Instead of "Waiting for a School Miracle," last week's 2nd most-clicked ASCD SmartBrief story, Diane Ravitch says society should invest in families, "children's most important educators." Of course schools should improve, says Ravitch, but schools alone cannot live up to the miraculous transformations heralded in the press and by the Administration. Be skeptical, put the numbers into perspective, and look at the results over the long-term, Ravitch says of miracle turnarounds.

Instead of magic beans, Ravitch says society can support stronger families, through parental education, prenatal care and preschool, for example.

Ravitch noted in an earlier column that the perpetuation of education policy based on myth has its roots in the

Why the NAACP is Suing New York | Edwize

Why the NAACP is Suing New York

by W.J. Levay

In Friday’s Washington Post NAACP President and CEO Benjamin Todd Jealous explains why the NAACP, the UFT and others are suing the DOE.

This lawsuit was filed for the most common reasons we have sued boards of education across the decades: Students are being grossly mistreated, their parents are being deeply disrespected and the entire community stands to suffer.
There are two issues we are particularly concerned about.
First, the city has located charter schools under the same roofs as traditional public schools in a way that is unfair and unjust. Their poor handling has led to many complaints from our members and their neighbors, including:
Students in the traditional public school must now eat lunch at 10 a.m. so that charter school students can enjoy lunch at noon.
The “regular school’s children” had library access for a little over four hours so that the “new charter school’s kids” could have access for almost seven.
“Traditional school students” were moved to a basement, where they were next to the boiler room, to make room for their charter school peers, and teachers of the regular students

Supreme Court rejects illegal immigrants' tuition case | Reuters

Supreme Court rejects illegal immigrants' tuition case

Security guards walk the steps of the Supreme Court in Washington, October 1, 2010. REUTERS/Larry Downing

By James Vicini

WASHINGTON | Mon Jun 6, 2011 11:24am EDT

(Reuters) - The Supreme Court on Monday rejected a challenge to a California law that gives illegal immigrants the same in-state college tuition rates as legal state residents, another contentious issue in the nation's immigration policy debate.

The justices refused to hear an appeal by group of out-of-state U.S. citizens after the California Supreme Court unanimously upheld the law and dismissed their lawsuit.

A Paradox? Or a Genuine Contradiction? | Taking Note

A Paradox? Or a Genuine Contradiction?

by JOHN MERROW on 06. JUN, 2011 in EARLY CHILDHOOD EDUCATION, STANDARIZED TESTS, MEDIA, NEW YORK CITY, READING,TEACHING

Can something really be good and bad at the same time? How about that delicious but fattening dinner you had last week? It was great, until you added up the calories, right? Now what about a school? Can it be both good and bad at the same time? Is educational quality–like beauty–in the eye of the beholder or do test scores say it all?

More precisely, can a school with only 18% of its 4th graders at grade level in reading be considered a good school? Before you say, “Of course not,” please read on. Because we discovered that the FIRST graders at that school were reading confidently and competently. That’s right: the first graders were readers, but the fourth graders weren’t according to the results of the state test.

Is this a paradox, or a full-blown contradiction?

I’m asking these questions of you because we are asking them of ourselves, in our reporting for the

Into the Fray | Seattle Education

Into the Fray

by seattleducation2011

Diane Ravitch

Sometimes people make it too easy to respond when they attack my opinions or those of others. This happened last week with Jonathan Alter’s diatribe about Diane Ravitch’s comments regarding tests and test results in herOp Ed piece published last Sunday in the New York Times. I have been reading the responses to Alter’s attack and the blog posts, from the eloquence of Jim Horn’s piece in Schools Matter, to the matter-of-fact post by Douglas Massey and Leonie Hamison’s post with the facts and a challenge to Alter and others. Well, just for the fun of it, I decided to throw in my two cents. Mr. Alter needs to understand that there are a lot of people who know a heck of a lot more about education than he or the other pundits do who take on the subject of education without educating themselves to the reality that is facing our students today.

What I have learned as I started to speak up two years ago about what was happening in Seattle and around the

Need MORE Proof that Testing is Destroying Education? - The Tempered Radical

Need MORE Proof that Testing is Destroying Education?

Back in April, I spent a few minutes with one of my professional heroes: Dick Sagor—whose work on action research has been a direct attempt to raise the professional status and credibility of educators.

Our conversation was anything but optimistic, though. Dick was convinced that the teaching profession in America was at a turning point and that our nation was going to head in one of three directions:

(1). We’re going to completely abandon formal teacher preparation programs and rely on TFA style staffing patterns—kind of like Switzerland’s volunteer army or the Peace Corps.

(2). We’re going to completely strip down

Week of Action | May 9-13 « State of Emergency

Week of Action | May 9-13

by jortiz

Posted in Video

California Education Service Workers Will Take 'Midnight Ride' To Sacramento

Cafeteria Workers Take On California's Capitol

by The Huffington Post News Team

Barbara Torres says she was a "troubled child" growing up in the Los Angeles public school system.

But, at age 14, an administrator gave her a chance, setting her up with work as a student aide. Torres has remained an employee of the Los Angeles Unified School District for the past 16 years. She works as a special education assistant, helping children with autism adapt to mainstream classrooms.

With the financial stresses on education, though, she worries that the next troubled child to come through LAUSD's public schools may not be quite so lucky.

"Kids have issues but we can work through them, they can graduate. You just have to have that push," Torres told The Huffington Post. "We're overworked, morale is low, there are furloughs and there are pay cuts. We all have to do extra. It's hard on us but it's even harder on the kids. What if those kids don't have that somebody like I did?"

Torres says that's why she plans to join about 100 other education service workers, from cafeteria servers to bus

Shanker Blog » In Census Finance Data, Most Charters Are Not Quite Public Schools

In Census Finance Data, Most Charters Are Not Quite Public Schools

by Matthew Di Carlo

Last month, the U.S. Census Bureau released its annual public K-12 school finance report (and accompanying datasets). The data, which are for FY 2009 (there’s always a lag in finance data), show that spending increased roughly two percent from the previous year. This represents much slower growth than usual.

These data are a valuable resource that has rightfully gotten a lot of attention. But there’s a serious problem within them, which, while slightly technical, hasn’t received any attention at all: The vast majority of public charter schools are not included in the data.

To gather its data, the Census Bureau relies on reporting from “government entities.” Some charter schools fit this description neatly, such as those operated by governments or government-affiliated bodies, including states, districts, counties, and public universities. But most charter schools are operated by private organizations (mostly non-profits), and finance figures for these schools are not included in the report (the Census classifies them as “private charter schools”).

What does this mean? Well, for one thing, it means that the overall spending figures (total dollar amounts) are a

How do we fit the policy to the need? « My Island View

How do we fit the policy to the need?

by tomwhitby

My post today is on a topic which I have discussed before and probably will discuss more in the future. As much as we talk about reform in education, the system is very slow to change. Many of the people shouting the loudest for a need for sweeping improvements are some of the same people who are ardent supporters of the status quo. For whatever reasons they may publicly state, their preference is to keep things the way that they have been. Whether it is comfort or ease, things in a system, as large as education, are very slow to change. Even though we are educated adults, with adult experience, more often than not we hear the term “baby steps” used in conversations of education reform.

My school district for many years spent what may have been thousands of dollars each year on the first day back to school in order to provide an inspirational keynote speaker for the entire district faculty meeting to kick off the new year. It was an expense, and a practice which I always found to be a waste of time and money. There is however, one memory of one such speaker sharing an experience, which I remember lo these many years.

According to this speaker, each Christmas her family had a traditional family dinner featuring a ham for the main

Department of Education Spending, 1980 to 2010 | Federal Education Policy History

Department of Education Spending, 1980 to 2010

Figure 1 depicts the billions of dollars in outlays (money spent) by the Department of Education from 1980 to 2010.(1) These expenditures are not adjusted for inflation.(2)

Figure 1. Department of Education Spending 1980-2010 (billions of dollars)

Source: Ronald Reagan and Education Policy.

Figure 2, meanwhile, depicts these same data adjusted for inflation and expressed as 1981 dollars. Note the large difference in the size of the outlays

Harmony Charter School Graduation Rates: Fact or Fiction? « A "Fuller" Look at Education Issues

Harmony Charter School Graduation Rates: Fact or Fiction?

by Dr. Ed Fuller

Evidently, the CEO of Harmony Charter Schools will testify today that Harmony Science Cademy Schools in Texas have a 100% graduation rate. We often hear charter school operators make this claim. Are charters schools really that great? Should we open more charter schools to increase the graduation rate? And what, exactly, are these schools doing to have such extraordinary graduation rates.

When the state calculates graduation rates, it uses the number of students in the 9th grade cohort as the denominator (see http://ritter.tea.state.tx.us/perfreport/aeis/2010/glossary.html from TEA and look under completion rates for the complete definition). This makes complete sense. To calculate a graduate rate, you start with the number of 9th grade students and then follow them over time. Except that students are removed from the denominator if they transfer to another school or leave public schools for a variety of reasons.

As shown in Table 1 below, we see that there were 192 students enrolled in Harmony charter schools in the 9th

Dirty Work: The Creeping Rollback of Child Labor Laws - TIME

Dirty Work: The Creeping Rollback of Child Labor Laws

A young doffer boy works among the machines in a Lincolnton mill, North Carolina, 1908.

Lewis Hine / Buyenlarge / Getty Images

The government has not had a lot of ideas for what to do about the nation's anemic job market, but there are troubling signs that one old idea is starting to reemerge: child labor. In the first part of the 20th century, there was a concerted effort to end the scourge of children working in factories and textile mills. But now there is a small but noticeable drive to weaken these protections.

Maine grabbed headlines in late May when it enacted a law rolling back restrictions on employment of minors. Children under the age of 18 can now work 24 hours a week - up from 20 - and as late as 10:15 on school nights, up from 10 pm (the bill's backers wanted to raise the cut-off to 11 pm). The law diluted protections that had been put in place in 1991, when teachers were

Analysis: A month of major education changes

Jun 5, 2011 3:00pm

NEW ORLEANS (AP) — The news conference took place at a school that looked like a maze of wood decking and ramps connecting a series of portable buildings in eastern New Orleans, where boarded structures and weedy lots still say "Katrina was here."

Despite the bleak setting, the news was largely good. John White, new head of the state entity that has run most New Orleans schools since the storm — and which has taken over a handful of foundering schools elsewhere in Louisiana — announced standardized test scores that showed impressive improvement.

"The New Orleans system of schools works. Period. End of story," White declared. "And we cannot go back to a system that does not put children's needs first. These results should close the book on that question."

Not likely. White's mid-May news conference was one in a series of events in Louisiana education last month that make clear the book is still being written.

White himself was at the center of one of those events, almost as soon as he arrived to succeed Paul Vallas as superintendent of the Recovery School District. As it

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