From Diane Ravitch’s blog — incredibly important response to slight of hand “research”:
David Berliner Responds to Economists Who Discount Role of Child Poverty.
Monthly Archives: July 2014
David Berliner Responds to Economists Who Discount Role of Child Poverty via Diane Ravitch
Filed under Data, politics, Shared Posts, Social Justice
Donna Brazile, Ted Strickland and Jennifer Granholm To Defend Public Education
Opponents of current reform trends in education (and even just those with some skepticism) have had few ways to get their messages out in the past decade. While charter school chains have found wealthy investors and enthusiastic politicians, public school teachers have traditionally relied upon their unions to publicly advocate on their behalf. However, until very recently both the AFT and the NEA have openly supported reforms such as the Common Core State Standards despite rank and file concerns, and both unions offered endorsements to Democratic candidates who have openly courted the same money that has backed charter school expansion, CCSS and evaluating teachers by high stakes tests, many teacher concerns have had limited means to reach the public. Add to that a media that has seemed completely incapable of asking a single teacher about the combination of reform forces that have potential to greatly damage public education, it has been lonely work to try to raise alarms.
That may be changing.
First, there are some in the media actually asking hard questions about how such a narrow slate of characters have managed to push nearly all 50 states in the same curriculum direction without having a robust public debate. The luster of charter schools as the proposed cure all for urban education is coming under question with more and more reporting of the opportunists who have rushed into the poorly regulated sector of education. As Common Core has begun to reach classrooms with plans to begin mass testing of students and to implement value added measures for teacher evaluations, union leaders have backed away from initial support of the standards themselves. They are joined by a small but growing movement of parents at the grassroots who are choosing to “opt out” their children from the increasing testing regimen that has characterized education reform of the past decade and a half.
These are all developments that promise to change the direction of our education reform discourse. But it is likely not enough. Proponents of Common Core, mass testing, test-based teacher evaluations and the rapid expansion of charter schools have the ears of major media figures, federal and state governments and are able to call upon deep pocketed allies to pummel those who try to slow down their goals. Eva Moskowitz’s allies unleashed more than 3 million dollars in a 3 week advertising blitz against New York Mayor Bill de Blasio when he dared give her only 80 percent of what she wanted. They also seem to recruit new front people easily — former NBC and CNN personality Campbell Brown has joined Michelle Rhee’s campaign against teacher job protections by taking the Vergara lawsuit on its first cross country tour to New York.
The balance of voices is changing.
The AFT announced the formation of a new lobbying group, Democrats for Public Education that will be chaired by former Ohio Governor Ted Strickland, former Michigan Governor Jennifer Granholm and DNC vice-chair Donna Brazile. Ms. Brazile addressed the AFT convention:
Why does this change the balance? For starters, it says that the leadership of America’s teacher unions is pivoting from hoping that reforms will be both disruptive AND productive to realizing that many reforms threaten the very nature of public education. More importantly? It provides media allies for defending public schools and their students and teachers. Although the research on many reform efforts’ problematic outcomes is solid and growing, voice and access has been much slower. What does Donna Brazile bring that academic research and the concerns of parents and classroom teachers does not? Access. Ms. Brazile’s phone calls get returned. Mr. Strickland and Ms. Granholm are known in all 50 state capitols and Washington. While Bill Gates, Michelle Rhee, Joel Klein and pro-reform politicians have had the media’s ears all to themselves and have, to date, successfully portrayed their opponents as not caring about kids, now there is an organization headlined by well-connected and well-known allies to provide the alternative perspective. In an age of media driven by sound bites 24/7, that matters.
How did Democrats for Education Reform, the hedge-fund financed group that has donated to numerous Democrats in exchange for support of charter school expansion, respond to the announcement? “Welcome to the jungle, baby” was it.
Think about that for a second. They could have written about welcoming a public debate. They could have written about their “disappointment” that such prominent people could not see the value of their ideas, but that they look forward to engaging the public. They could have written a spirited defense of charter school innovation for students.
Instead, they offer what could be Gordon Gekko’s back-up tag phrase. Someone is either arrogant or worried — and someone is not thinking about the kids first and foremost.
Filed under Activism, charter schools, Common Core, DFER, Media, politics, Unions
Four More Things To Tell President Obama
Valerie Strauss of the Washington Post wrote last week that President Obama and Secretary of Education Arne Duncan had a meeting with teachers over lunch. Her column provided space for the 2007 Arkansas Teacher of the Year, Justin Minkel, to offer his insights into how the meeting went and what the President and Secretary heard from the teachers present. Mr. Minkel, who is a member of both the National Network of State Teachers of the Year and the Center for Teacher Quality and who blogs for Education Week and for CTQ, wrote cogently and intelligently about four key points:
1. There’s Nothing Wrong With the Kids
2. “Responsibility and Delight Can Co-exist”
3. It’s not about good and bad teachers. It is about good and bad teaching.
4. If we want students to innovate, collaborate, and solve real-world problems, we need to make it possible for teachers to do the same things.
These are outstanding points, and I thank Mr. Minkel and his fellow teachers for communicating them directly at such a high level. There are, of course, many other points that the President and his Secretary of Education need to genuinely hear and know. I would like to offer my own four points to build upon these:
1. You are looking for teacher effectiveness in all the wrong places
Teachers matter. Nobody should ever suggest otherwise. But No Child Left Behind and Race to the Top both represent sustained efforts to locate how teachers matter in standardized test scores, and since Race to the Top, the strongest proxy for teacher effectiveness written into state and federal policy has been annual student progress on standardized testing. This is a flawed approach for several reasons. To begin with, the tests that are designed to demonstrate if a student has mastered a body of knowledge or a set of skills are designed for that purpose and that purpose only. As Dr. Nunoz of Concordia University Chicago notes, testing and measurement is a precise field and it is improper and inaccurate to use an examination for a different purpose because it would not be designed the same way. The American Statistical Association released a statement on value added measurements earlier this year that clearly stated that the association does not believe any examination currently used to measure teacher effectiveness meets the strict criteria necessary for such a test, and they noted that most studies on VAMs find that teachers’ input only accounts for between 1-14% of the variability among student results on such tests. Looking for teacher effectiveness in the results of standardized examinations is essentially playing dice with teachers’ futures.
Even the research that claims such models are useful is suspect. As Dr. Jesse Rothstein of U.C. Berkeley found, even the Gates Foundation funded research on “Measures of Effective Teaching” makes claims that are poorly supported by their own data. Despite the MET study’s endorsement of VAMs, Dr. Rothstein notes that “teacher evaluations based on observed state test outcomes are only slightly better than coin tosses at identifying teachers whose students perform unusually well or badly on assessments of conceptual understanding (p. 5),” and goes on to note that teachers whose students did well on standardized exams did far less well on measurements of critical thinking. Using standardized examinations as a measure of teacher effectiveness can reward a weak teacher who focuses on test preparation and punish a highly skilled teacher who emphasizes higher order thinking and creative problem solving.
Teachers, of course, do make a difference for students. And there are teachers who do not teach well, and there are teachers who excel at the work. But the impact of that teaching is simply poorly represented in paper and pencil standardized examinations. It can be found in student produced artifacts that explore rich content in creative and insightful ways. It can be found in a classroom that “buzzes” with the constant hum of excited work. It can be found in the individual lives of children who are inspired to explore a field they never knew held interest before. It can be found in the children who find a mentor and reliable adult among the body of teachers in a school and stick with their education when nobody thought they could. It can be found the eyes of a student whose talents and passions are affirmed for the first time in his or her young life. This is what happens in millions of classrooms across the country on a daily basis that cannot be captured on a standardized examination.
Taylor Mali, teacher and poet, captures quite a lot of that nicely in this poetry performance:
2. It’s the poverty
You’ve been told by a lot of current reformers that talking about the extraordinary difficulties of educating children born into poverty is just “making excuses” for “bad teachers”. I cannot say not only how much this refrain hurts teachers who have dedicated themselves to working with our most needy students, but also how much it hurts those very same students. It places upon the teachers a burden to, on their own, lift children of poverty to a level playing field with their more advantaged peers. It thrusts upon those children schools that keep cutting out critical thinking and aesthetic enrichment in favor of test preparation because of draconian layoff and reorganization threats while offering the students a brutally unlevel playing field if they graduate. I can think of few practical jokes more cruel than this.
Poverty is not an “excuse”; it is a fact that broadly impacts the earliest childhood of 22% of our young people. It is a fact that we do much less to alleviate poverty’s deprivations than our peer democracies in the West. And because our residential income segregation is very high and has risen by over a third since 1980, it is a fact that poverty disproportionately impacts specific schools and school systems.
And it is not a fact that is fully constrained to those meeting the federal definition of poverty. Income, housing and food insecurity impact the lower middle class, many of whom are clinging to that status solely because of federal assistance programs and the Earned Income Tax Credit. In 2011, only North Dakota and New Hampshire had child food insecurity rates below 15%. The Hamilton Project report also notes that food insecurity can have potentially life long consequences in both educational outcomes and economic security, but teachers are going to be held accountable for children who will suffer lower birth weights, worse lifetime health outcomes and lower economic outcomes because Congress refuses to fund expanded SNAP benefits that amount to less than half of the cost of USS Gerald Ford.
This is not meant to “excuse” those teachers and administrators who give up on children in poverty or near poverty and do not do their utmost to educate, inspire and mentor those in their care. However, it is intellectually and morally bankrupt to ignore that our much lamented gap in PISA can be located almost entirely within our poverty level, and to blame teachers and schools for failing to single-handedly overcome a phenomenon much larger than our schools and about which the billionaires driving today’s “reforms” refuse to discuss.
3. There is no “secret sauce” for educating our most struggling children
Former White House Chief of Staff and current Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel opined that Noble Network of charter schools in Chicago had the “secret sauce” for motivating students to perform. An element of that recipe? Collecting $400,000 in disciplinary “fines” from its students since 2008. Advocates of the rapidly expanding charter sector of education like to paper over such practices, but it is vitally important to expose them because while their sponsors and leaders like to hype test performance, they often achieve those results at the expense of up to half of their students.
This should be absolutely clear: with 1000s of charter schools across the country, there must be many schools and teachers who do a genuinely great job with the students in their care. Unfortunately, they are overshadowed by the high profile charter schools that are essentially corporate entities and that tout themselves as miracle factories based upon high test scores. They consume public dollars, refuse public accountability, have astonishing attrition rates usually at the expense of the neediest children enrolled in them, and have formed powerful lobbies to influence politicians to continue to favor charter schools over fully public schools.
This is not to say that none of these schools do a good job of educating the students that they do accommodate and that there are not students and families who are sincerely grateful to be in those schools. But it does mean that they cannot legitimately claim to have found any “secret sauce” for educating our neediest students when they engage in extreme cream skimming, refuse to let the public examine their finances and rely upon their extremely wealthy patrons to strong arm politicians on their behalf. To put this in perspective: In 2012, the NEA spent $13 million in campaign contributions total across the country, and the AFT spent $5.9 million. Success Academy Charter’s supporters spent $3.6 million in THREE WEEKS just because Mayor de Blasio slowed down the expansion of the network.
Truly working with our neediest takes far more than advertising and cherry-picked student bodies.
4. Arts and the humanities matter
Despite very shaky evidence to back up the claim, we have been treated to nonstop rhetoric about our “crisis” in graduates with STEM degrees, and policy has pushed hard to create more pipelines for people to enter such fields regardless of the actual employment picture for them. There is, however, evidence that in the age of test based accountability, we have marginalized endeavors that are critical to both our civic life and our general well being. Social studies instruction has shrunk from 9.5% of instructional time to 7.6%, meaning that our students spend less time today learning history and engaging in critical thinking about their civic life. While instruction in the English Language Arts has increased because of its status as a tested subject, there are legitimate concerns that the emphasis on reading informational texts in the Common Core State Standards and associated testing, will drive more classrooms away from reading great works of literary fiction and poetry.
And then there is the long term and precipitous decline in arts education which fell below 50% for 18 year olds in their childhood education in 2008. That means that half of the children in America born in 1990 received no arts education in their entire education K-12. Research is very clear that participation in the arts has a wide range of academic benefits from higher test scores to higher rates of college completion among low income students. Eliot Eisner of Stanford University notes the lessons that the arts teach such as: making judgments about relationships, seeing multiple answers to problems, accepting multiple perspectives, complex problem solving, learning that cognition is not limited by language, seeing large effects from small differences, and thinking through materials to fruition of an idea. It is not hard at all to see the connection between these capacities and the capacities that lead not simply to STEM competencies but also to STEM understanding and innovation. No wonder, then, that there is a small but growing movement to “move from STEM to STEAM” and place arts at the center of our drive for more STEM education.
While this is admirable, it is also not enough to envision the importance of the arts and humanities as a partner to scientific and technological advancement because they possess their own warrants. Eisner’s “ten lessons” also include: teaching children how to say what “cannot be said” via “poetic capacities,” experiencing things that cannot be experienced in any other way and exploring one’s capacity for feeling, symbolizing what is important in society. The arts and humanities, therefore, enrich us in ways that cannot be measured via test based accountability but which are part of our essential humanity. That 50% of our young people experience no arts education means that their education was fundamentally inattentive to their humanity. As we advocate for literature, poetry, music, visual and performing arts for all children, we must remember this — the arts and humanities cannot become yet another preserve of the wealthy and we cannot allow test based accountability to squeeze what is left of them from our public schools.
Filed under charter schools, Common Core, DFER, politics, schools, Social Justice, Testing, Unions, VAMs
Jonathan Chait Joins His Esteemed Colleagues at the New York Times in Not Understanding a Thing About Teachers
I was reading my news feed yesterday morning, when I saw that Chalkbeat had retweeted an article from New York Magazine entitled “Teachers Unions Turn Against Democrats.” Having noted that NEA members voted to call for Secretary of Education Arne Duncan’s resignation, and knowing that a significant factor in Fordham Law School professor Zephyr Teachout’s campaign to challenge sitting Governor Andrew Cuomo is Cuomo’s enthusiastic embrace of current education reforms, I was prepared for an interesting article. Certainly, someone with Jonathan Chait’s experience and rhetorical talent would have an interesting examination of reform advocates’ efforts and rationales combined with the growing frustration of rank and file teachers and the balancing act attempted by union leaders trying to maintain their traditional coalition with Democrats and advocate for their members.
Boy, was I wrong.
Chait does acknowledge that Democrats have been forceful in pushing reform efforts that are more historically comfortable ground for Republicans, but his portrayal of the reforms themselves is entirely problematic and he ultimately chalks up firm opposition as the work of reactionary “hard liners”. In Chait’s view, the center of this hard-liner coalition is New York University’s Diane Ravitch who has been blogging on the agenda of education reformers for several years now.
The leadership of this movement has fallen to Diane Ravitch, formerly a right-of-center education activist who has converted to the cause of teachers-union absolutism with an evangelical fervor, maintaining an almost superhuman schedule of public speaking and prolific blogging.
Ravitch has depicted education reform as a plot by corporate elites to privatize schools and destroy unions. If charter schools claim to help poor children by providing longer school days, then Ravitch is certain thatlonger school days cannot work. Having identified their enemies with the cause of pure evil, Ravitch and her fellow hard-liners have taken to defending not only the practice of paying teachers by length of service, but the structure and form of the school day (created in an era of stay-at-home mothers and designed around the summer harvest) as a standard of perfection that must be defended absolutely. Ravitch and her allies have found the leadership of the unions disturbingly faint of heart.
Goodness.
Does Chait expend even minimal effort in examining what in education reform is actually agitating teachers? Beyond acknowledgement that the administration and its allies have embraced accountability and charter schools and implying that resistance to those efforts is the work of unthinking hardliners, not much. He doesn’t examine teachers’ frustration and anxiety that the largest curriculum experiment in American history has been implemented with almost no study and little time to prepare at the behest of one man’s exceptional wealth. He doesn’t examine how the “accountability” measures favored by reformers come from statistical models that are not accepted as valid measures of teachers’ impact on student learning. He doesn’t look at the impact on students, teachers and schools of the constant drive for more testing of students, nor does he look at the corporations that are eager to monetize the results of those tests.
He does not consider the ways in which the rich and influential have used charter school expansion to line their own investment portfolios, nor does he consider the corrupting influence on Democratic politicians of hedge fund manager created political action committees that use campaign donations to ensure charter schools keep expanding. He does not examine that many charter school “successes” come at the expense of their appalling attrition rates, nor does he reference the new reports of widespread fraud and abuse of public money in the rapidly growing and poorly regulated charter sector. He mentions the Vergara decision in California and opines that it “embarrasses” teacher unions by highlighting the “least-defensible aspect of their agenda and its most sympathetic victims,” but he does not mention the extremely questionable research that was used to support the case, nor does he mention that the victims in question could not name a single teacher who was “grossly ineffective”. Since Mr. Chait deems Dr. Ravitch to be unreasonable, here is the post trial brief that explains the issue.
Jonathan Chait is an experienced journalist and editor. He had it entirely within his power to write an interesting piece on the potential of a rift between Democrats and one of their traditionally reliable constituencies, and to examine, fairly, the different sides of the issues. Instead, he took it as a given that charter schools are successful alternatives and only union absolutists have any qualms about accountability and tenure reforms.
That, of course, would have taken more work than portraying Dr. Ravitch as the Abigail Williams of the teaching profession.
How Jon Chait Sees Diane Ravitch?
“The best anti-poverty program around is….” a strong union.
In his 2010 State of the Union address, President Obama reviewed the legislation his administration had passed as favoring “reform” and “innovation” in our schools, and observed that “In the 21st century, the best anti-poverty program around is a world-class education.” Since that address, we have seen the “reform” and “innovation” that the President was talking about: CCSS, high stakes testing, teacher evaluations tied to those evaluations, charter school expansion. And now former members of the President’s administration are joining corporate reformer Campbell Brown in an effort to sue away teachers’ workplace protections.
But is the underlying assumption of the President’s statement that is driving all of these efforts to replace public education as we have known it with an amalgam of public and public-in-name-only schools with teachers who lack strong union protection and who are assessed primarily via student test scores even accurate? Does a “world class education” function as the “best” anti-poverty program or was the President engaging in dangerously simplistic rhetoric that places a burden on primary, secondary and higher education without asking what conditions need to exist in the market for labor?
There isn’t a simple answer for this, and there are plenty of competing voices. For example, the Bureau of Labor Statistics estimates that only 27% of the workforce need college degrees for our jobs, and they project only 23% of the labor force will need college or post graduate degrees in 2022. This is disputed by Anthony Carnevale and colleagues at the Georgetown Center for Education and the Workforce, who note that the “college wage premium” has grown 37% since 1976, indicating that employers are currently willing to pay a premium for graduates with post secondary education.
Recent data and analysis suggest that college is worth the effort and even the debt in gained economic output over the course of one’s career. The Federal Reserve notes that those with a bachelors degree are likely to earn up to a million dollars more over their lifetime than peers with only a high school education, and even those with associates degrees earn 100s of thousands more. Once cost of money out of pocket for the degree and inflation are considered, that still amounts to an additional 500 thousand. However, these numbers should be read with additional research on the lifetime cost of debt accrued in obtaining the degree which can amount to over 200 thousand dollars in net assets by retirement and which disproportionately effects minority college graduate who take out higher debt loads on average.
So is that case closed? Everyone should aspire to college education and secure themselves in the middle class? Not so fast.
While a premium exists in wages for college graduates over their peers, that premium has gone up for reasons other than demand for college educated workers. Pew Social Trends demonstrates that one contributing factor in the increased gap is the sharp drop in wages for non college educated citizens even while wages for those with a college degree have remained stagnant when adjusted for inflation. In 2012 dollars, a Millennial with a college degree earns $6600 more than a “Silent Generation” graduate in 1965, but only $730 more than a “Late Boomer” did in 1986. Meanwhile, those Millennials without a college degree earns almost $3400 less today than in 1965. College education, then, is indeed becoming a minimum requirement, but just to keep up at current, stagnant, levels of opportunity and to not fall off the cliff into chronic economic insecurity.
And this is where the decline in union representation in the workforce needs to be discussed. It does not appear to be enough to grow a healthy and vibrant middle class simply to say that all middle class aspirants need to attend college, especially when the gap between college and non college income can be at least partially attributed to falling wages. According to a paper from the National Bureau of Economic Research by Emin M. Dinlersoz of the Census Bureau and Jeremy Greenwood of University of Pennsylvania, the decline of organized labor can be attributed to technological innovation that either replaced or outsourced non-skilled jobs that traditionally enjoyed union representation. While there is no doubt that globalization and technology have been highly disruptive forces to organized work forces, it is also insufficient an explanation. To begin with, trade agreements and tax policies that lead to jobs being sent offshore are partially the result of choices made by elected officials as well as the result of innovation. Second, the drop off in labor unionization is distinctly steep in the United States compared with other industrialized economies. If labor’s decline in the United States was solely the result of especially “creative destruction” in the economy and not at least partially the result of choices made by those who influence the economy, our labor decline would be far less steep.
Labor’s decline and the overall dismal growth of inequality in our economy have marched hand in hand since the late 1970s. In this video, Colin Gordon of the University of Iowa maps the decline of union participation in the United States with the steady growth of the Gini coefficient:
Correlation may not be causality, but certain trend lines call our attention to possible causes, and Gordon reports research that notes up to a third of the rise in inequality in the 1980s and 1990s can be attributed to the decline of labor. If we want to address what has been happening to America’s widely stagnating middle class and especially to the cratering lower middle class, we must look at the decline of unions. While labor unions cannot revitalize by organizing jobs that no longer exist, there are credible arguments that even large swaths of the IT sector could benefit from unionization.
Which is why the full frontal assault on teachers’ unions since the Great Recession is both disheartening and an existential threat to the remains of the middle class. The NEA and AFT represent more than 4 million unionized teachers, but more than that, their representation provides those teachers with an ability to negotiate openly and fairly for their wages, working conditions and job security. Those negotiations help our children’s teachers maintain a middle class status they might not be able to achieve individually, and the due process rights they obtain from negotiations protect them in a job environment that has inherent political elements and can risk confrontation with the community. Given the mass of new job pressures layered on to the teaching profession since No Child Left Behind and Race to the Top, it is unthinkable that teachers’ collective bargaining rights and job protections should be subject to legislative and legal challenges across the country.
But that is exactly what is happening, and it isn’t merely a challenge to teachers’ due process rights — it is aimed directly at one of the largest bodies of unionized middle class professionals left in the country. Where will our Gini coefficient be in ten more years if teaching is no longer a unionized work force?
The contradictions of what we demand of teachers and with whom we entrust them and the goals of anti-union “reform” efforts to reduce teachers’ job securities and ability to negotiate fair wages and benefits are manifest. President Obama tasks a “world class education” with reducing poverty in the face of the multitude of social and economic factors that have entrenched poverty in our society. Every parent who sends a child to public school entrusts the teachers of that school with the well being of that child. That breaking the strength of teachers’ collective bargaining rights has appeared as an urgent need to make education better belies are far more malicious intent behind the well financed campaigns of Michelle Rhee and Campbell Brown. Teachers should not be the only ones who take notice — the entire middle class should as well.
From Mike Thompson of the Detroit Free Press
Filed under Activism, politics, Social Justice, Unions
Daniel Katz, Ph.D. 