Tag Archives: reporting

July 21, 2014 · 6:58 am

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.

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June 10, 2014 · 9:54 pm

Gates’ Money and Privacy Activism — Opposition to Ed. Reform Hits the Mainstream

A few stories caught a lot of eyes over the weekend.  None of that is good news for education reformers who have banked on stealth and little reporting.

The first is a major article and interview regarding the role Bill Gates’ money has played in the development of, promotion of and adoption of the Common Core State Standards in the Washington Post.  The story is not entirely complete.  For starters, it fails to disclose that David Coleman already had funding from the Gates Foundation for his Student Achievement Partners, so a meeting with Gates in 2008 is not their first intersection.  Also, it does not explore the heavy hand that Gates has also had in the push for more high stakes testing to evaluate teachers via his funding of the highly flawed Measures of Effective Teaching study, nor does it examine the role that Gates has played in enabling technology entrepreneurs to mine the data generated from those tests without parental consent.

Regardless, the article is both informative and important for several reasons.  First, it is one of the first times anyone in a major news outlet has provided a portrait of the diverse opposition to current reform efforts in education that doesn’t make it sound like mostly the work of Alex Jones style cranks.  The article even quotes academics who question whether the standards are based on sound research on how children learn or even if there is a connection between quality standards and learning.  Second, this is an article in a major outlet that does not equivocate in the slightest about how much influence one very rich man has had in trying to control the entire course of American public education.  While it does not editorialize on the question, it is hard to read how many federal, state, nonprofit, academic and corporate entities were lobbied by, influenced by or funded by Gates and not wonder what role democracy has anymore when it comes to our public schools.

Finally, Gates himself comes across as defensive and dismissive:

Gates is disdainful of the rhetoric from opponents. He sees himself as a technocrat trying to foster solutions to a profound social problem — gaping inequalities in U.S. public education — by investing in promising new ideas.

This would be more convincing if Gates displayed the slightest interest in testing new ideas before unveiling them in 45 states at once before parents and teachers have a chance to understand them, indeed, before anyone has a chance to understand if they are a net positive or not.  From Gates’ point of view and experience, this must make sense.  He has compared common standards to standardized electrical outlets and computer code as a means of allowing innovation, and certainly getting DOS on most desktop computers in the world led to a lot of software developers having a common platform.  But education is not consumer electronics, and bypassing the entirety of stakeholders who value public education for a variety of reasons was going to lead to push back, and even today, Bill Gates does not demonstrate awareness of that.

The second article appeared in Politico and was dedicated to parent activists working to protect their children from data mining operations tied to public education.  This represents another public airing of activities whose proponents would prefer to avoid being seen in the open.  The report quotes New York’s Leonie Haimson of Class Size Matters about how parents have reacted when informed about the plans of technology firms to use pretty much every bit of data they can get their hands on, and it quotes worried data entrepreneurs coming to grips with parental opposition:

Many said they had always assumed parents would support their vision: to mine vast quantities of data for insights into what’s working, and what’s not, for individual students and for the education system as a whole.

“People took for granted that parents would understand [the benefits], that it was self-evident,” said Michael Horn, a co-founder of the Clayton Christensen Institute, an education think tank.

Instead, legitimate questions about data security have mixed with alarmist rhetoric in a combustible brew that’s “spreading like wildfire” on social media, said Aimee Rogstad Guidera, executive director of the Data Quality Campaign, a nonprofit advocacy group for data-driven education.

That fear, Guidera said, “leads to people saying, ‘Shut it down. No more.’”

Guidera hopes to counter the protests by circulating videos and graphics emphasizing the value of data. But she acknowledges the outrage will be hard to rein in.

Could the parent lobby scuttle a data revolution that’s been championed by the White House, pushed by billionaire philanthropists and embraced by reformers of both parties as the best hope to improve public education? “I do have that concern,” Guidera said. “Absolutely.”

The article doesn’t go into detail about just how much money is thought to be at stake and takes the data mining firms at their word that they only want to help, but I came away from reading it with one resounding message: this damage is entirely self inflicted, but the data miners see the parent activists as the problem.  They did not want to do the hard marketing work of convincing people that they were doing something valuable, and they did not anticipate that parents might see the data generated by their children’s public educations as something they’d want to protect rather than just shovel over for free.  It is hard to sympathize here, especially when they have avoided openness from the beginning.

Which leads to the third article from today: a call from the Gates Foundation for a two year “moratorium” on high stakes decisions based upon Common Core aligned testing.  This is the first official wavering from the Gates camp since the standards and testing drive began in earnest, and it is highly significant as an indication of concern that the whole enterprise is in trouble.  It may also be a miscalculation — yes, teacher opposition to using value added measures of their effectiveness based on standardized tests is strong, and yes, teachers have barely had time to adjust to the new standards.  But two years will not fix the flaws in VAMs, and it will not assuage parental concerns about the role of testing and data mining.  It will potentially take a chunk out of testing companies and data mining companies who were making business plans based upon all Common Core states embarking on wide scale testing next year, and I find it interesting that the Gates Foundation is willing to have them cool their heels while the standards’ supporters try to do something they have avoided all along: talk in public.

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May 14, 2014 · 10:57 am

Ras Baraka Wins in Newark Despite Millions in Wall Street Money Going Against Him

Ras Baraka, high school principal and son of poet Amiri Barak, won the Newark mayor’s race yesterday, on a campaign that heavily emphasized the influence of outside reformers who have rushed to impose massive change on Newark’s school system.  According to Bob Braun, 50 year veteran of the Star Ledger, Wall Street interests rushed in the waning days of the campaign with 3 million dollars to try to get Shavar Jeffries over the top. It will remain to be seen if the new mayor has the ability to do anything to slow down or stop Trenton appointed school chief Cami Anderson and her controversial “One Newark” plan, but Mr. Baraka’s victory is instructive.

School reformers will undoubtedly decry this as a set back for “the children” as they often do when people question the endless emphasis on standards, high stakes testing, firing teachers, closing schools and turning them over to charter operators, but we have known for many years now the detrimental effects of poverty in childhood and not one of the corporate reformers’ ideas has any answer for that.  Pointing out that placing unrealistic demands on schools, essentially setting them up to fail, and then turning them over to charter operators who have become an investment vehicle for Wall Street is unfair and anti-democratic is not making excuses — it is demanding that “reformers” be upfront about how they have been monetizing public education.

The Newark race is also instructive because it represents a voter backlash against the general pace of change being placed upon public education from outside the democratic process.  Newark was placed under an astonishingly rapid pace for wholesale reform by former Mayor Cory Booker and Governor Chris Christie who had gained massive funding pledges from financial interests.  Booker himself is quoted in the New Yorker article as urgently pushing “reform” ahead regardless of what anyone in the path of it might think.  Now I doubt that anyone who is being honest would question that Newark needs change — administrative overhead is astonishingly high just as an example.  (I would like to thank Leonie Haimson of Class Size Matters who sent me a fact check from Bruce Baker of Rutgers University.  I sourced the observation of administration costs in Newark from The New Yorker article, but Professor Baker points out that Newark’s administration ranks 24th out of 103 K-12 districts in New Jersey school systems with over 3500 students.  Data from the state DOE can be found here.)

But Booker and Christie’s race to push reform from the top down absent any real effort to build a grassroots coalition for change is illustrative of the entire approach to “reform” that we have seen since No Child Left Behind raised the stakes on public education in the Bush administration.  Everything — from Common Core, to assessments, to value-added teacher evaluation, to tenure reform, to charter school expansion, to creating vast data clouds for vendors to mine — has come at a break neck clip without meaningful involvement of parents and teachers.

Public education is a part of our national “Commons” — our collective cultural and economic resources.  What has been going on in the past 15 years has been a cynical exploitation reminiscent of Garrett Hardin’s essay “The Tragedy of the Commons” where individuals pursuing rational self interest deplete or even destroy that resource.  It is certain that many involved in the Newark story sincerely believed they were working to improve Newark’s schools, but it is equally certain that many others were urging that process forward without democratic input because they saw many millions to be made regardless of whether or not the schools became great.

Yesterday, the voters of Newark said “enough” to that.  It is up to the new mayor to bring change for all of Newark’s children and to do so with the input of parents and teachers.

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May 6, 2014 · 9:46 pm

Who are “Democrats for Education Reform”?

Jan Resseger is the former chair of the National Council of Churches Committee on Public Education, and she has a blog post linking to a very insightful infographic on the organization “Democrats for Education Reform,” the group behind the “Camp Philos” education reform meeting in Lake Placid this week.

The graphic can be found here, and it comes courtesy of Billy Easton of the Alliance for Quality Education.  The short version is that, far from being a genuine organization of members of the Democratic party with ideas about education reform, it is a lobbying group designed to influence the policy choices of Democratic party politicians and which has taken huge sums of money from the same interests that have lobbied for aggressive charter expansion, curtailing teacher unions and assessing teachers  based on test scores.  While Democrats such as California’s Gloria Romero and New York’s Joel Klein have been prominent in the organization, it is extremely clear that on education, they are firmly allied with the pro-testing and pro-privatization forces that have been trying to drive education “reform” further and further away from schools as a locally democratic institution.  DFER is largely the creation of Whitney Tilson, founder of hedge fund T2 Partners, who was quoted in this New York Times article about the tenure of Joel Klein:

Charter schools, explained Whitney Tilson, the founder of T2 Partners and one of their most ardent supporters, are the perfect philanthropy for results-oriented business executives. For one thing, they can change lives permanently, not just help people get by from day to day. For another, he said, “hedge funds are always looking for ways to turn a small amount of capital into a large amount of capital.”

I’ve looked at that quote from several different angles: And assuming that it only unfortunately suggests an effort to turn schools into a profit stream, it staggering misconstrues why education costs what it costs.  If Tilson meant that a hedge fund can take a small investment in a charter school and turn it into a “large amount of capital” in the form of educated adults, the idea still misses why non-charter schools often need to spend more money to be in compliance with offering an appropriate education to ALL students in their zoned schools.  Charter schools’ cost “savings” frequently come from refusing or simply weeding out students who need more intensive and expensive interventions to succeed at school.  That’s a bit like praising the economy of a car manufacturer who gets permission to build cars without seatbelts.

It is also emblematic of the age we live in: groups across the spectrum adopt “brands” that can pass a very cursory glance, but which fall apart after more scrutiny.  The lesson?  Always use more scrutiny – whether it is a chain of hedge fund backed charter schools claiming miraculous results or a supposedly grass roots sounding organization that fronts for those same interests.

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May 3, 2014 · 9:15 am

Education Week Blog Piece on Charter School Funding Research

This caught my eye yesterday….for several reasons.

The first is that we can expect the charter school movement to latch on to these findings and demand that more states impose upon cities and communities the sorts of “protections” that were recently added to the New York state budget, which amount to extraordinary favors to well connected and already well funded chains of charter schools.  I have no doubt that there are probably many small, individual charter schools that do excellent work and struggle for sufficient funding, but I also have no doubt that the biggest noise about so-called threats to charters are coming from chains like Success and KIPP that are lavishly funded and connected to hedge fund billionaire patrons.

The second reason is that the blogger actually raised important additional considerations about why charter funding may be lagging on a per pupil basis that is frequently overlooked by lofty news organizations that report on charter school claims.

The issue of charter funding and the disparities that exist may depend on the methods used to do the calculations, though.

 

“For me, this is not research that’s helping draw good policies,” said Gary Miron, a professor at Western Michigan University who researchers and evaluates school reforms and education policies.

 

Drawing on his own previous analyses, Miron contends that charter schools already have a cost advantage that may not be captured and explained by the data.

 

“Special education and student support services explains most of the difference in funding,” said Miron. “Charters can get a lot more funding, but it would require that they enroll more students with severe and moderate disabilities. They aren’t enrolling these students.”

 

Other categorical funding, such as that distributed for vocational education, would also bring more funding to charters, should they choose to provide it.

 

In fact, in his studies, Miron found that charters have a cost advantage, because charters do not have to provide the same services or have the same expenditures as traditional public schools.Transportation costs, for example, are an area in which charters have a funding advantage. Districts are required to provide student transportation while charters are not.

If charter schools do not enroll similar numbers of students on IEPs and English Language Learners, it is entirely reasonable for their funding to be less than entirely public schools that are required to fully serve those populations of students.  Without accounting for that, the report draws a very questionable conclusion using figures that have dogged public discussion of education for years but which are, bluntly, one of my biggest pet peeves.

Which is reason number three: per pupil allocations as a marker of funding and a tool for policy.  It is an easy number to come up with: take the total school budget, divide it by the number of students in the district and voila! You have a per pupil spending figure.

And you have absolutely no idea what that number could possibly mean.

Per pupil costs make for a simple talking point, but a very little thinking effort demonstrates that two children do not necessarily cost the same to educate.  A classroom full of AP students may cost more than a classroom of college preparatory students because the teacher may be a well compensated veteran with a smaller number of students.  A student with an IEP or in ESL classes will cost more than the per pupil average if the district is properly committed to providing them with all legal accommodations, including additional personnel.  A district that is top heavy with administrators will have a higher per pupil cost without necessarily having more resources for the classroom. A district that cannot budget capital improvements will have a higher per pupil cost to cover the price of additional heating fuel in the winter due to leaky windows — and kids will have a harder time concentrating if they remain cold from November to April.

Any policy or discussion of policy that ignores or glosses over these facts is both deceptive and possibly destructive.  Consider vouchers as an example.  Taking a child’s “per pupil” money and handing it over to a new school does not make the old school magically one child less expensive to run.  Until enough children leave that the school starts dismissing staff and faculty or perhaps shuttering a disused wing, the lost student just ups the per pupil average for those who remaining — while skimming money out of the budget.  Meanwhile, the school getting voucher money did not magically become exactly one more student more expensive to run.

Here’s a mantra to repeat to politicians and education reporters: An individual child’s public education is not a product.  It costs what it costs to most effectively assist that child to learn as much as he or she can…and to preserve that child’s joy for learning and curiosity about the world.

Practices that shunt aside students who are harder to accommodate or that cover content while crushing the spirit, may be good for the budget, but we don’t aspire to them for children. So when we are discussing whether or not a particular sector of education is being “underfunded” it is important to consider far more than the sum of money they receive.

 

 

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April 24, 2014 · 9:49 am

Chalkbeat Gets a Letter Cogently Pointing Out Bias in Reporting — Responds With a Shrug

Leonie Haimson and other activists at Class Size Matters sent a letter to Chalkbeat.org pointing out the evident bias in their reporting of recent charter school controversies in New York.  In it, they note how much coverage has been devoted to the activities of pro-charter advocates compared to the coverage given to a citywide rally organized by the Community Education Councils.

Rather than sending one of your reporters to cover this event, you only posted a short blurb clearly taken from the press release after the fact.  Chalkbeat’s failure to assign a reporter to the event  glaringly contrasts with your close and detailed coverage of every move made by the charter operators and their backers.  Indeed, you published two different stories on the charter march across the Brooklyn Bridge, three different stories on the Albany rally for charters (though you failed to disclose that Gov. Cuomo was actually behind it) ,  and  on March 29  you ran two stories on reactions to the budget bills, BOTH from the point of view of the charter operators.

 

Even more importantly, you have failed to cover any of the substantive issues and reasons behind our anger, including how unprecedented these charter provisions are, how they apply only to NYC, how they will  detract from the city’s already underfunded capital plan and cost the taxpayers millions of dollars, while thousands of public school students will continue sit in trailers or in overcrowded classrooms, without art, music, science or therapy and counseling rooms, or on waiting lists for Kindergarten.

The letter further noted how Chalkbeat’s expansion from the now defunct Gothamschools site was made possible with funding from the Gates Foundation and the Walton Family Foundation, both strong advocates for charter schools.

Chalkbeat’s very brief reply stated:

The bottom line is that the protest was clearly well-attended and unique in its CEC-wide organization, and we wish we had been there.

 

We make decisions about coverage every day based on the fact that we can’t be at every relevant event in the city or it would be impossible for us to provide any deeper coverage of these issues. We regularly attend, and skip, events that reflect a variety of viewpoints. That’s why we work to keep readers informed about events we don’t make it to with posts like the one we wrote about this protest.

They also swore that their coverage choices merely reflect their best judgment on how to contribute to the conversation in New York City and not the political bias of their funders.

Uh-huh.  The response would have been more honest with an Alfred E. Neuman cartoon.

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