February 2012 Archives

Dear Deborah,

Two weeks ago, New York state's highest court ruled that the New York City Department of Education could release for public scrutiny the value-added ratings of teachers of mathematics and English in grades 4-8. Rupert Murdoch's New York Post, joined by other media, had filed a "freedom of information" request to obtain the testing data, and the United Federation of Teachers opposed their release, saying that the ratings contained many inaccuracies.

According to The New York Times, current schools Chancellor Dennis Walcott had "mixed feelings" about the naming of names, but his predecessor, Joel Klein, had "championed" their release. A story in the Columbia Journalism Review said that the city's department of education had encouraged reporters to file "freedom of information" requests and responded with uncustomary speed when the requests were received.

The scores were released to the public last Friday.

Just for the record, it should be noted that on Oct. 1, 2008, then-president of the UFT Randi Weingarten signed a joint letter with then-Chancellor Klein that said: "We wish to be clear on one point: the Teacher Data Reports are not to be used for evaluation purposes." On the same day, then-Deputy Chancellor Christopher Cerf (now acting commissioner of education in New Jersey) wrote a letter to Weingarten saying:
"1. It is DOE's firm position and expectation that Teacher Data Reports will not and should not be disclosed or shared outside the school community, defined to include administrators, coaches, mentors, and other professional colleagues authorized by the teacher in question.
2. We will advise Principals to take steps accordingly.
3. In the event a [freedom of information] request for such documents is made, we will work with the UFT to craft the best legal arguments available to the effect that such documents fall within an exemption from disclosure."

Clearly, the New York City Department of Education honored neither the letter nor the spirit of the promises it made in 2008.

While it has become customary to pay homage to the necessity of "multiple measures" when evaluating teachers, the New York City teacher data reports rely on only one measure: the scores of students on standardized tests in reading and mathematics, taken on one day each year for three consecutive years.

Most testing experts believe that value-added assessment has many technical problems that reduce its validity and reliability. The most recent research review appears in the current issue of the Phi Delta Kappan. Unfortunately, advocates of measuring teacher quality by student test scores never let research or evidence or, in New York City's case, unequivocal commitments to privacy, get in their way.

Now comes the next act of this sordid drama. As soon as New York City made public the ratings of thousands of teachers, their names and scores were promptly published by the New York Post and posted online by The New York Times and other media outlets. According to the New York Post, the list included 12,170 names, but the Times says it was "roughly 18,000."

Only one New York City media organization, gothamschools.org, had the integrity to refuse to name names. Journalists Elizabeth Green and Philissa Cramer explained: "We determined that the data were flawed, that the public might easily be misled by the ratings, and that no amount of context could justify attaching teachers' names to the statistics. When the city released the reports, we decided, we would write about them, and maybe even release Excel files with names wiped out. But we would not enable our readers to generate lists of the city's 'best' and 'worst' teachers or to search for individual teachers at all."

City officials lamely warned that no one should "draw a conclusion based on this score alone," but their plea predictably fell on deaf ears.

The New York Post exulted with a front-page, full-page banner headline: "REVEALED: TEACHER GRADES." On day one, it printed a picture of and story about "the best teacher," and on day two, a picture of and story about "the worst teacher." The Post interviewed parents who said they wanted their child out of that teacher's class or they wanted her fired. In recent years, the Post has often run stories about teachers who allegedly are criminals, perverts, or just plain lazy, greedy dummies who can't be trusted to teach anything and shouldn't be allowed near children. It seems that the Murdoch journal won't be satisfied until every school has been turned over to private management, with no unions, no seniority, and no job protections whatever for teachers.

In its coverage, the august New York Times sent a mixed message. Its first headline said "Teacher Quality Widely Diffused, Ratings Indicate," which implied that the ratings actually measured teacher quality and meant something real and important. And indeed, the first three paragraphs stated that every corner of the city, from the poorest to the most affluent districts, had teachers who were the most and least successful.

But the fourth paragraph of the Times story revealed the statistical inadequacy of the measures: "... the margin of error is so wide that the average confidence interval around each rating spanned 35 percentiles in math and 53 in English, the city said. Some teachers were judged on as few as 10 students." With such a large margin of error, it's hard to know how anyone could take these ratings seriously. The precise numbers attached to each teacher's name are nothing more than junk science.

The ratings were based on state tests from 2007-2010. In the delicate words of the Times, the state tests from 2007-2009 had been "somewhat discredited." The state education department acknowledged in 2010 that the scores for several years prior to that date were unreliable and inflated. Someone in the state education department had lowered the passing mark in some grades year after year to create the illusion of progress. That someone was never identified and never held accountable for having misled students, teachers, and parents. The state recalibrated scores across the state in 2010, which caused scores to fall in every district and, coincidentally, put an end to the New York City "miracle." But those "somewhat discredited" scores for 2007-2009 are now accepted as the foundation of the city's value-added ratings.

In another story on the same day, the Times showed just how arbitrary the scores are. It reported that quite a few teachers in the city's most coveted public schools had low scores. Their scores were low not because they were bad teachers, but because of the city's methodology, which graded teachers on a curve and compared teachers with others with similar students. Suddenly, even the best schools started looking like undesirable schools.

As educators spoke up, the ratings became even more problematic. One teacher said to the Times, "This data is based on ONE test taken on ONE day. ...Yes, I administered this test that generated this data to my 6th graders two years ago. I no longer teach 6th grade, and I no longer teach in the same school, or even the same subject. How is this data relevant today?"

A junior high school teacher told the Times that he had received only two rankings, 88 percent in one year, and 38 percent in the next, yet his rating was averaged as 40 percent. He noted that his score included students who had transferred in or out mid-year as well as students who were truants and rarely attended class at all.

The principal of an outstanding elementary school in Brooklyn wrote me to say that the release of the ratings made her "absolutely sick." One of her teachers was rated for a year when she was away on child-care leave. A teacher of gifted children got a very low rating because her students' scores went from 3.97 to 3.92. That change of five/one-hundredths of a point caused the teacher to rank in the lowest sixth percentile citywide. The principal said this teacher is one of her best, yet she has been publicly labeled one of the city's worst teachers.

The principal said that the public ratings are very demoralizing to all her teachers, because they are so arbitrary. Even the best teachers wonder if their heads will be on the chopping block next year.

The day before the scores were released, Bill Gates published an opinion piece in the Times opposing their release. He said that teacher evaluations should not be made public because doing so make it impossible for supervisors and employees to have an honest conversation about how to improve. I only wish he had published his views weeks or months ago, or in 2010, when The Los Angeles Times initiated this practice. Perhaps a phone call by Bill Gates to New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg would have made a difference, since he doesn't listen to parents or teachers.

Gates raises an important question: What is the point of evaluations? Shaming employees or helping them improve? In New York City, as in Los Angeles in 2010, it's hard to imagine that the publication of the ratings—with all their inaccuracies and errors—will result in anything other than embarrassing and humiliating teachers. No one will be a better teacher because of these actions. Some will leave this disrespected profession—which is daily losing the trappings of professionalism, the autonomy requisite to be considered a profession. Some will think twice about becoming a teacher. And children will lose the good teachers, the confident teachers, the energetic and creative teachers, they need.

Impelled by Race to the Top and Secretary of Education Arne Duncan's No Child Left Behind waivers, teacher value-added ratings are rapidly spreading to other districts and states. And in these many other districts and states, the media will file requests for release of these ratings. When it first happened in Los Angeles in 2010, Arne Duncan said this was a wonderful thing, that "Silence is not an option." He also said, "What's there to hide?" And he said that parents have a right to know if their teacher is effective. Wherever there are value-added ratings, you can be sure that there will be public disclosure of those ratings to the media.

Interesting that teaching is the only profession where job ratings, no matter how inaccurate, are published in the news media. Will we soon see similar evaluations of police officers and firefighters, legislators and reporters? Interesting, too, that no other nation does this to its teachers. Of course, when teachers are graded on a curve, 50 percent will be in the bottom half, and 25 percent in the bottom quartile.

Is this just another ploy to undermine public confidence in public education?

If ever we get past this terrible time of teacher-bashing and blame-shifting, Arne Duncan and his ignominious Race to the Top have a lot to answer for. And so will the irresponsible leadership of the New York City public schools, which cares so little for the morale and spirit of those whom they presumably lead.

Diane

Posted by Diane Ravitch at 9:30 AM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

Dear Diane,

Three days with the North Dakota Study Group restores my spirits every year. Some great speeches, small "works in progress" workshops, presentations by students, and just food and talk, talk, talk.

I read your blog this week while I was at the NDSG and passed it around. It's superb, and we should all tweet it to anyone we can think of—not just educators.

Not surprisingly, the folks at the NDSG claimed there was an ugly new mood of blaming the poor for their poverty and the unemployed for having done something wrong somewhere in the past. Probably due to bad public schools. (Plus those bad mothers.)

But there is also some renewed optimism that we might, just might, see a resurgence of energy for saving democracy. It's barely hanging in there. The advantages fall so heavily in favor of the 1 percent (or maybe the 1-5 percent) that it's hard to see how we can restore a healthy balance. In the absence of unions there is no counterweight—not in terms of money, but in terms of willing volunteers to man/woman opposition parties, causes, etc. Democracy rests on that.

Ditto re. civil liberties. And judicial decisions by our odd Supreme Court, more activist than it has been since ...? We have drones and contract workers fighting our wars now; and public libraries suffering from short hours and, in some cases, being closed for lack of money. Post Offices are next. And we're selling naming rights to our buildings, stadiums, and parks. What next?

We know that next is the acceptance of the fact that "public" schools don't belong to their "public." Maybe the money comes from the public, but not "ownership." I've been looking at the boards of some of the new charter chains and it just hits you between the eyes: They are composed of bankers, hedge-funders, corporate CEOs, and the heads of the foundations who also fund the reforms. I'm sitting here looking at the board of directors of Eve Moscowitz's Success Academy in Brooklyn. I believe I can say, with confidence, that none send their own kids to city public schools or live near the new school. They are chairs of investment firms of one sort or another!

An old business slogan—buyer beware—has become the mantra of the business community toward ... school teachers. Over and over we hear that children and teachers have opposing interests. We know that without enduring relationships between adults and children we cannot and won't have schools to which we would willingly send our kids. Even babysitters have to be trusted before we leave our children in their care, and no script for the evening is a safety net if we don't. What we know for sure is that babysitters are not interchangeable parts, nor are teachers or schools.

But we have set up a so-called "competitive" system based on test scores that control teachers' jobs and students' grades. We've accepted distrust as the norm, and then turned "control" over to those who have virtually NO STAKE in the outcome or whose only stake is the money they can skim off the top—for board honoraria, real estate deals, a say in contracts to builders, cleaners, publishers, et al.

And I note that The New York Times the other day called upon the charter folks to close more schools, just as they are closing non-charters. To be fair. Does anyone on the editorial board of the Times send their kids to schools which are opened and closed on a regular basis, with kids constantly moving from school to school, teacher to teacher. The evidence on this is unequivocal: School mobility is tough on kids.

Imagine the anxiety level of parents and students who discover, via the New York Times next week, that their teacher is on the low end of the new published ratings for last year's student test scores. Who gets the highly rated ones? Probably the very folks who get them now because on the whole it's the experienced senior teachers whose kids score better. (See a recent study reported on by Mike Klonsky's SmallTalk blog this week.)

A lady just called me on the phone to ask for a donation for Democracy in America. I laughed and added, "That's a great idea!" Indeed, as my favorite button says: "Well, at least the war on education is doing well."

So I am afraid.

I think the mayor of New York City, and Eli Broad, ALEC (the American Legislative Exchange Council), and the board of directors of Success Academy are perfectly happy about a future in which most teachers come and go every five or so years. Temps. Easier to manage and harder to organize. A few will rise to leadership positions after a few years of teaching—after getting MBAs?—and the rest of the leaders will come from other fields like law, business, and the military.

I'm not so worried about what this will do to math scores, Diane. I no longer have a reason to trust the data-collectors. What worries me is what it does to the mission of K-12 schooling. Building and sustaining a democratic culture and vision is mysterious, and as far as I can tell, sometimes it seems to happen just by good luck. It may not be antithetical to getting good test scores, but it's not the same thing. We're not born democrats. It's even possibly an "unnatural" human invention. So where is it—if not in schools—that we imagine the habits of intellect to sustain democracy might develop, not to mention the habits of heart and the social experience that make it seem do-able, as well as sensible? This includes experiencing what trust feels and looks like—and why it's so important to democracy. Meanwhile: Beware what they are selling us.

Deb

P.S. How did my family get possession of the Diego Rivera centerpiece mural? It's a good story, and I'll pass it on next week, along with an account of my visit to the Lab School where President Obama and current Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel sent their kids, and—I believe—where Arne Duncan himself went.

Posted by Deborah Meier at 11:25 AM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

Dear Deborah,

In New York, the politicians, the union leaders, and the media are all exchanging high fives over last week's agreement about teacher evaluation. Gov. Andrew Cuomo took credit for forcing the parties to settle. But it's a dark day when politicians impose an untested scheme on educators, despite a wealth of evidence that these schemes are inaccurate, unstable, and have negative consequences and no evidence that they improve education. See this and this. If we were serious about improving education for all children, we would take a broader view of the causes of and remedies for low achievement.

But the politicians have decided to solve our education problems not by looking at root causes but by firing teachers. They feel certain that we can fire our way to the top. In 2010, New York won a Race to the Top award of $700 million. To obtain this money—very little, if any, of which will ever reach any classroom or student—New York said it would devise a teacher evaluation plan that was based in part on student test scores. Although this idea finds little support among testing experts, it is an obsession with the current U.S. Department of Education. The winning New York proposal, in order to get the support of the teachers' unions, said that 20 percent of teachers' evaluations would be tied to student scores.

When states determine that test scores should count for 20 percent or 40 percent or 50 percent or some other percent, this is a purely arbitrary decision. There is no research, no experience, no evidence whatsoever that identifies what portion, if any, of a teacher's evaluation should be based on the increase in their students' test scores.

But the state's winning proposal set the number at 20 percent. As the union and the state haggled, Gov. Cuomo intervened and said the proportion should be 40 percent. The union had already won a court decision upholding the earlier 20 percent, which was mutually agreed upon, but never mind.

Now, we enter the realm of pure politics, where issues derived from research or from any consideration of education implications become irrelevant. After Cuomo stepped in, the tabloids (the New York Post and the New York Daily News) wrote frequent and strident editorials demanding that the parties accept 40 percent, and that anything less would be a blatant capitulation to unaccountable teachers and their greedy union. U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan informed New York that its Race to the Top winnings were at risk if it did not soon resolve the teacher evaluation issue.

Meanwhile, almost 1,400 principals (about a third of all principals across New York state) signed a petition to protest the educator evaluation system devised by the state education department.

Gov. Cuomo warned the unions that he would impose his own evaluation plan if they didn't reach an agreement, and he said that any district that did not accept the evaluation plan would lose any new state funding. Is it not amazing that the governor, who has never taught and never evaluated teachers or principals, presumes to know how to evaluate teachers and principals?

Last week, with Cuomo's deadline looming, the state and the unions reached an agreement. It says that 20 percent of teachers' evaluation will be based on the state tests and another 20 percent on locally designed tests, or on the state tests used in a different way. (It's the same scores, used for the same purpose; I have no idea how those scores might be used in "a different way,") The remaining 60 percent is supposed to consist of classroom observations and other measures. All teachers must be rated on a scale from 0 to 100, using these multiple measures. This draconian point system will guarantee that a teacher with a perfect 60 out of 60 on teaching skill will nonetheless be judged "ineffective" if he or she is in the ineffective range on scores. As it now stands, the rating system is so bizarre that a teacher could be rated effective in all three categories and still be rated "ineffective" overall.

The agreement contains this strange sentence: "Teachers rated ineffective on student performance based on objective assessments must be rated ineffective overall." Unless I can't read plain English, this says that the 40 percent devoted to test scores overrides the other 60 percent. In other words, 40 percent is equal to 100 percent. The teacher who doesn't raise test scores is ineffective. Oh, and state education Commissioner John King—who taught for three years and founded charter schools—will have the ultimate authority to review every district's additional measures for rigor and quality.

Carol Burris, one of the leaders of the Long Island principals' revolt, explained how this would work. (See here.) Gary Rubinstein, an experienced math teacher, felt certain that this whole edifice would soon collapse because of its absurdity.

This raises the stakes on high-stakes testing as they have never been raised before. Teachers will be graded on a curve, meaning many are in line to be fired for not raising test scores enough because they are competing with all other teachers. To deter narrowing the curriculum, the state plans to introduce many tests in many subjects, even in the arts and physical education. To gauge value-added, there will be pre-tests in the fall and post-tests at the end of the school year. Our schools will be test-centered in the extreme. Many days will be devoted to testing, not instruction.

Whence came this belief in the unerring, scientific objectivity of the tests? Only 18 months ago, New York tossed out its state test scores because the scores were unreliable. Someone in the state education department decided to lower the cut scores to artificially increase the number of students who reach proficient. No one was ever held accountable.

Now we are expected to believe that the state has made tests that are good enough to be decisive in firing teachers and ending their careers. Joseph D. Novak, in Learning, Creating, and Using Knowledge (Routledge), makes the shrewd observation that while the scoring of standardized tests may be objective (after all, they are scored by computers), the construction of the tests is highly subjective: "The test-maker chooses the specific subject matter content to be covered, the exact wording of the question, and the exact wording of the choices in multiple-choice exams." It is the test-maker who subjectively decides "what will be accepted as 'correct' answers." As New York demonstrated, even the scoring may be subjective, given state officials' ability to set the cut scores wherever they wish.

But back to the politics: In addition to the parties involved, charter school supporters hailed the agreement, which was odd because teachers in charter schools will not be subject to its provisions.

And, of course, Secretary Duncan hailed the pact and urged other governors to follow Cuomo's example. I am sure that Secretary Duncan knows that President Barack Obama wants teachers to "stop teaching to the test," as he said in his State of the Union address, and to teach with "creativity and passion."

Does anyone seriously believe that teachers in New York state will dare to stop teaching to the test? How many will be fired if they take that risk?

If you care about education—real education, where students are encouraged to think for themselves, not just take tests—and if you care about children, who will be subjected to unending test prep in every subject, and if you care about the long-term prospects for our society—which will not be improved by this scheme of measure-and-punish—this is a dark day for New York.

Diane

Posted by Diane Ravitch at 9:10 AM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

Dear Diane,

I do believe we are in that portion of the Roman Empire in which horses were considered "persons." Or was that just a mad movie I once saw about the fall of the Roman Empire?

Some of the madness is being conducted by very sane people with a very bad agenda. Yes, I do believe that, especially after reading your account about Cleveland, Diane.

Some are under a belief, genuinely held, that only when everything is private will human beings live as they should—in a libertarian dream world. They are risking our collective futures on their idealistic theory, much as radical leftists once did on a totalitarian dream that they hoped would lead to human liberation. We can't afford to let America try it out.

I just read a letter from a colleague whose "messy clutter" corner library center with comfy chairs and many readable books was literally removed over the weekend based on the recommendation of a "walk-through" team of so-called experts. Another colleague tells me that the classrooms he visits no longer even dream of having time for "read-alouds." And I long ago discovered that "telling stories"—made-up or otherwise (without a book)—has gone the way of ... see-saws.

In this climate the kind of common-sense wisdom that Vito Perrone, Ted Sizer, and Lillian Weber represented seems quaint. Only rigor, which now lives up to its true meaning—harsh and rigid—satisfies our leaders. "They" didn't select that word ignorantly, as I had assumed.

Who are "they?" Probably they include the folks who met on Amelia Island to develop their education agenda recently. Were we really unable to sneak a spy into that gathering?

So "we" need to meet, too. Across the many organizations out there who share a common agenda about the priorities of a school system that can support and nourish a troubled nation. When will we stop worrying about our own organizational fiscal et al condition for a few days and call for united action? I'm a member (but a poor one since collective call-in systems defy me) of the executive committee of Save Our Schools. They are planning a "convention" preceding the Democratic and Republican conventions to try to put together a shared education platform. We need to set aside time for talking about how we can operate better individually if we join together under a loose and larger umbrella. Even if only all the organizations I'm a member of met, it would make a good start!

As I said last week, we cannot afford to fall back on "the feeble strength of one." Maybe someone can suggest a song that embodies our shared task? I make this suggestion based on the euphoria I felt as I drove home last Saturday night from a sing-along of old Central Park East colleagues at our "old" music teacher's apartment. We sang the songs he taught our students and ourselves over the 35 years he was at CPE I. (We sang "All things shall perish from under the sky, music alone shall live, music alone shall live, never to die." But as we sang it I thought, "it might die, if the Arne Duncans of the world hold all the strings.")

Schools still largely rest—overwhelmingly—on tax dollars. Foundations and the federal government are actually a drop in the bucket. How have we let them run the show?

You can see that I'm floundering around for a cure. There is none, however, except if we work this out together.

"Step by step ... " (Heidi Lyne, Ayla Gavins, Mission Hillers, one and all, if you are reading this: Isn't that the beginning of a song we sang at our weekly gatherings?)

Diane, when you read this, I'll be in Chicago seeing old friends and heading off to the North Dakota Study Group's annual weekend. Last weekend I was in Boston at a memorial Harvard sponsored for Vito Perrone who "created" the NDSG 40 or so years ago. As I spoke, I looked out at the audience, I saw my past before my eyes. But there were enough young people to assure me that we have a future, too.

Deborah

P.S. Michael Fabricant and Michelle Fine have written a book that just came out. Charter Schools and the Corporate Makeover of Public Education: What's at Stake. Order it, and read it! Teachers College Press.

* The title of this column is taken from Don Rose's latest piece in the Chicago Daily Observer. But, says Rose, actually "the title is Mike Royko's." Regardless, it seemed a fit headline for this week's rant. (Almost everything Don writes I want to pass on.)

Posted by Deborah Meier at 10:12 AM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

Dear Deborah,

I recently went to Cleveland to speak to the City Club, where civic leaders gather every Friday to hear from people in different fields. I wanted to talk with educators as well, so I spoke to the Cleveland Teachers Union on the evening of Feb. 2, and to district administrators on Feb. 3, before addressing the City Club.

On my drive from the airport with Jan Resseger, the minister for public education for the United Church of Christ, we passed through several neighborhoods. First, Shaker Heights, an elegant suburban enclave with outstanding schools. Then East Cleveland, a very different suburb, marked by blocks of boarded-up apartment houses and sealed homes, as well as empty lots where vacant houses had been demolished. These were once-functional neighborhoods that had died. So devastated was the landscape, I thought I might be in a Third World country. In central Cleveland, many houses had windows covered with plywood, and many retail stores were empty. To put it mildly, this city is economically depressed.

After I spoke to the teachers, one came up and introduced herself as a 4th grade teacher. She said: "Thank you for giving me hope. I wish I could give some to my students. They have no hope for the future." That was the saddest thing I heard on my visit.

Cleveland has a level of urban decay that is alarming. Yet its municipal leaders have decided that their chief problem is bad teachers. Surely, I thought, the teachers didn't cause the flight of employers from the city, the collapse of its manufacturing base, and the massive loss of home mortgages.

But sure enough, Cleveland—and the state of Ohio—plans to attack its economic woes by creating more charter schools and supplying merit pay to teachers able to raise test scores. The leaders want to make it easier to fire teachers and to remove seniority. That's the mayor's plan to reform education in Cleveland. Mayor Frank Jackson, like Governor John Kasich, thinks that school choice is the remedy for the education woes of Cleveland and Ohio. So, of course, they both want more charters.

Cleveland has had mayoral control since 1995, so if mayoral control was the answer to urban woes, it should have happened here. It hasn't. Cleveland is one of the poorest, most racially segregated, and lowest-performing districts in the nation. According to data in the National Assessment of Educational Progress, Cleveland's school population is 85 percent black and Hispanic, and 100 percent of its students are eligible for free or reduced-price lunch.

Ohio has made a big bet on charter schools. It has an aggressive and entrepreneurial charter sector. About 100,000 of the state's 1.8 million students are enrolled in charter schools, but charter enrollment is far higher in the state's "Big 8" urban districts. About 25 percent (give or take a point or two) of students attend charters in Dayton, Youngstown, Cleveland, and Toledo.

The average public school teacher in Cleveland is paid about $66,000, while the average charter school teacher in that city receives about $33,000 a year. That's a big cost saving for the city and state. Most charters are non-union, and teachers have no job protections or employment rights. It appears that charters have a business plan in which they keep costs low by teacher turnover, low levels of experience, and low salaries.

As in other states, charters in Ohio get no better academic results on average than regular public schools. There are more charters at the bottom in the state's academic rating ("academic emergency" or "academic watch"), but not much difference in the middle or at the top. A study in 2009 by CREDO of Stanford found that "new charter school students have an initial loss of learning in both reading and math compared to their counterparts in traditional public schools. In subsequent years, charter school students receive no significant benefit in reading from charter school attendance compared to their counterparts in traditional public schools. However, charter school students continue significant losses of learning in math after the first year of attendance."

The biggest charter chain in Ohio is White Hat Management, a for-profit corporation run by Akron businessman David Brennan. Brennan and his family have contributed millions of dollars to Republican candidates over the past decade. White Hat manages 46 charter schools, both online and free-standing, most in Ohio. State law gives the corporation power to hire and fire board members as well as staff members. Board members in 10 White Hat schools sued the management company to find out where the money was going; management has received hundreds of millions of dollars in public funding, and the boards said they didn't know where the money was spent. State law gives the corporation ownership of everything purchased with taxpayer dollars.

Just last week, an Ohio court ruled that White Hat must open its books to individual charter boards, if they request to see them. But at the same time, the company is under no obligation to reveal its spending of public funds to public officials. This really illustrates the essence of privatization. A public entity must open its books to public scrutiny. The legislature could fix this, but it is hard to imagine that it would get tough with one of the state's major Republican contributors.

There's nothing special about the performance of this particular charter chain. According to information compiled by NPR in Ohio, "No Ohio White Hat school earned higher than the equivalent of a "C" on the state report cards. Most are in academic watch or emergency." In the company's view, the state grades are unimportant; all that matters is that parents are making a choice.

Ohio has also been fertile territory for virtual schools, some of which are owned by White Hat. The state has pumped more than $1 billion into them over the past decade, but they have gotten disappointing results. Of 23 e-schools in Ohio, only three were rated "effective" by the state. InnovationOhio, a watchdog group in the state, concluded that the e-schools are "vastly underperforming" and that "children are nearly 10 times more likely to receive an 'effective' education in traditional public school than they are in E- schools." But, quite frankly, sponsors of these schools make huge amounts of money, and where there is money, there are lobbyists and campaign contributions.

Governor Kasich also wants more vouchers for Ohio. Cleveland has had vouchers since 1995. Students who use vouchers to attend private schools in Cleveland perform no better on state tests than students in regular Cleveland public schools. When you consider that Cleveland is one of the lowest-performing school districts in the nation on NAEP, this doesn't say much for the power of vouchers as a tool to "rescue" students or to improve achievement or even test scores.

Yet there you have it. The leaders of one of the most economically depressed and racially segregated cities in the nation have decided that the answer to its problems is to fire teachers, close public schools, expand the number of charters, and possibly to expand the voucher program as well.

In the eyes of Ohio's elected officials, evidence about the past performance of charters and vouchers means nothing.

And about those children in the 4th grade in Cleveland who have no hope for the future, who probably live in one of those desolate neighborhoods surrounded by boarded-up homes and empty lots. There is nothing in the mayor or governor's plans to offer them hope. The illusion of hope, perhaps.

But they aren't thinking about those children. They are thinking about how to cut costs. They will keep hiring private firms to run schools. The private firms will fire those expensive teachers who earn a living wage and hire newcomers willing to work long hours for $30,000 a year. Some of the private firms will replace teachers with virtual academies, so those expensive buildings can be shuttered while children sit at a computer, with one teacher monitoring 50-100 or more screens. The "teachers" may not be certified, may be hourly workers with no benefits, may turn over with frequency. All that cuts costs, too.

There's lots in these plans to give hope to political allies of the electeds. But not much to give hope to the children.

Diane

Posted by Diane Ravitch at 10:13 AM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

Dear Diane,

Yes, Diane, we do have a few reasons for being hopeful of late. I was delighted to hear that California's Governor Jerry Brown has spoken out about testing. I had a good conversation with him recently about early childhood. It, too, left me optimistic.

It's interesting to speculate on why liberals are so divided on schooling issues. One consistently useful predictor of who's on which side is their attitude toward organized labor. The shift from seeing "labor" as underdogs to "big labor" or labor "bosses" goes back a while. From World War II to the early 1980s, trade unions were all-American favorites. The Left was more mad at them, it seemed, than the Right. (I'm exaggerating.) The shift coincided perhaps with the end of the war on Communism?

The other night I found myself muttering under my breath, "and the feeble strength of one." It took me a minute to remember where that line came from, and I decided to Google the lyrics of "Solidarity Forever." It's a song that's been sung perhaps at all AFL-CIO gatherings for many years. The first verse goes:

When the union's inspiration through the workers' blood shall run.
There can be no power greater anywhere beneath the sun;
For what force on earth is weaker than the feeble strength of one,
But the union makes us strong.

It seems old-fashioned now. "Feeble strength of one"? It conflicts with an equally strong message about the power of individuals to change the world. "As long as there is one, ..." I preach to kids. "You," I say over and over, "make a difference." Like lots of such common aphorisms—I like both. But one without the other is perhaps dangerous.

I've known good teachers who would tell me in disdain: "I want to succeed on my own individual merits. If I'm a good teacher, I can take care of myself. Only weak teachers 'need' a union to protect them." Joining a union seems to some a way of accepting one's "feebleness;" to others, it's a way of gaining dignity.

A year substituting in Chicago's public schools made me a radical/"reformer" from Day One. I saw the teachers' union as a force for good—including the individual good. For example, two of my 'children' became teachers and both have had to protect themselves via union-enforced due process at some point in their careers. In the absence of due process, none of us is safe from unjust bosses or benign rulers. (It's one reason I'm also such a fan of the Association for Union Democracy, which protects union members and staff from injustices by their "union bosses.")

Perhaps the dividing line on reform has something to do today with our gut reaction to calls for solidarity with our peers—our identification with the powerless. And thus our devotion to due process: "There but for the grace of God goes me."

The tension between individualism and solidarity even interacts with a puzzle I've been concerned with of late re. neighborhood schools vs. "schools of choice." Can choice sometimes be good for an individual and bad for the larger community, and if so ...? It needs more discussion, but here's my problem:

It stands as "common sense" that it's easier to create a productive, shared culture if one is joined together by mutual choice. But it's not synonymous with democracy. It's too easy to say in a school of choice, "if you don't like it, choose another school." In a democratic community one cannot use such language because the community belongs to both winners and losers, majorities and minorities. That's why democracy is so essential! It's why, I think, my mentor Lillian Weber had some misgivings about my work in East Harlem's District 4 creating district-wide schools of choice rather than tackling changing neighborhood schools.

Central Park East has a strong sense of community, but its members are together by choice. Weber feared that ultimately the "choici-est" choices would go to those best served by the existing system and that it would undermine the needed cohesion of existing besieged communities. She was prescient.

I sent my own children to our neighborhood schools despite their weaknesses because I wanted us embedded in our neighborhood. I largely avoided the politics of District 4 and was instead very active in District 3 (where my kids went to school). I served as an elected school board member, for example. Did I make the right decision? I'm not sure. My own son and his wife chose to look for the public school in New York City that they liked best. Did they make the right decision? (Of course, I didn't have their choices.)

Is there a way to give us the strengths of both? A way that honors communities and individual choice? That promotes solidarity without sacrificing individualism? I thought District 4 had it right. In one small geographic community (East Harlem covers probably a little over one square mile) there were both neighborhood schools and schools of choice. Furthermore, then-New York City Schools Chancellor Anthony Alvarado worked hard, I thought, to be as proud of his neighborhood schools as his "alternatives." I think his hope was that these alternatives would influence new practices in all schools.

I originally saw charters through my nostalgia for East Harlem. That was a possibility. I met some fascinating folks last week in Baltimore, where charter teachers are all union members and where progressive education has a strong hold in the charters. I visited the City Neighbors School there and fell in love with it. But, why only there?

It seems clearer than ever to me that we need to re-explore issues of choice, so that they are not used to undermine the political communities that are at the base of our political democracy or to glorify the segregation of schools by race. We need unions and public education and strong communities: for the sake of the kids. Only self-confident and respected adults can provide students with the adult company they need.

I'm just skimming the surface. Diane, readers, join me on this.

Deborah

Posted by Deborah Meier at 10:35 AM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

Dear Deborah,

One of the signature issues of the Obama administration's education reform strategy is "turning around" low-performing schools. We have been led to believe that schools with low test scores can be dramatically changed by firing the principal, replacing half or all the staff, closing the school or turning the school over to private management.

Part of the corporate reformers' message is that turning around a school may be painful but that it can produce transformational results, such as a graduation rate of 100 percent or a startling rise in test scores. The turnaround approach assumes that it is bad principals and bad teachers who stand in the way of school improvement. Any mention of poverty or other social and economic conditions that might affect students' motivation and academic performance is dismissed as excuse-making by the proponents of "No Excuses."

Today there is a burgeoning industry of private-sector consultants devoted to "turnarounds." One of the leading turnaround specialists is a company called Mass Insight. I recently received an email in which Mass Insight hailed several schools that had turned around. The stories seemed too good to be true.

So I turned to Gary Rubinstein, my favorite pedagogical detective, and asked him to investigate each of these schools. Gary did, and the results are on his blog. This is a short and fascinating read. Like the miracle schools about which I have written on this blog and elsewhere, the turnaround schools turn out to be less impressive than the hype.

As Gary Rubinstein writes, one of the supposed turnround schools "got rid of 70 percent of their staff. ...Their math scores shot up from 4 percent to 14 percent in just two years!...but then went back down to 10 percent. And this is despite the fact that their demographics changed drastically, leaving them with a much 'easier' group of kids. Title I went from 97 percent down to 75 percent.[English-language learners] went from 13 percent down to 4 percent."

Fortunately, Gary is not the only one who has figured out the games that politicians play. Matt Farmer, whom I don't know, wrote a stunning expose of Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel's effort to sell Collins Academy as a turnaround triumph.

After Arne Duncan closed Collins in 2006, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation pumped over $1 million into turning around the school. When Mayor Emanuel spoke at its graduation ceremonies in 2011, he congratulated the school for its graduation rate of 100 percent and the fact that nearly all were college-bound.

But Matt Farmer inconveniently pointed out that the test scores of Collins students were lower in 2011 than in 2006, when the school was closed down. Only 15 percent of the students met state standards in reading and math, and the school was officially classified as "level 3," on academic probation. Other schools have been closed for this kind of poor performance. To ease this embarrassment, school officials moved Collins to "level 2," making it a school in good standing, despite its poor scores. But on the most recent state tests, only 14.9 percent of the students met state standards in reading and 6.8 percent in math. Some turnaround.

I am happy to report, however, that turnarounds are possible. Researchers at the American Institutes for Research scoured the state of California to find low-performing schools that had achieved real and sustained improvement. The AIR researchers did something remarkable: They started with a clear definition: A turnaround was one that began with three years of low performance (bottom third in the state); that showed a specified level of growth over three years for all subgroups; that sustained its improvement into a fourth year; that improved relative to other schools in the state; and whose student population remained demographically similar over time.

The researchers identified 2,407 schools in the bottom third of the state rankings. Only 44 schools, or 2 percent of these schools, met their criteria. Few of these schools made "dramatic" progress; typically, it was "slow and steady." The successful schools described the elements that contributed to their improvement: instructional strategies focused on subgroups that need extra help; professional development; teacher collaboration; instructional leadership; wise use of data; district support; and parent involvement.

Why does the media swallow the tall tales of turnaround specialists? Why do politicians and big foundations promote wildly inflated claims of success? Why don't they recognize how hard it is to achieve reasonable goals? Why are they so eager to persuade the public that a school can "turnaround" in two or three years by firing the staff and starting over? The hyperbole of politicians, policymakers, and foundation leaders serves only to undermine confidence in public education and set the stage for privatization. There is no evidence that their slash-and-burn tactics improve the education of American students.

Diane

P.S. Here is yet another example of the hyping of turnarounds in Chicago: "School reform organization gets average grades."

Posted by Diane Ravitch at 9:11 AM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

Dear Diane,

Your California trip sounded wonderful. (I realize I'm a little late in saying this. By now you've probably been to half a dozen other states!) I'm encouraged by your positive experiences and that you can keep up the pace. I'm encouraged also by the shift in the language of politics of late, surely stimulated by the Occupy movement. Inequality now is at the top of list. Perhaps, fingers crossed, there will always be openings for pushing a pro-democracy agenda.

Meanwhile, I've been here and there meeting such wonderful, if often demoralized, colleagues: Baltimore is an interesting place (all charters are unionized, and the number of interesting ones encouraging). And Rochester, N.Y., where I met with the union president and the superintendent. It's an atypical city, too, and full of signs of hope.

We won't always win, and democracy is not a sure bet by any means, but the drive for personal liberty and our insistence that we actually are our "brother's" keeper is hard to kill. (On the same theme of optimism: Reading Steven Pinker's "The Better Angels of Our Nature" has not entirely convinced me, but it has shed a different light on some of my depressing fears. It was once worse.)

The latest issue of Commonweal has a piece by Peggy O'Brien Steinfels on Vaclav Havel which I recommend. Once again, a reminder of what's possible. Remember that many once held it to be impossible to overthrow a totalitarian regime from within. Havel's "The Power of the Powerless" strikes a deep chord. One we need to remember when "they" try to make teachers, parents, and students powerless.

Somewhere inside lurks a reminder that our task is to nourish the better part of our "natures" or, more simply perhaps, to be vigilantly on the side of those who get pushed around and to commit oneself not to push others around! Especially those less powerful than you. I thought about that while in Japan last month—having grown up in a culture filled with stereotypes of the ugliest sort about anything Japanese. The relative success of democracy in Japan cannot be the result merely of American dictates in the post-WWII period. There's something more to Japanese (and human) history that allowed democracy to take hold—some continuity that I know so little about. Something that accounts perhaps for that brief news piece about Osaka that I mentioned earlier. Teachers in Japan are refusing to comply with renewed demands to sing traditional patriotic songs, etc. (Three strikes and you're out is the government's solution.)

Years ago a wise mentor, Ted Chittenden (of Educational Testing Service!), suggested that it would help if we thought of education by imagining an axis, with one arrow standing for student initiative and the other intersecting arrow for teacher initiative. An
education for democracy would lie, he suggested, in the sector where both student and teacher initiative are high, while the current "reforms" lie in the opposite corner—where both student and teacher initiative are zero-to-low. (Traditional education is high on teacher and low on students, and "free schools" are high on student initiative, low on teachers'.) Can you picture this? Try drawing it. And I suspect one could produce a similar diagram with one arrow representing individual liberty and the other communal values. Democracy is the square where both are high! It was useful to me.

Oddly enough we offer a lot of my favored sector in the way we educate preschoolers, and after that we go in the opposite direction! In part because we simply can't control the very little ones as easily as we can pre-teens and teenagers. Besides the adult-student ratio makes it easier to substitute affection for coercion. Little kids don't yet know about shame and despair. But remember that some of the kids who "act out" or "refuse to learn" are exercising that powerful human ability to resist powerlessness! They're just not as lucky as Havel was.

I hope you have followed me enough to respond. It's more fun when there's an audience and an argument, as Parker Palmer notes in Healing the Heart of Democracy, his very recent book. I'll write more about it some other time, but meanwhile read it and tell me what you think.

What troubles me most about the KIPPs of the world are not issues of pedagogy or the public/private issue, but their "no excuses" ideology implemented by a code that rests on humiliating those less powerful than oneself and reinforcing a moral code that suggests that there's a one-to-one connection between being good and not getting caught. It tries to create certainties in a field where it does not belong. (Maybe that's why I enjoy Commonweal's religious essays; they remind me of a good Talmudic dialogue—always probing further.) Life is never so simple that we can award points for "badness" on a fixed numerical scale of bad-to-good. As we once reminded colleagues, Nazi Germany had a successful school system—so what? I'd be fascinated to interview some KIPP graduates to learn how its work plays out in their lives. My friend and former Mission Hill colleague, Emily Gasoi, is finishing her doctoral dissertation looking at the underlying adult culture of Mission Hill and a particularly interesting KIPP school, which intrigue her for their differences and similarities.

So, we come back to my other recurring theme: trade-offs. I'm for making the trade-offs that hold fast to values of democracy, even if inconvenient. But ... it's not easy to sort this out without more long-term argumentation and investigation.

I look at curriculum the same way. There is no perfect curriculum, but I base my preferences on precisely the principles underlying democracy. It's our teacherly obligation to consider what students will "need" to join fully into the life of a democratic community. But one of those qualities is celebrating self-initiative, personal passion, the power of the heart, as Parker Palmer uses that tricky word. Ditto for society and teachers! There's an essay in the latest Dissent magazine by mathematician Joi A. Spencer. He reminds me that what to "cover" lightly vs. what to "uncover" deeply even in a math class rests on judgments we need to make explicit between mathematical understanding and democracy.

More on this another time. But test preparation of the kind we now call math teaching won't help. I like that Occupy rests its case on a mathematical model: 99 percent vs. 1% rather than on slogans about equity.

And one more last thought! Everyone must read Michael Winerip's marvelously funny/sad piece entitled: "In Race for the Top, the Dirty Work Is Left to Those on the Bottom" in The New York Times.

Best,
Deborah

P.S. Sometimes what I remember most about other countries are oddities. For instance, I miss the warmed toilet seats in Japan! Imagine bus and subway schedules that are accurate to the second. People actually bowing to each other. No tipping ALLOWED.

Posted by Deborah Meier at 9:44 AM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend