Is the non-parent Parent Trigger backfiring?

The move to hand challenged, high-need McKinley Elementary School in Compton over to a charter operator under California's “Parent Trigger” law was widely reported earlier this month as a resounding triumph for low-income parents demanding a decent school for their children.

To those following the issue closely, that version has rapidly fallen apart, as critics (including this poster) have retorted that an organization founded by charter operators and funded by billionaires ran the show and exploited the parents. As I and many others have said, it's unclear on the concept to portray an action orchestrated by professionals, funded by billionaires and corporate titans, and applauded by the leader of the free world (reportedly), the governor of California and the mayor of Los Angeles as a “revolution of the little people.”

Meanwhile, the school community has predictably dissolved into chaos and conflict.

California's Parent Trigger legislation passed earlier this year and allows 51 percent of voters (the specifics of exactly who can vote appear to be nebulous) to sign petitions to force a school to transform by (choose one) requiring a charter school to take over; bringing in a new staff and giving the parents significant control over staffing and budgeting; closing down the school; or merely replacing the principal.

On Dec. 7, in a polished media event, McKinley parents delivered their signatures (apparently of McKinley parents and not the vague “others” the Parent Trigger law also allows to vote) to officials of the Compton Unified School District.

The move would put the school into the hands of a specific charter operator, Celerity Educational Group. The entire Parent Trigger move actually came not from within the McKinley community but from the organization Parent Revolution, which was founded not by parents but by a group of charter school operators led by the high-profile Green Dot. As the L.A. Weekly puts it, Parent Revolution “has 10 full-time staff members and a $1 million annual operating budget, is funded by blue-chip philanthropic endeavors, such as the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the Wasserman Foundation, the Broad Foundation, the Hewlett Foundation and the Walton Family Foundation [of Wal-Mart]."

The L.A. Weekly, a conservative “advocacy journalism” alternative paper, provides the most detailed and revealing accounts of the events before and since the signatures were delivered. The degree to which the accounts are revealing is ironic, as the Weekly's advocacy in favor of the Trigger is full-throated — to my eyes as a well-informed California education advocate who holds the opposite position, much of the Weekly's portrayal is jaw-droppingly distorted. But putting that aside, if even a portion of the information is accurate, the L.A. Weekly is definitely the source to follow.

After the signatures were delivered and the national and international press, politicians, commentators et al. leaped on the event to proclaim a victory for the people, the L.A. Times followed up with a Dec. 11 story announcing that some McKinley parents claimed to have been misled and wanted to withdraw their signatures.

And in a detailed blog report posted late last night (Dec. 14), the L.A. Weekly describes an angry and chaotic Compton Unified School District meeting, “packed with press and hundreds of angry parents, many of whom say they were tricked into signing the Parent Trigger petition without knowing its gravity.”

“Above all,” the Weekly post declares, “the air is buzzing with confusion.
“It seems everyone here has a contradicting understanding of what, exactly, the new Celerity Educational Group charter school would mean for their children.”

Further chaos ensues:

Admin, teachers, parents and students from another Los Angeles charter school — the Wisdom Academy for Young Scientists — have showed up in mass (sic) to sing the praises of charter schools. 'The teachers there are great — everybody's great,' says one mother. WAYS grandmother Ethel Nathaniel says, 'The school is really beautiful; it's wonderful.'

'We don't want charter school! We don't want charter school!' some mothers chant.
… More and more, the crowd reveals itself as anti-Parent Trigger. The only speakers that are cheered are the ones defending CUSD.

The conclusion of the current version of the L.A. Weekly blog tells the story.

… There's a new civil war working against the betterment [the wording expresses the Weekly's open view that the move would promote the school's “betterment”] of McKinley Elementary: The Celerity parents versus the CUSD parents. And as long as they're both preaching to their own choirs, this is going to be one long, painful board meeting of a battle for the children.”

It was obvious that this move would rip the community apart. No one who has been part of — or a close observer of — a school community could fail to see that.

The Weekly is once again the best source for a description of how the organizing against McKinley Elementary took place:

"Parent Revolution decided to focus on McKinley Elementary School and approach parents there after researching the worst school districts in California. ... [Parent Revolution Executive Director Ben] Austin and his staff surveyed parents at several schools in Compton, asking if they were interested in a transformation. ... field organizers have canvassed a large chunk of the 10-square-mile city of Compton, knocking on hundreds of doors, walking its sidewalks and driving its streets, asking people if their children attend McKinley, making contacts."

Needless to say, an organizing drive from within a school community does not require paid organizers to cold-call all over town, asking strangers if their children attend the school.

The Weekly's description of the photo-op surprise delivery of the petition signatures to the school district should make it clear to anyone who's not sound asleep that there's big money behind this move: A "crowd -- including parents, children and reporters from the New York Times, Los Angeles times, CNN, local TV channels 2, 4, 7, 11, radio news stations KPCC and others, as well as aides to U.S. Sen. Dianne Feinstein and Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa -- then clambers into two yellow school buses...” After a mother hands the signatures to the acting superintendent (who's waiting outside with a police escort), requests and receives a receipt, the mother “holds the receipt in the air and several parents and their children cheer and begin chanting 'Yes we can! Yes we can!' ”

Not an event created by meek and downtrodden parents unaccustomed to the media spotlight, shall we say.

There's one more little twist to the national press coverage describing McKinley Elementary as a disastrous academic failure: In reality, McKinley outperforms the average Green Dot charter school. Green Dot, again, is the organization behind this move, as the lead founder of Parent Revolution.

California's school accountability system is called the Academic Performance Index, which compiles the student test scores annually into one API number on a scale of 200-1000. 800-plus is considered excellent.

Spring 2010 API for McKinley Elementary in Compton, CA: 684.
Spring 2010 average API for all Green Dot charter schools in California: 657.

(Source: My own research on the California Department of Education database.)


— Caroline Grannan

Is the non-parent Parent Trigger backfiring?

"Waiting for Superman" subject's own words refute movie's tale

"Woodside High is a great school."

The movie “Waiting for Superman” tells the stories of five students around the country who are desperate to escape their “failing” public schools and get into the shining charters that are portrayed as their only chance of success — or at least that's the tale the movie tells.

One of those stories takes place in my neck of the woods, here in the San Francisco Bay Area. The one white middle-class student among the five kids in the movie is Emily Jones, who lives on the suburban San Francisco Peninsula. The story “Waiting for Superman” tells is that Emily is desperate to escape her district public high school, Woodside High, because she's a bright student who “doesn't test well,” and due to Woodside's antiquated and harmful tracking policies, she'll be tracked into lower-level classes that will doom her to mediocrity. She grasps at (as the movie shows it) her only hope — Summit Prep Charter, which does the opposite of tracking, requiring all its students to take six AP courses during high school.

Well, that story is false. Here's the proof. On this video clip, John Fensterwald of the Silicon Valley Education Foundation interviews Emily. The part in the movie illustrating how the horror of tracking sent her fleeing to Summit Prep features a graphic showing students on a conveyor belt, with the select few being elevated to higher-level classes and the rest being dropped onto a march to oblivion. Yet in the video interview, Emily chats freely with John for five minutes and mentions a number of reasons for wanting to go to Summit instead of Woodside — but never mentions or even alludes to tracking. Just after minute five, Fensterwald brings up tracking. Emily comments on tracking only after Fensterwald prompts her.

And in fact, here's what Emily says about Woodside High: “Woodside is a great school. I really liked it and I really wanted to go there before I saw Summit.”

That’s not what “Waiting for Superman” portrays. If the movie misled viewers with a false story about Emily, the line “fool me twice, shame on me” applies – we can't believe anything it shows us.

Meanwhile, parents at Woodside High have created a huge banner and posted it across the front of the school: “Woodside High School teachers — Man, You're Super! Thank you for teaching ALL the students in our community!”


— Caroline Grannan, San Francisco

"Waiting for Superman" subject's own words refute movie's tale

Mysterious religious-political group's charter network

Sharon Higgins at the Perimeter Primate blog in Oakland is reporting that about 90 charter schools around the nation are run by insiders in the Gulen movement, described in the one mainstream news report on this issue as "a powerful Islamic movement unknown to many Americans." It's based in Turkey and involves a political/religious movement that is described as wanting to restore the Ottoman Empire.

I am not posting from an informed perspective on this issue, though in my opinion, publicly funded schools should not be run by ANY political/religious movement.

This sounds like some paranoid fantasy, I know, and some of the numerous resources that show up on a Google search are right-wing projects that wouldn't normally be my preferred information sources — put it that way. But there's enough solid information to give it credibility.

The schools seem to be run and staffed by Turkish emigres (or Turkish nationals), but they don't appear to aim at serving Turkish students. A number of the schools on a list on a website called Turkish Forum are in the L.A. area and elsewhere in Southern California: two Magnolia Science Academies on Sherman Way and Kittredge Street in Reseda; Magnolia Science Academy 3, Gardena; Magnolia Science Academy 4, Venice; Magnolia Science Academy 5, Hollywood; Momentum Middle School, San Diego; and reportedly to have opened in 2009, Pacific Technology Schools in Santa Ana and San Juan. I haven't checked up on all these schools yet.

In my area, one low-performing Oakland charter school called Bay Area Technology School (BayTech) is part of the network. Its operators tried to open a charter school here in San Francisco a few years ago but gave up when the Board of Ed voted it down.

Don't miss Sharon Higgins' full post on the Gulen schools

A rare mainstream news report on this appeared in the Salt Lake City Tribune last year.

This could be a test of the charter movement's newly professed opinion that charter schools should be overseen and held accountable. (Or, I suppose, it could just be ignored in the general din.)

Mysterious religious-political group's charter network

Charters want accountability? That's a new concept

The charter school industry and its supporters earnestly assure the public these days that they want problem charter schools held accountable.

If that’s true, it’s good news. It’s also a drastic about-face for the charter school industry, which has long fought efforts to hold charter schools accountable. An article on charter schools in the May 25 New York Times pointed out the same thing. The charter industry has been waging successful court battles against efforts to hold charter schools accountable.

“…[C]harter schools have at times resisted tougher monitoring,” the Times wrote. “In 2007, a group of charter schools and advocates sued the [New York state] comptroller's office, challenging its right to audit the finances and academic performance of such schools. Critics said the comptroller's office had no expertise to assess academics. “Last year, the Court of Appeals, the state's highest court, ruled that charter schools were in effect independent contractors and beyond the comptroller's reach.”

Not that I’m unsympathetic to those who change their minds. After all, I’m a big admirer of Diane Ravitch’s. She’s the former Bush administration education official and former booster of high-stakes-testing/choice/privatization education policies who announced her change of mind and heart in her book “The Death and Life of the Great American School System.” Ravitch, who publicly described her soul-searching, now opposes the ideas she once championed, saying that in real life they have been shown to be not just ineffective but harmful to schools, children and public education.

It’s weird that (unlike Ravitch) the entire charter industry just changed its tune without missing a beat, though. There was no explanation and no discussion of the new philosophy or of renouncing the old philosophy. When did that new philosophy take effect?

Here in San Francisco a few years ago, our Board of Education (BOE) got beaten up by the charter world twice in a short period for trying to hold problem charter schools accountable. In one of those cases, the local, national and even international media eagerly, compliantly and unquestioningly leaped on the charter movement’s crusade, ganging up to blast the San Francisco Unified School District (SFUSD) for its effort to hold controversial, for-profit Edison Schools Inc. accountable back in 2001. (More on that below.)

Then, in 2003, SFUSD had to deal with its own home-grown charter problem, a high school called Urban Pioneer that specialized in wilderness experience for disaffected students. In March 2003, two UP students died by falling into a ravine at night on an unsupervised wilderness outing.

The ensuing scrutiny revealed that UP was also in financial chaos — “the budget allowed for just $2 per student per month and no janitors, testing or staff development,” according to the Chronicle. And UP was committing academic fraud, “graduating” students with far fewer than the required credits. The school’s test scores were rock bottom. Reportedly, the president of the school’s board of directors, a lawyer, had been intimidating would-be whistleblowers within the school into silence by threatening to sue them.

Yet when the SFUSD BOE began investigating the school, the charter lobby fought back hard, rousing the UP community and supporters to battle to keep the school open. Peter Thorp, best known here in San Francisco as founding principal of Gateway High School, our city’s most successful charter, spoke on behalf of the California Network of Educational Charters (now the California Charter Schools Association) against closing Urban Pioneer. I wasn’t present, but a friend who attended one of the public meetings tells me that the grieving parents of the deceased students had come to the meeting intending to speak, but were intimidated by the belligerent crowd and sat silently.

Meanwhile, despite its financial problems, UP somehow managed to scrape together the wherewithal to hire a high-priced damage-control PR specialist, David Hyams of San Francisco’s Solem & Associates. (Hyams had recently changed careers after many years as an editor at the San Francisco Chronicle.) The Chronicle quoted Hyams as likening SFUSD to the Taliban and its investigation to a “witch hunt.”

Urban Pioneer was ultimately shut down, though you can still find people in the community to this day who somehow managed to miss the whole story and who view it as an outrage that SFUSD shut down a “successful” charter school. I haven’t pinned down the source of that version of the story, though it’s easy to guess.

The UP controversy roiled our school district at a time when it had been recently battered by its bloody encounter with Edison Schools, the then-high-flying media darling that was being hailed as the solution for public education.

Edison was running one charter school in our district, Edison Charter Academy (ECA) at 22nd and Dolores on the border between San Francisco's Mission District and Noe Valley. Our wild and woolly superintendent of the ’90s, Bill Rojas, had brought Edison in, supported by a rubber-stamp Board of Ed majority.

Edison-friendly Rojas left in ’99 to run the Dallas school district (which later fired him), and by 2001, the BOE was no longer dominated by unquestioning Edison and Rojas supporters. The district was encountering the same problems with Edison that many other Edison client districts were reporting, including significantly higher costs than projected, low performance and “counseling out” of challenging students who then landed in district schools. Edison made burdensome demands on districts (one SFUSD central office bureaucrat who worked on contracts said she spent nearly half her time over several months just working with ECA), while adding insult to injury by issuing press releases touting itself as superior to the clients who had hired it.

Edison was founded and run by flamboyant entrepreneur Christopher Whittle, a non-educator who previously owned Esquire magazine. Whittle had obviously made some good high-level contacts in media, and when the SFUSD BOE started asking tough questions about ECA, he mobilized those contacts. Editorials criticizing SFUSD and praising Edison popped up all over, in places like the Wall Street Journal, USA Today, the London-based Economist and even random outlets like a Virginia newspaper that headlined its editorial “Dim Bulbs” (referring to the SFUSD BOE). The Chronicle and the San Jose Mercury News editorialized strongly in favor of Edison. The Chronicle editorial page worked itself into such a state of outrage at our BOE that one headline on an editorial about SFUSD used the word “goosestepping” (that particular editorial was not about Edison, but the Edison issue was the spark igniting a general frenzy of hostility at the Chron at that time).

News coverage, including a Page 1 story in the New York Times, portrayed ECA as a huge success and hinted at San Francisco’s leftist “land of fruits and nuts” image to claim that our BOE was opposing successful Edison for entirely “ideological” reasons. The press “forgot” to do a key piece of the research, which should have been to find out what was going on in other Edison client districts around the nation. (The insider term for that type of "forgetful" journalism is “check it and lose it.”)

The New York Times story addressed that issue by using a quote from Whittle: “None of the 44 other cities where we manage schools has ever done anything like this.” Reporter Edward Wyatt used the quote without checking it, challenging it or further commenting, letting it stand as a statement of fact.

But actually, Whittle was lying. Edison had already been kicked out by the Sherman, Texas, school district. Other clients at that time were looking into severing their Edison contracts too — among them Macon, Ga.; Lansing and Flint, Mich.; Goldsboro, N.C.; and Wichita, Kans., none of them generally vulnerable to “land of fruits and nuts” caricatures.

The bashing wasn’t limited to public school critics or mainstream media. Commentator Peter Schrag, normally a public school supporter, wrote a long piece for the leftist Nation magazine telling the same (inaccurate) story. Joan Walsh, now editor of Salon and a media star herself — and at the time an SFUSD parent, though not at ECA — did the same in a long Salon article. (To Walsh’s credit, she is one of the very few journalists who later corrected factual errors fed to her by Edison spokespeople — perhaps the only one.) When one Edison press release described ECA as “a successful school in a failing district,” variations on that line appeared in various media, including Schrag’s Nation article.

For the record, ECA’s achievement at the time (based on California’s Academic Performance Index compilation of test scores) ranked it close to the bottom among SFUSD schools for 1999-2000, the data available at the beginning of the media frenzy. And when the scores from spring 2001 testing were released, ECA’s were dead last in the district.

I helped other advocates research information about Edison, and we used the less-nimble technology of that time to create an e-mail press release list and a website, Parents Advocating School Accountability. At one point I wrote up an account of the situation to share with friends who weren’t versed in it, partly because if they came across my name (I was quoted in the Page 1 New York Times article), I wanted them to have heard my version first. A friend who was a Chronicle copy editor was amazed to learn from me that ECA wasn’t the highest-scoring school in the district. Though the Chronicle’s news coverage had mentioned that ECA’s actual test scores were low, the whole tone of the crusade had given her that impression — even though she was actually copy editing some of the coverage.

Meanwhile, Edison was fighting SFUSD in court too, and California charter PR man Gary Larson was mobilizing ECA parents to storm school board meetings in matching T-shirts, chanting “My child, my choice!”

Why did Edison mobilize against SFUSD — and mobilize the media on its behalf — while keeping a low profile about the numerous other client districts that had the same problems with Edison and were doing the same thing? At the time, Edison was making two ambitious bids in major districts. In New York City, it was trying to win five schools and a solid toehold. In Philadelphia, it was attempting to take over the entire district. My guess is that the thinking was that all this news coverage with a strong tone of disapproval aimed at one “land of fruits and nuts” district would divert everyone from checking into how Edison was doing with its various client districts. The strategy seemed to work.

What this all amounted to was a mass attack on SFUSD for attempting to hold Edison accountable for its commitments to its client school district (and its students). The fact that the media leaped gleefully into the fray provides a good view of the risks of trying to hold a charter operator accountable.

In the end, the outcome in San Francisco was a compromise. Edison and SFUSD severed their contract and the charter-promoting California state Board of Education took over chartering the school (the degree of oversight and accountability now is utterly unknown to the public). ECA is quietly operating in the same location, as a rent-paying tenant in an SFUSD facility. It’s an attractive facility in a great location, too, and a lot of young parents in trendy, family-friendly Noe Valley would like to get it back.

Edison lost its bid for the New York schools and ended up with just a couple dozen in Philadelphia. By now, Edison Schools Inc. has lost 29 of its client districts at last known count — and I am definitely not keeping up, so I’m sure there are many more. Here’s an account of Edison Schools’ situation from the PASA website.

It’s easy to see why anyone who has followed the history of charter schools would be surprised to hear from charter advocates that they now believe in accountability for problem charter schools. We shall see.

Charters want accountability? That's a new concept

Message to Obama, Congress: Listen to parents

Parents Across America: Join us in sending a message to President Obama and the Congress by signing on here; also please join our Facebook page and leave a comment.

On May 5, 18 parent activists from across the nation sent a letter to Obama and the Congress, opposing his administration's wrong-headed, pro-privatization version of education reform, and calling for new priorities for our public schools, including more parent involvement and smaller classes.

As we wrote:

So far, the parent voice has been missing from the debate over education and is entirely absent from the top-down and often draconian proposals being put forward by the administration. We strongly believe that the Blueprint’s proposals would undermine rather than strengthen our public school system, particularly in the urban districts whose parents we represent.

Read the full letter here, and the press release here. We also point out that Blueprint’s proposals represent large-scale experiments on our kids, and yet lack informed parental consent -- which would never be allowed in the field of medicine.

Incredibly, the only mention of the word "parents" in Duncan's entire "Blueprint" for the reauthorization of ESEA is that parents of American Indian children should have input as to the curriculum in their schools. No wonder that the US Department of Education's approval rating has dropped more sharply than any other government agency, according to the Pew Research Center.

The letter points out that "Education is a public trust and the very foundation of our democracy. We urge you to be wary of the influence of venture philanthropy on our public education system. We are well aware that powerful foundations -- such as those of Bill Gates, Eli Broad, the Walton family, and others – are shaping many of our federal and local education policies with dollars rather than evidence-based solutions."

We conclude our message to Congress this way: “You hold a great responsibility in your hands this year in reauthorizing the ESEA. ....We urge you to insist that the next version of the ESEA formally incorporates the views of public school parents as well. As highly knowledgeable primary stakeholders, we must be permitted to have a seat at the decision-making table."

For an article about our letter, check out Gotham Schools.

Message to Obama, Congress: Listen to parents

The private sector rewards only true merit — not!

Blaming teachers is the current hottest fad in “education reform,” and the sub-fad is pronouncing that getting rid of “bad teachers” would magically solve all our problems.

Of course there are some truly problematic teachers who shouldn’t be teaching at all, so let’s note that right off the bat. But what I’m addressing here is the frequently repeated claim that the private sector just efficiently gets rid of the bad and rewards the good and doesn’t have these problems. A parent posted the comment below on one of our local education listserves here in San Francisco, in response to one of those claims. I’m reposting it anonymously with her permission.

I have to chime in about the supposed efficiencies of the private sector. My husband works for a large corporation that, like so many, first underwent "extreme hiring" during the boom and then underwent massive layoffs.

If the private sector was so good at weeding those who perform poorly from those
who do well, you'd think only the best and the brightest would be left, but that isn't true. Certainly he works with a lot of great people, but there is still deadwood, including a couple in management. Usually these are people who talk a good line (and so might be best used in sales, to be honest), but never turn in their piece of the project on time.

Here’s my own view. My background in a private-sector industry is in unionized daily newspapers. Our pay scale was based on seniority, from <1 year to >6 years, and then negotiated raises in the contract. "Overscale" pay could be and was awarded on an individually negotiated basis — the equivalent of merit pay, of course.

The universal belief among my colleagues was that overscale was awarded when an employee was in a specific position to leverage management — for example, I made some due to taking on an unappealing position that nobody wanted, in an emergency — or to employees who were particularly aggressive and skilled at negotiating.

There was not a shred of belief in our newsroom that overscale was awarded based on actual pure merit.

I still sometimes see the byline of a former co-worker who was barely functional doing the actual job (reporting, writing, editing) but who was always charming, persuasive and winning, and gave great meeting. That colleague moved up from my former workplace, the San Jose Mercury News, to one of the names you would immediately mention if you were asked to name the nation’s top three or four newpapers.

I’m not sure where the people who believe that the private sector is so great and successful at rewarding the good and weeding out the bad have been working, but I’m not completely convinced it’s on Planet Earth.

— Caroline Grannan, San Francisco

The private sector rewards only true merit — not!

Time to pressure Rep. George Miller : revoke NCLB

Noted education commentator and author Diane Ravitch was in my part of the state, the San Francisco Bay Area, last week, urging Bay Area residents to launch a protest campaign to pressure our own Rep. George Miller to stop defending the No Child Left Behind law — which is based on (as Ravitch says) "measure and punish."

Miller co-sponsored the original law, but I asked her Ravitch there's any reason to pressure him at this point. She explained that he can control reauthorization of the law, and that Nancy Pelosi and the House Education Committee do what he wants. Miller’s district is in the East Bay, and he has offices in Richmond, Concord and Vallejo. Contact info at the end of this post.

I'm posting a string of quotes from Ravitch — both from her book "The Death and Life of the Great American School System" and from commentaries by her and interviews with her — to clarify why No Child Left Behind should be viewed as harming schools and even as a threat to the future of public education.

Quotes:

As 2014 draws nearer, growing numbers of schools across the nation are approaching an abyss. Because NCLB requires states to promise that they will reach an impossible goal, the states have adopted timetables agreeing to do what they can't do, no matter how hard teachers and principals try. Most have stretched out the timetable — putting off the biggest gains for the future — to stave off their inevitable failure. The school officials who wrote the timetables in the early years of implementation must have hoped or expected that they would be retired and gone long before 2014 arrived. With every passing year that brought the target date closer, more and more public schools failed to make AYP and were labeled as "failing." Even though some states lowered the cut scores (or passing marks) on their tests to make it easier for schools to meet their target, many still failed to make AYP toward 100 percent proficiency for every subgroup. And in states that maintained high standards and did not lower the cut scores, even more schools fell behind.

***

One of the unintended consequences of NCLB was the shrinkage of time available to teach anything other than reading and math. Other subjects, including history, science, the arts, geography, even recess, were curtailed in many schools. Reading and mathematics were the only subjects that counted in calculating a school's adequate yearly progress, and even in these subjects, instruction gave way to intensive test preparation. Test scores became an obsession. Many school districts invested heavily in test-preparation materials and activities. Test-taking skills and strategies took precedence over knowledge. Teachers used the tests from previous years to prepare their students, and many of the questions appeared in precisely the same format every year; sometimes the exact same questions reappeared on the state tests. In urban schools, where there are many low-performing students, drill and practice became a significant part of the daily routine.

***

NCLB was a punitive law based on erroneous assumptions about how to improve schools. It assumed that reporting test scores to the public would be an effective lever for school reform. It assumed that changes in governance would lead to school improvement. It assumed that shaming schools that were unable to lift test scores every year — and the people who work in them — would lead to higher scores. It assumed that low scores are caused by lazy teachers and lazy principals, who need to be threatened with the loss of their jobs. Perhaps most naively, it assumed that higher test scores on standardized tests of basic skills are synonymous with good education. Its assumptions were wrong. Testing is not a substitute for curriculum and instruction. Good education cannot be achieved by a strategy of testing children, shaming educators, and closing schools.

***

In the NCLB era, when the ultimate penalty for a low-performing school was to close it, punitive accountability achieved a certain luster, at least among the media and politicians. Politicians and non-educator superintendents boasted of how many schools they had shuttered. Their boasts won them headlines for "getting tough" and cracking down on bad schools. But closing down a school is punitive accountability, which should happen only in the most extreme cases, when a school is beyond help. Closing schools should be considered a last step and a rare one. It disrupts lives and communities, especially those of children and their families. It destroys established institutions, in the hope that something better is likely to arise out of the ashes of the old, now-defunct school. It accelerates a sense of transiency and impermanence, while dismissing the values of continuity and tradition, which children, families, and communities need as anchors in their lives. It teaches students that institutions and adults they once trusted can be tossed aside like squeezed lemons, and that data of questionable validity can be deployed to ruin people's lives.

***

Tests are necessary and helpful. But tests must be supplemented by human judgment. When we define what matters in education only by what we can measure, we are in serious trouble. When that happens, we tend to forget that schools are responsible for shaping character, developing sound minds in healthy bodies (mens sana in corpore sano), and forming citizens for our democracy, not just for teaching basic skills. We even forget to reflect on what we mean when we speak of a good education. Surely we have more in mind than just bare literacy and numeracy. And when we use the results of tests, with all their limitations, as a routine means to fire educators, hand out bonuses, and close schools, then we distort the purpose of schooling altogether.

***

Results from this multibillion-dollar undertaking have been disappointing. Gains in achievement have been meager, as we have seen not only on NAEP's long-term-trend report, but also on the NAEP tests that are administered every other year. In national assessments since the No Child Left Behind legislation was passed, 4th grade reading scores went up by 3 points, about the same as in the years preceding the law's enactment. In 8th grade reading, there have been no gains since 1998. In mathematics, the gains were larger before NCLB in both 4th grade and 8th grade.

***

In the latest international assessment of mathematics and science, released this past December, U.S. students again scored well behind students in Hong Kong, Singapore, Japan, and Taipei. Our 4th grade and 8th grade students recorded small improvements in mathematics, but not in science, where those in both grades scored lower than in years predating No Child Left Behind.

The decline of 8th grade test scores in science from 2003 to 2007 demonstrates the consequences of ignoring everything but reading and mathematics. Because NCLB counts only those basic skills, it has necessarily reduced attention to such non-tested subjects as science, history, civics, the arts, and geography.

***

(NCLB) has encouraged the states to dumb down the standards by saying that every state would have its own definition of proficiency, every state would use its own test, by setting a deadline of 2014—which is totally unrealistic—by which all students are supposed to be proficient, and then having very onerous sanctions for schools that are unable to meet this completely unrealistic deadline. It's meant that everyone is encouraged to find ways to produce the numbers, and one thing we know from the market sector is that when the numbers are what counts, people meet the numbers, even though they sacrifice the goals of the organization. What we're doing instead of producing well-educated people is producing the numbers. The gains since No Child Left Behind was adopted are smaller than before No Child Left Behind was adopted.

***

The basic strategy is measuring and punishing. And it turns out that as a result of putting so much emphasis on the test scores, there's a lot of cheating going on; there's a lot of gaming the system. Instead of raising standards, it's actually lowered standards because many states have dumbed down their tests, or changed the scoring of the tests, to say that more kids are passing than actually are.

There are states that say that 80 to 90 percent of their children are proficient readers and proficient in math. But when the national test is given, the National Assessment of Educational Progress, the same state will have not 90 percent proficient, but 25 or 30 percent.

***

The Obama education reform plan is an aggressive version of the Bush administration's No Child Left Behind, under which many schools have narrowed their curriculum to the tested subjects of reading and math. This poor substitute for a well-rounded education, which includes subjects such as the arts, history, geography, civics, science and foreign language, hits low-income children the hardest, since they are the most likely to attend the kind of "failing school" that drills kids relentlessly on the basics. Emphasis on test scores already compels teachers to focus on test preparation. Holding teachers personally and exclusively accountable for test scores — a key feature of Race to the Top — will make this situation even worse. Test scores will determine salary, tenure, bonuses and sanctions, as teachers and schools compete with each other, survival-of-the-fittest style.

e-mail Miller via a form here:

http://georgemiller.house.gov/contactus/

U.S. Mail

Hon. George Miller
2205 Rayburn House Office Building
Washington, DC 20515

Phones:
202-225-2095 (D.C.)
925-602-1880 (Concord)
510-262-6500 (Richmond)

707-645-1888 (Vallejo)

Or contact him through Facebook (the one with the picture of him that says “Local Business”).

— Caroline Grannan,
San Francisco public school parent and advocate

Time to pressure Rep. George Miller : revoke NCLB

Is firing bad teachers really the key to fixing education?

Education historian/commentator Diane Ravitch points out that the states with non-union teachers (who thus have little or no job security) tend to have lower
academic achievement than the states with strong teachers' unions.

That should put to rest the myth that bad teachers with ironclad job security are the cause of the challenges facing public education.

As Ravitch adds, the state reported to have the consistently highest academic achievement is Massachusetts — a strong union state. (It’s also widely called "Taxachusetts" by the right — could there be a connection?)

Ravitch emphasizes that she's not necessarily saying that unionization and job
security lead to higher academic achievement, but the facts show that unionization and job security clearly don't work against higher academic achievement. They are correlated.

I thought it was worth looking for some data. But not officially being a statistician, I wasn’t really sure of the best measure of state-by-state academic achievement.

So I decided to look at one measure that interests me. That's the list of "cut scores" for National Merit semifinalists. National Merit recognition is based on
the PSAT scores of 11th-graders. The cut score for recognition varies from state
to state. That's explained this way on Wikipedia:

The minimum Selection Index for recognition as a Semifinalist is set by the NMSC [National Merit Scholarship Corporation] in each state at whatever score yields about the 99th percentile.

The organization FairTest has posted a list of the cut scores for the high school graduating class of 2010, which range from 201 (Wyoming) to 221 (Massachusetts, Maryland and New Jersey). California's is 218.

The National Right to Work Legal Foundation posts a list of Right-to-Work states (which don't allow workplaces to require union membership, meaning unions are toothless) and what the Foundation calls Force Unionism states. I took those lists, added each state’s Class of 2010 National Merit cut scores and averaged.

The results:
Right-to-Work states: average cut score 208.4545
Forced Unionism states: average cut score 213.6897

That result seems to show that unionized teachers correlate with higher academic achievement, and non-union teachers correlate with lower academic achievement.

If I’m missing confounding factors, I can’t see what they would be. It's true that not all 11th-graders take the PSAT, and the culture probably varies state by state as to whether taking the PSAT is more widely encouraged or less. But that wouldn’t seem to confound the basic finding.

By the way, the lowest-cut-score state — Wyoming at 201 — is a Right-to-Work state, and the three that are tied for highest — Massachusetts, Maryland and New Jersey — are strong labor states.

It seems conclusive: Teachers' job security — and, if you will, "forced unionism" — correlate with higher academic achievement.

— Caroline Grannan,
San Francisco public school parent and advocate

Is firing bad teachers really the key to fixing education?

The Central Falls 93: Obama, press reset

The word “backlash” is actually being used about a so-called school reform maneuver so shortsighted and coldblooded that almost no one is speaking up in support of it — almost no one but President Obama.

Last month, all 93 members of the faculty, administration and support staff of Central Falls High school in Central Falls, R.I., were told that they’re fired as of the end of this school year.

Then, on Monday, President Obama spoke up, according to the New York Times.

“Mr. Obama said he supported the school board’s decision to dismiss the faculty and staff members. ‘Our kids get only one chance at an education and we need to get it right,’ he said.”

(Obama’s lightweight, resume-faking Secretary of Education praised the move too, but he’s not really worth devoting blogosphere bandwidth to.)

Despite the current climate in which blaming, bashing and demonizing teachers has become a comfortable and popular theme in all kinds of commentary, Obama’s remark actually seems to have provoked dismay and outrage. In the most current news article showing online as I write this, the Providence Journal uses the term “wildfire.”

“The wildfire of national debate over the mass firings at Central Falls High School spread further Tuesday, when the executive council of the AFL-CIO unanimously condemned the removal of all 93 teachers, support staff and administrators at the city’s only high school.
The executive council said its members were “appalled” that President Obama and U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan had endorsed the terminations in recent comments, and said the firings will not help the 800 students at the high school, which is one of the poorest and lowest-performing schools in Rhode Island.”

Well, I have a proposal. Those 93 teachers, support staff and administrators should get together, pull the necessary strings (which are in their reach right now while the story is hot), and request a meeting with the president — all 93 of them. If Obama could have a beer with Henry Louis Gates and that cop whose name I’ve now forgotten, surely he’s willing to spend a little time hearing the viewpoint of 93 people whom he has essentially attacked sight unseen. While it would be hospitable for him to invite them to the White House, it would be a lot classier for him to have a soothing spot of tea catered in at Central Falls High School. (And he desperately needs to show a little class right now; his supply is perilously low.) I’m sure the cafeteria has enough room to seat the Central Falls 93, Obama and his entourage.

Two years ago, it would have been impossible for me to imagine saying this, but I also propose that President Obama emulate something San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom has been doing. I’m not normally Newsom’s biggest fan, with the exception of back in February 2004 when his then-revolutionary gay marriages were spreading joy through San Francisco.

But lately, my city's mayor has been doing something admirable after being challenged by Patricia Gray, the longtime rock-star principal of San Francisco’s Balboa High School. Newsom has been spending Saturdays calling the homes of students who are chronically truant from their San Francisco public schools. The San Francisco Chronicle’s Matier and Ross political insider column wrote about this in a Jan. 31 column (not available online.)

“It has been a real eye-opener,” Newsom told the Chronicle. “In just about every case,” Matier and Ross wrote, “the family is in crisis.” In other words, truancy isn’t all the fault of inept teachers and uncaring schools after all, Newsom is learning.

At an overflowing Town Hall meeting in San Francisco, called by public-school parents to address the current budget crisis, Newsom brought up his calls (and visits) to the homes of truants, and reiterated that point quite emphatically. The truants are almost always living in households battered by the worst life can dump on them, and it’s unrealistic to expect educators to magically cure it all, and to blame them for not working miracles.

Well, if Newsom — who I never would have thought could hold a candle to Obama in depth and thoughtfulness — can accept Patricia Gray’s challenge and gain such new understanding, where’s the president?

I hope to read about that meeting in the Central Falls High School cafeteria soon.

For more on the Central Falls firings, here’s a snippet of commentary by veteran Washington Post education writer Valerie Strauss:

“…93 names were called for firing — 74 classroom teachers, plus reading specialists, guidance counselors, physical education teachers, the school psychologist, the principal and three assistant principals, according to the Providence Journal. Not one was good enough to stay.
Some of the teachers at the city's only high school cried, but the committee held firm.
It's no wonder that Education Secretary Arne Duncan applauded the move, saying the committee members were "showing courage and doing the right thing for kids."
Courage, indeed.
Now, all they have to do is find 93 excellent professionals to take their places. Recruiting the best educators should be easy, especially when you can offer them life in a very poor town and a job with no security.”

-- Guest blogger Caroline Grannan,
San Francisco public school parent and advocate

The Central Falls 93: Obama, press reset