Hyped AI New Personalized Learning

25 Apr

By Thomas Ultican 4/25/2024

In education today, Artificial Intelligence (AI) and personalized learning are the same thing. AI has been around for 70 years and is the technology that drove personalized learning. The release of ChatGPT in November 2022 caused buzz and may be responsible for Edtech sales-forces switching to AI from personalized learning. The personalized learning scam was exposed and AI became the shiny new object.

ChatGPT is a new language model developed by OpenAI. The basis is a giant data base to retrieve query answers and its breakthrough uses human style essays to deliver the responses. This makes cheating easier, giving teachers new issues to confront. To this point, blogger and educator Mercedes Schneider says “AI and I are not friends”, noting:

“As a teacher for many decades, I find increasingly more of my time consumed with devising means to ensure students complete my assignments without the easy-cheat, sustain-my-own-ignorance that AI enables in today’s students– and, it seems, an increasing number of (especially remote) professionals who may be using the corner-chopping ability AI offers to even hold multiple full-time positions.”

Schneider tested ChatGPT typing in “Could you provide some background info on Mercedes Schneider? She resides in Louisiana.” The answer revealed a weakness… much of the information was correct, some wrong, with other information, old and irrelevant. She did not attend University of Southern Louisiana nor received her PhD from LSU. Mercedes took her red pencil to this chatbot answer, “According to her website, she holds a Bachelor of Arts in secondary education ‘(TRUE)’, a Master of Education in gifted education ‘(FALSE)’, and a PhD in curriculum and instruction ‘(FALSE)’, all from the University of Southern Mississippi ‘(FALSE).’”

These errors may be unusual but the chatbot is unreliable.

What is AI?

“Artificial Intelligence” was first coined by Professor John McCarthy for a conference on the subject at Dartmouth College in 1956. It was also founded as an academic discipline in 1956.

Mathematician, computer scientist, and cryptanalyst, Alan Turing, described a test for verifying computer intelligence in a 1956 paper. He proposed a three-player game in which the human “interrogator” is asked to communicate via text with another human and a machine. If the interrogator cannot reliably identify the human, then the machine is judged “intelligent.”

Coursera states, “AI is an umbrella term that encompasses a wide variety of technologies, including machine learning, deep learning, and natural language processing (NLP).” However, none pass the Turing test for machines manifesting intelligence.

Machine-learning has been part of AI since its 1950s beginning. Algorithms are created to allow a machine to improve its performance on a given task automatically. Netflix uses it to create personalized recommendations, based on previous viewing history.

Deep-learning is advancement in machine-learning, layering algorithms into computer units referred to as neurons. Google Translate uses it for translation from one language to another.

Neural Network Cartoon

Natural language processing (NLP) is used in many products and services. Most commonly, NLP is used for voice-activated digital assistants on smartphones, email spam-scanning programs, and translation apps, deciphering foreign languages. ChatGPT uses large language models, an advancement to NLPs enabling a dialog format, to generate text in response to questions or comments posed.

Nick Bostrom, Director of the Future of Humanity Institute at the UK’s Oxford University, said, “A lot of cutting edge AI has filtered into general applications, often without being called AI because once something becomes useful enough and common enough it’s not labeled AI anymore.”

No machine has passed the Turing test. To this point there is no intelligence associated with AI, just algorithms. Another problem with powerful AI systems is they use a lot of electricity: by 2027, one researcher suggests that collectively, they could consume each year as much as a small country.

Should We Be Afraid?

In May 2023, Geoffrey Hinton, who won the Turing award in 2018 for “deep learning”, a foundation to much of AI in use today, spectacularly quit Google. He said companies, like Google, had stopped being proper stewards for AI in face of competition to advance the technology.

That same month a Scientific American article stated:

“A 2023 survey of AI experts found that 36 percent fear that AI development may result in a “nuclear-level catastrophe.” Almost 28,000 people have signed on to an open letter written by the Future of Life Institute, including Steve Wozniak, Elon Musk, the CEOs of several AI companies and many other prominent technologists, asking for a six-month pause or a moratorium on new advanced AI development.”

However other scientists in the field disagree.

The Guardian reported:

“Jürgen Schmidhuber, who has had a long-running dispute with Hinton and others in his industry over appropriate credit for AI research, says much of these fears are misplaced. He says the best counter to bad actors using AI will be developing good tools with AI.”

“And I would be much more worried about the old dangers of nuclear bombs than about the new little dangers of AI that we see now.”

Stanford professor, Andrew Ng, was a part of the Google brain project. He is not worried and in a recent interview stated:

“I can’t prove that AI won’t kill us all, which is akin to proving a negative, any more than I can prove that radio waves being emitted from Earth won’t allow aliens to find us and wipe us out. But I am not overly concerned about our radio waves leading to our extinction, and in a similar way I don’t see how AI could lead to human extinction.”

Meta’s chief AI scientist, Luan LeCun, scoffs at his peers dystopian attitudes, saying, “Some people are seeking attention, other people are naive about what’s really going on today.”

Hopefully dangers from AI are mitigated by the safety concerns addressed and development is not harmed by a flat-earth mentality.

Selling to Schools

Fast Company is a modern business news organization, tracking edtech sales and issues. Their April 16, 2024 article opened with,

“Between the pandemic and the rise of generative AI, the education sector has been in a permanent state of flux over the past few years. For a time, online learning platforms were ascendant, meeting the moment when workplaces and schools alike went remote (and later, hybrid). With the public debut of ChatGPT in 2022, edtech companies—such as edX, which was one of the first online learning giants to launch a ChatGPT plugin—jumped at the opportunity to integrate generative AI into their platforms, while teachers and administrators tried to understand what it could mean in the classroom.”

Generative AI is a tool that generates text, images, videos and other products.

I understand how K-12 students might want to become familiar with new AI tools but expecting them to be a boon to learning seems farfetched. Teachers need to find ways to stop students from misusing it. Clever as they are most students will not make good choices when realizing a chatbot can do homework.

Fast Company pointed out, schools are being inundated with new AI edtech products. George Veletsianos, Professor of learning technologies, University of Minnesota, recently gave purchasing guidance to school leaders in Conversation. Of his five points, point two seems especially relevant:

“Compelling evidence of the effect of GenAI products on educational outcomes does not yet exist. This leads some researchers to encourage education policymakers to put off buying products until such evidence arises. Others suggest relying on whether the product’s design is grounded in foundational research.”

“Unfortunately, a central source for product information and evaluation does not exist, which means that the onus of assessing products falls on the consumer. My recommendation is to consider a pre-GenAI recommendation: Ask vendors to provide independent and third-party studies of their products, but use multiple means for assessing the effectiveness of a product. This includes reports from peers and primary evidence.”

“Do not settle for reports that describe the potential benefits of GenAI – what you’re really after is what actually happens when the specific app or tool is used by teachers and students on the ground. Be on the lookout for unsubstantiated claims.”

Experience informs me that there will be many educational benefits from the overhyped AI but money hunger will be lurking. I am guessing AI currently will be of little use for teaching literature, mathematics or most sciences but will be a focus for computer science students.

Do not rush to implement AI tools in the K-12 environment.

Schools are more likely to be fleeced than left behind when the salesman calls. It may be the same person, who was selling “personalized learning” three or four years ago

…  but it is still BAD pedagogy.

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Defend the People’s Schools

19 Apr

By Thomas Ultican 4/19/2024

I am sure you’ll be shocked to your core but there are some really bad people out there trying to end publicly-financed free education.

Since the beginning to the 21st millennium, misguided wealthy people have been attacking public education. The reasons range from religion to hubris. Betsy DeVos thinks secular education is an insult to her Christian God. Bill Gates believes he knows more than anyone else and Charles Koch is opposed to all government-sponsored social action. That would all be fine if they were not billionaires, using immense wealth to impose their way.  

Truth-in-Funding (TiF) offers tools for opposing their propaganda with a webpage providing links to 25 organizations, working to protect public schools. Organizations such as National Education Policy Center, Network for Public Education and Education Law Center share links to their research along with toolkits for delivering the message.

The Truth-in-Funding Group

TiF’s homepage states:

“School voucher programs use public funds to pay for private education costs. These programs are spreading despite overwhelming evidence that they are harmful public policy.”

And their about page says:

“This website offers a wide range of tools from groups that oppose vouchers and other efforts to divert public funding in education. We work to protect the vital institution of public education and ensure all students have access to welcoming, well-resourced public schools.”

Highlighted Materials

Network for Public Education (NPE) was founded in 2013 by a middle-school teacher from Oakland, California, Anthony Cody and former Education Department official and education historian, Diane Ravitch. Soon after the founding, past New York principal of the year, Carol Burris, came on board as director. NPE has focused on uniting friends of public schools, researching the reality behind school choice and creating tools to protect public education.

Ravitch Introducing Keynote Speaker Gloria Ladson-Billings

At NPE Washington DC October 2023

One of NPE’s many “Toolkits”, which are concise two-page documents, is “Do charter schools and school vouchers “hurt” public schools?” The answer is:

“Yes.

“Charter schools, vouchers, and other “choice” options redirect public money to privately operated education enterprises, some of which operate for profit. That harms your public schools by siphoning off students, resources, and funding and reducing the ability of public schools to serve the full range of student needs and interests.”

This conclusion was justified with four paragraphs of explanation and eight examples from across America.

Policy Matters Ohio is a non-profit policy research institute. Funded by mostly small foundations and individual donations they claim to “create a more vibrant, equitable, sustainable and inclusive Ohio through research, strategic communications, coalition building and policy advocacy.”

Their 2023 Ohio voucher study concluded:

  • “Ohio is currently ranked 46th for per-pupil equitable distribution of funding. State funding that is allocated towards vouchers should be directed to public schools so that students can get the resources they need to thrive.
  • “Ohio public schools need funding, especially our largest urban school districts with high concentrations of Black, Brown, and Economically disadvantaged students (CCS example)
  • “Ohio is ranked 40th in starting teacher salaries, and falls below the national average. Funding allocated towards vouchers takes away from money that should be invested in our educators. Can help us to recruit and retain more teachers in the state
  • “Private schools can choose to kick back a child, but as of right now they would be able to keep the money that was awarded, this needs to be changed so that private schools are not benefiting from public dollars for a child they are not educating .
  • “With universal vouchers comes universal bussing costs for public-school districts who bear the cost of transporting all district voucher students to private schools. Property taxes will continue to rise as the public is forced to pay a billion dollars for private school tuition, which will strain lower income districts.”

With the advent of billionaire-financed attacks on public education, non-peer reviewed policy reports and education outcome studies have become prevalent. In response, a group of scholars created the National Education Policy Center (NEPC), housed at the University of Colorado to test the claims being made.

In 2023, there was a legislatively mandated report by the Georgia Department of Audits and Accounts estimating costs and benefits of the state’s new Qualified Education Expense tax credit (QEEC). It is a tax credit school voucher scheme that provides families with “scholarships”. These programs can be controversial because they send taxpayer funding to private schools which serve primarily religious schools that regularly exclude students based on faith, sexual orientation or disability. The Georgia report concluded the state would save money with these vouchers.

David S. Knight, University of Washington, studied the report for NEPC and concluded:

“Taken together, little evidence or data supports the report’s main findings and conclusions. If more accurate parameters are used to generate cost estimates, particularly for the switcher rate and for the cost savings of declining enrollment, a different picture emerges. While the report concludes that the tax-credit scholarship program will have a positive fiscal impact, a far more likely scenario, and one that has already played out in other states, is that the tax credit will cost Georgia taxpayers millions of dollars, potentially requiring future cuts to public services, while providing a cash bonus to many wealthy families.”

A visitor to the TiF library page discovers 13 hyper-linked categories including “Graphics” where I found this:

A Big Concern

 At the bottom of TiF’s main page, below the 25 hyper-linked partners, is a link to Partnership for the Future of Learning (PFL) with an invitation to visit their website.

Learning Policy Institute is listed as a member of the PFL network, founded in 2015 with Stanford professor Linda Darling-Hammond in charge and offices in Palo Alto and Washington DC. San Francisco-based Sandler Foundation was the lead funder with Atlantic Philanthropies, S.D. Bechtel, Jr. Foundation, Ford Foundation, William and Flora Hewlett Foundation. Stuart Foundation also provided initial support.

The Ford, Bechtel and Hewlett foundations have often supported initiatives that undermine public schools. The Hewlett foundation joined Zuckerberg and Kellogg in funding PFL. Hewlett’s 2022 form 990-PF (EIN: 94-1655673) reports grants of $600,000 to NWEA, $533,336 to Education Trust and $1,935,000 to the Aspen Institute.

Learning Policy Institute’s 2022 tax report lists Darling-Hammond’s salary at over $500,000 (EIN: 47-2772048). She has a history of being both supportive of public education and a problem. My friend, Steven Singer, titled his 2018 post about Darling-Hammond, “Linda Darling-Hammond vs. Linda-Darling Hammond – How a Once Great Educator Got Lost Among the Corporate Stooges.” While often brilliant, she does not seem to value the importance of school governance.

Another PFL partner, WK Kellogg Foundation, is one of America’s largest grant-making organizations. A quick perusal of their 990-PF tax forms (EIN: 38-1359264) showed many grants to clearly worthwhile causes. Unfortunately they also give money to organizations like Teach For America, who pawns off fake temp-teachers on America’s students. Their 2021 form gives the most recent spending data available from Kellogg, with the following partial table of giving:

PFL cites Teach Plus as a network partner. It is a private company trying to monetize teacher-training, established in 2007 by Celine Coggins, a professor at Harvard Innovation Labs. Her Harvard resume says, “Under Celine’s leadership, Teach Plus grew to over 30,000 participating teachers and a $10M annual operating budget by offering groundbreaking programs in leadership development and advocacy.” The actual groundbreaking was the effort to replace teacher-leadership and -training by established public universities like UCLA, University of Texas and University of Illinois, with a for-profit company.

PFL may be a true friend of public education but some of the organizations they listed are not. Until they clean their house of organizations that harm public education, TiF should reconsider giving them a link on their otherwise pristine webpage.

I do not want to overemphasize TiF’s one questionable link but am sensitive about the issue. Every national education news source now receives funding from Bill Gates. In addition, other billionaire enemies of public schools also contribute to school news outlets like The 74, education week etc. There are few places for the public to get true un-slanted education news.  

So far Truth-in-Funding appears to be a valuable resource for fighting misinformation and saving universal free public education.

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Jobs’ Reading Scam

10 Apr

By Thomas Ultican 4/10/2024

Laurene Powell Jobs controls Amplify, a kids-at-screens education enterprise. In 2011, she became one of the wealthiest women in the world when her husband, Steve, died. This former Silicon Valley housewife displays the arrogance of wealth, infecting all billionaires. She is now a “philanthropist”, in pursuit of both her concerns and biases. Her care for the environment and climate change are admirable but her anti-public school thinking is a threat to America. Her company, Amplify, sells the antithesis of good education.

I am on Amplify’s mailing list. April third’s new message said,

“What if I told you there’s a way for 95% of your students to read at or near grade level? Maybe you’ve heard the term Science of Reading before, and have wondered what it is and why it matters.”

Spokesperson, Susan Lambert, goes on to disingenuously explain how the Science of Reading (SoR) “refers to the abundance of research illustrating the best way students learn to read.”

This whopper is followed by a bigger one, stating:

“A shift to a Science of Reading-based curriculum can help give every teacher and student what they need and guarantee literacy success in your school. Tennessee school districts did just that and they are seeing an abundant amount of success from their efforts.”

A shift to SoR-based curriculum is as likely to cause harm as it is to bring literacy success. This was just a used-car salesman style claim. On the other hand, the “abundance of success” in Tennessee is an unadulterated lie. National Assessment of Education Progress (NAEP) tracks testing over time and is respected for education testing integrity. Tennessee’s NAEP data shows no success “from their efforts.” Their reading scores since 2013 have been down, not a lot but do not demonstrate an “abundance of success”.

NAEP Data Plot 2005 to 2022

Amplify’s Genesis

Larry Berger and Greg Dunn founded Wireless Generation in 2000 to create the software for lessons presented on screens. Ten years later, they sold it to Rupert Murdoch and his News Corporation for $360 million. Berger pocketed $40 million and agreed to stay on as head of curriculum. Wireless Generation was rebranded Amplify and Joel Klein was hired to run it.

Murdoch proposed buying a million I-pads to deliver classroom instruction. However, the Apple operating system was not flexible enough to run the software. The android system developed at Google met their needs. They purchased the Taiwanese-made Asus Tablets, well regarded in the market place but not designed for the rigors of school use. Another issue was that Wireless Generation had not developed curriculum but Murdoch wanted to beat Pearson and Houghton Mifflin to the digital education market place … so they forged ahead.

In 2012, the corporate plan was rolling along until the wheels came off. In Guilford County, North Carolina, the school district won a Race to the Top grant of $30 million dollars which it used to experiment with digital learning. The district’s plan called for nearly 17,000 students in 20 middle schools to receive Amplify tablets. When a charger for one of the tablets overheated, the plan was halted. Only two months into the experiment, they found not only had a charger malfunctioned but another 175 chargers had issues and 1500 screens were kid-damaged.

This was the beginning of the end.

By August of 2015, News Corporation announced it was exiting the education business. The corporation took a $371 million dollar write-off. The next month, they announced selling Amplify to members of its staff. In the deal orchestrated by Joel Klein, who remained a board member, Larry Berger assumed leadership of the company.

Three months later, Reuters reported that the real buyer was Laurene Powell Jobs. She purchased Amplify through her LLC, the Emerson Collective. In typical Powell Jobs style, no information was available for how much of the company she would personally control.

Because Emerson Collective is an LLC, it can purchase private companies and is not required to make money details public. However, the Waverley Street Foundation, also known as the Emerson Collective Foundation, is a 501 C3 (EIN: 81-3242506) that must make money transactions public. Waverly Street received their tax exempt status November 9, 2016.

SoR A Sales Scam

The Amplify email gave me a link to two documents that were supposed to explain SoR: (Navigating the shift to evidence-based literacy instruction 6 takeaways from Amplify’s Science of Reading: The Symposium) and (Change Management Playbook Navigating and sustaining change when implementing a Science of Reading curriculum). Let’s call them Symposium and Navigating.

Navigating tells readers that it helps teachers move away from ineffective legacy practices and start making shifts to evidence-based practices. The claim that “legacy practices” are “ineffective” is not evidence-based. The other assertion that SoR is evidence-based has no peer-reviewed research backing it.

Sally Riordan is a Senior Research Fellow at the University College London. In Britain, they have many of the same issues with reading instruction. In her recent research, she noted:

“In 2023, however, researchers at the University of Warwick pointed out something that should have been obvious for some time but has been very much overlooked – that following the evidence is not resulting in the progress we might expect.

“A series of randomised controlled trials, including one looking at how to improve literacy through evidence, have suggested that schools that use methods based on research are not performing better than schools that do not.”

In Symposium, we see quotes from Kareem Weaver who co-founded Fulcrum in Oakland, California and is its executive director. Weaver also was managing director of the New School Venture Fund, where Powell Jobs served on the board. He works for mostly white billionaires to the detriment of his community. (Page 15)

Both Symposium and Navigating have the same quote, “Our friends at the Reading League say that instruction based on the Science of Reading ‘will elevate and transform every community, every nation, through the power of literacy.”’

Who is the Reading League and where did they come from?

Dr. Maria Murray is the founder and CEO of The Reading League. It seems to have been hatched at the University of Syracuse and State University of New York at Oswego by Murray and Professor Jorene Finn in 2017. That year, they took in $11,044 in contributions (EIN: 81-0820021) and in 2018, another $109,652. Then in 2019, their revenues jumped 20 times to $2,240,707!

Jorene Finn worked for Cambria Learning Group and was a LETRS facilitator at Lexia. That means the group had serious connections to the corporate SoR initiative before they began.

With Amplify’s multiple citations of The Reading League, I speculated that the source of that big money in 2019 might have been Powell Jobs. Her Waverly Street Foundation (AKA Emerson Collective Foundation) only shows one large donation of $95,000,000 in 2019. It went to the Silicon Valley Community Foundation (EIN: 20-5205488), a donor-directed dark money fund.

There is no way of following that $95 million.

The Reading League Brain Scan Proving What?

Professor Paul Thomas of Furman University noted the League’s over-reliance on brain scans and shared:

“Many researchers in neurobiology (e.g., Elliott et al., 2020; Hickok, 2014; Lyon, 2017) have voiced alarming concerns about the validity and preciseness of brain imaging techniques such as functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to detect reliable biomarkers in processes such as reading and in the diagnosis of other mental activity….

“And Mark Seidenberg, a key neuroscientist cited by the “science of reading” movement, offers a serious caution about the value of brain research: “Our concern is that although reading science is highly relevant to learning in the classroom setting, it does not yet speak to what to teach, when, how, and for whom at a level that is useful for teachers.”

“Beware The Reading League because it is an advocacy movement that is too often little more than cherry-picking, oversimplification, and a thin veneer for commercial interests in the teaching of reading.”

The push to implement SoR is a new way to sell what Amplify originally called “personalized learning.” This corporate movement conned legislators, many are co-conspirators, into passing laws forcing schools and teachers to use the SoR-related programs, equipment and testing.

SoR is about economic gain for its purveyors and not science based.

When politicians and corporations control education, children and America lose.

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Fan of Standards-Based Grading?

2 Apr

By Thomas Ultican 4/2/2024

With the new century, public education encountered virulent standards, standards-based testing and a call for standards-based grading (SBG). While schools were inundated with standards and testing, SBG was not such a success. Since the pandemic, a renewed push for SBG rose. On March 16 2024, corporate education mouthpiece, The 74, published “Why is a Grading System Touted as More Accurate, Equitable So Hard to Implement?”

Answer: Maybe it is bad education policy?

Charter schools and vouchers claimed to save poor minority children from “failed” public schools. They wanted to bring fairness but instead brought segregation, no-excuses schools and discrimination. Similarly, SBG is neither about accuracy nor equity; it is about teaching to the test and implementing thoroughly debunked mastery learning.

What is SBG?

Common Goals Systems Inc. is typical of companies in the education business making it a good source to explain SBG and they share the following math report card example:

Their SBG definition states:

“In SBG, grading is based on demonstration of mastery. Students attempt standards-aligned activities (projects, worksheets, quizzes, essays, presentations, etc.). Teachers assess the student output and choose the appropriate mastery level that was demonstrated. In standards-based education, teaching is responsive to learning.” (Emphasis added.)

I never met a teacher who was not responsive to learning, no matter the grading system.

Power School sells school management programs that include grading tools. They state, “Since standards-based reporting is designed to only reflect true evidence of learning, parents get a clear picture of what the student has or hasn’t mastered without the influence of other factors, such as effort and attitude.”

Teachers and most parents believe effort and attitude have a lot to do with developing “true evidence of learning.”

Valerie L. Marsh, PhD from the University of Rochester, wrote a research brief about SBG:

“The emphasis in SBG is to promote teaching and learning that meet learning goals based on standards. Moreover, students are assessed on their level of mastery of specified standards rather than points accrued for individual assignments (Iamarino, 2014). Teachers then base course grades on students’ progress in meeting the standards (Lewis, 2022).” (Page 3)

When a group of Bay Area upper middle-class parents successfully reversed their districts move to SBG, EdSurge reported, “‘Standards-based grading’ treats homework as unscored practice, eliminates extra credit and focuses on proving mastery of material.” Dublin Unified School District’s parents were displeased with the new SBG pilot effort.

In July 2023, the school board voted 3-2 to end the experiment.

In the same article, Cody Whitehouse, a social studies teacher at Wilson College Prep high school in Phoenix, shared his experience with the district’s roll-out of SBG. At first, he was enthusiastic about allowing multiple opportunities to demonstrate learning but soon soured on it. Students quickly learned that homework was not being graded and stopped doing it!

Whitehouse said, “It’s teaching to the test — the assessment is all that matters.”

Grading Scale Comparison

Problem with Standards Based Education

In 2015, I wrote:

“The learning standards upon which high stakes testing is based come from a mistaken philosophy of pedagogy that posits: a standardized learning rate, standardized interests, linear learning progression, developmental alignment, etc. Humans are not standard. Some learn to speak at 16 months and some don’t acquire that skill until 72 months. Some are short, others are tall. Some are fast, other are not. A child from urban Chicago has different perceptions and interests than a child from Winnemucca, Nevada. A global curriculum will not meet the needs of an endlessly diverse population. One size truly does not fit all. Even if it did, it would still be a bad idea to have political entities in centers of power deciding what that curriculum should be.”

Reinforcing education standards by tying grades to them is a colossal error.

Arnold Toynbee (1889 – 1975) was perhaps the world’s most read, translated and discussed living scholar. His 10-volume masterpiece, “A Study of History”, was an enormous success and a 1-volume abridged version of the first 6 volumes by David Somervell sold more than 300,000 copies in 1947. Like most people, that was the version I read and found this quote:

“We must ask whether, as we look back over the ground we have traversed, we can discern any master tendency at work, and we do in fact unmistakably decry a tendency towards standardization and uniformity: a tendency which is correlative and opposite of the tendency towards differentiation and diversity which we have found to be the mark of the growth stage of civilizations.” (Page 555)

For politicians, oligarchs and many scholars, there is a powerful desire to control public education. They see teachers as inept and needing to be managed from Albany or Sacramento or Washington DC. Standards were seen as the path forward. They became more and more prescriptive with test and punish methods to enforce adherence. SBG is one more tool for developing faithfulness to standards.

Good schools in poor zip codes have been shuttered because they were not making adequate yearly progress based on testing results. There was no recognition that standardized testing results almost completely aligned with community wealth.

Since the pandemic, a new billionaire-financed movement has arisen to end the public education we know and replace it with a digital badging scheme. For this to work, mastery learning must be adopted and is likely the biggest reason SBG is being promoted.

In his 1916 book, Democracy and Education (page 122), John Dewey stated,

“An aim must, then, be flexible; it must be capable of alteration to meet circumstances. An end established externally to the process of action is always rigid.”

Mastery Learning violates Dewey’s warning.

In 1968, Benjamin Bloom published a small paper titled “Learning for Mastery”. This publication, Bloom’s Taxonomy and John Carroll’s work were combined to create “Mastery Learning”. 

Competency-based education (CBE) is the digital screen approach that replaced the failed 1990’s Outcome-based education. Outcome-based education is a renamed attempt to promote the 1970’s “mastery learning” theory. Mastery education’s failure was so complete that it had to be renamed. It was quickly derided by educators as “seats and sheets.” These schemes all posit that drilling small skills and mastering them is the best way to teach. It has not worked yet.

Summing it Up

Thomas R. Guskey, PhD University of Kentucky, is considered a world authority on grading practices and supports SBG. In 2001, he wrote the peer-reviewed article “Helping Standards Make the Grade”, responding to a widely held criticism of grades in K-12 schools. The curriculum expert, Robert Marzano, stated grades “are so imprecise that they are almost meaningless.”

I have a lot of respect for these scholars but it seems they were wrong.

Multiple studies have demonstrated that high school grades are more predictive of college success than standardized tests from ACT or SAT. The head of a 2020 University of Chicago study, Elaine M. Allensworth, reported “The bottom line is that high school grades are powerful tools for gauging students’ readiness for college, regardless of which high school a student attends, while ACT scores are not.”

I do not believe there is anything nefarious about either Marzano or Guskey. Their opposition to traditional grading is not well-supported and a grading scheme tied to standards promotes bad drill and skill education. Yet, their efforts were sincere.

There is something nefarious about Michael Moe and his company GSV Ventures. Several organizations fall under the main GSV group, including GSV Labs, GSV Asset Management and GSV Tomorrow, a commentary arm where investing trends and stories are disseminated. They link readers to the GSV landing page for the annual ASU+GSV Summit, claimed to be the “most impactful convening of leaders in education and talent tech” with over 5,000 attendees and 1,000 speakers from 45 different participating countries.

GSV appears to have convinced Tim Knowles and Carnegie Foundation to abandon the Carnegie Unit for CBE based badges.

Edtech leaders are creating a dystopian system of education and career tracking, making Orwell look optimistic. With this, every American’s history will be held in an unalterable blockchain which needs CBE as the education method to function.

It will be a goldmine for tech companies…

the big reason tech billionaires push Standards-Based Grading…

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Goodbye Doo Wop Don

27 Mar

By Thomas Ultican 3/27/2024

Don Shalvey, with his self-selected twitter handle @dooWopDon, passed away March 16th, succumbing to a lengthy battle with brain cancer. During his long education-centered career, he worked with billionaires including Reed Hastings, Bill Gates and Helen Schwab, to privatize public education. In 1993, Don’s San Carlos Learning Center became the first charter school in California and second in America.

Before he was a charter school founder and before he was a school teacher, he was a disc jockey. That is why his twitter was @dooWopDon.

When founding the charter in San Carlos, he was superintendent of a small K-8 district, a third of the way up the peninsula between San Jose and San Francisco. This event made an obscure education administrator into a rock star in the movement.

Don Shalvey September 14, 1944 – March 16, 2024

Lily Geismer writes about the Clinton administration and its embrace of education choice in her book Left Behind (page 244). In 1997, Bill and Hilary dropped off their daughter, Chelsea, for her freshman year at Stanford. The next morning they were in the gymnasium at Don’s San Carlos Learning Center for a roundtable discussion about charter schools (page 248). Geismer claimed, “The San Carlos event galvanized momentum for charter schools.”

At the time, there was a cap of 100 charter schools in California. Afterwards, “a thirty-something man with a goatee and Birkenstocks”, Reed Hastings, approached Shalvey, asking, “Do you ever think that there’ll be more than a hundred charter schools in California?” He talked Shalvey into helping to get rid of the charter school cap (page 249). “The combination of Don as Mr. Charming Establishment and me as a wealthy provocateur presented a unique challenge to the teachers union,” Hastings remembers in an interview.

Together, they successfully campaigned to end the charter school cap. At the same time, Hastings was starting his new company, Netflix. The two soon hooked up with John Doerr and NewSchools Venture Fund to invent the charter management organization (CMO). With $400,000 left from their campaign, they used it to create America’s first CMO, University Public Schools which later became Aspire.

Shalvey did most of the leg work.

The first Aspire charter school opened in 1999 in Stockton, California. During his career in education, Shalvey’s home was always a ranch in Linden, California about 10 miles from Stockton.

The Gates Foundation

From 2009 to 2020, Shalvey served as Deputy Director for K-12 Education at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.

While he was at the Foundation, charter school enrollments grew by a half-million students, fueled in large part by the Charter School Growth Fund supported by Gates, the Walton family and other billionaires. The Fund was founded in 2004 by Buzz Woolley and Don Fisher (Tax ID 05-0620063). In 2005, John Walton replaced Buzz Woolley as president, indicating his privatization focus changed from vouchers to charter schools.

Gates gave Shalvey two big jobs. He was to implement Common Core standards and target teacher preparation. Unfortunately the standards were installed with no field testing. There were many good ideas within them but much of it was improperly aligned and had no buy-in from educators. There were also political issues. People saw this as Gates’ effort to take control of public education and create a centralized US education marketplace.

Focus on teacher preparation became another effort at privatizing every aspect of the education industry. Instead of working with established institutions like Columbia University or the University of California system, Shalvey and Gates looked toward private companies like the Teach for America (TFA) spinoff, TNTP.

Wendy Kopp founded TNTP (originally called The New Teachers Project) in 1997 and assigned Michelle Rhee, who had just finished a two-year TFA tour, to run it. Under Rhee’s leadership, TNTP became noted for teacher bashing.

Soon after Shalvey went to work for Gates in 2009, he became a member of the EdSource board. Gates was perhaps their largest funder and Don, his representative, remaining a board member until his passing.

Returns to Stockton

June 30 2020 was Shalvey’s last day at the Gates Foundation. For the entire time he worked for Gates, he commuted from the home he shared with wife, Sue, in Linden, California. He stated:

“For the past 50 years, the San Joaquin Valley has been my home. I’m thrilled to spend the final years of my career working to improve education for the young people in our wonderful Valley.”

The 75 year-old Shalvey was not ready to retire. He became CEO of a local non-profit called San Joaquin A+. There must have been secret negotiations before he left Gates because it is probably not a coincident that at the same time billionaire, Helen Schwab, made a $400,000 donation to the non-profit.

Shalvey’s new job was part-time, committing 20 hours a week to his CEO position. Tax records indicate San Joaquin A+ (Tax ID: 51-0536117) became tax-exempt in 2005. It was a relatively low key organization until his arrival. In 2019, they had net assets of $39,266. Shalvey was compensated $160,225 that first year and in 2021, $332,782. In the three years prior to his arrival, A+ had taken in $15,169. The haul in 2020 was $3,176,833 and in 2021, $3,942,790.

He was definitely a rainmaker and the question is what did his billionaire supporters expect back?

Don Shalvey was known to be a good guy with a big smile and able to work with people but some locals in Stockton disagree. Founder of Facebook news report 209 Times, Motecuzoma (Motec) Sanchez, wrote:

“Every time one of these devils dies, like with Alex Spanos, you see their legacy media puppets try to brainwash the public into believing what they did in their lifetime was admirable. Shalvey exploited poor Brown and Black kids in my hometown of Stockton, Modesto and beyond. And his creations, like a monster, continue to do so.”

The late Alex Spanos was a very successful real-estate developer from Stockton who purchased the San Diego Chargers in 1984. Motec felt Spanos was ruthless and that just the way his life story was glorified is how Don Shalvey’s life is being embellished today. From his ranch in Linden, Shalvey consistently ingratiated himself with billionaires, denigrated public schools and made profits. 

In 2022, two grand jury reports seemed out to demonize the local school districts board and leadership. A report in The 74 quoted Shalvey saying, “I think Stockton Unified might be the worst system in the country.” That was typical of the hyperbolic anti-public school statements he often made.

It is true that during John Deasy’s two years as Superintendent, the district had some financial issues which have been solved. With 82% of K-12 students coming from families of poverty, it is little wonder they did not test well but their graduation rates were reasonable and English language progress rates, among the best in the state. It is one more example of good schools in poor neighborhoods having test results used to unfairly undermine them.

Shalvey made a lot of money working to destroy public education but that money is not helping him now. He raised an admirable family and seemed to have many good traits. I feel bad about writing critically of the dead but he, unwittingly or not, made many bad choices, harming countless children.

I agree with Motec.

Don Shalvey should never be lionized.

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Bad Governance with Education Vouchers

19 Mar

By Thomas Ultican 3/19/2024

 February 26, a Maricopa County Grand Jury indicted six people, including three employees of Arizona’s education department, for forgery, fraud and money laundering. The forty counts charged were related to stealing from the Empowerment Scholarship Account (ESA) program. Attorney General Kris Mayes claimed the fact that three department of education employees were involved indicates a lack of adequate fraud prevention but ESA advocates say new guardrails are not needed.

Before arriving into the 21st century, protecting against malfeasance with tax-generated dollars was considered fundamental to good governance. Arguably, voucher programs violate this basic tenet.

In the 19th century, America led the world to universal free public education. If parents wanted to put their child in a private school for religious or other reasons, it was a choice with no expectation from taxpayers. Today, voucher supporters demand Americans pay for private choices and claim accountability is just a way for liberals to kill vouchers.

In our upside-down politics, liberals are now the accountability hawks and conservatives blindly support spending tax dollars with no accountability.

 An article in The 74 quoted Lisa Snell, a senior fellow at Stand Together, brushing off the Arizona indictments with:

“I don’t think there’s any program that can regulate out the possibility of bad actors.”

“In any sector, there are people that are taking advantage of taxpayer money.”

 Stand Together was created by Charles Koch in 2003 and supports The 74.

The article continues with a quote by a director of national research at Milton Friedman’s EdChoice:

“Government employees committing fraud is a tale as old as time, and by no means unique to education”.

Arizona’s Governor, Katie Hobbs, proposed tightening accountability for the ESA program. Among eight propositions, she suggested an outside auditor to track private school use of ESA money with fingerprint background checks and minimum education requirements for teachers at these schools.

Mostly Republican ESA supporters held a rally after Hobbs announced her plan. Arizona State Senator Jake Hoffman claimed, “We’re here today to talk about Katie Hobbs’ abhorrent plan to regulate by death by a thousand cuts the Empowerment Scholarship Accounts out of existence”.

Former Arizona Secretary of Education Cathy Hoffman said:

“Ultimately, the problems with this program are bigger than any superintendent. The ESA program does not have — and has never had — enough oversight to ensure tax dollars are being spent appropriately.”

Education Vouchers

There are three main types of education vouchers.

Type 1: Voucher programs originally geared toward low-income families, allowing parents to use public education funding for tuition (in part or in full) at private schools that otherwise would be unaffordable. This includes both religious and non-religious schools. Sixteen states and Washington DC have voucher programs.

Type 2: Tax-Credit Scholarships programs offer full or partial tax credits to individuals or corporations who donate to nonprofit scholarship funds. Eligible families (usually low or middle income), looking for help paying private school tuition, apply for this through the scholarship-granting organization in their state.

Type 3: Education Savings Accounts allow eligible parents who withdraw their child from public school to get a deposit of state funds into a savings account or ESA which they use for educational expenses. It can pay private school tuition and fees but, unlike other school choice programs, may be used for other qualified expenses, like online learning programs or tutoring. In some states, like Arizona, leftover funds can even be applied for higher education.

These programs are all marketed as providing “school choice” with a sales pitch, claiming children are stuck in “failing public schools” and vouchers give them a way out.

Critics of school choice deny this claim and say funds should be reserved for public schools that serve all children. Jessica Levin, deputy litigation director at Education Law Center notes, “so-called school choice is really the schools’ choice”. She is pointing at the way private schools can and do discriminate against students they do not want.

Levin goes on to say:

“States with voucher programs usually permit participating private schools to discriminate based on disability, religion, LGBTQ+ status, English proficiency and other factors that public schools could never use to exclude or discipline students.”

Diane Hirshberg, director and professor of education policy at the Institute of Social and Economic Research at the University of Alaska—Anchorage shares, “The idea that vouchers enhance parent choice does not account for differences in socioeconomic circumstances which may constrain a family’s ability to take advantage of these or the limitations for rural and remote places”.

La Jolla Country Day in San Diego illustrates one of Hirshberg’s points. Even $11,000 vouchers are not pay enough for the $44,000 tuition but would be a nice perk for rich parents, already sending their children there. Arizona’s average ESA vouchers pay parents between $6,000 and $9,000. Low income kids are not going to high end private schools.

The Fordham Institute’s Chester Finn declared,

“It’s one thing to say parents should be able to review curriculum and have more say in what the schools are teaching and what is in the library. It’s a different thing to say parents should actually control the dollars that are spent on behalf of their child’s education and should be able to decide where those dollars are going and where that education is being delivered.”

No one would claim that Ronald Reagan’s former Assistant Secretary of Education, Chester Finn, was not a conservative but his ideology also means support for competent governance.

Director of the National Education Policy Center, Kevin Welner, observed:

“The idea is to be deregulated. For advocates of vouchers, transparency is not a good thing. Protections against discrimination in private schools is not a good thing. Oversight and data reporting and data collection, program evaluations, and accountability back to the government, none of those things are good things if you are coming from the perspective of voucher zealots.”

Voucher Schools are not Performing

Besides the fact that vouchers take money away from public schools attended by more than 90% of America’s students, they are generating horrendous test results.

Joshua Cowen is a professor of Education Policy at Michigan State University. From 2005 to 2010, he was part of an official evaluation of the Milwaukee Parental Choice Program. They followed 2500 students in the program who were carefully matched with 2500 public school students. Cowen reported, “After five years, we found very little difference on test scores between the two groups.”

This evaluation seems like the highpoint for voucher school performance. In a Time magazine article Cowen shared:

“Although small, pilot-phase programs showed some promise two decades ago, new evaluations of vouchers in Washington, D.C., Indiana, Louisiana, and Ohio show some of the largest test score drops ever seen in the research record—between -0.15 and -0.50 standard deviations of learning loss. That’s on par with what the COVID-19 pandemic did to test scores, and larger than Hurricane Katrina’s impacts on academics in New Orleans.”

DC Voucher Study Graphic (Page xiv)

Another major issue with voucher schools is that 20% to 30% of students leave every year, either giving up their vouchers or are pushed out.

It is not just Professor Cowen who is writing about these dismal results. Chalkbeat’s Mathew Barnum reported in 2019:

“That’s the grim conclusion of the latest study, released Tuesday, looking at Louisiana students who used a voucher to attend a private school. It echoes research out of Indiana, Ohio, and Washington, D.C. showing that vouchers reduce students’ math test scores and keep them down for two years or more.”

Joe Waddington, University of Kentucky professor, noted, “We’ve started to see persistent negative effects of receiving a voucher on student math achievement.”

So who benefits from vouchers?

There are three groups:

  1. Parents with children already in private schools
  2. Operators of private schools  
  3. Religious zealots who believe public schools are evil and must be destroyed

Public dollars should only go to public schools. American taxpayers generously agreed to finance public education. They have never voted to burden themselves with financing private schools. Every time given an opportunity to vote on vouchers, they said NO.

Choice is an ideology that came out of the negative reaction to Brown versus the Board of Education in 1954. It pushes people into separate silos and exacerbates division.

It is a bigoted choice and drives segregation…

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Subterfuge and Learning Loss Baloney

12 Mar

By Thomas Ultican 3/12/2024

Crazy pants Eric Hanushek claims COVID “learning-loss” could cost American students $31 trillion in future earnings. He burst onto the education world’s consciousness with his 1981 paper, claiming “there is no relationship between expenditures and the achievement of students and that such traditional remedies as reducing class sizes or hiring better trained teachers are unlikely to improve matters.” This played well with billionaires from the Walton family but had no relationship with reality. Likewise, his January 2024 “learning-loss” claims were straight up baloney.

Learning-Loss Reality

In the summer and fall of 2020, NWEA, McKinsey, CREDO and others produced unfounded analysis of looming learning-loss disaster caused by school closures. Since there was no data, summer learning-loss was used as a proxy, a bad one. In 2019, Paul von Hippel’s investigation threw great doubt on the 1982 Baltimore study that powerfully supported summer learning-loss belief. He showed using modern testing analysis, learning-loss was doubtful and in some cases, students gained during the summer. This data, used to trumpet a national education crisis, had no validity.

Unfortunately, billionaire-financed organizations, out to undermine public schools, do not care.

From March 2020 to February 2021, almost a half-million people died of COVID-19. There were no vaccines or Paxlovid type drugs. Refrigerator trucks stored dead bodies and more than 2 million Americans were hospitalized, some on ventilators for months. Schools were closed; unemployment jumped to 15%, murder rates shot up by 30% and fear was rampant.

In this environment, teachers heroically switched to online education.

K-12 students lost parents, became isolated from friends and visited family members in hospitals. Many kids struggled with online classes over inadequate internet feeds, parents were losing jobs and children could not visit grandparents.

Of course the rates of learning decreased but less than one might expect.

NEAP Data Explorer Graphs

The National Assessment of Education Progress (NAEP) 8th grade data graphs above show a modest decrease in both math and reading scores between 2019 and 2022. Reading fell by three points and math by eight points on a 500 point scale. I do not see catastrophe in these declines because given the context of the pandemic they strike me as rather small, with no signs of pending economic collapse.

Students have been out of school for months with medical or other reasons. I and others with this experience can testify that we were able to recover quickly. Claiming learning-loss disaster from COVID shutdown does not make sense.

Another interesting result from the 2022 NAEP test data comes from Commissioner Peggy Carr of the National Center for Education Statistics. She said, “There’s nothing in this data that tells us there is a measurable difference in the performance between states and districts based solely on how long schools were closed.”

To add further weight, New York Times opinion writer David Wallace-Wells wrote:

“In New York City, the nation’s largest school district, schools reopened in September 2020. There, average scores for reading fell by about a point for fourth graders and improved by about a point for eighth graders; in math, fourth-grade scores fell by nine points (statewide scores fell by 12) and eighth-grade scores fell by four points (statewide scores fell by six). In Los Angeles, the second-largest district, schools stayed closed through January 2021. There, average scores actually improved in fourth-grade reading, eighth-grade math and eighth-grade reading, where they improved by a robust nine points (to 257 from 248). Scores fell only in fourth-grade math (to 220 from 224).”

This January, the New York Times interactive posted “Students Are Making a ‘Surprising’ Rebound From Pandemic Closures”, based on a joint project from Stanford and Harvard Universities. Its executive summary states:

“Despite the lack of improvement during 2022-23 on assessments provided by NWEA and Curriculum Associates, we find that student achievement did improve between Spring 2022 and Spring 2023: in fact, students recovered approximately one-third of the original loss in math (0.17 grade levels out of the 0.53 grade levels decline from 2019-2022) and one quarter of the loss in reading (0.08 grade levels out of the 0.31 grade level decline from 2019-2022). Such improvements in grade levels in a single school year mean that students learned 117 percent in math and 108 percent in reading of what they would typically have learned in a pre-pandemic school year. These gains are large relative to historical changes in math and reading achievement on the National Assessment of Educational Progress.”

George Bush’s Secretary of Education, Margaret Spelling, says, “We’re slowly recovering, but not fast enough.” That is from the woman who claimed 100% of America’s students would be above average by 2014. Without being a statistician, it never rang true to me. Her failure to recognize the great work of public schools says she has an agenda.

Outrageous Claims

Eric Hanushek’s new report claims, “Historical earnings patterns make it is possible to estimate what the learning losses documented by NAEP will cost the average student in the Covid-cohort: 6 percent lower lifetime earnings than those not in this cohort.” To document this, he links it to a publication by the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development, referencing an article he wrote. Without evidence, he claimed Black students will have 8 percent lower lifetime earnings. His report is mostly unsupported assertions.

He states that “nations with more skilled populations grow faster” and asserts that pandemic learning losses mean the US will be less skilled, not growing as fast as “competitors”. Based on this, he postulated future economic losses for students of $28 trillion.

Seams he believes “competitors” would not have education setbacks from COVID.

Believing the pandemic brought harmful policy shifts, causing school quality to decline, he sees abandoning standardized test accountability as number one on his pantheon of bad moves. Teachers unions pushing for their preferred education policies seems wrong to Hanushek. After all, what do teachers know about good education? They are not trained MIT economists, like he is!

The one policy he sees bringing improvement is to put students with “top flight” teachers. This comes from the man who declared “hiring better trained teachers are unlikely to improve matters”.  Hanushek suggests, “The highly-effective teachers could teach larger classes or added sections of courses with both monetary incentives and additional support for this work.”

Remember he does not believe smaller class sizes are important.

Hanushek makes non-scientifically supported assertions and then amplifies them. Like dishonest scientists, he cites his own suspicious work as evidence for new claims. His days of learning test score conversions and estimates of economic loss are these kinds of mere postulations.

A Humanistic Perspective

Professor of literacy from the University of Connecticut, Rachael Gabriel, wrote a 2021 piece for the Washington Post Answer Sheet Blog claiming, “There is no such thing as learning loss.”  Her point was that even when not in school, young people are still learning. Professor Gabriel suggested:

“What if we imagined the “corona kids” had learned more than previous cohorts?

“What if we assumed they were more resilient, well-rounded, creative, and had even more potential than previous cohorts because of what they have lived through and lived without?

“What if we assumed that instead of behind, they were advanced in ways that matter beyond measure?”

Everyone should be confident that if schools and school teachers are allowed to do their job with no “expert” interference, students will be fine. Education and learning are not linear processes. When children are ready to learn, an explosion of growth occurs. It is the intellectual equivalent to that year I grew a foot taller.

Learning-loss is not the big danger facing America’s students. The real danger is the likes of McKinsey, NWEA, CREDO and research leaders like Eric Hanushek.

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Public Education Attack Measured

7 Mar

By Thomas Ultican 3/7/2024

A new report from Network for Public Education (NPE) concludes, “The war on public education has always been a part of Christian nationalism” (Page 32). NPE graded America’s schools using a 111 point scale:  a) Voucher and Charter Expansion and Protections – 66 points, b) Homeschooling governance – 7 points, c) Financial Support for Public Schools – 14 points and d) Freedom to Teach and Learn – 24 points (Page 9). The results from these category totals indicate, among other things, the extent of radical Christian and billionaire libertarian influence in each state.

No state earned a perfect 111 points with North Dakota’s 98 points being the high score. NPE translated the scores into letter grades of A – F: A – 86 to 98, B – 78 to 85, C – 67 to 77, D – 55 to 66 and F – 54 and below (Page 10). The top five states, all with A’s, and bottom five states, all with F’s, are listed below (Page 11).

                                    Top and Bottom Five

A GradesScore F Grades Score
North Dakota98 Arkansas37.5
Connecticut93 North Carolina32
Vermont90.5 Utah29.5
Illinois89 Arizona22.5
Nebraska87 Florida19

Interesting Privatization Observations

Stunningly, voucher costs have grown exponentially since 2000 while private school enrollment shrunk, decreasing from 11.38% in 1999 to 9.97% in 2021 (Page 5). The only way this could happen is if the public started paying for students who were already in private schools.

Of the 240 new charter schools in the US from 2022-2023, thirty of them had 25 or fewer students. A comparison of the National Center for Education Statistics data between 2021 and 2022 revealed 139 charter schools closed (Page 5).

NPE reported:

“Neighborhood public schools remain the first choice of the overwhelming majority of American families. Despite their popularity, schools, which are embedded in communities and governed by elected neighbors, have been the target of an unrelenting attack from the extreme right” (Page 4).

The title for most privatized school system in the US belongs to Florida. Even there, with its 74% public school enrollment, the popularity is unchallenged (Page 6).  

Public schools enroll about 90% of America’s K-12 students.

A Pennsylvania investigation discovered that 100% of voucher schools examined, engaged in some form of discrimination. The schools’ decisions were based on LGBTQ status, disability, academic capacity, family religion and “even pregnancy”. Dayspring Christian Academy declared that supporting the rights of LGBTQ students was also a reason for being denied enrollment or expulsion (Page 12).

The District of Columbia and 30 states have voucher programs with many having multiple programs. Some states allow participants to be in more than one program. Middle class and wealthy families who never had children in public schools now have tax-dollar generated sources flowing toward them (Page 12).

We now have the ludicrous situation where poor people are supporting private school students from wealthy families.

Root of Christian Nationalism

Carol Burris and her team at NPE observed:

“The war on public education has always been a part of Christian nationalism. As that movement rises, so do the attacks on public schools. Randall Balmer of Dartmouth College argues in his piece in Politico that the origins of the political power of the Religious Right began not with Roe v. Wade but rather with Green v. Kennedy, which denied segregation academies tax-exempt status. According to Balmer, that decision gave religious conservative Paul Weyrich an opening to leverage Evangelical political power. Today, the Heritage Foundation, the organization he co-founded, is part of a billionaire-funded effort to destroy ‘government schools’ under the banner of school choice.” (Page 32)

In 1973, Paul Weyrich co-founded the Christian nationalist think-tank, The Heritage Foundation, which has been brutal to the America I love. They attacked the separation of church and state guaranteed in the 1st amendment to the US constitution, undermined democratic action and demanded fidelity to their ideals. In their world, it is forbidden to embrace humanistic principles, share resource or help non-Christians.

Katherine Stewart discussed Weyrich in her book, The Power Worshippers. After the Democratic Party’s embrace of civil rights, Richard Nixon’s “Southern strategy” became a winner. Stewart shared, “If the right could access the religious vote, Weyrich reasoned, power would be in its grasp” (Worshippers 60).

In historian, Randall Balmer’s book, Thy Kingdom Come: How the Religious Right Distorts the Faith and Threatens America, Weyrich claimed that it was the 1975 IRS action against Bob Jones University that caused the Religious Right’s rise, not abortion. Only after New Right leaders held a 1978 conference call to discuss strategy, was abortion was put on their political agenda (Worshippers 64).

With the Soviet Union’s fall, Weyrich saw an opportunity to unite with religious conservatives in Russia and Eastern Europe. Stewart noted:

“All told, Weyrich made more than a dozen trips to Russia and Eastern Europe in the aftermath of the fall of communism. At the time of his death in 2008, even as he was riding high on a wave of plutocratic money in the United States, he was writing and speaking frequently in defense of Russia and facilitating visits between U. S. conservatives and Russian political leaders.” (Worshippers 270)

The long relationship between Christian nationalists and Russian plutocrats informs us why some Republicans support Russia against Ukraine. A pro-Russian attitude goes along with opposing public education. To Christian nationalists, the enemy is secular humanism and public schools reek of it.

Weyrich spent the last decade of his life in excruciating pain. In 1996, he fell on black ice, suffering a spinal injury. By 2001 he required a wheel chair to get around and in 2005; both his legs were amputated from his knees down. He was in constant pain until his death in late 2008.

Why was Florida Last

The team at NPE has provided a fair and well researched assessment of public schools across America. Their four categories and weightings they used to compare schools from many jurisdictions are reasonable. Clearly privatization efforts do significant harm to public education; making giving them 51% of the grade acceptable. Assigning 22% of the grade to protect freedom to teach may be a little low but OK. School finance, getting 13% of the grade, is definitely not too much and 6% of the grade, coming for homeschooling protection, is a needed new category.

With homeschooling accelerating over the last two decades, the need to protect children educated at home has become more critical. The Coalition for Responsible Home Education  was founded by adults, who were themselves homeschooled. Their database contains documented stories of brutal neglect, including homeschooled children murdered, sexually assaulted, imprisoned, and starved. Unfortunately these stories almost never garner national attention. Students in brick and mortar schools also suffer this kind of abuse but they are around mandated reporters (teachers) every day and are not hidden from sight like homeschooled kids.

Using well-sourced data and a four-category rubric, NPE has provided parents throughout the United States with tools to evaluate their states education leadership.

NPE mentioned The Heritage Foundation and its connection to Christian nationalism, which is leading the war against public education. Before he was elected governor of Florida, Jeb Bush served on the Heritage board. It was there he developed his agenda for privatizing public education. His most influential adviser was Patricia Levesque, a graduate of Bob Jones University, the fundamentalist Christian school in South Carolina.

Little wonder that Florida was dead last in supporting public education in America.

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Stalled California Charter Schools

29 Feb

By Thomas Ultican 2/29/2024

In California, from 2021 to 2023, 31 new charter schools opened but 63 closed. Since inception in 1994, charter school enrollment grew ever year until 2021. For the first time, charter school enrollment fell. This December, KIPP SoCal announced they were closing three of their 23 Los Angeles County schools. Alliance for College-Ready Public Schools and Green Dot Public Schools have also closed LA area schools.

The charter industry is struggling…

California State Enrollment Data

Los Angeles Unified School District

Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD) charter petitions used to arrive by the dozens but there were none this year. The 74 reported:

“Enrollment in the schools peaked in 2021, when the city’s charters enrolled nearly 168,000 students. Since then admissions have declined by nearly 11%, although not as fast as district schools.”

The “although not as fast as district schools” remark is disingenuous. In 2016, LAUSD enrollment was 639,337 and by 2023, had fallen to 538,295. This was a drop of almost 16% but over a much longer time period.

Since 2019, student enrollment in California declined by 5% and in Los Angeles County, the drop was 8.5% (California Data).

Howard Blum, reporting for the LA Times, stated:

“Twenty years ago, L.A. Unified had close to 740,000 students and was building schools as fast as it could. District-operated schools currently enroll about 420,000 students — a decline caused by reduced immigration, families moving out of L.A., lower birthrates — and, until recently, the growth of charter schools.”

Carol Burris and Network for Public Education (NPE) published Broken Promises in 2020. A stunning find was that almost 50% of charter schools had closed their doors within the first 15 years of operation (Broken Page 19).

About 50% of Charter Schools Closures by Year 15

Parents, sold a story about superior charter schools, often end up dismayed. A typical response to the closing of KIPP Poder comes from parent Gina Alonzo:

“I was very angry — very, very upset — disappointed, because we didn’t get a warning. We didn’t get a notification of what was going on — the issues that they were having.”

“We were grown as a community here. Everybody knows each other. This is all my son knows. So I’m upset and I’m thinking about the trauma that this is going to cause him.”

Besides new state policies and falling student populations, people in the choice community see the LAUSD board as hostile to charter schools. In 2022, Rocio Rivas won the district-2 seat in a tightly fought battle, not called until two weeks after the election. With a pro-public school board member, replacing termed-out Monica Garcia, the board shifted away from school choice.

In 2017, billionaires (Hastings, Broad, Rock, Fisher and, multiple Waltons) poured huge dollars into the LAUSD election, outspending their opponents 2 to 1 in America’s most expensive school board election ever. They spent more than $6 million in just the 2020 district-7 race to maintain control of the board. The 2022 results flipped the script and billionaires lost control.

John Angeli is executive director of the Los Angeles Coalition for Excellent Public Schools, a group that represents some of the city’s largest charter operators. He points out that in 2024, two incumbent school board members are running for reelection with two retiring board members, leaving open seats. Angeli believes the board could tip back to his favor in November.

School Choice – A Bad Choice

Some charter schools are abominations but most of them are reasonable. Like public schools, they are staffed with excellent or mostly decent teachers and a few who should not be in the profession. Their standardized testing results are similar to those of public schools with two deficiencies. They are likely to close their doors anytime while a public school never closes mid-school year, with no notice. Also public schools unify communities while charter schools divide them.

Birthed in the bowels of the 1950’s segregationist south, school choice has never been about improving education. It is founded on white supremacy, profiting off taxpayers, cutting taxes, selling market based solutions and financing religion. School choice ideology has a long dark history of dealing significant harm to public education.

Steve Suitts’ book, Overturning Brown, provides overwhelming evidence for the segregationist legacy of “school choice.” “Brown v Board” has been effectively gutted with “choice” as the white supremacists’ most potent strategy. In the 21st century, choice is being wielded to maintain segregation and destroy separation of church and state.

Southern segregationists often condemned “integration as the work of communists” (Suitts 32). Adopting the language of University of Chicago libertarian economist, Milton Friedman, they began denouncing the “monopoly of government schools”, calling it “socialism in its purest form” (Suitts 59). This is the basis of so-called school choice.

A Brookings Institute study of segregation in schools reported:

“Charter schools are more segregated than TPS [traditional public school] at national, state, and metro levels. Black students in charter schools are far more likely than their traditional public school counterparts to be educated in intensely segregated settings. At the national level, 70 percent of black charter school students attend intensely segregated minority charter schools (which enroll 90-100 percent of students from under-represented minority backgrounds), or twice as many as the share of intensely segregated black students in traditional public schools”.

This is a big problem concerning all races. Professors Linda R. Tropp and Suchi Saxena along with many other sociologists and educators have conducted research identifying the clear benefit of and need for school integration. They state, “New social science research demonstrates the importance of fostering sustained interracial contact between youth in order to prepare them to thrive in a multiracial society”.

UCLA Professor Gary Orfield coined the phrase “apartheid schools” for schools with a White student enrollment of 1% or less. A personal 2019 study of Washington DC charter schools revealed that 64 of the 116 charter schools could be classified as “apartheid schools”.

Yesterday, Peter Greene posted an insightful article about the coalition-promoting school choice and their splintering. One of the points he made was:

“But what the alliance didn’t produce was results. Choice did not provide a sudden lifting of all boats, despite some data-torturing attempts to show otherwise. Data-driven instruction didn’t improve the data generated by either students or teachers. Underserved communities that were supposed to be rescued from failing schools by charters and choice too often had education policies done to them rather than with them. And then there was the gross miscalculation that was Common Core, which drew attack from all across the political spectrum”.

For the Catholic Church and Evangelical Christians, like Betsy DeVos, publicly provided vouchers for private religious schools open a path to taxpayer support for their organizations. It is lamentable for their cause that every recent large scale study of vouchers showed students perform worse when transferred to voucher schools.

What is the main motive behind mega-rich spending to undermine public education? Professor Maurice Cunningham of the University of Massachusetts claimed they really want “lower state and local taxes.”

John Arnold is the billionaire Enron trader who did not go to prison when that company collapsed. He has joined forces with the billionaire CEO of Netflix, Reed Hastings, to sell the nation on the portfolio model of school management.  To achieve their goal, they created The City Fund. After its founding in 2018, billionaires Bill Gates, Michael Dell and Steve Ballmer all made significant contributions.

In brief, the portfolio model directs closing schools that score in the bottom 5% on standardized testing and reopening them as charter schools or Innovation schools. In either case, they will no longer come under the purview of an elected school board. It is a march to oblivion for public schools because there will always be a bottom 5%.

Two central ideologies behind school choice are markets always make superior decisions and the cost of local control of schools is poor outcomes. Both ideas are demonstrably untrue but big money and power politics keep them alive.

It is good for America that charter schools are starting to struggle but it is heartbreaking for parents, hornswaggled by billionaires. Americans have always had school choice. If taxpayer funded public school are not wanted, there are always private schools, without the choice encumbering taxpayers.

Let’s join with the Network for Public Education and thoughtfully role back choice schools and put them under democratic control.

Stop fleecing taxpayers to finance privatized schools.

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Time to Leave International PISA Testing

20 Feb

By Thomas Ultican 2/20/2024

February began with Progressive Policy Institute and The 74 teaming up for a Webinar on PISA math test results, declaring “Historically Underperforming PISA Scores are a Call to Action”. 

Dr. Yong Zhao, Foundation Distinguished Professor of Education at University of Kansas and among his many accolades, an appointed Professor of Educational Leadership at University of Melbourne, has a different view, stating:

“Since 2000, our scores on PISA have barely changed. While there’s much chatter about learning from other systems, it has not happened. There is no reason that the U.S. should continue its participation in PISA.”

Zhao sees standardized testing as undermining student creativity. PISA tests stress cognitive skills while noncognitive skills are more related to creativity and entrepreneurship. His book, Who’s Afraid of the Big Bad Dragon, describes how in 605 AD the Chinese government developed a testing system known as “keju” to select people for prestigious government positions. That system is now blamed for stifling creativity and scientific development. When westerners showed up in their ships, guided by compasses and using gunpowder, both invented in china, the Chinese could not defend themselves. Zhao writes, “In fact, the keju system has been held responsible for the decline of the Chinese empire.” (Big Bad Dragon page 35)

PISA 2022 Testing Results

A quick peek at PISA’s data presentation reveals average scores in everything have gone the wrong direction since bankers from the Organization of Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) got involved. Furthermore, their baseless use of translating test scores into time is fraudulent.

Why would anyone pay attention to their views on education?

Progressive Policy Institute

Going into the 1984 Democratic convention, several politicians, not happy with the party’s direction, met in a San Francisco hotel room but did not take action. After Walter Mondale’s thumping by Ronald Reagan, the Democratic Leadership Council (DLC) was created based on a plan developed by Al From who believed that being independent from the Democratic Party would allow them to be more “entrepreneurial”. Current PPI Director, Will Marshall, was hired to be policy director (Left Behind Pages 43-45).

To drive their policy strategy, From and Marshall decided to establish a think tank. Seeing the way Heritage Foundation, American Enterprise Institute and Cato Institute had driven the conservative revolution in the 1970s and 1980s, they created a new idea-generating center called Progressive Policy Institute (PPI) (Left Behind Pages 112-113).

Early on, PPI came out with articles opposing minimum wages which many people saw as anti-union. Later, a PPI fellow, David Osborne, famously campaigned for an entrepreneurial government to meld public and private to maximize productivity and effectiveness. Lily Geismer said, “Osborne developed these ideas into a book cowritten with Ted Gaebler, called Reinventing Government: How the Entrepreneurial Spirit Is Transforming the Public Sector; which was released in 1992” (Left Behind Page 117).

Geismer continued:

“Under Osborne’s guidance, the DLC became one of the first political organizations to explore charter schools as a means of improving public education. Charters, along with the other programs, became a critical part of the new approach that DLC promised it would provide as the nation was starting a new decade.” (Left Behind Page 118)

It is no surprise to see PPI joining with The 74 to trash public education. Their “third way” agenda has a lot in common with the GOP driven school choice and anti-labor agenda.

For this Webinar, the PPI expert panel included Dr. Peggy G. Carr, Commissioner of the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) in the U.S. Department of Education, Andreas Schleicher, Director of the Directorate of Education and Skills at the OECD and Jonathan A. Supovitz, Professor in charge of Organizations, Leadership, and Systems Division at University of Pennsylvania, Graduate School of Education. The moderator was PPI’s Tressa Pankovits, Co-Director of Reinventing America’s Schools.

Peggy Carr served in NCES for more than 20 years before Biden appointed her Commissioner. She is undoubtedly a gifted mathematician but knows little about America’s classrooms. Carr recently made headlines when the charter school she founded, Children’s Village Academy in North Carolina, was charged with paying exorbitant interest rates on a 15-year old loan she gave the school.

Andreas Schleicher is a fine mathematician but, just like Peggy Carr, he knows nothing about good education. His personal PISA involvement blinds him to how little value standardized testing is for evaluating student learning.

I really don’t want to say anything mean about moderator Tressa Pankovits because she is a fellow Aztec, unfortunately her resume reveals no training or experience as an educator. Still she is PPI’s “Co-Director of Reinventing America’s Schools, which researches innovations needed to create a 21st century model for public education that is geared to the knowledge economy.” It is hard to understand how her background qualifies for the position. Before she got this job she worked 10 years for Paul Vallas who hurt public schools in Chicago, Philadelphia, New Orleans and Bridgeport. He also has no training or experience as an educator.

The only educator in this group is Jonathan A. Supovitz. His values look shaky, based on the company he keeps.

PISA and the OECD

OECD was formed in 1961 as a follow-on to the Marshall plan, run by bankers and economists. Market Business states:

“All OECD member states claim to be market economies that are committed to democracy. The organization says it provides a platform where they:

  • Share and compare policy experiences.
  • Identify good practices.
  • Coordinate members’ international and domestic policies.
  • Seek answers to common problems.”

In 2014, German writers, Sija Graupe and Jochen Krautz, wrote “From Yardstick to Hegemony”, using OECD documents:

“The OECD Conference documentation of 1961 declares unequivocally: ‘It goes without saying that the educational system must be an aggregate of the economy, it is just as necessary to prepare people for the economy as real assets and machines. The educational system is now equal to highways, steel works and chemical fertilizers’”.

“What this unrealistic worldview setting in turn impedes is any critique or will to change because rather than being understood by the public as a theoretical construct it is, according to the neoliberal economist August Hayek, accepted by most as an immediately evident truth. Whether they are true or false, economic theories and all assessments based on these (such as PISA) determine reality. … As long as people believe having more PISA points is better than less in order to be successful economically they will, of course, do everything they can to acquire more. Education is then forced to uncritically yield to the pressure of comparative assessment, even if it is based on pure assertion.”

The meaningfulness of PISA testing results are pure assertion based on bad science.

Noel Wilson’s famous 1997 peer-reviewed thesis, “Educational Standards and the Problem of Error” fundamentally states the error involved in educational testing is so great that validity is compromised. In other words, standardized tests are not refined enough to make more than generalizations and are bunk for measuring learning or teaching.

Yong Zhao shared research showing an inverse relationship between test scores and economic development:

“In fact, a correlational analysis done in 2007 showed a negative correlation between international test scores and economic development (Baker, 2007). That is, countries with higher scores in the first international study did worse than countries with lower scores.” 

Because America does not filter students from the academic system before high school, tested populations do not compare well internationally. However, since 2010, in the yearly International Math Olympiad, the USA team has come in first four times and never finished lower than fourth … out of over 100 entrants.

So why are we still bothering with meaningless PISA exams???

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