Archive | October, 2024

Privatized Schools Will End Democracy

30 Oct

By Thomas Ultican 10/30/2024

America’s founders believed in a need to educate the populace, especially second and third presidents, John Adams and Thomas Jefferson. They believed that the only way a self-governing society could be sustained is with an educated population. Adams penned to his wife, Abigail, “And liberty cannot be preserved without a general knowledge among the people who have a right from the frame of their nature to knowledge, as their great Creator who does nothing in vain, has given them understandings and a desire to know.” In a 1786 letter to scholar and fellow signatory to the Declaration of Independence, George Wythe, Jefferson wrote:

“I think by far the most important bill in our whole code is that for the diffusion of knowledge among the people. No other sure foundation can be devised for the preservation of peace and happiness.” (School and Society 1995, Page 25)

In the antebellum era, two types of schools flourished, common schools and academies. Common schools were supported by local and state governments. They were free for students. Academies may have received some governmental support but they charged students tuition. The common schools dominated towns and cities while the rural areas without enough population to support a common school turned to academies which were often boarding schools.

After the Civil War, common schools became more dominant. As the school system developed throughout America, the public structure took root.

In the 1930’s, the fact of an educated population that could read, write and do some math probably saved America from authoritarianism. During World War II, the high rates of literacy among American troops had a lot to do with their success on the battlefield.

The 1960s and 70s witnessed civil rights coming to public education and the development of a pluralistic system. Unfortunately, in the late 1970s, Washington DC politicians began to interfere with public education by proposing education standards, a harmful error.

In 1983, the Reagan administration published a deceitful attack on public schools, “Nation at Risk.” Since then public schools have been under relentless attack financed by billionaires.

A key weapon in this attack has been forcing school vouchers on communities and states. Vouchers have never survived a popular vote, but in areas dominated by the Republican Party they have been enacted by legislatures. Researcher Joshua Cowen’s new book, “The Privateers; How Billionaires Created a Culture War and Sold School Vouchers,” documents the way rightwing billionaires advanced a public education killing agenda.

The Privateers

Milwaukee, Wisconsin brought us America’s first voucher program in 1991. Cowen claims with evidence that the driving force behind the program was the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation.

In 1901, the brothers founded the Allen Bradley Company with a $1,000 investment by local Milwaukee doctor Stanton Allen. The older brother Lynde died in 1942 and the younger brother Harry succumbed in 1965. In 1985, Rockwell International bought the Allen Bradley Company for $1.65 billion and overnight the Bradley Foundation ballooned from $14 million to $300 million. The faceless people in control of this giant pile of cash pushed through America’s first voucher program.

Joshua Cowen is a Professor of Education Policy at the University of Wisconsin, Madison.  From 2015-2018, he served as co-editor of Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis, the flagship peer-reviewed education policy journal in the United States. He was previously Associate Editor of Education Finance and Policy, and remains on the editorial boards of both journals. Since 2009, his research has been funded by an array of philanthropist and organizations including The University of Arkansas Foundation, the Walton Family Foundation and John Arnold.

Cowen being in the research trenches working directly with scholars that had an ideological predisposition to support vouchers makes his information powerful.

Billionaires Charles Koch, Betsy DeVos and other holders of extreme wealth have financed the fight to move funding away from public education and toward private schools. Cowen explains, “The purpose was and is to do away with schools existing as a core function of democracy and stand up instead a privately held, sectarian and theocratic version of publicly funded education.” (Privateers Page 30)

When the nation’s first voucher program was enacted, Wisconsin lawmakers included a requirement for an outside evaluation. University of Wisconsin professor of political science, John F. Witte, was given the assignment. Cowen reports, “Although the evaluation found the parents of voucher users indicated greater levels of satisfaction with their children’s educational experiences over time, Witte also found little consistent evidence that vouchers improved test scores or attendance rates and found that students gave up the vouchers at high rates to return to Milwaukee Public Schools.” (Privateers Page 36)

Paul Peterson, a Harvard professor who thirty years earlier earned a PhD in political science from the University of Chicago, was not having it. He blasted Witte’s report in the New York Times and in academic papers. Peterson was known mostly for his 1990 book, “Welfare Magnets.” However, in 1995, he received funding from both the Olin foundation and the Bradley foundation. Some of that funding was to evaluate Witte’s report. Peterson and his then graduate-student Jay P. Greene (now at the Heritage Foundation) attacked Witte’s study with a shocking level of vitriol and ferocity. (Privateers Page 38)

The next voucher program popped up in Cleveland, Ohio. It was the Peterson-Greene evaluation of the program that caused researchers concern about a hidden agenda and sloppy scholarship. Cowen writes:

‘“Even when he has limited data, he’s always squeezing out whatever data he can to arrive at a predetermined answer,’ said Professor Bruce Fuller, an early voucher critic at University of California, Berkeley. Fuller noted that with Olin and Bradley funding Peterson’s work, ‘That’s like the tobacco companies sponsoring studies on the effects of smoking.’ A later textbook for future evaluators would cite the Peterson Milwaukee work as a cautionary example of ideologically predisposed research and ‘a hidden agenda,’ particularly in Peterson and Greene’s willingness to use lower-than-conventional standards of statistical inference to make their case. Even Paul T. Hill, an otherwise prominent school choice supporter, singled out the Peterson Cleveland work as ‘not a persuasive study.’” (Privateers Page 42)

The central role of the Bradley Foundation was brought home with a quote from the New Yorker’s Jane Mayer:

“The Bradley Foundation virtually drove the early national ‘school choice’ movement, waging an all-out assault on teachers’ unions and traditional public schools. In an effort to ‘wean’ Americans from government, the foundation militated for parents to be able to use public funds to send their children to private and parochial schools.” (Privateers Page 46/7)

The wheels on the voucher bandwagon flew off. Patrick Wolf, another Peterson acolyte at Harvard who is now at the University of Arkansas, presented a paper with results Cowen described as “shocking.” The evaluation of Louisiana’s statewide voucher program showed unprecedented large negative impacts on students. Martin West, a former Peterson student and now Harvard Professor, wrote about the results calling them “as large as any I’ve seen” in the history of American Education.(Privateers Page 89)

Since that Louisiana study, two studies in Washington DC also showed large academic losses. The same thing occurred in both Ohio and Indiana. The largest academic declines ever recorded were from these voucher programs; larger than the losses due to Katrina or the Covid pandemic.

Conclusion

 If you have not read “Privateers,” I strongly recommend you do. In it, Joshua Cowen documents the massive spending by Charles Koch, Betsy DeVos, the Walton family and other wealthy conservatives to undermine public education by selling school choice. Public education is expensive and does not allow for religious indoctrination. Good private schools cost a lot more than the vouchers offered. This creates two benefits for conservative billionaires, overall education costs are reduced and the public is forced to fund religious schools. Those who are not wealthy will get an enfeebled education if the billionaires succeed in destroying public education.

Koch, DeVos and other billionaires run wealthy foundations that are tax exempt charities. In reality, they are not charities. They are political organizations spending to advance school privatization and other political agendas. The laws governing tax exempt foundations are being ignored because no one wants to face the wrath of the supper wealthy.

America can no longer afford billionaires. They undermine democracy. I have two recommendations. Tax billionaires back to being millionaires and cleanup tax free giving.

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More Proof: Charter School Experiment FAILED

25 Oct

By Thomas Ultican 10/25/2024

Two new reports detail the high closure rates of charter schools and the negative effect of school closures on students. In 2020, Network for Public Education (NPE) produced “Broken Promises,” the first ever comprehensive study of charter school closure rates. Their just released new report, “Doomed to Fail,” updates “Broken Promises.” In May, Houston researcher, Jeonghyeok Kim, published “The Long Shadow of School Closures: Impacts on Students’ Educational and Labor Market Outcomes.” Taken together these two new studies demonstrate why the charter school industry is a dangerous failure.

Since the inception of charter schools in the 1990s, billionaires and entrepreneurs have worked to sell these privatized schools. Under Bill Clinton’s leadership, the Democratic Leadership Council embraced school choice believing in the power of the entrepreneurial economy to reform schools (Left Behind Pages 122-127). The federal government started experimenting with charter schools. A rewrite of the 1994 Elementary and Secondary Education Act included a provision for a new federal Charter School Program. In 1995, the new program granted a total of $4,539,548 to nine states. Today, $400 million federal dollars are spent yearly to promote charter schools and oversight is relatively weak.

There is no denying that some charter schools are excellent, however, in general they are unstable. As NPE has documented their closure rates are so high as to be a big risk for parents and students.

Doomed to Fail

Reformers believed that a large-scale charter experiment would either prove or disprove the superiority of charter schools. In 2006, after Hurricane Katrina, Louisiana turned to the new Recovery School District (RSD) and all the schools in New Orleans became charter schools. However, because the students who returned to New Orleans were different from those in the city before, and there was an enormous influx of philanthropic funding, it was impossible to determine if the charter experiment worked.

Gary Rubenstein explained:

“Reformers needed a new experiment where the schools would keep the same students they already had, but the staff at those schools would be replaced with nonunion charter school educators, and charter chains or start-up charter boards would run the schools. Race to the Top provided Tennessee the funding and incentive to test the reformers’ hypotheses.” (Doomed page 19)

The theory was that “failing” schools in the bottom 5% of testing data would be taken over by charter schools. The goal was to show that these privatized schools would soon be in the top 25% of schools on testing results. It was a complete failure. None of the 33 charterized schools ever left the bottom.

This experiment demonstrated that it was not the public schools causing poor performance and privatizing them provided no improvement. The type of school, charter or public, made no difference. However, unstable schools are harmful and “Doomed to Fail” shows that charter schools induce a failure rate crap shoot.

The NPE report describes how professional marketing campaigns convince parents that the new charter school is different and better than the nearby public school. “Doomed to Fail” states:

“However, as hundreds of thousands of families have found, enrolling your child in a charter school comes with enormous risk. Charter schools close at far higher rates than public schools. And, unlike public school districts where infrequent closures are orderly with the district finding a new school for the child, charter school closures are often chaotic and abrupt, taking parents by surprise.” (Doomed Page 1)

“Doomed to Fail” Page 11

Researcher Ryan Pfleger, Ph.D. used the federal Common Core of Data to create the table above. Each cohort is comprised of every year’s batch of new charter schools. The table informs us that 16% of new charter schools close their doors within the first three years. The ten 15-year cohorts failed at a 49% rate which is a 1% improvement over the 2020 “Broken Promises” report. However, the huge federal COVID payments of 2021 probably kept many schools in business that otherwise would have failed. The 20-year failure rate of 55% makes it clear that failure keeps happening and that more than half of all charter schools close their doors forcing families to make other arrangements.

The charter industry says their schools are more academically accountable and are closed if they do not meet the agreed to goals. However, NPE’s research discovered that this was the cause for only a minority of the schools that closed. Not being able to maintain enough enrollment to be viable or corruption and mismanagement were the cause in more than 68% of closures. 

“Doomed to Fail” Page 13

Closures Bring Long Term Negative Effects

In 2019, Matt Barnum of Chalkbeat reported on 17 studies of the effect of school closures on students. There were differing results but in general reading and math scores suffered but after three years, the academic effects seemed to have disappeared.

Researcher Jeonghyeok Kim took a longer range look at the student outcomes and the results were surprising. Like other studies, Kim’s showed a short term academic decline and then recovery within three years. However, he also discovered long term discipline issues, lowered college completion rates and reduced incomes.

In EdWeek, Libby Stanford reported, “Kim centered his research around a dataset of 470 Texas schools that closed from 1998 to 2015.” Stanford also noted, “In a study of federal enrollment data from 2000 to 2018, researchers at the Stanford Graduate School of Education found that majority-Black schools were three times more likely to close than schools with smaller enrollments of Black students.” Since Kim associated the harshest closed school outcomes with economically disadvantaged families, this represents a double whammy.

The abstract from Kim’s paper states:

“Each year, over a thousand public schools in the US close due to declining enrollments and chronic low performance, displacing hundreds of thousands of students. Using Texas administrative data and empirical strategies that use within-student across-time and within-school across-cohort variation, I explore the impact of school closures on students’ educational and labor market outcomes. The findings indicate that experiencing school closures results in disruptions in both test scores and behavior. While the drop in test scores is recovered within three years, behavioral issues persist. This study further finds decreases in post-secondary education attainment, employment, and earnings at ages 25–27. These impacts are particularly pronounced among students in secondary education, Hispanic students, and those from originally low-performing schools and economically disadvantaged families.”

Kim’s ground breaking research shows that the negative effects of experiencing a school closure are not just short term, but appear to be a life long hindrance.

Conclusion

NPE’s new study, “Doomed to Fail,” makes it clear how unstable privatized schools are. The study also reports on charter skullduggery and specific school closures like Jubilee academy, sharing:

“On August 14, 2023, Jubilee Academies Highland Park in San Antonio, Texas, began the school year. Two weeks later, parents were informed that the school would close by mid-September. Families would have to find another school or agree to bus their child to another Jubilee school. Two hundred and ten students were displaced.” (Doomed Page 14)

When “Doomed to Fail” is combined with Jeonghyeok Kim’s new research, it is clear that parents are risking the future of their children when they enroll them in a charter school.

To be clear, trusting your child to a charter school is a bad idea.

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Lying to Sell School Choice

20 Oct

By Thomas Ultican 10/20/2024

Progressive Policy Institute (PPI) and The 74 are lying about education gaps to promote “school choice.” The 74’s October 10 headline says, “In Cities With School Choice, Low-Income Kids Catching up to Wealthier Peers.” The article is based on a report from the PPI’s Reinventing America’s Schools. The non-peer reviewed report assaults scholarship and is based on other billionaire paid nonsense.

Progressive Policy Institute

Tressa Pankovits, the Co-director of PPI’s Reinventing America’s Public Schools, authored the propagandistic report. She came to PPI after 10 years as CEO of Vallas Group inc. Her PPI bio says the Vallas Group was, “led by esteemed education and public finance expert Paul Vallas.”  It should be noted Vallas is not universally esteemed in New Orleans, Philadelphia or Chicago where he did his best to privatize their schools and demean teachers.

PPI pushes conservative ideology while dressing it up like progressive philosophy. The biography of its founder, Will Marshal, states, “Founded in 1989, PPI started as the intellectual birthplace of the New Democrat and ‘Third Way’ movements, earning a reputation as President Bill Clinton’s ‘idea mill.”’

Lily Geismer’s book, Left Behind, claims that the Democrats failed attempt to solve inequality demonstrates how Bill Clinton “ultimately did more to sell free-market thinking than even Friedman and his acolytes” (Left Behind Page 13). She went on to note that Journalist Charles Peters called Clinton and his core supporters, neoliberals. Geismer noted:

“Peters meant it not as a pejorative but as a positive. … Neoliberals, he observed, ‘still believe in liberty and justice and a fair chance for all, in mercy for the afflicted and help for the down and out,’ but ‘no longer automatically favor unions and big government’” (Left Behind Page 18). [Emphasis added]

Historian Arthur Schlesinger labeled the DLC “a quasi-Reaganite formation” and accused them of “worshiping at the shrine of the free market” (Left Behind Page 46). DLC stands for Democratic Leadership Council which is also referred to as “New Democrats.”

David Osborne was an early fellow at PPI. He developed his view of entrepreneurial government into a 1992 book written with Ted Gaebler, called “Reinventing Government: How the Entrepreneurial Spirit is Transforming the Public Sector.” In their book the authors “made the case for what they called ‘entrepreneurial schools,’ which would compete among each other for customers” (A Wolf at the School House Door Page 84).  Under Osborne’s influence, “the DLC became one of the first political organizations to explore charter schools as a means of improving public education” (Left Behind Page 118). Osbourn became a senior advisor for Vice President Al Gore and founded PPI’s Reinventing America’s Public Schools. He is still its Director Emeritus.

Reinventing America’s Public Schools is aggressively for school privatization through charter schools. They are funded by the Walton Family Foundation (TIN: 13-3441466), the Broad Foundation (TIN: 95-4686318), and the Arnold Foundation (TIN: 26-3241764). These are the billionaires paying the freight and they want their deliverables.

Propaganda Masquerading as Research

There are two main claims being asserted in the report. One is that achievement gaps are shrinking in areas with significant school choice. The second claim is that charter schools do not negatively impact public schools. The 74 quotes Brandon Brown, CEO of the Mind Trust in Indianapolis, saying, “[A] lot of the evidence shows that the growth of high-quality charter schools does not come at the expense of the school district.” Both of these claims are farcical.

The PPI report claims:

“Stanford University’s Center for Research on Education Outcomes (CREDO) has undertaken many local studies and, in 2023, released its third major national report in a series spread out over the past 30 years. In that massive study, CREDO researchers assessed the performance of students at 6,200 charter schools in 29 states between 2014 and 2019, confirming that charter-school students, on average, outperformed their peers in demographically-matched traditional public schools” (Report Page 6).

If we believed the CREDO results, the differences of 0.011 standard deviations in math and 0.028 standard deviations in reading are so small as to be meaningless. In addition, the CREDO methodology is highly suspect. Professor Andrew Maul of UC Santa-Barbara stated, “The study’s ‘virtual twin’ technique is insufficiently documented, and it remains unclear and puzzling why the researchers use this approach rather than the more accepted approach of propensity score matching.”

Economics writer, Andrea Gabor, noted the “study excludes public schools that do NOT send students to charters, thus introducing a bias against the best urban public schools, especially small public schools that may send few, if any, students to charters.” Schools sending less than 5 students to charters are excluded from the study. In addition, the CREDO study makes no adjustment for charter schools creaming students which means charters teach fewer special education and language learner students than do public schools.

Macke Raymond is the current director of CREDO. In 2015, her Hoover Institute Fellow’s profile said, “In partnership with the Walton Family Foundation and Pearson Learning Systems, Raymond is leading a national study of the effectiveness of public charter schools.” The 2023 report was their third in this series of studies. Her partners have too much skin in the game to be viewed as unbiased.

The PPI report looks at 10 cities “with more than one-third of students enrolled in bricks-and-mortar charter or charter-like schools.” PPI claims, “In every one of these cities, students have significantly closed the gap in outcomes between low-income students and all students statewide between 2010-11 and 2022-23” (Report Page 10). (Emphasis added)

In the beginning of the standardized testing craze, outcome gaps between racial groups were a big concern. Then Sean Reardon and his team at Stanford discovered that these gaps in testing results were more likely poverty driven. There is almost no information about where PPI got the data to support their claims. Most of the 10 cities studied are in states that have changed test types and venders since 2011. This makes the state tests somewhat difficult to use for comparing gap changes if the data required could be attained. However four of the cities PPI studied are in the NAEP (National Assessment of Education Progress) Trial Urban District Assessment (TUDA) group; Cleveland, District of Columbia, Detroit and Philadelphia.

Using the NAEP data explorer to look at 8th grade math, the results for students receiving free or reduced lunch was found. Free and reduced lunch is generally believed to be a good indicator of poverty and 8th grade math is a subject that all students take. There was almost no change over the 12 years cited.

Only the national results saw a 3% improvement and the four studied cities saw testing declines of more that 1%. The PPI report states, “In all of these 10 cities, the data show that in the last decade (school years 2010-2011 through 2022-2023), low-income urban students closed the gap with statewide test score averages by 25-40% (Report Page 10). This is a surprising and difficult claim to accept. In fact, it looks like an outright lie.

Conclusion

It has been clear that The 74 was a billionaire propaganda rag ever since its original funding was provided by the Dick and Betsy DeVos Family Foundation, the Walton Family Foundation, the Doris and Donald Fisher Fund and Bloomberg Philanthropies.

PPI appears to be an organization stuck in its 1990s neoliberal ideology with their misguided belief that markets are always the superior path to improvement.

Both organizations seem to be missing out on ethics. Here they have joined in a lie to sell school choice.

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Education Support, More Harm than Help

10 Oct

By Thomas Ultican 10/10/2024

In California, we have the Fiscal Crisis and Management Assist Team (FCMAT – pronounced fick-mat) which is more often the bane of its clients than a help. It is a quasi-autonomous non-governmental organization signed into law in 1992 by Governor Pete Wilson. FCMAT was a response to the financial collapse of the Richmond school district. Unfortunately organizations with this structure become bureaucratic and overtly support the political agenda of whoever is in power. The unhelpful nature of FCMAT recently reared its ugly head in Stockton Unified Schools District (SUSD).

The story of Stockton is that of a small city less than 50 miles south of Sacramento whose school district has become the target of unrelenting attacks by billionaires. It is a minority majority city of about 321,000 people. The demographic makeup is 45.2% Hispanic, 20.9% Asian, 31.3% White and 11.6% Black. The city has a little more than a 15.6% poverty rate; however, SUSD reports that 77% of their students live in poverty.

California’s Data Quest enrollment data for the 2023-24 school year shows charter schools with 6,282 students, public schools with 32,448. That means charter school enrollment is 16% of the 38,730 total publicly supported students in Stockton.

The two biggest problems for the schools is massive spending by billionaires to privatize them and an unrelenting superintendent of schools turnover. Since 2005, there has been a revolving door for superintendents. The longest serving one in that period was John Deasy and he resigned June 15, 2020 serving just 2 weeks more than 2 years.

Deasy was succeeded by Brian Beiderman who already worked in the district and appeared to have been Deasy’s choice. Beiderman was interim superintendent for 8 months and then resigned. He was replaced by John Ramirez Jr., who resigned under a cloud just over one year from being appointed interim superintendent. Going into the 2022-23 school year, the SUSD board settled on Dr. Traci E. Miller as interim superintendent.

In December 2022, Superintendent Miller was informed that “we have decided to go in another direction” six months before her contract was allowed to expire. She says the call was from Don Shalvey, CEO of San Joaquin A+, and Fritz Grupe a real estate developer, who leases charter facilities. It is of note that neither of these gentlemen had any actual standing in SUSD.

June 30 2020, was the 75 year old Shalvey’s last day at the Gates’ Foundation. For the entire 11 years he worked for Bill Gates, Shalvey commuted from his ranch in Linwood, California where he lived with his wife Sue. Linwood is 10 miles outside of Stockton.

San Joaquin A+ was a small non-profit (TIN: 51-0536117) supporting education initiative with modest holdings of less than $40,000. Coincident with Shalvey’s availability, Helen Schwab, a San Francisco billionaire, donated $400,000 to A+ and Shalvey was named CEO. 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. Shalvey’s new part-time job was paying him a high six-figure salary and billionaire dollars were flooding Stockton.

FCMAT Arrived

FCMAT Main Web-Page

John Ramirez, who was interim superintendent in 2021, appeared concerned about the reliability of his district’s budget. He contacted FCMAT for help. In June 2022, an odd Stockton grand jury reported on the district. Local news group Stocktonia briefed:

“The biggest concern: SUSD is “headed toward at least a $30 million deficit by `the fiscal year 2024-2025.” And if the current management practices continue, that deficit will “likely escalate.”’

Despite Ramirez having called on FCMAT months before this grand jury report, the San Joaquin County office of Education stated:

“The SJCOE can confirm that it has contracted with the Fiscal Crisis Management Assistance Team (FCMAT) in order to conduct a comprehensive review of the school district.  The San Joaquin County Superintendent of Schools initiated the AB139 Extraordinary Audit earlier this year.”  (An AB139 audit gets its name from the assembly bill 139 that authorized these audits of school district budgets.)

In 2023, FCMAT issued two reports. February saw the release of their Extraordinary Audit which was a bureaucratic nightmare. On page 33, the report states, “Based on the findings in this report, there is sufficient evidence to demonstrate that fraud, misappropriation of funds and/or assets, or other illegal fiscal practices may have occurred in the specific areas reviewed.” The audit cost the district $50,000 and provided no insight into the looming $30 million dollar deficit or what evidence of fraud and illegal fiscal practices had been unearthed.

The same unfounded claims of criminality were lobbed by FCMAT CEO Michael Fine at Sweetwater Union High School District where I worked. No serious legal charges were ever made and the district finally got FCMAT off their back.

The final report, Fiscal Health Risk Analysis, was presented in August. FCMAT has developed a group of tables with a series of questions having three possible responses, yes, no or N/A. They then use some secret formula to turn these answers into numbers which guides the conclusion. They determined that SUSD’s solvency risk factor was high. The report is not that convincing.

These reports were responses that provided little to no help for SUSD, who originally asked for the audit. The Extraordinary audit seemed to be a regurgitation of the grand jury findings. FCMAT trashed the board and management of the school but offered few insights. During COVID, the school board received federal money to do things like improve ventilation in schools. The audit spent five of 45 pages on the air purifier purchase from IAQ that the board made. It seems some people wanted a different company to get the contract and felt the school board froze them out. However, this was a – spend the money or lose it – purchase, and did not affect the viability of the budget.

An interesting character in this episode is financial expert Susan Montoya. She was chief financial officer when John Ramirez was superintendent of the district. Supposedly she informed Ramirez that she would be away for a while, but would have the 2021-2022 budget ready. She did return with the budget in hand and then resigned. Later, Montoya was hired by San Joaquin County school superintendent, Troy Brown, to be the counties “Fiscal Expert.”

Before Montoya’s hiring, SUSD interim superintendent, Traci Miller, wrote Brown sternly warning against the hiring. Miller stated that Montoya was unprofessional and many of the district’s “current fiscal problems can be traced back to Montoya.” Miller feared she “will sabotage our progress and our implementation of new and improved processes.” Miller was ignored.

When FCMAT was conducting its audit, the county’s “Fiscal Expert,” Susan Montoya, was a primary source. The person Traci Miller blamed for the district’s fiscal problems was part of the team doing the audit. In effect, grading her own home work. In the extraordinary audit, FCMAT writes, “Limiting the possibility of any personal influence, either directly or indirectly, is about avoiding even the appearance of a conflict.” (Page 10) Their statement seems a little hypocritical.

To put a cherry on the top, SUSD has discovered that the $30 million budget deficit was rouge. Supposedly, Montoya had created phantom positions that were being funded and that was the source of the apparent deficit that never existed.

Public Schools are Resilient

After years of turbulence and leadership turnover, it could be that SUSD is on a better path. Traci Miller took over a mess and improved the district’s functioning. In 2003, the district hired Michelle Rodriguez to be superintendent. After one year on the job, her contract was extended from three to five years.

Rodriguez studied at Chico State University and upon graduation went to Spain for further study. She is fully bilingual. Rodriguez earned a PhD from University of Southern California, was a principal in San Diego, became chief academic officer in Santa Ana and was Superintendent of Pajaro Unified School District in Watsonville for 7 years prior to accepting the Stockton job. Michelle stated she expects to be in Stockton for 7 years declaring, “I plan to retire here. I plan to stay here and affect change.” 

SUSD has been demeaned because it does not have good standardized test scores. In statistics, the r-value correlation has a value between o and 1 for determining the effects of different inputs on education testing results. An r = 0 means there in no relationship and an r = 1 means the input is 100% determinative. Inputs like teacher, curriculum design, class size, etc. can be evaluated. The only input ever found with more than 0.3 r-value is family wealth at a 0.9 r-value. Stockton parents are poor and many of the students are language learners; for them to perform as well on standardized tests as wealthy students would show statistical evaluations to be meaningless.

The California dashboard reveals that Stockton has no academic areas in crisis and meets all professional standards. It has a relatively low graduation rate of 82% but is improving the rates of chronic absenteeism. Public schools are very resilient. With the constant leadership turnover, high poverty rates, billionaire attacks and widespread belief the district is corrupt, schools are still functioning at a high level. With a little stability and professionalism at the top, the future looks bright.

On the other hand, FCMAT needs to be defunded. Programs aiding districts should be in the California Department of Education and not be in some semi-private organization in Bakersfield, California.

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Science of Learning; an Education Fraud

2 Oct

By Thomas Ultican 10/2/2024

On September 24, The 74 headline read, “What Happens When a 48K-Student District Commits to the ‘Science of Learning’ – In Frederick County, Maryland, test scores rose, achievement gaps shrank and even veteran educators slowly embraced the decidedly not-faddish fix.” This statement is mostly baloney used to sell the “science of learning.”

The article opens with a new first grade teacher discussing her next day’s math lesson with the school’s principal, Tracy Poquette. The third paragraph says,

“Poquette recommended the whiteboards. ‘You’re going to ask them to hold them up,’ Poquette coached Able, miming holding a whiteboard in the air. Then you can see their answers, and how they got to that. Every student is responding.”’

This seems fine but it is hardly innovative. This technique comes from the 20th century or maybe even the 19th century. The next paragraph states, “The sessions are meant to accelerate student learning and take some of the guesswork out of becoming an effective teacher, part of a larger district plan to incorporate research from the fields of neuroscience, educational psychology and cognitive science — often referred together broadly as the ‘science of learning.’”

They are selling baseless malarkey. Neuroscience and cognitive science still do not provide much usable insight into how students learn or what the best teaching methods are.

The claim of rising test scores is deliberately misleading. The scores may have risen a little but this is a case in which the cause is pretty clear. In statistics, the r-value correlation has a value between o and 1 for determining the effects of different inputs on education testing results. An r = 0 means there in no relationship and an r = 1 means the input is 100% determinative. Inputs like teacher, curriculum design, class size, etc. can be evaluated. The only input ever found with more than o.3 r-value is family wealth at a 0.9 r-value. Between 2021 and 2022, Frederick County, Maryland had “the largest net positive change in total income in the state.” As indicated by statistical analysis, of course test scores raised some.

These fraudulent claims about the “science of learning” are being financed by wealthy people wanting to implement competency based education (CBE). With its concentration on developing mastery of small discrete information bites, CBE makes kids learning at screens more possible. Since 2010, the annual GSV+ASU conference, which is a big deal with tech billionaires, has been striving toward this goal. At their 2023 conference in San Diego, Carnegie and ETS announced a new partnership to create functional testing for competency based education (CBE).

GSV (Global Silicon Valley) appears to have convinced Tim Knowles and the Carnegie Foundation to abandon the Carnegie Unit to open the way for CBE based testing and badges.

The Claims and Propaganda

The proponents of the “science of learning” claim that Pestalozzi, Herbart and Dewey, the fathers of progressive education, were wrong. They tell us that “problem based education” is counterproductive and that discovery approaches are harming children. They claim that direct instruction and drilling small bits of information to mastery are what children need.

Trish Jha, a research fellow at the Center for Independent Studies in Australia, just published a more than 15,000 word essay explaining why the “science of learning” is needed. She claims:

“Australian education needs to position the science of learning as the foundation for policy and practice.”

“Unfortunately, key pillars of Australian education policy do not reflect the science of learning, due to the far-reaching impacts of progressive educational beliefs dating back to the 18th century.”

“These beliefs include that:

    • Students learn best when they themselves guide their learning and it aligns with their interest;
    • Rote learning is harmful;
    • Learning should be based on projects or experiences, and that doing this will result in critical and creative thinkers.”

“But these beliefs are contradicted by the science of learning.”

Ms. Jha asserts, “The teaching approach best supported by the evidence is explicit instruction of a well-sequenced, knowledge-focused curriculum.” She sites E. D. Hirsh as one of her experts supporting this thinking.

It is part of a worldwide effort by wealthy people to digitized education under the cover of “science of learning”. In 2018, the Center for American Progress (CAP) wrote:

“This brief builds on the growing momentum for both the science of learning and school redesign. Last month, for instance, the XQ Institute released a policy guide for states on how best to redesign their schools. The document argued, among other things, that students should be able to learn at their own pace, progressing as they demonstrate mastery of key concepts.”

And CAP went on to quote XQ:

“[Competency-based education] isn’t about replacing what goes on in the classroom with less-demanding experiences outside of it. This is about integrating innovative approaches to teaching in the classroom with opportunities for students to develop practical, concrete skills in real world settings. And it’s about awarding credit for learning—demonstrated learning—no matter where or when the learning takes place.”

The XQ institute is the creation of noted anti-public school and teacher disparaging billionaire, Laurene Powell Jobs.

For 50 years, mastery-based education now called CBE has been a major flop. Established on the mind-numbing drill and skill approach, CBE undermines authentic learning. It has never worked.

Deans for Impact, a Billionaire Created Example

The Deans for Impact Supporters Page

Teach for America (TFA) is viewed by many people as the billionaires’ army for school privatization and the New Schools Venture Fund (NSVF) is the Swiss army knife of public school privatization. Deans for Impact (DFI) was created in 2015 with personnel from TFA and NSVF.

DFI founder, Benjamin Riley, was a policy director at NSVF. Riley stepped down as executive director of DFI in August 2022 and was replaced by another NSVF alumnus, Valarie Sakimura. Francesca Forzani, the current board president, spent 4 years as a TFA teacher in Greenville, Mississippi. The list of people from public school privatization promoting organizations who have served on the DFI board of directors is extensive:

Supporters of DFI have been very generous since the founding in 2015. The last year for which tax records are available was 2022. Federal tax forms 990-PF show:

  • Bill and Melinda Gate Foundation (TIN: 56-2618866)  $3,482,504
  • Charles and Lynn Schusterman Family Foundation (TIN: 73-1312965)  $2,135,000
  • Michael & Susan Dell Foundation (TIN: 36-4336415)  $2,375,000
  • The Joyce Foundation (TIN: 36-6079185)  $2,400,000
  • Carnegie Corporation of New York (TIN: 13-1628151) $875,000

These are huge sums of money but not for billionaires.

The Carnegie Corporation did not contribute to DFI until Timothy Knowles became president of the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching in 2021; probably not a coincidence.

Deans for Impact states:

“DFI believes all teacher-candidates should know the cognitive-science principles explored in The Science of Learning. And all educators, including new teachers, should be able to connect those principles to their practical implications for the classroom.”

Of course cognitive scientists do not agree on these principles and the neuroscience pitch is fantasy, but DFI is coming through with its deliverables.

Deans for Impact is just one small example of the many organizations billionaires have created to do their bidding.

Conclusions

The “science of learning” is another scam to defeat progressive education and replace it with kids at screens earning badges. Unfortunately, billionaire money distorts reality. “Science of learning” and “science of reading” are frauds not science. They are oligarch created deceptions bringing bad pedagogy and the end of free universal public education.

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