Corporate Education Reform

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Reselling NCLB … No Kidding!

By Thomas Ultican 5/1/2024

Neoliberals joined with libertarians to “reform” public education. Their tools were big money and propaganda distributed by media outlets like The 74, support by The Walton family (EIN 13-3441466) and Bill Gates (EIN 56-2618866). This year, regular columnist for The 74, Chad Aldeman, is trying to claim that lifting No Child Left Behind (NCLB) school accountability sanctions is responsible for the public school testing “data decline”.

Aldeman came east from the University of Iowa, with his BA in Public Policy, to gain a Masters in Public Policy from William and Mary University. His first job in 2008 was with the neoliberal Education Sector which states, “Since our founding in 2005, Education Sector has established our expertise in key issue areas—including educational choice, human capital, K–12 accountability, and higher education—and gained credibility as an independent leader in the field.” (emphases added)

After three years, Aldeman joined Arne Duncan’s Department of Education as a Confidential Assistant and left the Department in 2012 for neoliberal oriented Bell Weather Education Partners as a Principal, working there until 2020.

Diane Ravitch said of Bell Weather in 2016:

“Bellwether, co-founded by Andrew Rotherham, is a leading force in the corporate reform movement. Rotherham has been a columnist for TIME. Currently he is on the board of Campbell Brown’s THE 74.

“Among its clients: TN Achievement School District, National Alliance for Public Charter Schools, NewSchools Venture Fund, Rhode Island Department of Education, Stranahan Foundation, Walton Family Foundation, Stand for Children, CEE-Trust, Goodwill Education Initiatives, Harmony Public Schools (Gulen charter schools), TNTP, Rocketship Education (charter chain), KIPP, IDEA charter schools, The Mind Trust, Chiefs for Change, TeachPlus, and the Black Alliance for Education Options.”

I used this quote, because Bellweather’s list of clients has gotten much larger, extra disgusting but not more illuminating.

Bottom-line: Aldeman is steeped in anti-public school dogma.

Going on the Attack

Aldeman’s latest piece for The 74 is called “Gaps Widening Between Indiana’s Highest- and Lowest-Performing Students,” claiming that since approximately 2013 education outcomes as measured by test scores were bad. He stated gaps between highest- and lowest-performing students were widening while overall scores declined and this was not just an Indiana problem but a national one.

The following is one of his graphs, Indiana 4^th grade reading outcomes.

Chad Aldeman Graph from The 74

In the article he stated from 2003 to 2015, the average gains went up by 7 points and from 2015 to 2022, the average losses were 10 points. What he did not mention was where the test data came from and what its maximum scale was. If this happened to be a testing performance based on a 1,000 point scale, a 10 point change is fairly meaningless even if you believe in standards-based testing.

To check if there was any reality to Aldeman’s graph, I interrogated data from the National Assessment of Education Progress (NAEP). Using free lunch as a proxy for low-performing students, both national data and Indiana data for 4^th grade reading was graphed. NAEP, known as the nation’s report card, has given the same type of reading exams since 1992. Indiana changed its ELA testing regime in 2018 which makes evaluating data from 2010 when the last testing method was adopted, difficult to impossible. It lacks continuity.

Reading data is scored on a 500 point scale. Scores above 250 and below 190 are meaningless for the 4^th grade reading test. Testing score gaps between students eligible for free lunch and those not, in the US, wavered between 26 and 28 points. In Indiana, it varied from 20 to 23 points with one outlier in 2019 at 27 points. The gap between top and bottom has been unchanged within a 3 or 4 point range. Since 1992, 4^th grade reading data average for the nation has wiggled up and down within a ten point range. The first test data in 1992 came in at a 217 points average and was also 217 points in 2022.

From 1970 to 1992, America’s schools showed slow but steady improvement in education-testing outcomes but since the era of standards, testing and accountability, improvement basically stopped. Education, run by billionaires and politicians instead of educators, failed to improve testing outcomes.

What Happened?

Alderman stated in his latest article that it is not just an Indiana problem but that “49 of 50 states, the District of Columbia and 17 out of 20 of the large cities that participated in NAEP … saw a widening of their achievement gap over the last decade.” He did not share which tests showed widened achievement gaps nor which cohorts were compared. NAEP reports on reading scores for 4^th and 8^th grade do not show a significant change in scoring gaps between Black and White students and comparisons in other ethnic groups also were steady.

After asking what has caused this (non-existent) achievement gap increase, Alderman posited several possible reasons: Common Core state standards (CCSS), per-pupil spending, technology and social media. He said the timing for CCSS fit but did not explain why states where CCSS was never adopted had the same problem. For per-pupil spending, he claimed that more money was getting to classrooms, which defies education-spending reports, making his claim a little shady. For technology and social media, he said other countries with similar problems, did not see testing declines … a declaration made with no evidence cited.

He finally made his real point, “I argue that the weakening of school accountability pressures after the No Child Left Behind Act was passed is responsible for a large portion of the drop.” Those of us, who were in classrooms and witnessed the test-and-punish philosophy damage to public education, disagree. How many great public schools were labeled “failures and closed” because they existed in low income zip codes?

If this decline were real, wouldn’t the privatization of public education be the most likely culprit? Charter schools came first followed by vouchers and more charter schools. Data clearly shows that vouchers harm student-testing performance. Furthermore both charter schools and voucher schools leech money from public education budgets.

Conclusions

The 74 was founded in 2015 by former CNN news anchor, Campbell Brown, along with Michael Bloomberg’s education advisor, Romy Drucker. Its original funding came from the Dick and Betsy DeVos Family Foundation, Walton Family Foundation, Doris and Donald Fisher Fund and Bloomberg Philanthropies. Since then, it has been the vehicle for spreading the billionaire message of privatization and undermining public schools.

Some billionaires see the non-sectarian nature of public education as a threat to their dreams of a Christian theocracy. Others are libertarians that oppose free universal public education, believing everyone should pay one’s own way and not steal people’s private properties using taxation. The Neoliberals are convinced that education should be run like a business and react to market forces.

Responding to the mission of The 74, Chad Aldeman’s series of articles, like those of many of his colleagues, are pure propaganda, shaping data to support his neoliberal ideology instead of honestly reporting facts. Unfortunately this kind of fake “journalism” is flooding email boxes and web pages throughout America every day.

Tags: Bell Weather Education Partners, Chad Aldeman, Christian theocracy, Education Gaps, Libertarianism, neoliberalism

Comments 1 Comment
Categories Corporate Education Reform

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.

Tags: Emerson Collective, Joel Klien, Larry Berger, Laurene Powell Jobs, Paul Thomas, Rupert Murdoch, Sally Riordan, Science of Reading, SoR, The Reading League

Comments 3 Comments
Categories Corporate Education Reform, technology

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) 8^th 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.

Tags: CREDO, David Wallace-Wells, Eric Hanushek, McKinsey and Company, NWEA, Paul von Hippel, Rachael Gabriel

Comments 2 Comments
Categories Corporate Education Reform, education

Promotion of Education Savings Accounts aka Vouchers

4 Feb

By Thomas Ultican 2/4/2024

Propaganda Rag, The 74, continuously endorses their billionaire funders’ agendas. On January 23, they were passing on lies about Education Savings Accounts (ESA), another name for school vouchers. The hidden deep pocket behind the fraudulent article was Charles Koch.

Christopher Leonard describes Koch’s economic philosophy in his masterpiece, Kochland:

“Charles Koch became enamored with the thinking of economists and philosophers like Ludwig von Mises and Friedrich Hayek, two Austrian academics who did most of their formative work during the 1930s and 1940s. In later years, Charles Koch would be described as a libertarian or a conservative. But these were imperfect labels that didn’t capture his true world view. More than anything, he was an Austrian economist, or a ‘classical liberal,’ as he liked to call it. Hayek, in particular, put forward a radical concept of capitalism and the role that markets should play in society, and his thinking had an enduring effect on Charles Koch.” (Page 42)

As a “classical liberal,” Koch is opposed to Social Security, Medicare and public education. This is probably not a case of billionaire greed but his philosophical belief. He sees being taxed to pay for public schools and medical care for aging people as stealing. Hardcore libertarians believe people should pay their own way and believe children’s education, retirement and health care are individual responsibilities.

Koch is an extremely bright MIT-trained doctorate in engineering and an astute politician.

Choice Propaganda

On January 23^rd, The 74 published “Three Things to Know About National Education Tax Credit Survey.” The three things are (1) most adults support education tax credits, (2) poor people show lowest support for them and (3) parents who support education tax credits also favor education savings accounts, public school open enrollment and part-time public school access.

The subtitle of the article says, “New YouGov poll found education tax credit support from 80 percent of K-12 parents — pointing to a growing interest in school choice options.”

Education tax credits and education savings accounts are new names for vouchers. How could the claims in this article be true if a voucher law has never received a positive vote from the public?

YouGov describes itself as “an international online research data and analytics technology group.” Founded in 2000 and based in the UK, it was apparently hired by Yes. Every Kid. to run a few surveys. The results are opposite from other surveys on the same subject.

A March 2023 survey by Reuters/Ipsos found that 36% of respondents showed some support for vouchers with only 15% strongly supporting them (See Page 11). One reason YouGov got such positive responses may be how the question was asked. The Reuters/Ipsos poll inquired about “Laws allowing government money to send students to private and religious schools, even if it reduces money for public schools?” It is unknown what YouGov asked.

An article posted at 538 explained,

“Complicating the picture further is the fact that several of the survey sponsors, such as EdChoice and yes. every kid., are advocacy organizations that support voucher programs, which means they may be incentivized to word their poll questions in a way that encourages respondents to indicate support for the programs. They may also be less transparent about how their polls are conducted and how their questions are worded. For example, polling from YouGov/yes. every kid. conducted in November and December of last year found a slight majority (54 percent) of Americans support ESAs, though a significant number (33 percent) were undecided on the issue. But the organization didn’t release complete toplines or question wording, so it’s not clear how much this result might have been influenced by the pollster’s framing of the issue.”

Koch Financed It

The 74 noted at the end of the article,

“Disclosure: Yes. Every Kid. operates as part of the wider Stand Together Trust network. Stand Together Trust provides financial support to The 74.

Stand Together was founded by Charles Koch in 2003 and, like all of his organizations, it is complicated and divided into six organizations today. The Stand Together about web page says:

“Stand Together was founded in 2003, but our story really started more than 50 years ago. It began with Charles Koch — a Forbes Top-25 philanthropist and the CEO of the largest private company in the country.

Today, Brian Hooks is the chairman and CEO of Stand Together. He is co-author with Charles of Believe in People: Bottom-Up Solutions for a Top-Down World and a 2021 TIME 100 Next honoree, featuring leaders shaping the future of their fields.

In 2013, Stand Together Trust (EIN 46-3508366) was formed. It gifted The 74 $277,000 in 2022 and provided Yes. Every Kid. with $2,010,000.

Looking through the latest non-profit tax filings by Stand Together Trust, Yes. Every Kid. Foundation (EIN 84-3535275) and Charles Koch Foundation (EIN 48-0918408), I noticed many of the board members are the same.

From Stand Together Trust: Brian Menkes Secretary, Derek Johnson Executive Director, Brian Hooks Director, Kara Hartnett Treasure, Charles Koch Director, Henrich Heuer – Keeps the records

From Yes. Every Kid. Foundation: Derek Johnson Director, Brian Menkes Secretary, Henrich Heuer Treasure

From Charles Koch Foundation: Charles Koch Chairman, Brian Menkes Secretary, Kara Hartnett Treasure, Brian Hooks Director

Kochtopus

The graphic above appeared December 13, 2013 on Progressive Collapse. The web site is no longer viable but their image is. It uses an octopus to demonstrate the vast influence Koch has created in areas of public interest. Since then, it has been shared by many. On the occasion of David Koch’s passing in 2019, the Guardian titled its article “The Kochtopus: sprawling network keeps David Koch’s legacy thriving.”

In 2010, the Koch brothers staged one of their twice-yearly programs that became known as “Freedom Partners.” A brochure, accompanying invitations, highlighted a previous event in Aspen. The Guardian’s article reported:

“The most intriguing part of the brochure was a roll-call of names of those lured to previous “Freedom Partner” gatherings. It included the current vice-president, Mike Pence; the Wisconsin politician Paul Ryan, who would go on to become speaker of the House of Representatives; super-donors such as the hedge fund manager Ken Griffin, and most intriguingly of all two conservative justices of the US supreme court, Clarence Thomas and the late Antonin Scalia.”

Koch is known to be a shrewd businessman who supports voucher plans with as little oversight as possible. Education savings accounts are fraught with malfeasance. Peter Greene, reporting at Forbes noted:

“In Arizona, an audit found that parents had spent $700K of ESA money on beauty supplies and clothing. In Florida, where voucher-receiving schools openly discriminate against LGBTQ students, a new bill proposes that audits be performed only every three years. Kentucky’s new ESA bill proposes audits after the state has found evidence of misuse of funds, which seems like a rather late shutting of the barn doors. And the bill that the Iowa senate just fast-tracked in order to establish ESAs includes no call for any audits or oversight at all. (That may be in part why the Iowa Satanic Temple has announced their intention to establish the Iowa Satanic School.)”

For Charles Koch to support this kind of financial chicanery, there must be an ulterior motive. Most likely, the purpose is destroying America’s public school system and ending the voucher mess. His classical liberal ideology would be realized and universal free public education would be ended.

Koch once again extended his octopus-like tentacles when he joined the Walton Family to form the Vela Education Fund. Vela received their 501 C3 determination (EIN 84-4185046) from the IRS December 10, 2020. Stand Together’s latest form 990 filing listed $6,340,018 to Vela and the Walton Families Foundations (EIN-13-3441466) latest form 990 filing showed $5,000,000 to Vela.

It is clear that Vela is a Koch operation. Derek Johnson and Brian Menkes are on the board and Kara Hartnett is listed as Treasurer. These three people are on several Koch organization boards. This is one more weapon in Charles Koch’s quiver for ending public education.

Billionaires like Koch, the Walton family and former Education Secretary Betsy DeVos are intent on using their wealth to defeat democratic support for public schools and end “Democracy’s Schools.” America can no longer afford to put up with billionaires and their non-democratic ways.

Time that voters tax billionaires out of existence.

Tags: Charles Koch, Education Savings Accounts, Stand Together, The 74, vouchers, Walton Family Foundation

Comments 8 Comments
Categories Corporate Education Reform

Billionaire Science-of-Reading Support

21 Jan

By Thomas Ultican 1/21/2024

National Center on Teacher Quality (NCTQ) released an unreviewed report (1-16-2024) on state laws, about teaching reading inadequacy. That day, The 74 ran an article about it, verified by an EdReports’ curriculum quality evaluation. These three entities are billionaire creations, used to chip away local control of schools.

In a 2012 Washington Post Answer Sheet Blog, Diane Ravitch shared,

“NCTQ was created by the Thomas B. Fordham Foundation in 2000. I was on the board of TBF at the time. Conservatives, and I was one, did not like teacher training institutions. We thought they were too touchy-feely, too concerned about self-esteem and social justice and not concerned enough with basic skills and academics.”

Kate Walsh led NCTQ from 2000 until 2022, retired and Heather Peske took over. During Walsh’s tenure, notoriety was gained by teaming with Newsweek and claiming America’s teacher education programs were unsatisfactory. Their research methods were widely panned. They Looked only at class syllabi and made no attempt to ascertain new teacher job performance before denigrating the programs.

NCTQ’s rankings were endorsed by eight state school education chiefs, part of Jeb Bush’s Chiefs for Change: Janet Barresi, Oklahoma; Tony Bennett, Indiana; Steve Bowen, Maine; Chris Cerf, New Jersey; Deborah A. Gist, Rhode Island; Kevin Huffman, Tennessee; Eric Smith, Florida and Hanna Skandera, New Mexico.

Walsh also famously called for teacher merit pay and held up Washington DC’s schools as a good example. Critics called the Washington experiment a failure because of the high stakes and “significant differences” in percentage of teachers rated “highly effective” in low and high poverty schools. Teaching is so complicated, with no justifiable way for accurate evaluations for these high stakes.

Heather Peske has a resume that makes billionaire education reformers comfortable. After starting as an elementary teacher in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, she served as Director of Teacher Quality at The Education Trust and later, Vice President of Programs at Teach Plus. She was also named “Future Chief” by Chiefs for Change, became a Broad Academy Fellow and earned a doctorate in Administration, Planning, and Social Policy from Harvard Graduate School of Education.

Peske Report

Action 1 of the NCTQ report, named “Five Policy Actions to Strengthen Implementation of the Science of Reading,” began by calling for standards, “Many new teachers aren’t prepared to teach reading because only 26 states provide clear standards to teacher prep programs.” This translates to mean only 26 states provide billionaire-funded standards. NCTQ has been relentless in its attempts to undermine university-run teacher training.

Action 2 calls for “reviewing teacher prep programs to ensure they teach the science of reading,” claiming it is laudable that Indiana and Ohio have audited prep programs, ensuring focus on implementing the science-of-reading (SoR).

Action 3 requires elementary teacher candidates to pass a reading licensure test. The report cautions readers that some tests do not fully address all five core components of SoR, another call for turning over teacher selection to private entities.

Action 4 addresses “the use of high-quality curricula aligned to the science of reading.” NCTQ’s solution to this is to sign on with EdReports which reviews reading materials and lets client schools know its alignment with SoR.

The report claims “only nine states require districts to select high-quality reading curriculum materials” and noted that forward-looking states, like Arkansas, partner with EdReports.

Action 5 provides “professional learning and ongoing support to sustain implementation of science of reading.” Current elementary teachers are to receive high-quality professional learning in scientifically-based reading instruction and demonstrate their learning.

They claim Mississippi found that teachers’ ability to teach reading improved after participating in the Language Essentials for Teaching Reading and Spelling’s (LETRS) professional development program. Texas and North Carolina mandate LETRS training.

This report hinges on the belief that SoR is the only good method for teaching reading with no downside. United Kingdom went to a program similar to SoR in 2012. Last year reading researchers published a major study that concluded England’s over-emphasis on phonics instruction was harmful and caused reading test scores to go down.

NTCQ’s report was funded by The Joyce Foundation.

In August, Rachel Cohen wrote an informative and balanced article about SoR, reporting:

“Despite its close associations with the “science of reading” — LETRS has its own middling track record of effectiveness. One experimental study found teachers who were trained by LETRS did improve in their knowledge of reading science, but their students did not have statistically higher differences in achievement than teachers in the control group.”

She noted the Orton-Gillingham reading intervention, favored by SoR advocates, yielded mixed results and “wasn’t found to significantly boost comprehension or vocabulary.”

Cohen also wrote:

“Generally reading experts say the policies included in the new state reading laws are a “real mixed bag.” Some laws incorporate more research-backed ideas like coaching, while other endorsed approaches are more suspect. There is no clear amount of time that research shows should be spent daily on phonics, no established curriculum for the “science of reading” and studies on so-called decodable books — strongly endorsed by some phonics advocates to help young students practice letter-sound combinations — have their own mixed research track record.”

There probably are some good ideas hidden in the SoR movement but it is certainly not settled-science nor the best way to teach reading. Billionaires are not invested in improving reading instruction. The SoR movement is another avenue for undermining local control in education doctrine and empowers private companies over state run universities.

Billionaire Team

National Center on Teacher Quality was formed in 2000(Tax ID: 04-3536571).
- 2021 tax form lists 2 executives on their highest paid list: Kate Walsh (former president) $259,877 and Ashley Kincade $170,044.
- Major funders include Charles and Lynn Schusterman, Joyce Foundation, Laura and John Arnold and the Walton Family Foundation.
- Reported donations totaled $2,378,006.
The 74 Media, Inc. was formed in 2013 with non-profit tax ID:47-2788684.
- Top executive pay includes Steven Snyder $264,968, James Roberts $265,348, Kathleen Moore O’Connor $153,341, Beverly Weintraub $184,245, Dena Wilson $142,548, Laurel Hawkins $148,632 and Emmeline Zhao $142,407.
- Major funding comes from Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the Carnegie Corporation, the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, the Charles and Lynn Schusterman Family Foundation, the City Fund and the Walton Family Foundation.
- Reported donations totaled $4,466,877.
EdReports Org Inc. was formed in 2014 with non-profit tax ID: 47-1171149.
- Top executive pay includes Eric Hirsh $304,596, Donnidra Johnson $196,788, Janna Chan $179,055, Courtney Allison $192,521 and Lauren Weisskirk $192,212.
- Major funding comes from Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, Broadcom Corporation, Carnegie Corporation of New York, The Charles and Helen Schwab Foundation, The Charles and Lynn Schusterman Family Philanthropies, Overdeck Family Foundation, The Walton Family Foundation, The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation and The W.K. Kellogg Foundation.
- Reported donations totaled $7,419,702.
Chiefs for Change was formed in 2014 with non-profit tax ID 47-2373903.
- Top executive pay includes Leila Walsh $262,885, Robert Runcie (interim CEO) $208,930, Jamar Knox $253,457, Stephanie Zamorano $206,788, Kimberly Tang $188,753, Danielle Durban $198,705, Makese Motley $166,383 and Michael McGee (CEO thru 4/29/2022) $132,180.
- Major funding from Walton Family Foundation, Overdeck Family Foundation, Bill and Malinda Gates Foundation, Michael and Susan Dell Foundation, Bloomberg Philanthropies, Blue Meridian Partners and Silicon Valley Community Foundation.
- Reported donations totaled $24,294,635.

Wrapping Up

This report was produced and promoted by billionaire-created and funded organizations. Major funders listed are either billionaires or billionaire funded dark-money organizations. They pay big wages with an agenda and that does not support locally-controlled public schools. Worse, this is one small team, out of many, financed by the same people.

SoR has errors and is not settled-science. Balanced literacy probably has a better track record based on what works investigations.

Billionaires spend big money to continue chipping at local control … unconcerned about good education, only regarding national standards and control as important.

And … some want to end publicly-financed education!

Time to tax billionaires out of existence???

Tags: Chiefs for Change, EdReports, Heather Peske, National Center on Teacher Quality, NCTQ, Rachel Cohen, The 74

Comments 3 Comments
Categories Corporate Education Reform, education

Hoover Institution 2023 “A Nation at Risk” Address

1 Jan

By Thomas Ultican 1/1/2024

Amazingly, Hoover Institution marked 40+ years of “A Nation at Risk” (ANAR) by glorifying it. They published a 300+ page book, in November, claiming it was the stick that stirred the education reform pot. While their namesake’s mishandling of the 1929 Wall Street crash could be credited with inspiring Social Security, labor rights and many other New Deal reforms, ANAR brought nothing but pain to public schools. Fourteen writers, known for attacking public education and living on the right, created the material presented.

In 1983, Gerald Holton, then a physics professor at Harvard University, and a member of the National Commission on Excellence in Education, drafted some of the most alarmist language in ANAR, including: “If an unfriendly foreign power had attempted to impose on America the mediocre educational performance that exists today, we might well have viewed it as an act of war.”

Last year, I met James Harvey, who was responsible for getting ANAR ready to print. He viewed Holton’s line “to be utter bombast.” In a final editing session at the University of Utah, he and Commission Chairman, David Gardner, agreed to excise the line from the report. Harvey took ANAR back to Washington DC, gave the revision to the printer … and went on vacation.

Later, he learned commission member and Nobel Prize winning Chemist, Glenn Seaborg, had refused to sign off on the report until Holton’s line was restored.

When writing an ANAR thirty-fifth anniversary report for National Public Radio, Anya Kamenetz discovered the commission never set out to undertake an objective inquiry into the state of the nation’s schools. She wrote, “They started out already alarmed by what they believed was a decline in education, and looked for facts to fit that narrative.”

A decade before, Florida education professor, James Guthrie, noted, “They cooked the books to get what they wanted.”

Salvatore Balbones wrote “Education ‘reforms’ big lie” for Salon, observing:

“The commission included 12 administrators, 1 businessperson, 1 chemist, 1 physicist, 1 politician, 1 conservative activist, and 1 teacher. No students or recent graduates. No everyday parents. No representatives of parents’ organizations. No social workers, school psychologists, or guidance counselors. No representatives of teacher’s unions (God forbid). Just one practicing teacher and not a single academic expert on education.”

In ANAR, the most convincing evidence given that America’s public schools were failing was a bullet point on page 11:

“The College Board’s Scholastic Aptitude Tests (SAT) demonstrate a virtually unbroken decline from 1963 to 1980. Average verbal scores fell over 50 points and average mathematics scores dropped nearly 40 points.”

This is the single most powerful piece of evidence providing proof that Americas’ schools were failing. It was also based on a lie or at best, ignorance.

In 1990, engineers at Sandia National Laboratory in New Mexico looked at the same data and found an error. Their findings appeared to have been suppressed. Gerald Bracey reported in Huffington Post, “Jim Raths of the University of Delaware and then an editor at the Journal of Educational Research made it the entirety of the May/June 1993 issue of that small journal.” That seems to be the only place it was ever published but some reporters and scholars saw the report in the early 1990s.

From their writings, we know the Sandia engineers disaggregated the data by race and sex. They found that every group advanced during the 1963 to 1980 period and continued to do so until 1988 when the data was gathered. The other simultaneous occurrence was the larger numbers of people testing every year. Increases were driven by poor, minority and female students, causing the test averages to drop.

ANAR was a fraudulent paper and America’s schools were actually healthy and doing well.

Selling a Fraud +40

Authors of Hoover Institution’s A Nation at Risk +40

Name	Section	Field	About
Stephen L. Bowen	Introduction	Politician	Paul LePage’s policy adviser and Director of Maine Heritage Policy Center.
Deborah Stipek	Chapter 1	Education	Former Director of UCLA Seeds School. Stanford Graduate School of Ed.
Maria D. Fitzpatrick	Chapter 2	Economics	Department of Policy and Management at Cornell University.
Michael Hansen	Chapter 3	Economics	Senior Fellow on Education Policy Brookings Institution; labor economist
Thomas S. Dee	Chapter 4	Economics	Stanford professor; member of the American Enterprise Institute
Robert Pondiscio	Chapter 5	Education	Senior Fellow at American Enterprise Institute; former teacher
Eric Bettinger	Chapter 6	Economics	Professor Stanford Graduate School of Education; education economists
Tom Vander Ark	Chapter 7	Finance	Executive Director of Education Gates Foundation; EdTech champion
Eric A. Hanushek	Chapter 8	Economics	Father of evaluating teachers using value added measures; Co-founder of CREDO
Michael T. Hartney	Chapter 9	Political Science	Senior Fellow at the Manhattan Institute; Hoover Fellow
John D. Singleton	Chapter 10	Economics	Professor of economics University of Rochester; Studies school boards.
Michael J. Petrilli	Chapter 11	Political Science	President at Thomas B. Fordham Institute; editor Education Next
Cami Anderson	Chapter 12	Administrator	In 2011, appointed Superintendent of Newark Public Schools
Margaret “Macke” Raymond	Conclusion	Political Science	Director of CREDO; married to Eric Hanushek who was her professor in Rochester.

A common theme in most of the essays presented is “ANAR did not cover this really important topic” and instructs readers about its importance. ANAR’s 38 recommendations are along the lines of fixing unacceptable teachers but not eliminating elected school boards. It seems blowing up the education system never occurred to the commission and that is criticized as a weakness by some of the authors.

ANAR did kick off an era of school reform that continued gaining momentum into the twenty-first century. In chapter 5, Robert Pondiscio claims, “Decades of education reform have left policymakers, educators, and students alike fatigued and unimpressed.” (Page 109) These reforms were often so misguided, destructive and self-serving that the word “reform” became an odorous term.

At its core, ANAR was an attack on the teaching profession. Chapters three and four address this. Michael Hansen observed ANAR did “encourage bringing qualified people from other occupations into teaching to support hard-to-staff fields, and these policies gained momentum.” (Page 66) Hansen cites Teach for America as a particularly outstanding example of an alternative certificate program. Evidently, college graduates with no training, mostly hired by charter schools to teach scripted lessons, are venerated by Senior Fellows from the Brookings Institution.

In the wake of ANAR, President Reagan backed merit pay for teachers. It is a reform with a long track record of failure, pre-dating ANAR and Reagan. When the present state controller of Houston’s schools, Mike Miles, was in Dallas, he introduced a merit pay program based on value-added measures. It unsurprisingly resulted in a drain of experience from the district. Senior teachers quit and left. It was one more example of merit pay not producing the hoped for result.

In chapter 9, Michael Hartney does not hold back on his anti-public school feelings. Christopher Rufo’s Manhattan Institute colleague says American K-12 education “is burdened by a century-old, one-size-fits-all governance model that prioritizes adult rather than student interests.” (Page-181) The “one-size-fits-all governance model” is also known as democracy. It is the system where local communities control their schools through elected representatives. The malarkey about prioritizing adults over students is meaningless rhetoric. No one other than parents cares more about students than public school teachers and officials.

Hartney calls for privatizing schools as the solution to his claimed burden. He states, “[F]or chronically low-performing systems, policymakers can disrupt the ‘district as monopoly’ education provider by pursuing a portfolio management model (PMM) strategy that takes districts out of the business of running schools and instead has them provide performance-based oversight in a diverse ecosystem of regulated, but still autonomous, schools of choice.” (Page-181) This piece of “argle-bargle” means turn your community’s schools over to private operators. Someone may get rich but the well-run, responsive public schools will be gone.

Michael Petrilli writes in chapter 11 that “student achievement plateaued and even started to decline in the 2010s.” (Page 226) He postulates that the softening of the No Child Left Behind accountability might be responsible. More likely, the hyper-focus on testing and standards were responsible for a general slowing in education progress since 2000.

Conclusion

It appears that Stanford’s Hoover Institution right-wingers are more interested in ending public education than reforming it.

A Nation at Risk started out as a fraud. Schools were not failing but ANAR produced phony data to show they were. Sure there were big problems within the public education system. Dale Russakoff’s The Prize documented extreme corruption within Newark, New Jersey’s public schools. Violence levels were unacceptably high in some school districts. However, ANAR ignored those problems. Instead, they speculated about how poor American scholarship opened the door for the Japanese taking over auto production, Koreans dominating steel and Germans ruling machine tools.

BUT they were wrong!

Those “terrible” American students were busy inventing the computer industry … internet, I-pad and smart phone, followed by a great surge in biotech. Maybe Glenn Seaborg won a Nobel Prize but he was completely blind about America’s schools or what good education looked like. He was a chemist, not a pedagogue. Conspicuously, there were no pedagogues on the National Commission on Excellence in Education.

Today, ANAR is still a weapon for undermining public schools. It is embraced by people on the far right to do away with public education while also attacking anything else belonging to the commons.

Tags: A Nation at Risk, David Gardner, Gerald Holton, Glenn Seaborg, James Harvey, Sandia National Labratory

Comments 4 Comments
Categories Corporate Education Reform

Panic! Pandemic Learning Loss!

17 Dec

By Thomas Ultican 12/17/2023

Wal-Mart family’s propaganda rag, The 74, says those not hysterical over learning loss wear rose-colored glasses and damaged students are doomed, losing billions in future earnings, if nothing is done now. Their major recommendations are frequent testing, high-dose tutoring and tough grading. Unsurprisingly these lead to more corporate profits.

A gathering at the Aspen Institute asserted the dire situation. Jens Ludwig, University of Chicago economics professor, said, “We do not have our hair on fire the way it needs to be.” The other members of this panel were Nat Malkus of the American Enterprise Institute, T. Nakia Towns of Accelerate and Melissa Kearney of the Aspen Institute.

There was a strong smell of corporate education bias in the air. The Aspen Institute was the creation of corporate leaders and largely funded by foundations, such as, Carnegie Corporation, Rockefeller Brothers Fund, Gates Foundation, Lumina Foundation, and Ford Foundation. American Enterprise Institute is a center right research group that grew out of the American Enterprise Association which formed in 1938 to fight Roosevelt’s New Deal. Accelerate’s CEO is Michelle Rhee’s former husband, Kevin Huffman, also a founding partner at The City Fund. Listed funders of Accelerate are Gates Foundation, Arnold Ventures, Walton Family Foundation, Overdeck Family Foundation and Ken C. Griffin.

Testing Declines were Universal

The 74 claims:

“Parents expressed little concern about lasting damage from the pandemic and typically thought their children were doing well in school — a view that researchers say is belied by dismal state and national test scores.”

“The 2022 National Assessment of Educational Progress showed historic declines in math and flat performance in reading.” (Emphasis added.)

Plotted by NAEP from 2022 Testing Data

The 2022 8-point drop in mathematics scores was unusually large. In the spring of 2020, schools throughout America shut down and most of them did not reopen in class until fall 2021. If there were not a drop in testing scores, the NAEP assessment would have been meaningless.

The 74 further notes that a recent release of international scores shows U.S. students dropped 13 points in math between 2018 and 2022. Their linked article noted that many other countries had worse drops.

Because America does not filter students from the academic system before high school, the tested population does not score as 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.

The Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) created and administers the Program for International Student Assessment (PISA). The table shown is from the 2022 math exam given to 15-year olds and score changes since the last administration in 2018. As normal, the US scored in the lower half of OECD countries but did improve one step from 2018.

Advocating More Standardized Testing

Fordham Institute has documented a growing discrepancy between grade point averages and standardized test scores. TNTP produced a report showing an increase in B grades since the pandemic. The basic argument of corporate reformers is that parents should not trust public school grades and more standardized testing is required.

Policy Analysis for California Education (PACE) and California Office of Reform Education (CORE) sound like official governmental organizations but they are not. Billionaires created these institutions for the express purpose of undermining and controlling public schools. In 2019, PACE was determined to sell California on growth models to evaluate schools. University of Southern California (USC) Professor of Education Policy, Morgan Polikoff, produced a policy brief for PACE stating:

“Based on the existing literature and an examination of California’s own goals for the Dashboard and the continuous improvement system, the state should adopt a student-level growth model as soon as possible. Forty-eight states have already done so; there is no reason for California to hang back with Kansas while other states use growth data to improve their schools.”

Polikoff seems to be a sincere academic but growth models do not do well when scrutinized. Jesse Rothstein, professor of public policy and economics at University of California, Berkeley, ran a verification test and found, “these models indicate large ‘effects’ of 5th grade teachers on 4th grade test score gains.” A verification test run at the University of California Davis, showed that teachers affect student height…??? “Using a common measure of effect size in standard deviation units, we find a 1σ increase in ‘value-added’ on the height of New York City 4th graders is about 0.22σ, or 0.65 inches.”

An article by Linda Hammond Darling notes the instability of VAM result: “A study examining data from five school districts found, for example, that of teachers who scored in the bottom 20% of rankings in one year, only 20% to 30% had similar ratings the next year, while 25% to 45% of these teachers moved to the top part of the distribution, scoring well above average.”

Standardized testing and growth models are as likely to be misleading as illuminating. On the other side of the coin, high school grades are more predictive of college success than standardized testing. Public school grades, though fraught with issues, are much more reflective of student progress and potential.

Dan Goldhaber, director of the CALDER Center at the American Institutes for Research, and Polikoff are among the “experts,” urging educators to make test score data a much larger focus of conversations with parents. Polikoff sees separation between parents and the nation’s education scholars as part of a larger anti-testing movement that started brewing long before the pandemic. The pandemic pause on state assessments and accountability sparked a renewed push to limit the number of tests and try different models.

“There’s just very close to zero constituencies advocating for tests or that they matter,” Polikoff said. Republicans “want only unfettered choice” while the left is not defending the usefulness of tests “to ensure educational quality or equity.” He says the backlash against testing has come “at the worst possible time given the damage that’s actually been done.”

Polikoff and his USC team recently published a report, based on interviews with 42 parents over the past two+ years:

“One of the clearest findings from our interviews is that caretakers, when making judgments about students’ performance, overwhelmingly rely less on standardized test scores than they do grades, other school-reported measures of student progress, and their own observations of their children’s work and work ethic.” (Page 15)

“A final insight our data provides into the parent-expert disconnect is that caretakers often, and very explicitly, noted that children are resilient.” (Page 20)

Observation and Conclusion

Noel Wilson’s famous 1997 peer-reviewed article, “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 great generalizations. They are bunk for measuring learning or teaching.

Clearly people like Professors Polikoff and Goldhaber believe in these tools. It is likely they embrace testing because they are good at math and strongly desire tools that provide clear, unbiased conclusions. Unfortunately, they have grabbed onto an illusion.

Parents are correct when they say “children are resilient.” What students and schools need now is to be left alone to do their job. The COVID pandemic was traumatic for us all and it may take two or even three years for student recovery. They will, unless we continue mindlessly over-testing and forcing some sort of academic acceleration.

Profiteers see this as a business opportunity. Protect the children and let kids be kids.

They will be fine!

Tags: Dan Goldhaber, Jens Ludwig, Morgan Polikoff, OECD, PISA, The 74

Comments 2 Comments
Categories Corporate Education Reform, education

Carnegie vs Carnegie Unit

9 Dec

By Thomas Ultican 12/9/2023

Current president of Carnegie Foundation, Tim Knowles, from the University of Chicago and founding director of Teach for America, is vigorously trying to upend the Carnegie Unit. Joining in this crusade are CEO of Education Testing Services (ETS), Amit Savak, and billionaire Laurene Powell Jobs’ XQ Institute.

What is it and Where Did it Come From?

Andrew Carnegie became the wealthiest man in the world when he sold Carnegie Steele to J. P. Morgan in 1901. With the sale, he surpassed John D. Rockefeller’s riches. Carnegie, the penniless Scotsman who came to America and became wealthy, is also known as the man who gave it all away. In 1905, he put up $10 million to create retirement benefits for college professors. In today’s dollars that grant would be worth about $350 million.

The problem became developing a standard for identifying legitimate professors.

A 2015 paper from the Carnegie Foundation reported that in 1906:

“The Carnegie trustees concluded that college entrance requirements should be ‘designated in terms of units, a unit being a course of five periods weekly throughout an academic year of the preparatory school.’ Fourteen such units constituted ‘the minimum amount of preparation’ for students heading for college. And colleges that required fourteen units for admission would, if they met the Foundation’s other requirements, qualify for the pension fund.” (Page 8)

The Carnegie Unit, which developed from this decision, measures student progress. For example, a student attending class meetings one hour a day 3 times a week, for 40 weeks, plus passing the course work and testing involved earns one “unit” of high school credit, for the 120 hours in class. The “unit” is a minimum requirement creating a nationwide agreed-upon structure. It does not control pedagogy nor assessments but insures a minimum amount of time on task.

The 2015 Carnegie paper also stated:

“It provides a common currency that makes possible innumerable exchanges and interconnections among institutions. And it continues to provide a valuable opportunity-to-learn standard for students in both higher education and K-12 education, where inequitable resources and variable quality are more the rule than the exception.” (Page 5)

The Carnegie Unit is a method for insuring a minimum amount of time is spent in class to earn a credit. Curriculum choices, assignments and testing are the province of classroom teachers and their schools. The number of credits required to graduate from a high school are set by state education departments and local school districts.

Changes Knowles and Others Want

Billionaire-financed propaganda rag, The 74, interviewed Tim Knowles in September. The sub-head stated, “From credits to seat time to school finance to student engagement, century-old unit of measurement is stifling real education reform and innovation.” Knowles’ first answer, explaining the Carnegie Unit is a lie:

“What it is, fundamentally, is the conflation of time and learning. It’s the suggestion that X number of minutes equals learning.”

It has never conflated time and learning.

Knowles, Savak and Jobs see the Carnegie Unit as a roadblock for their vision of a competency-based education (CBE) system, replacing units with proof of skills. Savak’s ETS promises to develop reliable mastery testing methods for providing a designation of competency, such as grades or badges. Jobs’ Amplify Education already has virtual courses that students can complete at their own speed. These fit nicely with Bill Gates’ old employee, Tom Vander Ark’s new Mastery Transcript Consortium.

In September, The 74 obligingly published “Credit Hours Are a Relic of the Past. How States Must Disrupt High School – Now.” The article is written by Russlynn Ali director of Laurene Powell Jobs’ XQ Institute and Timothy Knowles, blaming the Carnegie Unit for only half of high school graduates being ready for college, decline in economic mobility and NAEP scores falling after the pandemic. Ali and Knowles promise they “are intent on building a new educational architecture that shifts the sector to a truly competency-based system and away from time-bound conceptions of what knowledge is and how it is acquired.”

Not everyone is sanguine about their new “educational architecture.” Jal Mehta, professor of education at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, said in a published dialog:

“I’ve found myself increasingly wary each time another educational leader tells me how enthusiastic they are about this venture. For one thing, this year marked the 40^th anniversary of ‘A Nation at Risk,’ which famously urged states to boost the number of Carnegie Units required for graduation. Given that many of those excited about ditching Carnegie sit in the same offices as those who, a generation ago, led the push to act on that report’s recommendation, it’s worth asking why savvy leaders once deemed mandating more math, science, English, and world-language requirements a promising path forward. The answer, of course, is that they thought it a crude but workable way to put a floor beneath student learning. In a time of sky-high graduation rates, rampant grade inflation, and plummeting student achievement, this is something that we shouldn’t lightly dismiss.”

“The case against changing the Carnegie Unit is essentially twofold. First, that it was never intended as a way of measuring learning, which is properly left to individual teachers, professors, departments, and schools. It offers a very rough view of what is a “course” – defined by time – and then leaves all the assessment questions to local actors. Yes, there is tremendous variability in how these actors define ‘quality learning.’ But it preserves their autonomy to do so, while at the same time creating some basic measures that allow some equity and comparability across institutions. The second case against changing it is that anything replacing it would be worse. As the author of The Allure of Order, I can certainly make a case that efforts to build massive systems of measurement and impose them across different contexts of learning have often gone poorly!”

Education writer, Derek Newton’s article for Forbes, opposed ending the Carnegie unit for a host of reasons but the major one is cheating:

“Cheating, academic misconduct as the insiders know it, is so pervasive and so easy that it makes a complete mockery of any effort to build an entire education system around testing.”

“The sellers use software to take remote control of a test-taker’s computer and have a ringer take the exam for them.”

“But because of the credit hour system, which is designed to measure classroom instruction time, it’s still relatively hard to cheat your way to a full college degree.”

Doomed to Bad Pedagogy

ETS and Carnegie Foundation partnered to create assessments for CBE, making the Orwellian-named “personalized-learning” viable for issuing digitally-earned certifications. This is one required ingredient for their plan to shift American education to a “competency-based system,” with a 50-year history of failure.

The 1970’s “mastery learning” was very unpopular and renamed “outcome-based education” in the 1990s, now it’s called “competency-based education.” CBE is a move to use “mastery leaning” techniques to create individualized certification paths. However it is still the same mind-numbing approach that the 1970s teachers began calling “seats and sheets.” This behaviorist approach to education leaves almost no room for students to construct knowledge and ignores the social component of education.

In A Wolf at the Schoolhouse Door, Jack Schneider and Jennifer Berkshire explain, “Because learning is deeply rooted in relationships, it can’t be farmed out to robots or time-saving devices.”

Final Observations

The American education system has become more and more centrally controlled since 1983’s “Nation at Risk.” This has made it more vulnerable to hare-brained schemes that would upend it, like Tim Knowles new “educational architecture.”

Billions of dollars have been spent to convince people that public schools are failing. This is not true. We have the premier education system in the world. If most people are satisfied with their schools, corporations will be denied easy access to the $100’s of billions from annual education budgets. They want Tim Knowles’ new “educational architecture,” not that it is better but it is more profitable.

Knowles, Savak and leaders at Jobs’ XQ Institute have been all over the country this year, at corporate-sponsored education events, trying to convince people to get rid of the Carnegie Unit. They want to replace it with CBE, a failed-education approach accompanied by an unproven testing system.

This approach to education has the potential to end American democracy because the public education system is its pillar. It also ignores the important social component of education.

Upending public schools this way is folly.

Tags: Amit Savak, Derek Newton, Jal Mehta, Laurene Powell Jobs, Russlynn Ali, Timothy Knowles

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Categories Corporate Education Reform

Network for Public Education Was in Washington DC

2 Nov

By Thomas Ultican 11/2/2023

NPE met at the Capitol Hilton for a weekend conference beginning on Friday, October 27. The old hotel seemed well maintained. That first evening, Diane Ravitch interviewed James Harvey who was a key contributor to “A Nation at Risk.” We gathered in a larger conference room which caused Mr. Harvey to comment, “I remember being at a meeting in this room fifty years ago when we heard that Alexander Butterfield had just testified that there were tapes of the oval office.”

With that historical reference, the conference was off to a wonderful start.

“A Nation at Risk” is seen as an unfair turning point that undermined public education. Mr. Harvey’s job was to synthesize the input from members of the National Commission on Excellence in Education, created by Secretary of Education, Terrence Bell, and produce the report. He shared that two famous academics on the panel, Nobel Prize winner, Glen Seaborg, and physicist, Gerald Holton, were the driving forces for politicizing public education.

Diane Ravitch and James Harvey

That first night’s presentation was actually an added event for the benefit of us coming in on Friday afternoon. The conference had three keynote addresses, two panel discussions and seven breakout sessions. It was difficult to choose which breakout sessions to attend.

Pastors for Children

For session one, I attended “Mobilizing Faith Leaders as Public Education Allies.” The amazing founder of Pastors for Children, Charles Foster Johnson, and his two cohorts were well reasoned and did not proselytize us. Their movement really does seem to be about helping communities and not building their church. Among Johnson’s points were:

“Privatized religion teachers believe ‘God likes my tribe best.”‘
“We are the reason there is not a voucher program in Texas.”
“Conservatives and liberals come together over education.”
“Faith leaders have a different effect when lobbying politicians.”
“We are making social justice warriors out of fundamentalist Baptist preachers.”

Houston School Takeover

I have no intention of writing about each of the 7 sessions I attended, but the session on the Houston School District takeover needs mention.

Texas took-over Houston Independent School District (ISD) on June 1, 2023. It is the largest school district in the state and eighth largest in the country with more than 180,000 students attending 274 schools. The student demographics are 62% Hispanic, 22% African-American, 10% White and 4% Asian, with 79% identified as economically disadvantaged.

In 2021, Millard House II was selected by a unanimous vote of the Houston ISD school board to be Superintendent. Under his leadership, Houston ISD was rated a B+ district, a school in one of Houston’s poorest neighborhoods, and used to excuse the takeover received a passing grade on Texas’s latest STAR testing. The takeover board replaced House with Mike Miles, a charter school operator from Colorado, previously lasted 2 years of his five-year contract, to lead the Dallas ISD.

Ruth Kravetz talked at some length about the how angry Houstonians are and their effective grassroots organizing. Kravetz stated, “We want Mike Miles gone.” She noted that the local media started turning against the takeover when citizens were locked out of the first takeover board meetings.

Kravetz intoned:

“Teachers no longer need a certificate or college degree to teach in Houston ISD.”
“Seven year-olds are not allowed to use restrooms during instructional times. They must wait.”
“People are being fired for ridiculous reasons. Five people were fired last week over a made up story.”
Expect more student action against the takeover.
“Rolling sickouts are coming.”

Jessica Campos is a mother in one of Houston’s poorest communities. She said her school is made up of 98% Mexicans with 68% of them being Spanish speakers. She claims, “Our school community has been destroyed”, and reported all teachers were removed with many, replaced by uncertified teachers.

Daniel Santos (High School social studies teacher) said:

“It is all about dismantling our school district. We wear red-for-Ed every Wednesday and Mayor Turner lights up city hall in red.”

The Keynote Addresses

Gloria Ladson-Billings from the University of Wisconsin Madison delivered the first Keynote address on Saturday morning.

She said that we were really dealing with 4 pandemics:

Covid-19
George Floyd murder
“Economic Shesession” (Large numbers of women were forced to leave the workforce.)
Climate catastrophe

Professor Ladson-Billings claims the larger agenda is the complete eradication of public education in what she sees as an evolving effort:

The evacuation of the public spaces which are being privatized.
Affordable, Reliable and Dependable (public space keys) is being undermined.
Public housing is closing.
The last domino is public education!

Ladson-Billings says, “choice is a synonym for privatization.” There is money in the public and wealthy elites do not think the public should have it. Also noted was “We are in the business of citizen making.” We do not want to go back to normal because it was not that great and ending on a positive note, “All is not lost – people on the ground in Florida are working hard to reverse it.”

History Professor Marvin Dunn from Florida was the lunch time keynote speaker. He has been working hard to educate the children of Florida about the states’ racist past, including giving guided tours of the site of the 1923 Rosewood Massacre of an African American community.

He noted that “Racism is in our national DNA” and shared that George Washington owned 500+ slaves. When he was 11 years-old, Washington was given his first slave. Still, 500 black soldiers were with him at the crossing of the Delaware river.

Another American icon mentioned by Professor Dunn was Thomas Jefferson. The third president of the United States was 41 years-old when first having sexual relations with Sally Hemings; she was 14.

Julian Vasquez Heilig, Josh Cowen and Jon Hale held a late afternoon public discussion on Saturday. The moderator, Heilig, made the point that instead of funding one system, now many states are funding three systems with the same amount of dollars.

Josh Cowen, from Michigan State University, noted that using evidence based data since 2013, vouchers have been catastrophic. If we were using evidence informed education policy, vouchers would have died 5 years ago. Test score losses from voucher students are greater than those experienced in either Katrina or Covid-19. He also noted that 20% – 30% of children give up their voucher each year.

He added don’t believe a word coming out of Iowa Governor Kim Reynolds’ mouth. She has instituted vouchers, opposed abortion and supported child labor.

Reynolds is pushing Christian nationalism.

Jon Hale, from the University of Illinois says white architects of choice have a 70 year history. He says it was never about improving schools. The white supremacist movement sprung up after Brown versus the Board of Education in 1954.

Becky Pringle of the National Education Association and Randi Weingarten of the American Federation of Teachers joined in conversation with Diane Ravitch.

Becky Pringle stated that the attack on public education is deliberate and schools must be reclaimed as a common good noting that more than 50% of today’s students are of color.

Pringle claimed that every single social system in the country is under attack and declared forcefully that elections matter!!

Weingarten asked how many schools are not talking about what is going on in the Middle East right now because they are scared stiff? She made three important points:

“The tool of the autocrat is apathy.”
“Find the things that unite us.”
“Make schools fun.”

The last Keynote speaker was Georgina Perez, Texas State School Board member from 2017 until January 2023.

Georgina introduced herself as a chick from west Texas and obviously there was real steel there. She said, regarding vouchers, “It is completely asinine to take a nickel from the 95% of students and give it to the 5%.”

Being from the border area, she naturally was looking out for the border raised students. Georgina said I could see that all of the “Spanish language EL’s were not dropping out; they were being pushed out.” In order to get what she wanted for them, she needed to work with some very staunch conservatives and was quite successful at it. For example, she got ethnics studies by having a steak dinner and drinking with David Bradley, making a friend. She is a powerful example of how conservatives and liberals can work together for education.

What I Found

Several participants showed up kind of down in the mouth. However, by the end of the conference they were heading back home with new energy and resolve. Billionaires are spending vast sums of money trying to end public school because if public education goes then all of the commons will follow. Their big problem is that vast wealth and spending is not a match for the grassroots organizing that is happening throughout America.

Diane Ravitch, Carol Burris and the members of NPE have become a bulwark for democracy and public education.

Tags: Becky Pringle, Charles Foster Johnson, Dian Ravitch, Gloria Ladson-Billings, James Harvey, Jon Hale, Josh Cohen, Julian Vasquez Heilig, Marvin Dunn, Randi Weingarten

Comments 1 Comment
Categories DPE, education

A National Warning

14 Aug

By Thomas Ultican 8/14/2023

An unholy alliance between neoliberal Democrats and education reform oligarchs is harming Delaware public education. This is a lesson for the rest of the nation.

A new charter school law introduced to reduce principal professionalism is the latest example. Data clearly shows for almost two decades, top-down education reform has been ineffective and seriously damaged a once, exemplary system.

In March, Delaware Professional Standards Board recommended charter school certification requirements match public school rules. Kendall Massett, executive director of the Delaware Charter Schools Network, immediately responded, “All Delaware charter schools are led by highly qualified administrators.” She said charter school principals have a different role than public school leaders and need to be excellent marketeers to raise funds and drive enrollment.

Did she mean charter school principals don’t need to be professional educators?

For the Standards Board recommendation to take effect, adoption by the State Board of Education is required. Before they acted, Senate President Pro Tem David P. Sokola introduced senate bill 163 to relax certification rules for charter school principals.

The heart of Democrat Sokola’s legislation says:

“The bill creates new subsections in Section 507(c) of Title 14 of the Delaware Code to define the licensure and certification requirements more clearly within Chapter 5 of Title 14. Finally, the bill requires the Secretary of Education to work with the Delaware Charter Schools Network to create a qualified alternative licensure and certification pathway for charter school administrators engaged in the instruction of students (Instructional Administrators).”

Teachers’ union leader, Mike Matthews, wrote to the Senate Executive Committee:

“I was disheartened to see that SB 163 — a bill that will actually deprofessionalize the education profession — was introduced by Senator Sokola. I was even more disappointed — and concerned — to see it filed in the Senate Executive Committee instead of the Senate Education Committee where it belongs. Why was that?”

Bill was passed by the State Senate and is currently awaiting action in the House Administration Committee. The House Education Committee, like its counterpart in the Senate, is not involved.

Neoliberal Education Reform

A Delaware Live headline howls, “School test scores dismal again despite new math, reading plans.” Two decades of 4^th and 8^th grade reading and math data on the National Assessment of Education Progress (NAEP) support the headline. NAEP is often referred to as the nation’s education report card. The above graphs beg the question, “what happened in 2010?”

Long-term NAEP data showed from 1971 until 2002, there was steady growth in math and reading. The steady growth ended concurrent with the adoption of the bipartisan Kennedy-Bush education reform, No Child Left Behind. The graphs illustrate this phenomenon.

Why did Delaware’s scores start falling?

In 2010 educator and blogger, Susan Ohanian, reported,

“Delaware and Tennessee came out on top in round one of RTTT: Delaware got $100 million (about $800 per student), and Tennessee $500 million (about $500 per student). Since these states radically changed their education strategies to receive what amounts to 7 percent of their total expenditures on elementary and secondary education, the feds are getting a lot of bang for the buck.”

The $4.5 billion dollar Obama era Race To The Top (RTTT) program was administered by Education Secretary Arne Duncan. Grants were given to states that complied with three key elements: (1) Evaluate teachers based on student test scores (2) Close and turn into charter schools public schools that continue to get low test scores (3) In low-test score schools, the principal and half of the staff are to be fired and replaced. In addition, states were encouraged to create more privately-managed charter schools.

Education historian and former Assistant US Secretary of Education Diane Ravitch predicted the program’s utter failure when it was announced:

“All of these elements are problematic. Evaluating teachers in relation to student test scores will have many adverse consequences. It will make the current standardized tests of basic skills more important than ever, and even more time and resources will be devoted to raising scores on these tests. The curriculum will be narrowed even more than under George W. Bush’s No Child Left Behind, because of the link between wages and scores. There will be even less time available for the arts, science, history, civics, foreign language, even physical education. Teachers will teach to the test. There will be more cheating, more gaming the system.”

For more than a century, brilliant educators have been skeptical of top-down coerced education reform like those from Duncan, Obama, Bush and Kennedy. Alfred North Whitehead published his essay, “The Aims of Education,” in 1917, stating:

“I suggest that no system of external tests which aims primarily at examining individual scholars can result in anything but educational waste.” (Page 13)

“But the first requisite for educational reform is the school as a unit, with its approved curriculum based on its own needs, and evolved by its own staff. If we fail to secure that, we simply fall from one formalism into another, from one dung-hill of inert ideas into another.” (Page 13)

Former McKinsey Consultant and Democrat with neoliberal inclinations, Jack Markell, was elected Delaware Governor in 2009. His first major victory was winning the RTTT grant. He said:

“What’s really important today is where we go from here; whether we have the will to put our children first and move forward with reforms to improve our schools so that Delaware children can successfully compete for the best jobs in an increasingly competitive global economy. That won’t be easy, but we have proven in these past few months that it can be done. I would like to thank all those who worked with us in support of our application and look forward to moving ahead to improve our schools.”

Markell praised then Senate Education Committee Chair, David Sokola, for his work on the RTTT grant proposal, the same Senator who just introduced legislation to soften certification requirements for charter school principals.

Since the RTTT announcement, Delaware has gone from consistently scoring above the national average on all NAEP testing to dropping well below.

Science of Reading is NOT the Answer

Delaware Live reported that because of the relative drop in reading scores, the state is implementing the “science of reading.” The article stated, “Today, after a decade of emphasizing training teachers in the science, Mississippi students handily outperform Delaware’s, which has dropped below the national average.”

While the scoring drop in Delaware looked real, the success in Mississippi was a mirage. The graphs to the left plot 2002, 2011 and 2022 NAEP scoring data for 4^th and 8^th grade reading. Delaware is graphed in red, Mississippi in green and National Public in blue. The 4^th grade Mississippi data looked amazing but in 8^th grade, they returned to being significantly below national average.

The anomaly is explained, in part, by Mississippi retaining all third graders who did not pass the state reading test. It made the 4^th grade NAEP data look good but the 8^th grade data indicated no earth-shaking advancement to emulate.

In 2021, Delaware’s Department of Education doubled down on oligarch-driven education reform. Monica Gant, Ph.D. from the Delaware Department of Education (DDOE), presented their strategy to accelerate learning in March 2021.

Under the heading “Literacy Professional Learning,” Professor Grant noted, “Participants will have a chance to apply their learning of the Science of Reading either through their district HQIM or utilize free OER (Open Education Resources) HQIM for this work.”

HQIM and OER are both programs financed by Bill Gates, Laurene Powell Jobs and other billionaires.

To guide Delaware public schools’ literacy program, DDOE has turned to the International Dyslexia Association (IDA) who advocates the “science of reading”, to validate Delaware’s programs. IDA is leading the effort to monetize dyslexia and establish state-mandated science of reading curriculum, purchased from specified vendors.

While jurisdictions throughout the US saw a tick down in 2022 NAEP reading scores, Delaware’s scores, after a year of “science of reading”, were one the largest drops in America.

Final Observations

The reform movement in Delaware is still being pushed in a destructive direction. Senator Brian Pettyjohn, a Republican from Georgetown and member of the Senate Education Committee, commented on recent testing results:

“Our state must do more to hold school districts responsible for students’ academic success. The current mechanism in place for holding schools accountable is ineffective, and it is time for the state to establish a new system that recognizes school districts for their accomplishments and holds them responsible when they fall short of their objectives.”

The concern is understandable but his solution is wrong-headed. More mandates from politicians who do not understand education are not likely to be helpful.

There appears to be a privatization-promoting organization in Delaware called First State Educate. They just hired Julia Keleher as Executive Director. Serving as Secretary of Education in Puerto Rico, Keleher, who is not Puerto Rican, secured a new law allowing for charter schools and vouchers, as well as, the closure of hundreds of schools.

At a San Juan rally, protesters chanted, “Julia go home!”

Things went sideways for Keleher. December 17 2021, a federal judge in Puerto Rico sentenced her with six months prison, 12 months house arrest and a $21,000 fine. She pled guilty in June to two felony counts involving conspiracies to commit fraud.

Today she is another voice in Delaware, pushing for top-down reform and privatization of public education.

Delaware schools were most successful when local educators and school leaders took charge. Since then, after standards were imposed and teacher accountability mandated, school performance suffered. Alfred North Whitehead was right in 1917.

Give autonomy back to schools and professional educators. Politicians at state capitals have little understanding of local school needs or good pedagogy.

Empower teachers and Delaware education will shine again.

Tags: Alfred North Whitehead, David Sokola, Delaware Department of Education, Jack Markell, Julia Keleher, NAEP, RttT

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Categories Corporate Education Reform

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