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Genuine Reforms by Real Education Professionals

By Thomas Ultican 7/5/2022

The tragedy of modern school “reform” is that it stopped education improvement. Politicians from the Democratic and Republican Parties agreed that government-run organizations were inferior to privatized ones and market forces were the path for lifting all boats. Their economic theories led to charter schools and vouchers for private, mostly religion sponsored schools. Moguls and legislators, with no education training or knowledge decided that standards, modeled on business practices were, required. It has become a tool for privatizing public schools, controlling classrooms by politicians in capital cities, and is making learning dreary.

It is wonderful to learn of professional educators standing up to this folly and implementing practices promising to undo some of the damage. In Orange County, California, Alison Dover and Fernando Rodríguez-Valls, associate professors in the Department of Secondary Education at California State University, Fullerton, have been developing the Language Explorers program since 2015. The methods they used can be adapted to any classroom or discipline. Their newly published book by Teachers College Press is Radically Inclusive Teaching with Newcomer and Emergent Plurilingual Students Braving Up. With this book when combined with the supplemental materials at Professor Dover’s web site, any teacher’s practice can be advanced.

Cultural Destructiveness

In 2001, I began teaching in a California school, often being the only White guy in classrooms where the bullring in Las Playas de Tijuana was in sight. Naturally many many of the students were native Spanish speakers and some of them had almost no English abilities. Surprisingly a student’s multilingual abilities were not prized. In fact a state law pushed by software developer, Ron Unz, mandated English only instruction.

Around the change of the millennium, Unz financed legislative initiatives in California and Arizona, replacing bilingual education with English immersion programs, also known as the “Unz initiatives.” They were detested by many teachers, administrators and parents alike and eventually challenged in Arizona. In 2015, the San Francisco-based 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled in favor of the state rejecting the plaintiffs’ argument that the approach violated the federal Equal Educational Opportunities Act.

By 2004, Massachusetts, California and Arizona were subjecting 40% of America’s newcomer language learners to anti-bilingual policies. After more than two decades of academic failure, these language laws are almost all repealed. However immigrants are still being labeled. Dover and Rodríguez-Valls write, “Instead of amplifying emergent bi- and Plurilingual students’ already expansive linguistic resources, schools routinely frame newcomer students as ‘English Learners’ who lack the communicative skills to fully participate in academic settings.” (Radically Page 4)

Newcomers and emergent plurilingual students are not half-empty vessels that need to be filled with English language skills. The authors share,

“In our work with teachers and administrators, we challenge them to position newcomer students as Emergent Plurilingual (EP) students, who enter our classrooms with unique and expanding linguistic repertoires that are ready to be utilized as classroom resources; in fact, most students whom districts label as ELs are actually already plurilingual, in that they have the ability to use multiple languages at varying levels of proficiency and for different purposes (Council of Europe, 2007). Our challenge, then, is not to address students’ ‘deficits,’ but to figure out how to support all students – including monolingual and plurilingual students – in exploring, playing with, and using their linguistic repertoires as a bridge to complex disciplinary content.” (Radically Page 13)

Central to the education malpractice that Dover and Rodríguez-Valls are addressing is the trust in monoglossic ideologies. Influenced by academic articles like “Undoing Appropriateness: Raciolinguistic Ideologies and Language Diversity in Education” by Nelson Flores and Johnathan Rosa, they share this perspective,

“Monoglossic Ideologies lead educators to shut down students’ use of multiple languages, encouraging them to ‘focus on English,’ rather than consciously stretch their linguistic repertoires by making connections between their existing linguistic structures and new content and concepts. While few educators with a monoglossic ideology see themselves as oppressive, monoglossia reflects the colonial, assimilationist roots of US public education, in which being monocultural and monolingual (in English) has historically been positioned as more desirable than multicultural and plurilingual identities. This is sometimes referred to as one of the ways ‘White gaze’ shapes educational and linguistic policies and practices, irrespective of the racial and linguistic identities of educators and students themselves …” (Radically Page 16)

Dover and Rodríguez-Valls tell us that braving up is about creating alternative, plurilingual spaces that evade restrictive policies and mandates. This “radically inclusive teaching” challenges educators to take a stand and do what is right for their students and engage with this approach:

“As university-based researchers and teacher educators, we see our role not as providing ‘professional development’ per se, but rather as collaborating with school-based educators to reimagine what it means to teach and learn in radically inclusive, plurilingual environments. We use the word ‘radical’ intentionally; one of the first conversations we have with prospective Language Explorer teachers invites them to first define and describe the culture of schooling as it is now, and then participate in a visioning process in which they reimagine school as affirming and culturally robust.” (Radically Pages 29-30)

Rejecting the Banking Model

In 1970, the famed Brazilian educator, Paolo Freire, wrote Pedagogy of the Oppressed, addressing the classroom model in which learning is one-directional; teachers teach and students learn. He labeled this the “banking model” where “knowledge is a gift bestowed by those who consider themselves knowledgeable upon those whom they consider to know nothing.” Dover and Rodríguez-Valls update this observation stating, “Despite movements toward more student-centered pedagogies, ultimately most educational experiences remain structured around the knowledge teachers want to impart to students.” (Radically Page 82)

The book emphasizes the needs and benefits associated with recognizing students’ cultural “funds of knowledge” as assets to the classroom along with their raciolinguistic identities (ascribed to students without their knowledge or consent) and daily languaging practices. In doing so, monoglossic ideologies are disrupted, heteroglossic classrooms emerge and “plurilingual superpowers” are unleashed. (Radically Page 43)

To accomplish this, three core principles are emphasized: modeling, open dialogues, and co-learning. All of these are nuanced and in this piece I will not delve into them in any detail. However here is an example from the core of modeling which is “We do every project first.” (Radically Page 43)

Click to access 9780807766408_art.pdf

Based on the modeling principles framework, a non-negotiable practice for educators is that “teachers do every single project themselves before assigning work to students.” Unlike classrooms where modeling is focused on concrete skills, the language explorer teachers use modeling as a form of academic disruption in which they use themselves as “models to illustrate principles of vulnerability, humanity, and linguistic experimentation.” (Radically Page 43)

Authentic Teacher Training

For the past 30 years, there has been an effort to privatize teacher training financed by billionaires. For example, Relay Graduate School is a fraudulent effort created by the charter school industry and made possible by billionaire financing. TNTP is an unqualified teacher training organization, spawned by Teach for America, whose training program would be laughable if it was not so harmful. These and many other teacher and administrator training programs have all been lavishly financed by billionaires, with one of three agendas: (1) advance neoliberal causes; (2) implement libertarianism; or (3) realize a religious approach to schooling. Improving public education is not their priority.

In this book we find an authentic effort to improve pedagogy in public schools, full of useful ideas and stimulating insights. More importantly this is how teacher development should be. Fullerton State University is located in Fullerton, California just north of Anaheim in Orange County. The department of Education there hosts teacher training and programs for school districts throughout Orange County and the Los Angeles basin. These publicly supported professionals from Fullerton are improving schools, enhancing student equity and supporting education justice.

One of the partners for the Fullerton team is Anaheim Union High School District (AUHSD). Its 20 middle and high school campuses serve 30,000 students, utilizing 1,200 teachers. Twenty percent of the students are classified as emergent plurilingual with 54 languages spoken in the district. AUHSD takes in on average over 300 students from 20 different countries every year, making it a natural client for the Language Explorer program. (Radically Page 123)

AUHSD is led by Superintendent Michael Matsuda who taught in the district for 22 years before assuming its leadership. He is focused on equity, inclusion and teaching democracy. In 2015, the district turned to Fullerton State for help when an influx of newcomers arrived including many refugees from the Middle East. Matsuda’s team wanted a summer bridge program created for the new students. This situation widened the path on which radically inclusive teaching could travel.

Dover and Rodríguez-Valls forcefully state that the Language Explorers learning is done in academic enrichment classes. They explain,

“They are not remedial programs to meet perceived gaps in students’ academic or linguistic foundation. This framing is both intentional and strategic; within many districts, ‘enrichment’ is typically interpreted as primarily for academically elite and linguistically dominant students. However, by positioning the Language Explorers as an enrichment program – one in which students earn elective credit; go on field trips; access smaller class sizes and mentorship; engage in creative, project-based learning; develop leadership skills; and present to outside audiences – leaders can situate newcomer programming to serve the broader educational mission of the district.” (Radically Page 135)

Language Explorers wants us to brave up our pedagogies and methodologies. Dover and Rodríguez-Valls state, ‘Radical teaching does not happen in isolation; changing systems of oppression is a collective process.” (Radically Page 136)

I was personally impressed by the methods taught in this book.

Tags: Alison Dover, Anaheim Union High School District, Califronia State University Fullerton, Fernando Rodríguez-Valls, Michael Matsuda, Ron Unz

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Categories education, Standards

Privatizing Educator Training to End Public Education

17 Feb

By Thomas Ultican 2/17/2022

The agenda for privatizing public education embraces indoctrinating educators. Billionaire sponsors determined that overturning teacher and administrative training by public universities was essential. These “philanthropists” early on embraced Teach For America (TFA) and TNTP which expose teachers to a market centered way of thinking. In 2001, a new non-profit developed by graduate students at Harvard University focused on administrator training. The New Leaders for New Schools (NLNS) program taught a pro-privatization and business focused ideology to prospective school leaders.

Mercedes Schneider wrote in her book Chronicle of Echoes, “Wendy Kopp declared that she had a force of young, predominantly-Ivy League idealists for sale; Big Money arrived on the scene to make the purchase.” Wendy Kopp is the founder of TFA and the young idealists for sale were “temp teachers” who have no intention of staying in the classroom.

Why would they make this purchase? Microsoft’s Bill Gates nor The Gap’s Doris Fisher nor Sun America’s Eli Broad nor Walmart’s Alice Walton would have ever considered using untrained temps in key positions within their businesses. However, they have spent many hundreds of millions of dollars to push unqualified temp teachers into America’s classrooms.

In addition, an emerging plutocracy has routinely financed charter schools started by inexperienced TFA teachers and as the article “TNTP is a Part of the Destroy Public Education Infrastructure” observed, “Before the billionaire driven push to privatize public education, a “non-profit” company like TNTP would have gotten no consideration for training teachers because they were unqualified.”

The same story of financing unqualified or barely experienced people repeated itself in 2001 when a Harvard Graduate School inspired non-profit was launched. The NLNS team was woefully lacking in credentials or experience for training principals but they immediately attracted billionaire funding.

It becomes obvious that improving public schools is not the agenda. Rather, an injudicious belief that market based solutions were how to fix “failing” schools drove the benighted spending. The reality is that schools were not failing; some communities were. To sell their misguided policies and neoliberal ideology, five decades of “failing” schools hogwash has been produced by American tycoons along with five decades of “market-world” solutions. If the real agenda is ending universal free public education then maybe the spending is not benighted; just evil.

New Leaders for New Schools a Billionaire Financed Program

NLNS’s first usable presence on the Wayback Machine is a 2001 page. The history page says,

“In the spring of 2000, a team of five graduate students at Harvard Business School and the Harvard Graduate School of Education completed a business plan to launch New Leaders for New Schools. … The NLNS business plan was entered into the annual Harvard Business School business plan contest and NLNS became the first non-profit team ever to be selected as a semi-finalist in Harvard’s competition. … Soon after, New Leaders for New Schools received start-up funding from a number of venture philanthropists and venture capitalists.”

The 2001 web page also lists the founding team with short biographies.

CEO and Co-Founder: Jon Schnur was a policy advisor on K-12 education in the Clinton Administration. Jon was Associate Director for Educational Policy at the White House, Vice President Gore’s Senior Policy Advisor on education, and Special Assistant to the Secretary of Education. Jon led the Education Department’s team responsible for supporting the development of high-quality charter schools and addressing significant public policy issues related to the creation of these schools. He completed a Masters in Education at the Harvard Graduate School of Education.

President and Chief Curriculum Officer and Co-Founder: Monique M. Burns is currently completing her doctorate at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. She moved into education reform after business school, and opened four middle schools in Washington, DC through her work with the McKenzie Group. She was a Special Assistant to the Superintendent of the Philadelphia Public School District. While working on her doctorate, Monique has spent a year as a leadership coach and consultant for fourteen charter schools in Massachusetts. Monique’s dissertation is a study of the management and instructional leadership skills necessary for being a successful entrepreneurial leader of a start-up charter school.

Chief Operating Officer and Co-Founder: Benjamin G. Fenton is a graduate of Harvard Business School. He was a management consultant for McKinsey and Company. After leaving McKinsey, he worked for Fisher Scientific where he developed a marketing and sales strategy for their online procurement subsidiary, ProcureNet.

Director of Recruiting and Admissions and Co-Founder: Allison Gaines taught second grade in a New York City school. She has also worked as a journalist at Time Warner and as a producer for Brooklyn Academy of Music’s Education and Humanities Department, where she produced educational workshops with the Royal Shakespeare Company. Her experiences as a teacher drove her to focus on school reform through improved leadership. While working on a Masters Degree in Education at Harvard, specifically focused on School Leadership and Development, she co-wrote a handbook introducing the public to school reform initiatives and worked on parental involvement at the Boston Plan for Excellence.

While these people seem like someone a shrewd business man might want to hire. They did not have the experience and education background to compete with universities for training school leaders. The typical university program would have multiple doctorates in education and business with decades of experience. NLNS had two doctoral candidates focused on creating successful charter schools and a “reform” template. None of the founders had deep experience in schools.

Education policies from the Clinton administration provide some clues as to why they were financed. Marc Tucker, a leader in the standards-driven education reform movement, saw like-minded education reformers in the arriving Clinton administration who believed like him that the public school system was outdated and failing. His infamous November 11, 1992 “Hillary Letter” laid out several reform ideas that would completely change how education is done. He began:

“First, a vision of the kind of national — not federal — human resources development system the nation could have. … What is essential is that we create a seamless web of opportunities, to develop one’s skills that literally extends from cradle to grave and is the same system for everyone — young and old, poor and rich, worker and full-time student. It needs to be a system driven by client needs (not agency regulations or the needs of the organization providing the services), guided by clear standards that define the stages of the system for the people who progress through it, and regulated on the basis of outcomes that providers produce for their clients, not inputs into the system.”

The Clinton’s supported education standards, charter schools and TFA. Jon Schnur’s involvement in founding NLNS was proof that the new organization believed in the “failing” public schools mythology and neoliberal ideology. His co-founders were all either involved in the new business oriented education “reform” movement or came from a business centric organization like McKinsey and Company.

Almost as soon as NLNS legally established itself as a non-profit, the billionaire Eli Broad gifted them $1,056,000 (EIN: 95-4686318) and the New Schools Venture Fund kicked in another $253,000 (EIN: 94-3281780). By 2004, NLNS was claiming support from 10 foundations and corporations.

LittleSis Data Base Map: “New Leaders for Privatizing Schools”

The LittleSis Map above shows the large amounts gifted to NLNS by the biggest spenders on privatizing public education. If you go to the map and click on the entity names a large data base of spending and associations opens up. Today, NLNS lists over 90 corporate and foundation supporters. Those who have been following the people and corporations working to end public education will recognize many of the names listed.

NLNS’s Odd Naming History

Today, New Leaders for New Schools is more simply named New Leaders.

In 1995, The New Leaders (TNL) was formed to support talented Black community leaders and politicians. Its uniform source locator or url was “http://Newleaders.org.” In 2000, NLNS established an internet presence at url “http://www.nlns.org.”

In 2006, TNL announced that their legacy web page was being shutdown and would be re-launched. In 2007, the Newleaders.org page reappeared and in their about statement said, “New Leaders for New Schools is a national non-profit organization that selects and trains passionate and results-focused individuals, from within education, as well as former educators, to become urban public school principals.” There was no other explanation of the change in mission. The page also said, “For more information on our organization, please navigate to http://www.nlns.org.”

In 2011, the url “http://www.nlns.org” disappeared and New Leaders for New Schools changed name to New Leader with the url “http://Newleaders.org.”

Oakland, California and New Leaders

A 2005 press release from New Leaders announced their new partnership with Oakland Unified School District (OUSD) and updated their commitment with the Aspire charter school chain. Some of the following passages from the announcement make sense today.

“New Leaders also announced a major grant from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation which will support this work along with $200,000 from local funders, and $75,000 from the CA Charter Schools Association.”

“Representatives from New Leaders for New Schools were joined by Dr. Randolph Ward, OUSD State Administrator …”

“With the expansion of the New Leaders’ program in Oakland, up to 50 New Leaders principals will be recruited over the next 3 years, including up to 35 for OUSD and up to 15 for Bay Area charter schools.”

‘“We are excited to partner with New Leaders for New Schools to train outstanding educators to start urban charter high schools in the Bay Area,’ said Caprice Young, CEO of the California Charter Schools Association.”

This occurred less than two years after the state of California took control of OUSD. The state picked Randolph Ward to be the new Superintendent and gave him total control. He had just completed training at Eli Broad’s new superintendent’s training program and it is more than likely that the billionaire had a lot to do with Ward’s selection.

The Aspire charter school chain is run by the first charter management organization in America. It was established by Reed Hastings and Don Shalvey.

In new news, the OUSD’s school board just undid their October decision not to close schools. The reversal was a response to Alameda County Superintendent of Education L. Karen Monroe’s demand that they continued to close schools. She also ordered them to follow the dictates of the Fiscal Crisis Management Assist Team that has been involved with OUSD by order of the state since the 2003 takeover. Monroe’s order also carried an implied threat of another district takeover.

What made Monroe insist on closing public schools? Her county biography gives us a clue when it says, “L.K. holds a degree in Public Administration from the University of Southern California, a teaching credential from Holy Names University, and her administrative credential from the national New Leaders educational leadership program.” (Emphasis Added)

Tags: Caprice Young, Eli Broad, Jon Schnur, L. Karen Monroe, Marc Tucker, New Leaders, New Leaders for New Schools, NLNS, Randolph Ward

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Categories Corporate Education Reform, Standards

Testing Industry Scores Big in California

13 May

By Thomas Ultican 5/13/2021

At 1:45 PM this Wednesday, the California State Board of Education (SBE) adopted a “student growth model” to evaluate student learning. It is a method fans of standardized test based accountability have been trumpeting. The big winner here is the testing giant Education Testing Services (ETS) who created the model to be used.

Board member Sue Burr who was appointed to the board by then Governor Jerry Brown made the motion for using the growth model. She carefully presented her motion directly from the state’s California Department of Education (CDE) staff report which recommended:

“The student growth model methodology, which includes using RG [residual growth] scores and the EBLP [Empirical Best Linear Prediction] hybrid approach to report aggregated student growth, and that the following score reporting be adopted:

“1. Report the EBLP weighted average for:

“1. Schools

“2. Student groups in a school

“3. The “All” student group in an County or District

“4. Student groups in a district with 500 or fewer students (with test scores)

“2. At the Local Education Agency level, report the simple average for all race/ethnicity and program participation student groups with more than 500 scores.”

Board member Patricia Ann Rucker seconded the motion. She is a legislative advocate for the California Teachers Association.

The measure was adopted by a unanimous 10-0 vote. The only member of the eleven-member board not voting for it was Board President Linda Darling-Hammond who was absent.

Developing an Accountability Model to Satisfy ESSA

In January 2016, the SBE discussed how to bring the state’s accountability vision in line with the federal Every Student Succeeds Act’s (ESSA) new accountability requirements. SBE received an information memorandum from the CDE stating,

“One such indicator would be a student-level growth model. This memorandum provides an overview of student-level growth models that can be used to communicate Smarter Balanced Summative Assessment results.”

In 2017, the state joined with testing vendor ETS to develop a Growth Model. After exploring several different models, the SBE selected the “residual gain” method for further study.

Again the state hired testing vendor ETS to evaluate the residual gain model in 2018. In a report, ETS stated that the model had low “cross-year stability.” In other words the results were not consistent. ETS developed an arithmetic manipulation method to solve the stability problem that they named the “Empirical Best Linear Prediction (EBLP).”

Student Growth Model Requires Opaque Math

The graphic above shows two types of growth models. One is the gain model which simply subtracts the third grade testing data from the fourth grade data to get a gain score. However, it is not really that simple. Mathematical manipulation is required to make the scale from the 3^rd grade match the scale in 4^th grade. This requires several assumptions that affect the results.

The method California has chosen adds another set of mathematical assumptions to create an expected outcome. That expected outcome is then subtracted from the 4^th grade data to get the residual gain score. However since those scores are not stable, the ETS averaging scheme is being applied to make the results appear stable.

ETS is the Goliath of the standardized testing industry. It administers America’s most important standardized tests (including the SAT, PSAT, CLEP, AP, TOEFL, and Praxis exams) and develops many of them. ETS was organized as a non-profit in 1948. Today, their 2018 tax document shows this “non-profit” has revenues in excess of $1.5 billion. It also shows that 17 board members working 2-hours or less per week had an average income of $73,000 and 33 key employees had average incomes of over $533,000 per year with President Walter McDonald taking in $1,350,474.

The ETS “non-profit” is actually diving up a lot of profits.

Standards Based Education and Testing is Harming Kids

In December, Peter Greene put together a compendium of articles he has posted about the stupidity associated with standardized testing in schools. One particularly important article is about Daniel Koretz book the Testing Charade. This recognized testing expert from the Harvard Graduate School of Education gives us one more well-founded dismantling of the myth that standardized testing is anything other than destructive.

Student testing data does not indicate learning, teacher effectiveness or school quality and it is statistically noisy. A correlation study of how testing data is affected by various factors assigns r-values of between 1 and 0. A value of 1 means 100% correlated and a value of 0 means not correlated at all. When correlation studies are done with standardized testing data there is only one factor that has an r-value greater the 0.3 (weakly correlated) and that is family wealth which has an r-value of 0.9.

So if Burrito Canyon high school has excellent testing data that is always better than the scores at Pawn Valley high school, there is nothing known about the learning and teaching, but you can be confident students at Burrito Canyon have wealthier parents.

These growth models – that are now being used in almost every state in America – take in noisy testing data that has little valuable meaning and applies fancy arithmetic. It is the classic “garbage in – garbage out” situation.

Not only is standardized testing removing almost $2 billion dollars from America’s classrooms every year, it is doing damage to students. Standards based education is bad education theory because there are no standard children. Testing forces educators to teach to the test and it further narrows curriculum. Gifted education professionals have shown repeatedly that this methodology driven by corporations and billionaires is harmfully misguided.

Tags: California Department of Education, California State Board of Education, Education Testing Services, ETS, Growth Models, Residual Gain Model

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Categories Corporate Education Reform, education, Standards

Authentic Education Reform Based on Diversity Research

7 May

By Thomas Ultican 5/7/2021

“Dedicated with admiration and respect to public school teachers who opt-out of commercial standardized tests.”

These are the words of dedication for Garn Press’s new book in their “Woman Scholars Series,” Diversity Research in Action. In this book, lengthy excerpts from published research by three PhD’s in education Anne Haas Dyson, Denny Taylor and Catherine Compton-Lilly are introduced and woven together by a forth doctorate of education Bobbie Kabuto. It seems like decades since this kind of authentic thinking about how to improve education and equity in our schools has been widely shared.

On a personal note, I began my masters of education program in 2001 and found the kind of pedagogy being advocated by these women very appealing. Unfortunately, that was precisely at the time when Ted Kennedy and George Bush teamed up to smoother it. It was obvious to me that we needed to meet our students at whatever attainment level they had and begin there. Students are not standard so it made no sense to follow some standards arrangement when teaching them.

Most educators found teaching to the standards and administering testing mandated by the No Child Left Behind act – the 2002 rewrite of the US federal education law – heartbreaking. In my remedial high school algebra classes, students were learning but just not fast enough. Instead of being encouraged to continue growing, they were labeled failures.

Building Biographic Literature Profiles

At a time when the president of the United States, George H. W. Bush, and the governor of Arkansas, Bill Clinton, joined with CEO’s like IBM’s Louis Gerstner to call for education standards, Denny Taylor was conducting research which showed how foolhardy they were.

Hundreds of students, dozens of teachers and administrators participated in Taylor’s “Biographic Literacy Profiles Project” from 1989 – 1991. Essentially, she turned kindergarten thru third grade teachers into ethnographers studying their students and how they made sense of literary learning. They collected into portfolios every scrap of paper available that showed how students were using symbols, drawings and invented writing methods to communicate. They added to these portfolios notes describing what the students were doing, what kind of growth they were exhibiting and how they were successful.

Taylor wrote,

“…, while I would rather have the child’s production than some simplistic (asinine is probably a better descriptor) ‘text’ copied from the board, the child’s writing without notes written by the teacher still only provides a part of the ‘picture.’ Portfolios are not enough. To understand how individual children actively engage in the reconstruction of the functions, uses, and forms of written language we need to observe them at work.” (p 117)

Taylor published the findings of the “Biographic Literature Profiles” under the title “Teaching Without Testing.” The profiles show how unique each student is and therefore, how useless education standards and testing are.

“They leave teachers and administrators with no alternative but to teach to the test. Children’s lives are altered, drilled, and skilled – the natural rhythm of their learning is changed to a solemn beat.” (p 150)

One of the school principals participating in the project noted,

“Change should be teacher initiated, teacher implemented, and teacher controlled. But teachers don’t have the power.” (p 140)

Over the last thirty years this has persisted. Peter Greene a Forbes commentator and decades-long educator tweeted.

Permeable Curriculum

In introducing this section, Bobbie Kabuto states,

“Curriculum is the heart and soul of educational systems, and it is in jeopardy of a coup d’état by corporate and political forces. It has not always been this way. As a teacher in the mid 1990s, I knew a time when money was invested in the professional development of teachers rather in than in high-stakes testing.”

Here, Professor Anne Hass Dyson takes the reader through negotiating a permeable curriculum and why it is required. Often teacher world and student world require interplay between children’s language and experience and that of the teacher. The distance between the two is exacerbated by diverse sociocultural backgrounds. Teachers and students do feel disconnected. Dyson states,

“On the one hand, we must allow – indeed, support – the embedding of written language in children’s social worlds, so that they find it a useful symbolic tool (a suggestion made by educators as separated in time and space as Ashton-Warner, Freire, and Vygotsky). But, on the other hand, we must also help children expand and negotiate among the sociocultural worlds – the dialogues – in which they participate.” (p 205)

It requires the educator to deeply understand the student’s home culture and what children are currently fascinated by in order to design curriculum that meets their needs.

Habitus and Chronotype

Researcher Catherine Compton-Lilly’s research is focused on habitus and chronotype. Habitus explains the complex interactions between culture, social structures, and individual agency. In other words what are the environmental factors linking to the way a student talks, acts and believes. These are the factors crucial to the development of cultural capital. Chronotype literally means time-space. Compton-Lilly applied the chronotype motifs from literature to motifs in literacy and schooling.

Compton-Lilly observes,

“Significantly, expanded notions of time invite educators and scholars to think about inequity ‘because time is largely taken for granted and therefore invisible, the social relation of time can continue to maintain existing inequalities and create new ones in the globally constituted world.’” (p 311)

She also shared,

“As Sorokin (1943) argued ‘Observation shows that persons equally old according to the physical clock are physiologically at quite different stages of development.” Yet there are areas in educational research that attempt to normalize development, create age- and grade- level expectations, and require students to make adequate yearly progress.”

Top flight education scholars like the authors of Diversity Research in Action are why billionaires are funding non-university based teacher development programs like the academically inferior Teach For America spinoff TNTP and the late Eli Broad’s superintendents’ academy. They know that authentic professional educators oppose their uninformed theories of education and disruption of public schools.

If you are interested in a deeper perspective on teaching and learning, I recommend this book.

Tags: Anne Haas Dyson, Bobbie Kabuto, Catherine Compton-Lilly, Denny Taylor, Diversity Research in Action

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Categories education, School Experiences, Standards

Destroy Public Education (DPE) for Dummies

22 Feb

By T. Ultican 2/22/2018

America’s public education system is being deliberately destroyed. If you graduated from high school in the 1950’s, 60’s, 70’s or 80’s, it is such an unthinkable concept that it is difficult to even imagine. Not only is it possible, it is happening and a lot of damage has already occurred.

Just this morning, I learned that a Republican legislator has proposed privatizing all the schools in Muncie, Indiana. Almost all the schools in New Orleans were privatized after hurricane Katrina. Half the schools in Washington DC and a quarter of the schools in Los Angeles are privatized. However, ninety percent of America’s K-12 students attend public schools. (Note: Charter schools are not public schools, they are schools run by private businesses that have government contracts.)

DPE Movement False Taking Points

Public schools are failing.
Teachers’ unions fight for the status quo and against education reform.
Standardized testing is a tool that fairly holds teachers and schools accountable.
Standardized testing proves America’s schools are not competitive internationally.
Teacher quality can be assessed with value added measures.
University professors of education are out of touch and an obstacle to school improvement.
Teacher training and professional development is better run by non-profit organizations and consultants than universities.
A college graduate with five weeks of training is qualified to be a teacher.
Experience over rated when it comes to good teaching.
Advanced training such as a master’s degree in education is not worth extra pay.
No excuses charter schools are superior to neighborhood public schools.
Business principles and experience are the key ingredients needed for reforming public schools.
Market forces and competition are the principles required to improve schools.
Public education needs disruption.
Schools districts should be managed using the portfolio model – close failing schools and replace them with higher performing charter schools or voucher schools.
Failing schools should be transformed into successful schools by changing the administration and replacing the existing teachers.

None of these points are true but they are repeated so often by extremely wealthy people and their sycophants that they sound true. It is all a part of the one great lie, “public schools are failing!”

Seminal Events Along the Destroy Public Education (DPE) Trajectory

In 1983, Terrel ‘Ted’ Bell, the 2nd Secretary of Education in the United States, created the “National Commission on Excellence in Education.” It gave us the infamous “A Nation at Risk.” Beyond just claiming that public education in America was failing and needed drastic reform; the claimants said that reform needed the leadership of people who were not professional educators.

“A Nation at Risk: The Imperative for Education Reform” looked deceptively like a genuine peer review research paper, however, it was not. It was a political polemic attacking public education written by businessmen and a famous Nobel Prize winning chemist, Glenn Seaborg. Without substantiation they said, “the educational foundations of our society are presently being eroded by a rising tide of mediocrity that threatens our very future as a Nation and a people.” And claimed, “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.”

In 1991, Julie Miller wrote about a research study conducted by the Sandia Laboratory in New Mexico. Her Education Week article, “Report Questioning ‘Crisis’ in Education Triggers an Uproar,” is one of the few reports on this government study that seriously questioned claims in “A Nation at Risk.” Miller’s lead paragraph reads,

“Three researchers at a federally funded research center in New Mexico have sparked an uproar with a study of American education that concludes that policymakers and pundits who bemoan a system-wide crisis are both overstating and misstating the problem.”

“A Nation at Risk” propelled us down the road toward education standards, testing and competition as drivers for education reform. A huge mistake.

The Washington Post ran a retrospective article asking “experts” which president deserves the moniker “education president?” Christopher T. Cross, chairman of an education policy consulting firm replied:

“… The unlikely duo of George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton were the driving forces to put education on the national map in a significant way. Bush did it by convening the Charlottesville Summit in September of 1989, Clinton by securing passage of the Improving American’s Schools Act as an amendment to ESEA and the Goals 2000 Educate America Act, both within a few months of each other in 1994. What Bush had begun, with Clinton’s support as then-governor of Arkansas, Clinton saw to fruition.

“The significance of these actions is that they did cast the die for accountability in the use of federal funds, made an attempt at national assessments in math and reading, and did create national goals for education.”

Charlottsvill Summit 1989 Bush

President Bush and the nation’s Governors on the steps of the University of Virginia at Charlottesville, September 28, 1989. – Picture from the Bush Library

The Charlottesville joint communiqué listed the four areas of agreement reached at the summit:

“The President and the nation’s Governors have agreed at this summit to:

Establish a process for setting national education goals;
Seek greater flexibility and enhanced accountability in the use of Federal resources to meet the goals, through both regulatory and legislative changes;
Undertake a major state-by-state effort to restructure our education system; and
Report annually on progress in achieving our goals.”

In 1998, Bill Clinton wrote:

“We have worked to raise academic standards, promote accountability, and provide greater competition and choice within the public schools, including support for a dramatic increase in charter schools.”

The philosophy of education these “education presidents” put forward accelerated the harm being perpetrated on public schools. It was completely misguided and undermined local democratically oriented control of schools. At least with local control vast harm to the entire nation is not possible.

From 2002 to 2011, The Committee on Incentives and Test-Based Accountability in Public Education established by the National Research Council studied the results and unintended consequences of test based accountability. When looking at high school exit exams they concluded, “The evidence we have reviewed suggests that high school exit exam programs, as currently implemented in the United States, decrease the rate of high school graduation without increasing achievement.”

A 2013 study by Tom Loveless at the Brookings Institute stated,

“Education leaders often talk about standards as if they are a system of weights and measures—the word “benchmarks” is used promiscuously as a synonym for standards. But the term is misleading by inferring that there is a real, known standard of measurement. Standards in education are best understood as aspirational, and like a strict diet or prudent plan to save money for the future, they represent good intentions that are not often realized.”

In 2001, Ted Kennedy and George W. Bush united to complete the federal takeover of public education. The federal education law rewrite that they promoted was called No Child Left Behind (NCLB). It mandated standardized testing, incentivized charter schools and demanded schools be held accountable; judged solely by testing results.

Standardized testing is not capable of measuring school or teacher quality, but makes a great messaging tool that can misleadingly indicate that schools are failing. The education writer, Alfie Kohn, wrote in his article, “Test Today, Privatize Tomorrow:”

“We now have corroboration that these fears were entirely justified. Susan Neuman, an assistant secretary of education during the roll-out of NCLB, admitted that others in Bush’s Department of Education “saw NCLB as a Trojan horse for the choice agenda – a way to expose the failure of public education and ‘blow it up a bit’” (Claudia Wallis, “No Child Left Behind: Doomed to Fail?”, Time, June 8, 2008).”

Barak Obama and the Democratic Party’s embrace of neoliberal ideology in regard to education became apparent at the 2008 Democratic National Convention in Denver. The hedge fund dominated group Democrats for Education Reform convinced Obama to dump his presumptive Secretary of Education nominee, Linda Hammond-Darling, and appoint Arne Duncan. Obama and Duncan put into place the test centric and competition oriented Race to the Top (RTTT) initiative. For the first time ever, in accord with neoliberal theory, states were forced to compete for education dollars.

RTTT was all about objective measures and competition. To win RTTT monies, states had to agree to enact Common Core State Standards (or their equivalent), evaluate teachers and schools based on testing results and open a path for more privatized schools (charter schools). The Democratic governor of New York, Andrew Cuomo, enthusiastically embraced RTTT even parroting Milton Friedman, saying he wanted to destroy “the public-school monopoly.”

Consistently in the background of the DPE movement from the late 1970’s on has been an evangelical Christian disdain for public schools. Writer Katherine Stewart’s book, The Good News Club, The Christian Right’s Stealth Assault on America’s Children chronicles the undermining of the separation of church and state in school.

Stewart witnessed the infamous Texas school book selection process in 2010 dominated by evangelicals. She describes attending evangelical missionary conferences aimed at infiltrating schools and converting students. She describes President Trump’s lawyer, Jay Sekulow, winning at the Supreme Court arguing against the separation of church and state in public schools. All Americans concerned about – freedom of religion; Shielding children from unwanted religious indoctrination at school; and protecting public education – should be concerned.

U.S. Secretary of Education, Betsy DeVos is a devout member of an evangelical church, Mars Hill Bible Church. It seems apparent that our education secretary has an evangelically based anti-public education agenda. Arguing the relative merits of school policies with her misses the point.

It is more likely that religious ideology is the point.

A Large Group of Billionaires are Funding and Steering the DPE Movement

Charter Schools have proven to be second rate, unstable and plagued by fraud. There are some exceptions but the experiment would have been abandoned as a failure without the unrelenting support of billionaires.

It is the same with voucher schools. Only high end expensive private schools compete well with public education but a poor person with a voucher still cannot afford the tuition. Affordable voucher schools are substandard. However, vouchers have opened the door for government support of religious schools and that is probably why voucher laws keep getting proposed.

There are many billionaires pouring money into the DPE movement. The following is a little about just a few of them.

Bill Gates (Microsoft founder – Harvard dropout) – Spends about $500 million a year on education – he pushes portfolio district theory, charter schools, Teach for America (TFA), standards, testing, teacher merit pay, and the list of bad ideas goes on. He has spent multiple billions of dollars on the writing and institution of the common core state standards. He also spends big money influencing education research and education journalism. Makes large political contributions.

Reed Hastings (Netflix Founder and CEO) – Charter school advocate who served on the board of the California Charter School Association; was the primary advocate of California’s charter school co-location law; Investor in DreamBox Learning a company creating software to teach kids at computers. Has said that elected school boards need to be done away with. Supports TFA. Makes large political contributions.

Michael Bloomberg (Publisher and former New York mayor) – Charter school supporter, supports education technology and TFA. Makes large political contributions.

John Arnold (Made a fortune at Enron and with a Hedge fund; retired at 38 years old) – Supports the portfolio model of education and school choice, gives big to charter schools and TFA. Makes large political contributions.

The Walton Family (Wealthiest family in America, owns Walmart) – Support charter schools, vouchers and TFA. Makes large political contributions.

Eli Broad (Real Estate Developer and Insurance Magnate) – Supports charter schools, TFA and other efforts the undermine the teaching profession. Makes large political contributions.

No less important are Mark Zuckerberg, Laurene Powell-Jobs, Doris Fisher, Michael Dell and several more.

This billionaire group all gives large contributions to TFA. Although, these youthful college graduates have no training in education, they are useful troops on the ground in a cult like environment. Most TFA candidates are unaware of their complicity in undermining public education in America.

The super wealthy can legally contribute large sums of money for local elections without publicity. They take advantage of federal tax code 501 C4 that allows them to give to a dark money organization like Betsy DeVos’s American Federation of Children which then funnels the money into the current hot campaign.

Across the United States, school board elections have become too expensive for most common citizens to participate. Elections that used to cost less than $5,000 to run a successful campaign are now costing over $35.000. In the last school board election in Los Angeles more than $30 million was spent.

Conclusions

It is unlikely that government spending on education will end any time soon. However, as schools are increasingly privatized, public spending on education will decrease.

Today, we have come to expect high quality public education. We expect trained certificated teachers and administrators to staff our schools. We expect reasonable class sizes and current well-resourced curriculum. It is those expectations that are being shattered.

Many forces are attacking public education for diverse reasons, but the fundamental reason is still rich people do not like paying taxes. Choice and the attack on public education, at its root, is about decreasing government spending and lowering taxes.

Tags: Bill Gates, Christianity, Dreambox, Evangelical, NCLB, Standardized Testing, Standards

Comments 16 Comments
Categories DPE, education, Law, Standards

Standards Based Education Reform is Toxic

14 Feb

By T. Ultican 2/14/2018

In 1983, lawyers, business titans and famous scientists ushered in the era of standards based reform with the infamous “A Nation at Risk.” This political polemic masquerading as a scholarly paper proclaimed a crisis in American education. It propelled us careening down a path of harm. Harm for children; harm for educators; harm for communities; harm for schools and harm for democracy.

During my first quarter at UCSD’s teacher education program, I was assigned many readings including Alfie Kohn’s The Schools Our Children Deserve. By 1999, the time of the books writing, Clinton’s Goals 2000 was in force and many states were already adopting high school exit exams and other standardized testing practices. Although not impressed by this theory of education improvement, Alfie was more focused on improving education practices in public schools.

He asked,

“Is it possible that we are not really as well educated as we’d like to think? Might we have spent a good chunk of our childhoods doing stuff that was exactly as pointless as we suspected it was at the time?”

Kohn believes in progressive education and opposes behaviorism. He embraces the ideas of Dewey and Piaget; he is a constructivist. He railed against traditional classroom management, teacher centered instruction, homework and grading policies. One of his criticisms of education reform in 1999 says, “The dominant philosophy of fixing schools consists of saying, in effect, that ‘what we’re doing is OK, we just need to do it harder, longer, stronger, louder, meaner, and we’ll have a better country.”

Less than five years latter Kohn would write:

“I just about fell off my desk chair the other day when I came across my own name in an essay by a conservative economist who specializes in educational issues. The reason for my astonishment is that I was described as being ‘dead set against any fundamental changes in the nation’s schools.’ Now having been accused with some regularity of arguing for too damn many fundamental changes in the nation’s schools, I found this new criticism more than a bit puzzling. But then I remembered that, during a TV interview a couple of years ago, another author from a different right-wing think tank had labeled me a ‘defender of the educational status quo.’”

Standards Based Education Reform is Based on Bad Theory

Professor Ellen Brantlinger of Indiana University was an early critic of standards based education reform (SBR). Unlike the promoters of SBR, Brantlinger was a scholar whose work was peer reviewed. In a 1997 paper published in Review of Education Research, she observed that ideology preserves “existing social structures and power relations” and that SBR was based on uncritical ideology that venerated the dominant culture and subjugated minority cultures.

In another article, “An Application of Gramsci’s ‘Who Benefits?’ to High-Stakes Testing”, Brantlinger wrote:

“It seems reasonable to conclude that a number of parties reap rewards from high-stakes testing. Turning to Gramsci’s idea of hegemony (that powerful groups in society strive to maintain and strengthen their dominance by offering new evidence to justify it), it is plausible to assume that high-stakes tests facilitate the win/lose situations that justify hierarchical social relations and dominant groups’ material and status advantages.”

After the Common Core State Standards were released, Tom Loveless of the Brookings Institute conducted a study to ascertain the expected benefit from the new standards. He concluded, “Despite all the money and effort devoted to developing the Common Core State Standards—not to mention the simmering controversy over their adoption in several states—the study foresees little to no impact on student learning.”

He came to this conclusion in part by looking at the effect on testing results due to varying quality in state standards on the National Education Performance Assessments (NEAP).

Loveless also noted:

Loveless countered one of the more loudly proclaimed reasons for national curriculum guided by national standards:

“In the U.S., advocates of a national curriculum have for years pointed to nations at the top of TIMSS and PISA rankings and argued that because those countries have national curriculums, a national curriculum must be good. The argument is without merit. What the advocates neglect to observe is that countries at the bottom of the international rankings also have a national curriculum.”

Mathew DiCarlo writing for the Shanker Blog cited the work of Eric Hanushek, Jonah Rockoff and others to note that family background constitutes more than half the cause for scholastic achievement. He reported:

“But in the big picture, roughly 60 percent of achievement outcomes is explained by student and family background characteristics (most are unobserved, but likely pertain to income/poverty). Observable and unobservable schooling factors explain roughly 20 percent, most of this (10-15 percent) being teacher effects. The rest of the variation (about 20 percent) is unexplained (error).”

Professor Paul Thomas from Furman University shared his conclusion in an article published by Alternet “Corporations Are Behind the Common Core State Standards — And That’s Why They’ll Never Work.” He wrote,

“Noted earlier, the evidence from standards-based education has revealed that standards, testing, and accountability do not succeed in raising test scores. Related, the evidence on teaching shows that focusing on direct instruction and content acquisition is also ineffective. …. Additionally, we have ample evidence that standards and high-stakes tests do not create the democratic outcomes we seek in schools such as critical thinking, creativity, and equity of opportunity.”

Geometry Standards Posted

Teachers Are Forced to Post Standards and Teach to the Test – Photo by Ultican

Harming Students, Teachers, Schools and Communities

The real standards in a standards-based education system are the standards that get tested or as Center for Education Policy President and CEO Jack Jennings put it, “What gets tested gets taught.” A natural narrowing of curriculum occurs.

Professor Julian Vasquez Heilig of California State University Sacramento recently shared some corroboration of Jennings point on his blog “Cloaking Inequality.” In a piece he called “From Segregated, to Integrated, to Narrowed.” there is a documented account of a first-year chemistry teacher so focused on Texas testing that “The entire chemistry course was solely designed to drill students for science exit testing by utilizing multiple-choice worksheets.” The article included this outcome from Julian’s research:

“Vasquez Heilig (2011) studied majority-minority urban and rural schools in Texas and found that teachers (11 of 33) and principals (6 of 7) in his study detailed aspects of ‘teaching to the test’ and the impact of exit testing on the narrowing of the curriculum. A high school administrator in the study acknowledged that schools are paying attention to constraints created by the current educational policy system: There’s no way around it, I mean you’d be a fool if you did not play that game, I guess you can call it … . You can easily end up being labeled unacceptable if you did not prepare the students to take the test … . Two weeks before the TAKS [Texas’s standardized tests] date we pull out the kids … . We let the teachers know you’re not going to see these kids for 4 days. For 4 days we do what we call the TAKS blitz.”

The National Research Council (NRC) is a part of the National Academies. It was founded in 1916 to study issues related to coordinating science and technology research for America’s possible involvement in World War I. The NRC conducted a nine-year study of the standards based education reforms mandated by the No Child Left Behind (NCLB) law. Here are a few of its findings:

“Incentives will often lead people to find ways to increase measured performance that do not also improve the desired outcomes.”

“The evidence we have reviewed suggests that high school exit exam programs, as currently implemented in the United States, decrease the rate of high school graduation without increasing achievement.”

“To help explain why test-based incentives sometimes produce negative effects on achievement, researchers should collect data on changes in educational practice by the people who are affected by the incentives.”

Standards Based Education Reform Destroyed Schools in Poor and Minority Neighborhoods

In an article he called “Test Today, Privatize Tomorrow – Using Accountability to “Reform” Public Schools to Death” Alfie Kohn shared,

“As Lily Tomlin once remarked, ‘No matter how cynical you become, it’s never enough to keep up.’

“I try to imagine myself as a privatizer. How would I proceed? If my objective were to dismantle public schools, I would begin by trying to discredit them. I would probably refer to them as “government” schools, hoping to tap into a vein of libertarian resentment. I would never miss an opportunity to sneer at researchers and teacher educators as out-of-touch “educationists.” Recognizing that it’s politically unwise to attack teachers, I would do so obliquely, bashing the unions to which most of them belong. Most important, if I had the power, I would ratchet up the number and difficulty of standardized tests that students had to take, in order that I could then point to the predictably pitiful results. I would then defy my opponents to defend the schools that had produced students who did so poorly.”

Jessica Bacon an Education Professor from City University, New York and Professor Beth A. Ferri from the school of education Syracuse University studied the demise of Westvale, a K-5 urban elementary school in New York state. Their paper is called “The impact of standards-based reform: applying Brantlinger’s critique of ‘hierarchical ideologies’.”

It is a story that has repeated itself too often. Westvale served a population that does not test well. The demographics of the school: 95% free and reduced lunch, 40% limited English proficiency, and 20% students with disabilities. The racial makeup of the school was: 50% Hispanic, 35% African-American, and 10% white.

Because Westvale elementary could not meet the testing targets set by the NCLB law, the state of New York categorized them as “Persistently Lowest Achieving” which meant the district had to select one of four remediation methods. The district chose the transformation model.

The paper reports, “Unfortunately, during this process, Westvale also ‘transformed’ from a school that had been moving towards a fully inclusive model, to one that reverted to a variety of segregated, tracked, and pullout classes.”

Today, many schools in communities that test poorly are being privatized as either charter schools, innovation schools or voucher schools.

In an Education Week article, “‘Defies Measurement’ Illustrates Failures of Test-Focused Policy,” David B. Cohen writes,

“In ‘Defies Measurement,’ teacher-turned-filmmaker Shannon Puckett gathers the recollections and reflections of twenty-three former students, parents, and teachers from Chipman Middle School in Alameda, California, and illustrates how a nurturing school community was gradually dismantled by the test-and-punish dynamics of education reform under No Child Left Behind. Puckett, who taught at Chipman and quit because of the changes following from NCLB, also contextualizes the eventual closure of the school, and the devaluation of what it stood for, in the broader context of education reform and accountability efforts nationwide.”

A school in which I had worked was closed because of the NCLB law. I wrote of about the “Unwarranted Demise of Mar Vista Middle School.” The piece began:

“In February, while attending a science teacher’s professional development at Mar Vista High School, I first heard the rumor that Mar Vista Middle School (MVM) was going to be closed, all of its staff dismissed and the school reopened as a charter school. Since 1961, this venerable institution has been a treasure in the poverty-stricken neighborhood situated one mile north of the world’s busiest border crossing (San Diego-Tijuana). At the March 11, 2013 board meeting (Sweetwater Union High School District) the rumor was confirmed, a restructuring plan for MVM was approved. Or as one person observed, ‘they legally stole an asset belonging to a poor community for their own purposes.’”

It turned out that the community successfully fought off the charter school conversion. The remedy became close the school and reopen it as a focus or theme school with a transformed staff. Fifty percent of the original staff was sent packing. The school is not much changed today because it is still serving the same community, but it is now called Mar Vista Academy and many lives were disrupted.

Some Last Words

Last September, the Labour Party in New Zealand captured control of the government. The news service Stuff reported, “Labour campaigned hard on scrapping National Standards in the lead-up to the September election on the basis they were neither ‘national or standard’.” Labour has rid the country of standards based education reform.

Last week brought a new initiative from the Labour government to rid the country of charter schools. Stuff quotes Education Minister Chris Hipkins,

“Both National Standards and charter schools were driven by ideology rather than evidence. Both were rejected by the vast majority of the education sector. The Government’s strong view is that there is no place for them in the New Zealand education system.”

There are twin lies supporting standards based education reform and the destruction of public education in the United States. The first lie promotes “the illusion“ that public education in this country is failing. It never was failing nor is it failing now. The second lie is driven by market based ideology. It posits that privately-run charter schools are superior to “government schools.” A group of researchers in Massachusetts studied the results after 20 years of the 1993 state education law enactment. They reported:

“While some charter high schools with a large percentage of low-income students score high on MCAS [Massachusetts standardized tests], these schools rank much lower on the SATs. What’s more, research indicates many students from high-scoring charter schools do not fare well in college, as measured by six-year college completion rates.”

Hopefully, a political party in the United States will also realize that protecting public education is good politics. I don’t care what letter they use after their name – D, G, I or R – they will have my vote.

Tags: education, NCLB, Politics, Privitization, Public education, Public Schools, reform, Standards, testing

Comments 11 Comments
Categories Corporate Education Reform, DPE, education, Law, Standards

California State Board of Education is a Corporate Reform Tool

1 Dec

By Thomas Ultican 12/1/2017

For three decades, California’s State Board of Education (SBE) has embraced a neoliberal agenda. It has promoted school privatization; embraced standards based education; and advocated for the STEM fraud.

The eleven current members of the SBE were all appointed by Governor Jerry Brown.

State school Board

Photos Gathered from the SBE Web Page

The board is representative of most of California with members from the central coast, the inland empire, the San Joaquin valley, the bay area, LA county, Orange county and San Diego county.

SBE is organized like K-12 boards throughout the state including a high school student member who is appointed by the Governor. The big difference is the members are appointed not elected.

The student member is appointed for a one-year term and the ten voting board members are appointed to a four-year term. On the surface, this board looks like a highly qualified group of professional educators with stellar credentials.

Neoliberalism Guides

Jenifer Berkshire published an article titled “How Education Reform Ate the Democratic Party.” In this brilliant piece, Berkshire clearly elucidates the term neoliberal. She writes:

“By the early 1980s, there was already a word for turning public institutions upside down: neoliberalism. Before it degenerated into a flabby insult, neoliberal referred to a self-identified brand of Democrat, ready to break with the tired dogmas of the past. ‘The solutions of the thirties will not solve the problems of the eighties,’ wrote Randall Rothenberg in his breathless 1984 paean to this new breed, whom he called simply ‘The Neoliberals.’ His list of luminaries included the likes of Paul Tsongas, Bill Bradley, Gary Hart and Al Gore (for the record, Gore eschewed the neoliberal label in favor of something he liked to call ‘neopopulism’). In Rothenberg’s telling, the ascendancy of the neoliberals represented an economic repositioning of the Democratic Party that had begun during the economic crises of the 1970s. The era of big, affirmative government demanding action—desegregate those schools, clean up those polluted rivers, enforce those civil rights and labor laws—was over. It was time for fresh neo-ideas.” (emphasis added)

Board President Michael Kirst’s CV resume references his Ph.D. awarded at Harvard University in 1964 for Political Economy and Government. Soon after Harvard he joined the Johnson administration working as a budget analyst in the Office of Education. He became a Whitehouse Fellow and then director of the Bureau of Elementary and Secondary Education. When Richard Nixon was elected President, Kirst became a senate staffer for the U.S. Senate Subcommittee on Manpower, Employment and Poverty.

In 1969, Kirst left Washington for Stanford University. Governor Jerry Brown appointed Kirst to the SBE in 1975. Brown would subsequently appoint Kirst to a four-year term three more times.

The 1970’s revealed Kirst to be a highly educated and experienced liberal; working to advance the Democratic party and education.

When Jerry Brown’s first stint as governor ended, Kirst returned to Stanford.

Kirst rejoined Brown, who became the new Mayor of Oakland in 1999. Kirst was a member of the Mayor’s Commission on Education. In Oakland, this once champion of public education and labor rights helped Brown make Oakland’s schools the most privatized in California.

Around the same time, Kirst became a board member of EdVoice. When EdVoice sued the Los Angeles Unified School District for not using standardized testing results to evaluate teachers, education historian, Diane Ravitch explained who EdVoice is:

“EdVoice was founded in 2001 by Reed Hastings (CEO of Netflix, Microsoft board member, Green Dot founding funder) and John Doerr (venture capitalist, investment banker), along with and former CA state Assembly members Ted Lempert and Steve Poizner. Eli Broad and Don Fisher (deceased CEO of The Gap and major KIPP supporter) once served on EdVoice’s board.”

“Back in 1998, Hastings also co-founded Californians for Public School Excellence with Don Shalvey. This is the organization that pushed for the Charter Schools Act of 1998, the law that lifted the cap on the number of charter schools in the state.”

EdVoice gives unstinting media support to the California Charter Schools Association (CCSA) and standardized testing.

SBE is Responsible for Academic Standards

The SBE adopted standards developed through the aegis of Bill Gates, CEO of Microsoft and Louis Gerstner, former CEO of both IBM and RJR Nabisco. This is “corporate education reform.” It is reform led by amateurs instead of education professionals.

California is one of the few states that has continued with the common cores state standards (CCSS) which were written in secret by mostly testing corporation employees.

Media from the right, left and center are routinely running headlines calling Bill Gates’ CCSS a disaster: Stick A Fork In Common Core—It’s Done – The Federalist; Analysis: Top 5 Reasons Common Core Has Been a Disaster – The Christian Post; Another Common Core disaster: Corporate-education reformer John King is exactly the wrong man to be secretary of education – Salon; PARCC Gets Parked: What Testing Companies Don’t Want Parents to Know – Huffington Post.

While most states have abandoned the CCSS, SBE is enforcing them.

Louis Gerstner’s Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS) are even worse. He personally oversaw the NGSS development. They are so bad that even SBE recognized something had to be done, so they had the standards rewritten into a more usable form. However, they are still a science education plague.

The newest board member, Trish Boyd Williams, exemplifies the nexus between corporate education reform and the SBE. She served for 19-years as the Executive Director of Edsource which describes itself,

“Since its founding in 1977, EdSource has broadened its focus to include a broad range of education reforms, including early education and preschools, charter schools, school accountability, STEM education, teacher evaluation and obstacles students face in the math pipeline from pre-kindergarten to college. In 2012, it launched its journalism and communications arms, EdSource Today, which now comprises the largest education reporting staff of any newsroom in the state.”

The secret of Edsource’s success is keeping happy its big pocketed contributors including The S. D. Bechtel, Jr. Foundation; The California Endowment; The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation; The Stuart Foundation and several more.

Of course, this required a careful editorial policy. For example, the stated purpose of 2016’s $1.3 million dollar contribution to Edsource from the Bill and Melinda Gates foundation listed this purpose: “to deepen knowledge and awareness of state and federal reforms, including the Common Core standards and the Every Student Succeeds Act, through regular reporting on successful strategies as well as challenges that need to be overcome.”

It is not likely that Edsource will have a bad thing to say about CCSS.

Williams also served from 1993 to 2011 as the design architect, first author, and project lead with a team that included faculty from Stanford and researchers from the American Institutes for Research and WestEd doing large-scale survey studies, including the “Gaining Ground in the Middle Grades” study released in February 2010.

Gaining Ground in the Middle Grades says on the author’s page, “EdSource thanks Reed Hastings, CEO of Netflix, for his generous support of this study.”

The central question asked was, “Why do some middle grades schools clearly outperform others on standards-based tests even though they serve a similar student population?”

The first problem with this study is that standardized testing has no ability to identify good pedagogy or learning. It has been a corporate reform delusion since “Nation at Risk” was published that standardized testing could accurately assess schools and teachers. It’s a scheme that began failing in China 1,500 years ago.

Of course, the answer discovered was that fidelity to the standards was the key. In other words, this paper found that higher test scores are possible. Teachers and schools just need to teach to the test.

Standards based education is bad education. It is founded on a delusion.

SBE Responsible for Charter Schools

Here we have the fox guarding the hen house. The SBE responsibility:

“All-charter district petitions are submitted directly to the SBE and the State Superintendent of Public Instruction, who have joint approval authority. In addition, the SBE has the authority to approve statewide benefit charter schools that operate at multiple locations throughout the state. As a charter authorizer, the SBE has monitoring and accountability responsibilities for the schools and all-charter districts it approves. The SBE also considers appeals of decisions made by local educational agencies to revoke a charter school’s operating petition.”

Districts and counties have turned down charter schools for various reasons only to have the SBE routinely authorize them. Some board members are charter school enthusiasts.

Board member Ting Lan Sun is the co-founder and Executive Director of the Sacramento-based Natomas Charter School.

Ting was Vice President of Leadership and Quality for the California Charter Schools Association (CCSA) from 2003-2006 where she developed and implemented the Association’s quality assurance strategy and initiatives. The CCSA tax form 990 from 2010 shows Ting receiving $158,000 in compensation.

Board member Bruce Holaday served in multiple positions at the Culver Academies from 1976 to 2004. He was formerly the Director of Newpoint Tampa High School from 2009 to 2010 (a charter school that went out of business in 2013) and Director of the Oakland Military Institute from 2004 to 2009. Mr. Holaday never attended a public school nor worked in one.

Oakland Military Institute is where he met then Mayor Brown. The OMI web-site relates its history:

“OMI was founded in 2001 after a hard-fought two-year campaign led by then Oakland Mayor Jerry Brown. Governor Gray Davis helped secure the charter after local school boards rejected it. It was the first charter ever sponsored by the state, the first public military school and the first school sponsored by the National Guard.”

Cyber charters managed by K-12 Inc. and mall schools are ubiquitous in California and have a history of terrible outcomes. This November, the NPE released a major report on charter schools in which the history of malfeasance and bad public policy are documented. NPE Executive director, Carol Burris, spent a year researching and writing the report. She apprises,

“A bill that would have banned for-profit charters in California was vetoed by Governor Jerry Brown in 2015. An additional bill, which would have prevented financially troubled districts from authorizing charters in other districts, was vetoed by Governor Brown in 2016. The president of the California State Board of Education, Michael Kirst, worked as a K12 consultant, prior to his appointment by Governor Brown.”

Is anyone on California’s State Board of Education trying to protect the 90% of students in public schools, or is it a neoliberal free for all decimating a legacy?

SBE Responsible for Curriculum

In the 1990’s, a great hue and cry arose from the titans of Silicon Valley claiming, “The US has a shortage of science, technology, engineering and math professionals (STEM).” They called for the H1B visa program to be greatly expanded.

These fraudulent STEM claims were trumpeted so widely they became common knowledge.

By 2004, The Rand Corporation and others were publishing studies poking holes in the claims but few heard. Rand observed:

“Concerns about the size and adequacy of the U.S. scientific, technical, engineering, and mathematics workforce have grown amid fears of a dwindling labor pool and concern that this may erode U.S. leadership in science and technology and could complicate mobilization of appropriate manpower for homeland security. In the past, such fears have failed to materialize, and surpluses have been more common than shortages.”

Professionals should be aware that STEM claims are not based on evidence. Perhaps at SBE they are and have other agendas.

Board President Kirst became a board member of the Silicon Valley Education Foundation in 2008. The foundation’s spending is almost exclusively for STEM education. The charity navigator website details that spending:

The Elevate Program $1,219,440 31.8% (math education program)

49ers STEM Leadership Institute $850,500 22.2%

STEM Initiative $739,574 19.3%

Board member Williams says she “has focused her service on the SBE priorities of charter school policy and appeals, Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS), and Computer Science.” (Computer science is a subset of STEM fraud.)

Board member Ortiz-Licon says she is focusing on, among other things, college and career-readiness and STEM initiatives.

The result is that school curriculums have been deformed based by a lie. There is even a push to make computer science a requirement for high school graduation.

Next year, California selects a new governor. Democrats, please avoid neoliberals like Villaraigosa.

Tags: education, Gates, Gates Foundation, Louis Gerstner, Public education, Public Schools, Standardized Testing, Standards, STEM

Comments 5 Comments
Categories Corporate Education Reform, education, Justice, Law, Standards, technology

An Educators Preference for the Next California Governor – John Chiang

2 Nov

By Thomas Ultican 11/2/2017

It seemed like identifying the best option for our next governor would be difficult. It wasn’t. The next governor will most likely come from the big three in the Democratic party; Gavin Newsom, Anthony Villaraigosa or John Chiang. Republican, John Fox is fighting against history and Delaine Eastin has yet to raise enough money to be taken seriously. Breitbart favorite, Travis Allan, has raised even less money than Eastin.

The Case for John Chiang (pronounced chung)

Recently, I asked the head of a Democratic Assembly member’s staff who the member was supporting for governor. He would not say but shared his own opinion. He said Jerry Brown had been successful as governor because of his fiscal responsibility. The staffer said that John Chiang was the only Democratic candidate who would control the spending of California’s democratically dominated assembly.

The 55 years-old Chiang’s education and experience include a degree in finance from the University of South Florida; a law degree from Georgetown; past work experience that includes tax law specialist for the IRS and an attorney for the California state controller’s office.

Chiang’s career in public office began in 1997 when he was appointed to the California Board of Equalization, and then was elected the following year to the same position. Chiang won re-election in 2002, and then went on to serve two terms as California state controller. In 2014, he was elected California state treasurer.

Gridlock and rancor dominated Sacramento in 2008. Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, reacted to the ensuing budget crisis by ordering state worker’s pay to be slashed and thousands of others to be laid off. Chiang refused to comply. “Frankly, [the governor] is just trying to make me do something that’s improper and illegal,” Chiang told the San Francisco Chronicle.

The New Yorker chronicled this episode dubbing Chiang an unlikely hero,

“Under Schwarzenegger’s plan, the workers would receive their full salaries once a budget was approved. But California had enough cash in its accounts, and, in Chiang’s view, the Governor’s move could violate the Fair Labor Standards Act. Moreover, he thought, it was cruel. It was the height of the financial crisis, and mortgage defaults were up more than a hundred per cent over the previous year.”

“The Sacramento Bee, adapting the iconic image of a protester at Tiananmen Square, published a cartoon that depicted Chiang as a lone resister before a line of Hummers, with “Arnold” stenciled on the bumper of the lead vehicle. The Liberal O.C., a progressive blog, nicknamed him ‘the Controllernator.’”

Schwarzenegger sued Chiang but eventually, Schwarzenegger’s replacement, Jerry Brown, dropped the legal action.

An NBC report on Chiang notes:

“Chiang’s campaign site lists an extensive rundown of his accomplishments as controller and currently as treasurer that include restructuring the state’s debt during the recession “to generate $2 billion for schools, infrastructure and public safety” and imposing sanctions on Wells Fargo following a scandal that revealed over 2 million fake bank accounts.”

Because of the relentless attacks on public schools and educators, candidate views on education are key. Many self-styled “progressive democrats,” have adopted education positions attacking teachers’ unions and promoting privatization (Rahm Emanuel, Corey Booker, Antonio Villaraigosa). Some position statements promulgated by Chiang’s campaign:

“In 1988, California voters approved Proposition 98, which requires a minimum percentage of the state budget to be spent on K-12 education. Unfortunately, while Proposition 98 was meant to create a constitutional “floor” for education spending, it has turned into a political ceiling. As a result, California is grossly under-invested in public education.”

“We also must protect the collective bargaining rights of our educators, classified employees, professors, early childhood educators and child care providers. It is critically important that the people who interact with our students and children every day have a seat at the table and a voice on the job to advocate for the best conditions possible for our children to learn.”

“We must also increase both the quantity and quality of California’s early childhood education programs and assure free access for all working families.

“We also know that small class sizes are the key to improving student learning. We need to expand the Class Size Reduction program so our students have every opportunity to learn.”

“Cities and states across the nation are jumping on board and are finding innovative solutions to provide two free years of community college. California needs to find a way to get to that place, where we make community college free while ensuring students are on the right path through participation and graduation.”

“To reclaim the promise of quality education, we must ensure that children and their families have access to wraparound services to meet their social, emotional and health needs.”

Money, Money, Money

John Cox, the Republican gubernatorial candidate from Rancho Santa Fe, is fighting an uphill battle and he has yet to share his views on issues like education.

When Pete Wilson was running for reelection as governor in 1994, he used proposition 187 as a wedge issue. The proposition established a state-run citizenship screening system and prohibited illegal aliens from using non-emergency health care, public education, and other services in California. Another Republican candidate for governor, Ron Unz, campaigned against bilingual education. Both positions alienated many people in the Hispanic community.

Even more damaging to the image of the Republican party in California is the widely held view that they cannot govern. Californians blamed them for repeated failures to pass a budget which led to service interruptions and layoffs. Originally, Democrat, Gray Davis was blamed. However, his Republican replacement, Arnold Schwarzenegger, was also unable to pass a budget. So, intransient Republican legislators inherited Gray’s reputation as the source of the problem.

John Cox is not likely to become governor, but his views about political corruption are interesting. He states:

“Think about it. Legislators are largely funded, not by the voters, but by the lobbyists whose bills they’re going to vote on.

“You couldn’t have designed a system more fraught with temptation, or ripe for reform.”

Reforming California’s system of government appears to be Cox’s sole issue. In a system that makes it impossible that someone without access to financial resources be taken seriously, Mr. Cox became relevant. He donated himself $3,000,000.

Money on Hand July 31_2017

Campaign Funds Report to State of California

A Daily News article from this May reported on the effect of the Los Angeles School Board election for those advocating a privatized education system:

“Advocates for change include Netflix founder Reed Hastings and developer Eli Broad, who have poured millions of dollars into pro-charter groups that fund political campaigns. Their recent win in Los Angeles “portends a massive investment in the superintendent’s race and the governor’s race,” said Mike Trujillo, a Democratic political consultant who worked on campaigns for Kelly Gonez and Nick Melvoin, the newly elected Los Angeles school board members.

“There is not a better motivator than the nectar of victory to push along the issue that you care about, and that’s improving public education and ensuring that every child in every school has a high-quality teacher,” Trujillo said.

“Trujillo worked closely with Antonio Villaraigosa when, as mayor of Los Angeles, he bucked the teachers union and took control of several low-performing schools. Now running for governor, Villaraigosa has signaled that education will be a focus of his campaign. In his speech at the Democratic convention, Villaraigosa called the education split ‘the most important civil rights battle of our generation.’”

The largest contributors to both Gavin Newsom and Antonio Villaraigosa are Stewart and Lynda Resnick, the billionaires behind Fiji Water and POM Wonderful juice contributed $116,800 to Newsom and $112,000 to Villaraigosa.

Gavin Newsom also got large contributions from Trump supporter Peter Thiel, from George Soros and from Laurene Powell Jobs.

Villaraigosa scored big contributions from fans of privatizing public education; Eli and Edythe Broad ($112,800), Anschutz Entertainment Group ($56,400), and Reed Hastings ($56,400).

Chiang’s big money contributions come mostly from wealthy Chinese business people like CC and Regina Yin, owners of dozens of McDonalds restaurants who contributed $94,600.

Newsom and Villaraigosa on Education

Villaraigosa has education views that are almost identical to the hedge fund supported group Democrats for Education Reform and the California Charter School Association. He will surely receive more large amounts of funding from these entities and their fellow travelers. His anti-teachers’ union message is popular with billionaires.

The attacks on the teachers’ union are disingenuous. Teachers’ unions are driven by impassioned idealistic young women who believe in social justice and public education. Trying to make them into enemies of the public is a cynical ploy. It is especially damaging in an era when working people have less and less protection from mega-wealth.

Gavin Newsom in more nuanced than Villaraigosa but no friend of public education. Last month Newsom responded to a question about charter schools:

“I’m not interested in the stale and raging debate about which side, which camp you’re on – are you with the charter people, are you anti-charter, are you with the teachers, are you anti-teacher. I’ve been hearing that damn debate for ten damn years. With all due respect, I got four kids. I have an eight-year-old, second grade. I have a five, three and a one year old. I’m not gonna wait around until they’ve all graduated to resolve whether Eli Broad was right or whether or not the CTA was wrong. I’m not interested in that debate. I’m interested in shaping a different conversation around a 21st century education system that brings people together, that could shape public opinion, not just here in the state, but could shape an agenda more broadly across the country, particularly in a time of Betsy DeVos and Donald Trump. We need that kind of leadership.”

During Newsom’s last run for governor in 2010, he said:

“To close this achievement and opportunity gap, underperforming public schools need more resources, and above all, real accountability for results. Accountability means ending social promotion, measuring student performance with standards-based assessments, and testing teachers for subject-matter competency.”

Newsom adopted the manifesto, “A New Agenda for the New Decade” and his goals for 2010 were:

Turn around every failing public school.
Make charter schools an option in every state and community.
Offer every parent a choice of public schools to which to send his or her child.
Make sure every classroom has well-qualified teachers who know the subjects they teach, and pay teachers more for performance.
Create a safe, clean, healthy, disciplined learning environment for every student.
Make pre-kindergarten education universally available.

Newsom has not repeated his call for charter schools, merit pay and standardized testing in 2017 but he has not retracted them either.

Newsom also embraces the tech industry. He joins their attempt to control curriculum by promoting computer science education as a core subject in k-12 schools and in universities. He also promotes their fraudulent STEM shortage propaganda.

Does Character Matter?

In 2007 both Gavin Newsom and Antonio Villaraigosa were involved with illicit affairs.

The San Francisco Chronicle reported,

“San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom’s re-election campaign manager resigned Wednesday after confronting the mayor about an affair Newsom had with his wife while she worked in the mayor’s office, City Hall sources said.”

Meanwhile in LA the Daily News reported:

“The revelation of a romantic relationship with television newswoman Mirthala Salinas came to light in a Daily News story today after the mayor had dodged months of questions about the breakup of his marriage.”

“For the sometimes rocky marriage of the mayor and his wife, who merged their surnames Villar and Raigosa when they married some 20 years ago, it was the beginning of the end.”

Shouldn’t bad personal conduct be a red flag when bestowing public trust?

Conclusion

If Delaine Eastin were financially more viable, then this recommendation would have been more difficult. I think I would have ended in the same place because of Chiang’s financial acumen but Eastin has always been a feisty leader with good instincts.

For the reasons stated above, I am supporting John Chiang to be California’s next governor.

Tags: California Governor, Chiang, education, Governor's Race, Newsom, Politics, Public Schools, Standards, testing, Villaraigosa

Comments 1 Comment
Categories Corporate Education Reform, education, Standards

Rethink and Rollback the Expansion of AP and IB

19 Oct

By T. Ultican 10/19/2017

What if the education reform ideology is wrong? What if the ideology of reform was based on an incorrect understanding of developmentally appropriate pedagogy? In a 2006 hearing before the senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions committee, Assistant Secretary of Education, Henry Johnson testified, “We believe that the Advanced Placement program offers a proven, scalable approach to raising expectations and increasing rigor in America’s high schools, particularly those with high concentrations of low-income students that typically do not offer such curricula.” What if that belief is ill-founded?

I taught AP physics and what a treat that was for me. I always had the highest performing students in the high school. This year both the salutatorian and the valedictorian were in my class. It was way more interesting than teaching a concepts oriented class in physics designed for the general student. Of course, I enjoyed teaching AP Physics to the school’s elite students, however, I perceived a dark side. The more I pondered it, the more I concluded that the AP and IB programs were developmentally inappropriate.

Physics Lab 2

Mar Vista High School – Picture by Thomas Ultican

IB stands for international baccalaureate. People who worked in embassies or other out of country assignments put their children in international schools. When they move from one country to the next, the school curriculum tended to be significantly different. IB developed to standardize curriculum from one country to the next. The IB program is unnecessary in America. Local communities who pay for schools deserve input into the curriculum and locally developed curriculum vetted by education leaders at local universities is more meaningful to the community.

AP stands for advance placement. It is a product of College Board, the testing giant that produces the SAT tests. College Board is organized as a “non-profit” but it has hundreds of employees making six and seven figure incomes. AP is being heavily promoted by technology companies, politicians and other corporations. There is a push to make AP the leader in curricular development and teacher training. AP employs the teach to the test strategy of pedagogy.

The National Math and Science Initiative (NMSI) is now putting pressure towards the expansion of AP courses in high schools across the nation. A teacher in the Sweetwater Union High School District wrote me this week saying teachers are under heavy pressure to participate in NMSI/AP sponsored training and AP class promotion.

Both AP and IB, allow students to earn college credits that are accepted by most universities. But is it developmentally appropriate? Are we harming students?

“Sicker Not Smarter”

Paraphrasing an observation about American public education students between world war II and the publishing of “A Nation at Risk” in 1983:

“They were not serious about learning. They went to dances, participated in sports and performed in plays. They hung out with friends and listened to rock music. They seldom studied and were consistently average performers when compared with foreign students. They graduated from high school and three months latter a miracle occurred; they became the top college students in the world.”

Throughout the history of American education there has been a constant healthy debate about pedagogy. It would be difficult to find any professional educator that does not believe education in public schools can be improved. However, education reform that is not developmentally appropriate is many times worse than the derided status quo.

The 1983 polemic “A Nation at Risk” marks a transition from education guided by professional educators to education guided by powerful business leaders, politicians and famous scientists. Convinced that education in America was failing, their solution was education standards, testing and competition. The famous education writer from Harvard University, Alfie Kohn characterized modern education reform in his 2001 book, The Schools Our Children Deserve: “The dominant philosophy of fixing schools consists of saying, in effect, that ‘what we’re doing is OK, we just need to do it harder, longer, stronger, louder, meaner, and we’ll have a better country.’” (page 16)

Two years ago, Vicki Abeles published her book Beyond Measure, Rescuing an Overscheduled, Overtested, Underestimated Generation. She opened chapter 1, “Sicker, Not Smarter” by quoting Stuart Slavin, a Saint Louis University School of Medicine professor and pediatrician. He shared,

“My personal feeling is that we are conducting an enormous and unprecedented social experiment on an entire generation of American children, and the evidence of a negative impact on adolescent mental health is overwhelming. … It is even more profoundly disturbing when one considers that there is absolutely no evidence that this educational approach actually leads to better educational outcomes.” (page 15)

Abeles quoted Donna Jackson Nakazawa, “There’s a perception that constant high demands will make kids stronger says Nakazawa, ‘“but biologically that is not the case; it’s actually breaking down the brain rather than creating resilience.”’ (page 31) Abeles continued:

“We think of the years from zero to three as the critical period for brain development, but Temple University neuroscientist Laurence Steinberg underscores that adolescence is another one. ‘[T]he brain’s malleability makes adolescence a period of tremendous opportunity – and great risk,’ writes Steinberg. ‘If we expose our young people to positive, supportive environments, they flourish. But if the environments are toxic, they will suffer in powerful and enduring ways.’” (page 36)

Writing for the New York Times Magazine this month Benoit Denizet-Lewis addressed the deteriorating mental health manifesting among America’s teens. She reported,

“… Suniya Luthar, a professor of psychology at Arizona State University who has studied distress and resilience in both well-off and disadvantaged teenagers, has found that privileged youths are among the most emotionally distressed young people in America. ‘These kids are incredibly anxious and perfectionistic,’ she says, but there’s ‘contempt and scorn for the idea that kids who have it all might be hurting.’

“For many of these young people, the biggest single stressor is that they “never get to the point where they can say, ‘I’ve done enough, and now I can stop,’ Luthar says. ‘There’s always one more activity, one more A.P. class, one more thing to do in order to get into a top college. Kids have a sense that they’re not measuring up. The pressure is relentless and getting worse.”’

AP Like Common Core is not Age Appropriate

I taught my first AP physics class in 2004, my first year at Mar Vista High School in Imperial Beach, California. All my AP students were taking multiple AP classes and four of them were taking five. I was shocked! They were high school kids not college kids but were allowed – no encouraged – to take a heavier academic load than most college students take.

Jay Mathews of the Washington Post creates an annual ranking of America’s high schools. He explained the ranking criteria with this year’s rankings:

“America’s Most Challenging High Schools ranks schools through an index formula that’s a simple ratio: the number of Advanced Placement, International Baccalaureate and Advanced International Certificate of Education tests given at a school each year, divided by the number of seniors who graduated that year. A ratio of 1.000 means the school had as many tests as graduates.”

Today, we actually have AP classes for ninth graders and non-profit organizations pressuring public and charter schools to accelerate moving college education into high school. Like the inappropriate efforts to make kindergarten the new first grade, and move advanced mathematics into 7^th grade, college classes in high school are not developmentally appropriate.

History Teaches that Breaking the AP Hold in America Will Not be Easy

By the 1980’s, an education philosophy popular among the titans of industry started dominating. This ideology posits that standards, high expectation, increased rigor and accountability are the keys to improving k-12 education. In 1994, the CEO of IBM, Louis Gerstner wrote in his book Reinventing Education:

“Schools must meet the test any high-performance organization must meet: results. And results are not achieved by bureaucratic regulation. They are achieved by meeting customer requirements by rewards for success and penalties for failure. Market discipline is the key, the ultimate form of accountability.”

Gerstner started and led a non-profit called Achieve Inc. Achieve wrote and holds the copyright for the Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS). These standards have wide financial and political support; however, they are so poorly written, that California re-wrote their version of the NGSS.

In 2010, Bill Gates, who also became an advocate of standards and testing, instigated the writing of the Common Core State Standards. Twenty-one people working in secret wrote the standards. Nineteen of the twenty-one writers came from the testing industry including fifteen from College Board and ACT.

I am not saying there is an evil conspiracy here. I believe that people like Peter O’Donnell the wealthy businessman and political activist from Dallas, Texas, who poured personal wealth into promoting AP are totally sincere in their desire to improve the plight of education in America. I have the same view of Bill Gates and Louis Gerstner. The problem is they have great financial and political power, unfortunately, they do not know what they don’t know about human development and good pedagogy.

Today, colleges throughout the nation are giving college credit to incoming students for successfully completing AP courses. In addition, they are giving extra weight towards admissions to applicants with multiple AP courses on their transcripts. This system is well established and ubiquitous. Chinese history teaches how difficult it is to mitigate this kind of culture.

Two years in a row, representatives from the Chinese ministry of education came to observe classes at Mar Vista High School. They even contracted with one of our math teachers, Mark James, to go to China and teach a model class. In China, there is general agreement that their high-pressure test centric education needs reforming. It is harming the youth.

In Young Zhao’s book Who’s Afraid of the Big Bad Dragon there is a chapter titled “The Witch That Cannot Be Killed.” In it he wrote:

‘“Thus, more than a decade’s history of prohibition orders from educational departments has been a history of ineffective orders,’ notes a report in China Weekly after reviewing numerous attempts to curtail the power of testing in Chinese Education. How is it possible that in such a tightly controlled, authoritarian society, the omnipotent government has been unable to kill the witch of testing?” (page 151)

Professor Zhao’s answer to his own question is a warning for us. If we ever recognize the wrong educational path we have taken, changing course will be difficult. Zhao explained:

“In the effort to lessen academic burden and reduce testing, Chinese parents, students, teachers, and schools are all playing the prisoner’s dilemma game. Knowing or assuming that others will continue to do more homework, seek private tutoring, and prepare for tests, very few parents, children, and schools would choose to voluntarily reduce the work load for fear of losing the game. Most schools, knowing that others will continue to use exams to select better students and gain an advantage, will choose to continue to use exams to admit students because the school’s reputation is on the line and will be judged by how well its students score in the future. Essentially the dilemma dictates that everyone must continue to behave in the same way. No one can afford to cut back first, for fear that the others won’t follow suit. Consequently, although new policies might bring a better education for all, no player in the education game is willing to take the risky first step.” (page 155/6)

There are many factors that would improve education and they are well know; smaller class sizes, integrated schools, well maintained modern facilities and teachers certificated in the subjects they teach are four such positive reforms. Surprisingly, increasing rigor and driving expectations down to younger students are counter-productive.

Kindergarteners should receive lessons such as don’t eat the clay and it’s not nice to pull hair. Academics are developmentally inappropriate and likely unhealthy for them. Teaching Newton’s laws of motion and principles of algebra in fourth grade will surely cause more harm than good. The nine-year-old brain is not ready for symbolic reasoning. And, teenagers are dealing with natural biological stress; they need a safe low stress environment for healthy development. Rigor and high stakes testing is the wrong recipe.

It is time to rethink AP and roll it back.

Tags: AP, Democratic Party, education, Education Reform, Gates, IB, Louis Gerstner, pedagogy, philanthropy, Public education, reform, Standardized Testing, Standards Based Education, Teachers, testing

Comments 13 Comments
Categories Corporate Education Reform, education, School Experiences, Standards

NMSI Pushes Bad Education Policies Based on Junk Science

12 Oct

By T. Ultican 10/12/2017

Last Week, I got this message from a colleague in the Sweetwater Union High School District: “you doing ok, brother Ultican? I have a question for you. In your tireless research and writing on education schemes and scams, what have you learned about NMSI? They’re in our district now and I’ve got a bad feeling about the direction it’s taking.” In the words of Dr. Johnny Fever, “Sometimes paranoia is just good thinking.”

The National Math and Science Initiative (NMSI) was founded by a group of Dallas area lawyers and businessmen. Tom Luce is identified as the founder and Rex Tillerson, the CEO of ExxonMobil and present US Secretary of State, provided the financing.

An ExxonMobil web-page announced:

“ExxonMobil became a founding sponsor of the National Math and Science Initiative (NMSI) in 2007 with a $125 million commitment to the non-profit organization, which provides scalable and rigorous program solutions that empower school communities to prepare all students to succeed in college and the workforce.”

Some Background on the Founder

NMSI founder Tom Luce’s bio at the George W. Bush Presidential Center states:

Tom Luce

From the George W. Bush Presidential Center

“Tom Luce, Chief Executive Officer, was a founding partner of Hughes & Luce, LLP, a prominent Texas law firm. … He served as U.S. Assistant Secretary of Education for Planning, Evaluation and Policy Development during the George W. Bush administration ….”

“From 2007 to 2011, he was founding CEO of the National Math and Science Initiative, Inc. Additionally, Tom served on Dell, Inc.’s Board of Directors from 1991 until 2012. … He presently serves as the Chairman of the Board for the National Math and Science Initiative.”

Tom Luce is a lawyer not an educator but his fingerprints are all over some of the worst education policies in the history of our country. His bio at the George W. Bush Whitehouse archives says, “… Luce is perhaps best known for his role in 1984 as the chief of staff of the Texas Select Committee of Public Education, which produced one of the first major reform efforts among public schools.” The chairman of that committee was Ross Perot.

A former Texas Lieutenant Governor, Bill Hobby, wrote in 2010 about that 1984 education reform law:

“Remarkably, most of the reforms initiated in House Bill 72 persist to this day. The teacher test was never repeated, but the statewide student tests are a hallmark of Texas education. They also served as the model for President George W. Bush’s ‘No Child Left Behind’ federal legislation.”

Mark Twain said, “To a man with a hammer, everything looks like a nail.” For Ross Perot, the founder of Electronic Data Systems the problems in education looked like data problems. He and his Chief of Staff, Tom Luce, decided standardized testing and data analysis were the prescription for failing public schools. Unfortunately, standardized testing is totally useless for analyzing learning and public schools were not actually failing.

Tom Luce was also directly involved in implementing NCLB (a spectacular education reform failure) while serving at the US Department of Education.

A Fraudulent Paper from the National Academies Motivated the Formation of NMSI

“RISING ABOVE THE GATHERING STORM” was published by the National Academies in 2005. The title of this paper echoes Winston Churchill’s The Gathering Storm which chronicled the lead up to World War II. The name like its predecessor “A Nation at Risk” indicates that the United States is in imminent danger of losing its superior economic and scientific lead in the world and education is the fundamental problem. Like “A Nation at Risk,” “Rising Above the Gathering Storm” is also a polemic that cannot stand up to scrutiny.

The late Gerald W. Bracey from Stanford University illuminated several false claims that were foundational to the papers arguments. He recited the Academies declaration, ‘”Last year more than 600,000 engineers graduated from institutions of higher education in China, … In India the figure was 350,000. In America, it was about 70,000.'”

Bracey continued,

“Naturally, given this lofty pedigree, the statistics then materialized in the New York Times, Boston Globe, Chicago Tribune and on many Web sites. While Times columnist Thomas L. Friedman did not use these specific numbers in his 2005 bestseller, ‘The World Is Flat,’ he did write that Asian universities currently produce eight times as many bachelor’s degrees in engineering as U.S. universities do.”

Bracey discussed the growing doubt about these numbers and cited credible peer reviewed research:

“After an exhaustive study, researchers at Duke University also pummeled the numbers. In a December 2005 analysis, ‘Framing the Engineering Outsourcing Debate,’ they reported that the United States annually produces 137,437 engineers with at least a bachelor’s degree while India produces 112,000 and China 351,537. That’s more U.S. degrees per million residents than in either other nation.”

This is an example of the kind of subterfuge that is being used to promote the unsupportable claim that education in America is not producing enough science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) workers.

The impetus and money for writing “RISING ABOVE THE GATHERING STORM” came from the United States Senate:

“Senator Alexander indicated that the Energy Subcommittee of the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee, which he chairs, had been given the authority by the full committee’s chair, Senator Pete Domenici, to hold a series of hearings to identify specific steps that the federal government should take to ensure the preeminence of America’s science and technology enterprise. Senator Alexander asked the National Academies to provide assistance in this effort by selecting a committee of experts from the scientific and technical community to assess the current situation and, where appropriate, make recommendations.”

By 2006 that series of hearings seemingly led to President Bush proposing legislation to solve the “crisis” in STEM education. Senate Bill 2198, “Protecting America’s Competitive Edge” came before the senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions committee on March 6, 2006. Although, the PACE bill never became law, the record of this senate hearing chaired by Lamar Alexander is instructive. It is also where the birth of NMSI came to light.

Arden L. Bement, Jr., Director, National Science Foundation, (one of the academies) said during his testimony:

“As you are well aware, the National Science Foundation has been selected to play a major role in the President’s American Competitiveness Initiative. One of the cornerstones of our involvement is preparing the Nation’s scientific, technological, engineering, and mathematics workforce for the 21st century while improving the quality of math and science education in America’s schools.”

“When three quarters of American colleges find it necessary to offer courses in remedial mathematics and 22 percent of entering freshman take these courses, it is clear that our high schools are not doing the job they should be doing.”

Here a spokesman for the National Academies is revealing that they have a big government contract to fix education. They are not likely to say, “public schools don’t need fixing” and the comment about remedial courses for freshman is meritless. There has always been a substantial number of students needing remedial courses – see the 1892 committee of 10 report.

James B. Hunt, the former Governor of North Carolina testified,

“A recent report on 30 countries and the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development showed that of those 30 countries–you have probably heard these figures–the United States is 15th in reading, 18th in science, 24th in math. Of the G-8 countries, the eight countries, we are 7th in 10th grade mathematics.

“Now, those are the facts, folks.”

Governor, that was lame. Researchers around the world have been questioning the methodology employed by PISA and especially the value of their international rankings. For a good discussion of the useless nature of PISA comparisons see Yong Zhao’s Who’s Afraid of the Big Bad Dragon? starting on page 167. Or take a peek at Noel Wilson’s paper “Education Standards and the Problem of Error” for a discussion of the absolute folly of standardized testing.

James B. Hunt Jr. also testified. He said, “It is a well-documented fact that the single most important element in a student’s academic success is that student’s teacher.”

That is just ignorance. Parents and their economic conditions are far more important.

Senator Edward Kennedy remarked,

“By 2009, 6 million jobs will go unfilled because our youth will not be qualified to hold them. To keep America competitive, we need more students with degrees in math, science, and critical-need foreign languages.”

That is at a minimum uninformed. Kennedy repeats the lack of STEM educated graduates misinformation. He is selling the big lie.

Lamar Alexander announced one of the day’s star witnesses,

“Peter O’Donnell is here, who is a member of the National Academy’s Committee that produced ‘The Gathering Storm,’ and his work in Dallas is one reason for the inclusion in ‘The Gathering Storm’ report of the advanced placement recommendations.”

Peter O’Donnell is a wealthy businessman from Dallas, Texas and a huge contributor to the University of Texas at Austin. He is described by the American Statesman:

“O’Donnell is something of a godfather in the state Republican Party, having chaired it for several years in the 1960s. He was a top adviser to Bill Clements during his successful 1978 campaign to become the state’s first GOP governor in more than 100 years, and he has contributed to many Republican candidates in Texas and across the nation.”

Like most modern edu-philanthropists, he has no education experience or training. He testified about his foundation’s Advanced Placement Initiative which became NMSI:

“The Advanced Placement Incentive Program succeeds because of three fundamental concepts: the high standards of Advanced Placement, which is built on a strong curriculum, rigorous national exams, and measurable results; emphasis on excellent teacher training; and financial incentives for teachers and students. Incentives are key to the success of our program. They provide extra pay for extra work and are paid by private donors.”

He went on to describe the principles which were adopted by NMSI:

“These recommendations will provide public schools in the U.S. with outstanding math and science teachers on a scale equal to the size of the problem. The recommendations are based on six concepts:

High standards;
Measurable results;
Integrated curriculum for math and science for grades 6-12;
Quality teacher training that is based on content;
Incentives to teachers and students based on academic results;
Implementation vehicle in each State to manage the programs to ensure quality control and accountability.

There is general agreement that these six concepts will strengthen education, especially in math and science.”

In other words, NMSI calls for teacher merit pay, a hundred-year-old idea with a hundred years of failure to back it up. It employs top down control by using College Board to design curriculum and train educators. It calls for bribing students to study hard which most education theorists would agree is a way to undermine a student’s need to know and harms self-motivation.

NMSI has been moving into San Diego for a while. It is not just in the Sweetwater School District, in 2015 Serra High School of the San Diego Unified School District held an NMSI AP Incentive Awards Night. The announcement says, “Over $32,000 will be given out to 178 current students and graduates. Three students will be given $500 checks!”

Wealthy Texas conservatives say we should turn away from education professionals at Stanford or those at the California State University and the University of California systems. We should embrace the teach to the test education philosophy of College Board and bribe students to get them engaged. We should do this even though there is no independent evidence supporting NMSI’s claims of success.

I Will Let the Curmudgucator Conclude my Article

Three years ago, Peter Greene wrote about NMSI:

“While there may be similar-ish programs in districts across the country, the big dog in the AP bribery biz is the National Math and Science Initiative. NMSI is an organization that was launched ‘to address one of this nation’s greatest economic and intellectual threats – the declining number of students who are prepared to take rigorous college courses in math and science and are equipped for careers in those fields.’ You may recognize that as a classic reformster talking point– low test scores are a threat to our national security– and in fact, the big launching funders of NMSI include Exxon, the Michael and Susan Dell foundation, and the Gates Foundation. Partners also include the US Department of Education and the College Board, because why not fund an advocacy group that is telling everyone that your product is really important. This isn’t philanthropy– it’s marketing.”

Twitter: @tultican

Tags: education, NCLB, NMSI, pedagogy, philanthropy, Public education, Public Schools, reform, Standardized Testing, Standards, Teachers, Teaching, testing

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Categories Corporate Education Reform, education, Law, Standards

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