I Quit Teach for America

In 2012, Teach for America placed approximately 30 teachers in eastern Kentucky schools.

This from Olivia Blanchard in The Atlantic:

I am sitting in a comfortable gold folding chair inside one of the many ballrooms at the Georgia International Convention Center. The atmosphere is festive, with a three-course dinner being served and children playing a big-band number. The kids are students at a KIPP academy in Atlanta, and they are serenading future teachers on the first night of a four-day-long series of workshops that will introduce us to the complicated language, rituals, and doctrines we will need to adopt as Teach for America "Corps Members."

The phrase closing the achievement gap is the cornerstone of TFA's general philosophy, public-relations messaging, and training sessions. As a member of the 2011 corps, I was told immediately and often that 1) the achievement gap is a pervasive example of inequality in America, and 2) it is our personal responsibility to close the achievement gap within our classrooms, which are microcosms of America's educational inequality.

These are laudable goals. According to the National Center for Education Statistics, white fourth-graders performed better than their black peers on 2007 standardized mathematics exams in all 46 states where results were available. In 2004, there was a 23-point gap in mathematics scale scores between white and black 9-year-olds, with the gap growing to 26 points for 13-year-olds.

But between these two messages lies the unspoken logic that current, non-TFA teachers and schools are failing at the task of closing the achievement gap, through some combination of apathy or incompetence. Although TFA seminars and presentations never explicitly accuse educators of either, the implication is strong within the program's very structure: recruit high-achieving college students, train them over the summer, and send them into America's lowest-performing schools to make things right. The subtext is clear: Only you can fix what others have screwed up. It was an implication I noticed when an e-mail I received during Institute, the five-week training program, referring to “a system of students who have simply not been taught.” The e-mail explained, “That’s really what the achievement gap is—for all of the external factors that may or may not add challenges to our students’ lives—mostly it is that they really and truly have not been taught and are therefore years behind where they need to be.”

I later asked a TFA spokesperson if this e-mail reflects the organization’s official views on traditionally trained teachers. He denied that TFA believes “the shortcomings of public education” to be “the fault of teachers. If anything,” he added, “teachers are victims of more-structural problems: inequitable funding; inadequate systems of training and supporting teachers; the absence of strong school and district leadership.” Nonetheless, at the time, the dramatic indictment of America’s non-TFA teachers would stay with me as I headed into the scandal-ridden Atlanta Public Schools system.

In the weeks between accepting the offer to join TFA and the start of our training, I was told by e-mail that “as a 2011 corps member and leader, you have a deep personal and collective responsibility to ground everything you do in your belief that the educational inequality that persists along socioeconomic and racial lines is both our nation’s most fundamental injustice and a solvable problem. This mindset,” I was reminded, “is at the core of our Teach For America—Metro Atlanta Community.”

At the time, I appreciated TFA’s apparent confidence in me as a leader. I assumed that I would learn the concrete steps I needed to achieve this transformation during the training program. Instead I was immersed in a sea of jargon, buzzwords, and touchy-feely exercises. One memorable session began with directions for us to mentally “become” two of our students. After an elaborate, 32-slide reflection guide, we were asked to close the session with a “Vision Collage,” for which we were handed pre-scripted reflections. “One person will volunteer to read his/her line first. After one person reads aloud, another should jump in, so that one response immediately follows another—without any pauses.” At this stage in training, most of us were still struggling to grasp the basics of lesson planning. (According to TFA this exercise is not a part of the formal training program.)

Typical instructional training included only the most basic framework; one guide to introducing new material told us to “emphasize key points, command student attention, actively involve students, and check for understanding.” We were told that “uncommon techniques” included “setting high academic expectations, structuring and delivering your lessons, engaging students in your lessons, communicating high behavioral expectations, and building character and trust.” Specific tips included “you provide the answer; the student repeats the answer”; “ask students to make an exact replica in their notes of what you write on the board”; and “respond quickly to misunderstandings.” After observing and teaching alongside non-TFA teachers at my placement school, I can confidently say that these approaches are not “uncommon.”

I am shifting my weight uncomfortably in a plastic classroom chair on an Atlanta summer afternoon. Our adviser interrupts lunch by asking us to pause to spend a few minutes reflecting on what brought us to TFA in the first place. After the requisite reflection time, and after turning off the room’s lights, Alicia begins to share a story about growing up with a single mother, culminating in an emotional appeal to do whatever we can to help "our kids" in the future. Although I have always found Alicia to be rather stoic, she suddenly begins sobbing when relaying this story. After regaining composure, she makes it clear that we are meant to follow suit. One by one, until the 12th person has spoken, we deliver either tearful accounts of personal hardship or awkward, halting stories recounted by people uncomfortable with the level of intimacy. While talking to other TFA teachers from different schools over dinner, I learn that other groups had nearly identical sessions.

Once the school year began, I found myself teaching in a 500-student K–5 school with two other corps members and three TFA alumni. The school’s other 30 teachers had gone through some version of a traditional teaching program, involving years of studying educational theory and practice, as well as extensive student teaching. As I got to know my new colleagues and some level of trust was established, it didn't take long to discover that TFA's five-week training model was a source of resentment for these teachers. Not only were we youngsters going into "rough" schools with the stated goal of changing what they had not been able to, but we had done this with only half a summer's worth of preparation. I began to understand why my TFA status instantly communicated to other teachers that I found myself superior.

Although I felt bad that TFA had created a system that caused a rift between corps members and traditional teachers, I didn’t have much time to worry about that. The truth was, the five-week training program had not prepared me adequately.

During my training, I taught a group of nine well-behaved third-graders who had failed the state reading test and hoped to make it to fourth grade. Working with three other corps members, which created a generous teacher-student ratio, I had ample time for one-on-one instruction.

That classroom training was completely unlike the situation I now faced in Atlanta: teaching math and science to two 20-person groups of rotating, difficult fifth-graders—fifth-graders so difficult that multiple substitute teachers would vow never to teach fifth grade at our school again.

I had few insights or resources to draw on when preteen boys decided recess would be the perfect opportunity to beat each other bloody, or when parents all but accused me of being racist during meetings. Or when a student told me that his habit of doing nothing during class stemmed from his (admittedly sound) logic that "I did the same thing last year and I passed." The Institute’s training curriculum was far too broad to help me navigate these situations. Because many corps members do not receive their specific teaching assignments until after training has ended, the same training is given to future kindergarten teachers in Atlanta, charter-school teachers in New Orleans, and high-school physics teachers in Memphis.

I was not alone in my trouble with student behavior. Gary Rubinstein, a 1991 TFA alum and an outspoken critic of the organization, believes the training sets teachers up for failure: TFA teachers “don’t know how to deal with discipline problems, because they’ve never dealt with a class with more than 10 kids—there’s no way to deal with so many potential problems when they’ve never been practiced.”

Jessica Smith, a corps member I recently called up, agrees. “I’ve struggled with behavior management,” she admits. (As with all the names of teachers I spoke to for this article, “Jessica” is a pseudonym.) Though training includes some instruction in student discipline, “I didn’t really have the training to know how to give consequences consistently,” Jessica said.

I asked if she reached out for support. “I think I talked to every person I knew to talk to, even our region’s executive director,” Jessica recalled. Although TFA ultimately did send in a behavior-management expert, “The person who finally came in to help me came at the end of February for a 20-minute session.” Is this a representative experience? It’s hard to say. “We provide training in behavior-management techniques,” a TFA spokesperson said when asked about Jessica, “but corps members are expected to adapt their training to their unique school culture. We also provide continuing support for corps members who have trouble fitting in.”

Jessica has decided not to return to TFA for a second year. She said she was so unsupported that she felt justified reneging on her two-year commitment. “Yes a commitment matters,” she wrote, “but staying isn’t necessarily helpful to your kids or anybody.” Jessica said that after she notified local TFA leadership of her decision, the reaction was severe. “They chewed out my character and made personal allegations,” she said. She was told, she recalls, that she would “personally have to deal with remorse and regret.”

On its website, TFA makes a bold claim that “By the end of Institute, corps members have developed a foundation of knowledge, skills, and mindsets needed to be effective beginning teachers.” Training is supposed to include teaching “for an average of two hours each day … observed by experienced teachers,” “extensive lesson planning instruction,” and constant opportunities for feedback. Personally, I taught two 90-minute classes per week, a far cry from the 10 hours per week described in the publicity materials—and “experienced teachers” usually meant new TFA alumni with two years of classroom experience.

“It is certainly possible that [you] got less classroom time than promised,” the TFA spokesperson told me. “But we work to avoid that situation. During summer Institute, we work with 120 different schools, and there is variation in the schedule, which we don’t always control.” The spokesperson added that “as part of Institute, our CMs have access to two different coaches: a coach/adviser that we hire and train as well as a veteran teacher from the local school or district with whom we are partnering.” Although my group was assigned a veteran teacher during Institute, she did not have a substantive role in our training, and halfway through the summer she was implicated in the Atlanta Public Schools cheating scandal.

Compared with the experiences of other Teach for America teachers, though, my placement and training were actually fairly lucky. I know more than one Religious Studies major who arrived in Atlanta ready to teach elementary school, only to be told that she was being reassigned to teach high-school mathematics. Of course, becoming "highly qualified" to teach upper-level math meant passing the state teaching test in that subject, and some recruits found out midway through the summer that they had failed. After being recruited by TFA, successfully completing training, and hearing time and again that we would be supported throughout the hiring process, we received the following e-mail, a terse reminder of how alone we actually were:

If you did not pass your exam, you will have to Emergency Release from the corps—your position will be reserved for the [next] Academic Year and you will not be required to attend Institute. You will be able to apply for open positions within Teach For America, receive guidance on how to apply to other opportunities within the Atlanta area, and be able to use the Teach For America Corps Member Computer Lab and Resource Room as needed during your transition.

At a party last year, I met one former TFA recruit who had failed the state’s notoriously difficult special-education exam. After I complimented her espadrilles, she replied that she'd gotten them at a discount through her retail job. Shocked that she hadn’t been placed elsewhere, I thought back to the e-mail we had received. Having a reserved spot in next year’s corps isn’t much help to 22-year-olds who have uprooted their lives for a teaching position they believe to be all but guaranteed.

I am standing, arms crossed, back hunched, whispering with Ms. Jones, as we sort supplies our students will need for the Criterion Referenced Competency Test. In the last few free minutes before testing begins, Ms. Jones is sharing her candid, and often hilarious, views on first-year teaching. “It’s wrong!” she whispers passionately, her eyebrows shoot up far into her forehead. Ms. Jones is known as a no-nonsense veteran teacher, and I had found her quite intimidating before I realized she is incredibly kind. “It’s wrong to put teachers in the classroom with no experience, Ms. Blanchard. I went through a teaching program, and I taught in four different classrooms before I ever had these kids on my own.” Looking at Ms. Jones’ perfectly behaved, high-achieving third-graders and comparing them with my own unruly students, I can see her point. The intercom buzzes to announce a five-minute warning before testing will begin, and that reminds Ms. Jones of the labyrinthine set of test procedures to come. “Make sure they have their pencils, Ms. Blanchard, we can’t have any testing irregularities. You know we have to cover ourselves. Everyone’s watching this building, and I don’t know about you, but Ms. Jones is not fixing to be on Channel 2 tonight.”

By the end of the school year, I felt like I would scream if I ever heard the phrase cover yourself again. Within Atlanta Public Schools, this phrase embodies a general spirit of fear and intimidation, not to mention sad tolerance for the fact that teachers are seen as little more than passive cogs in the wheel of the city's education machine.

Valuable minutes of classroom instruction time were lost to filling out accident reports when kids occasionally fell out of their chairs or poked each other with pencils. If two students began arguing and one child angrily vowed to “get” the other, I was always advised by fellow teachers to write up the incident on Atlanta Public Schools letterhead immediately, thereby “covering” the district if the threat materialized and parents were feeling litigious. What our students needed the most in these situations, it seemed, were conflict-management skills and character education, but unfortunately these interventions do not sufficiently “cover” the adult interests of the district. When I was once asked to fill in for an unexpectedly absent colleague, one of her second-graders chose to confide in me about his abysmal home life. He explained, with wide and trusting eyes, that his mother’s boyfriend enjoyed getting drunk, abusing the family, and sometimes shooting at the kids with a BB gun for fun. I immediately reported the incident to an administrator, who reacted with what appeared to be annoyance that one more paper had to be filed at 3:00 p.m. on a Friday. This was an administrator who really does care about children and wants to improve their lives—but the all-important duty of covering the legal interests of the district can make crucial social work feel like just another rubber stamp.

I’d been at TFA training, about to head into this system, when the official report on the cheating scandal in the Atlanta Public Schools was released. My immediate reaction was shock that so many teachers could be complicit in something so outrageously dishonest. Midway through the school year, though, I came to understand exactly how it had happened. APS has some of the best teachers in the country, but surviving in the district means covering yourself, and during standardized testing this means ensuring objective success. In a top-down, ruthless bureaucracy like APS, teachers are front-line foot soldiers, not educators encouraged to pursue their calling.

Atlanta Public Schools teachers spend countless hours teaching to exhaustion, spending their own money on classroom supplies, and buying basic necessities for their poorest students, only to be reminded constantly that their job performance will be judged according to test answers bubbled in by wobbly little fingers barely able to hold a pencil upright. Teaching children is inherently much more intimate, messy, and personal than any office job could ever be. It's about guiding, pushing, and spending most of your waking hours with other people's children, whether they need a Band-Aid, a bear hug, or a fresh set of markers that their parents can't afford. Many teachers in schools like mine would agree that often the most-struggling students improve in ways that will not be reflected on the state test. They might learn to say please and thank you, or they might master a set of academic skills that still will not be enough to pass on-level, or they might gain a healthy dose of self-respect. After a year in this environment, I realized I could understand how, when the annual testing frenzy rolled around, a lot of teachers chose to put their heads down, tune out, and cover themselves.

Teach for America cited the Atlanta scandal as a sad example of what is wrong with education's status quo, one of the many reasons America's schools need even more reform and innovation. But what occurred to me, as I worked my way, ill-prepared, through Atlanta Public Schools, was that the two systems are not as far apart as either might like to suggest. TFA is at least as enamored of numerical "data points" of success as APS is. TFA strongly encourages its teachers to base their classes' "big goals" around standardized-test scores. Past and present corps members are asked to stand to thunderous applause if their students have achieved some objectively impressive measure of achievement, and everyone knows that the best way to work for and rise through TFA ranks is to have a great elevator pitch about how your students' scores improved by X percent.

Nor is the organization a stranger to controversies involving performance measurement. On its website, TFA claims that “Teach For America corps members help their students achieve academic gains equal to or larger than teachers from other preparation programs, according to the most recent and rigorous studies on teacher effectiveness.” But TFA’s ability to rate the performance of its own teachers has been heavily criticized; a Reuters article in 2012 pointed out that TFA’s 2010 federal grant of $50 million was based on the organization’s internal data “showing that 41 percent of its first-year teachers and 53 percent of its second-year teachers advanced their students by an impressive 1.5 to 2 years in a single school year.” When asked about the origin of these statistics, TFA’s former research director, Heather Harding, admitted that many teachers provide performance statistics based on self-designed assessments. Reuters quoted Harding saying, “I don’t think it stands up to external research scrutiny.”

The TFA spokesperson maintains that the comment “was taken out of context,” and that Simon was “merely pointing out that internal research referenced in a grant application does not meet the same level of rigor as external research, although both show the positive impact our corps members are having on students.”

Whether or not the numerical data is broadly accurate, I can attest to the pressure within TFA to produce proof of student gains without much oversight or guidance.

By the end of my time at TFA and Atlanta Public Schools, I came to feel that both organizations had a disconnect between their public ideals and their actual effectiveness. APS invests in beautiful new buildings and glossy public-relations messaging, only to pressure its teachers into pedagogical conformity that often prevents them from reaching the district’s most remedial students. Likewise, TFA promotes a public image of eager high achievers dedicated to one mission, reaching “Big Goals” that pull students out of the achievement gap, where non-TFA teachers have let them fall. But in my experience, many if not most corps members are confused about their purpose, uncertain of their skills, and struggling to learn the basics.

TFA often cites research showing that its teachers perform well in relation to other teachers; a spokesperson I talked to said that, “In terms of the external research, the most-rigorous nationwide studies on TFA to date, by Mathematica and CALDER, found TFA teachers to be at least as effective as other teachers at the schools where they teach. A follow-up analysis of the Mathematica data showed that Teach for America teachers produce significant student achievement gains in math, regardless of how well students were performing beforehand.” Referencing statewide studies of teacher effectiveness, TFA’s website notes that studies in Louisiana, North Carolina, and Tennessee all “found that corps members often help their students achieve academic gains at rates equal to or larger than those for students of more veteran teachers.” A just-released U.S. Department of Education study of secondary math teachers showed Teach for America teachers to be more effective than other teachers at their schools. According to the study, students with TFA teachers scored higher on end-of-year exams than their peers in non-TFA classrooms—the difference is equivalent to 2.6 extra months of classroom time.

I have no reason to doubt studies showing that TFA teachers are more effective—after all, they are recruited from a pool of the country’s hardest-working college students, and good teaching is nothing if not hard work. But Teach for America aspires to close the achievement gap by training teachers that are significantly better than educators already in the system. Can simply being “at least as effective as other teachers” really be cited as success?

I am sitting in a black, leather office chair in my new Washington, D.C., office. I have just been hired at a private company whose vision statement says nothing about closing the achievement gap, and the time has come to send TFA an e-mail announcing that I am leaving the program. I have only completed one year of my two-year commitment, knowing full well that this kind of mission-shirking is seen as a very serious, selfish betrayal within TFA. However, the reality is that my employer has been Atlanta Public Schools, my contract with the district was only for one year, and most of my teaching experiences have been defined by the messy struggles of Atlanta Public Schools, not the comfortable mantras of TFA. I struggle to summon the guilt I know I am supposed to be feeling. My large-screen computer monitor rests sturdily in front of me, and the cursor on an empty Word document blinks. What can I say to them?, I wonder. I steel myself against the possibility of criticism, against accusations of apathy, inability, or lack of leadership.

When I click Gmail’s Send button, though, I am flooded with relief rather than dread. Because the truth is, by finally showing I don’t believe that American education can be saved by youthful enthusiasm, I feel more like a leader than I ever did inside the corps.

The Architect of School Reform Who Turned Against It

It was the early 1990s when I first began to engage in serious scholarship. Chapter Two of my doctoral research led me inevitably to Lawrence Cremin and his two best proteges - Ellen Condiliffe Lagemann and Diane Ravitch.

But in her 2000 volume Left Back, Ravitch threw a knuckle ball, down and away. Left Back rebuked the lingering progressive efforts of the 60s and 70s and outlined a new vision of questionable efforts that would supposedly refocus American schools on student achievement. In Left Back she warned that "anything in education that is labeled a 'movement' should be avoided like the plague." Then she helped launch the corporate education reform movement.

Rather than chase the pitch, I watched it go by and spent the next decade wondering where in the heck Ravitch had gotten off to. At some point, I learned that she was at the decidedly conservative and politically active Hoover Institute and might have written her off completely except that her writings remained some of the best researched and documented that I encountered.

Following her epic reversal of opinion on corporate education reform accompanied by her all out assault on the purveyors of "privatization" I should embrace the prodigal Ravitch, who now remembers that teachers are in the people business. Yet, I find that I still harbor resentments.When I think about the deamonization of teachers, which is still being done under the guise of school reform, along with the underfunding of the entire enterprise, I find it a more natural response to blame - when perhaps I should embrace. I'll have to take that up with my therapist.

In the meantime, Reign of Error is proving to be the "must-read" whistleblower's tale of the year, the kind that stays on your shelf for reference.

Diane Ravitch's second revolution

This from Sara Mosle in The Atlantic:

The survival of the school-reform movement, as it’s known to champions and detractors alike, is no longer assured. Even a couple years ago, few would have predicted this turn of events for a crusade that began with the publication of A Nation at Risk in 1983, gathered momentum as charter schools and Teach for America took off in the 1990s, and surged into the spotlight with No Child Left Behind in 2001. As a schoolteacher, I know I didn’t anticipate this altered landscape. If one person can be credited—or blamed—for the reform movement’s sudden vulnerability, it’s a fiercely articulate historian, now in her 70s, named Diane Ravitch.

That Ravitch helped conceive the movement she now condemns makes her current role even more unexpected. Almost four decades ago, Ravitch emerged as a preeminent chronicler of, as she put it, “the rise and fall of grand ideas” in American education. The author of 11 books, including Reign of Error (out this month), she has traced the past century’s successive battles over how best to deliver a quality education—and to whom.

In 1991, she shifted from observer to policy adviser, becoming an assistant secretary of education under George H. W. Bush. An outspoken critic of progressive pedagogical theories, she urged rigorous national standards and gravitated toward conservatives promoting parental choice, vouchers, and charter schools. Market-based alternatives, she decided, were the answer for impoverished parents desperate to see their children escape broken inner-city schools.

A decade later, No Child Left Behind’s bipartisan push for federally mandated assessments brought Ravitch’s favored prescriptions into the mainstream. A growing cadre of social entrepreneurs—including Teach for America’s founder, Wendy Kopp, and many former TFAers, among them the creators of the KIPP charter schools—focused more intently on improving teacher quality. This was the key, they argued, to boosting achievement among disadvantaged students. They attracted generous backers, not least the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.

Executives from Silicon Valley and Wall Street hedge funds joined the cause, financing new organizations, such as Democrats for Education Reform, to push for more innovation. Soon the movement commanded allegiance from Democrats and Republicans in Congress, secretaries of education from both parties, and several big-city mayors and school superintendents. Ravitch, for her part, briefly advised George W. Bush’s first presidential campaign. The only figures conspicuously absent from this burgeoning coalition seemed to be traditional teachers and their unions, whom many reformers judged a primary obstacle to necessary change.

President Obama embraced his predecessor’s policies with, if anything, greater gusto. His Race to the Top initiative, employing federal stimulus money, encouraged states to open more charter schools, use student test scores to assess teacher quality, and dismantle tenure. The revolution appeared nearly complete. Except that by 2010, Diane Ravitch had broken ranks.

That year, she published a carefully researched book in which she reflected on the movement she’d helped launch but could no longer support. Surveying the data, she concluded that the reform effort was just another in the parade of high hopes that policy makers and practitioners had promoted through the decades. Their strategies couldn’t transform schools into engines of social mobility, because they did little to address the underlying causes of the achievement gap between white and minority students: entrenched segregation and poverty in America’s urban core. The book was called The Death and Life of the Great American School System, but it might as well have been called The Corrections.

The evidence Ravitch marshaled was damning. Some charters were superb, but most were not outperforming traditional public schools. Recalcitrant teachers unions weren’t a chief cause of failing schools after all; plenty of charters, freed from union strictures, were foundering. Nor had No Child Left Behind generated a substantial rise in student achievement. Now that standardized-test scores determined schools’ fates and funding, the curriculum in many districts emphasized rote prep. Benchmarks got revised downward. Even a few of Ravitch’s conservative former colleagues conceded that she was essentially right on the facts.

A former compatriot, Ravitch was perfectly poised to lead the mid-course correction the reform movement acutely needed. Who better to ask the tough questions and propose the necessary adjustments before another wild pendulum swing exhausted the public’s patience for innovation, as Ravitch the historian had warned happens again and again? She challenged reformers’ alarmist narrative about an entire public-school system in sharp decline, noting that affluent American students were doing just fine. But the most-impoverished students were more socially isolated than ever.

Ravitch and her book instead further polarized an already strident debate. Movement crusaders denounced her as a doomsayer with no constructive answers. Although the reformist camp was more diverse than Ravitch acknowledged, its more hard-line proponents circled the wagons. They declined to scrutinize even the obvious excesses of their movement: the zealotry of D.C.’s superintendent of schools, Michelle Rhee, who soon found herself linked to a cheating scandal; the shady for-profit charters and so-called cyber schools with no record of serving disadvantaged children; the hastily adopted and unproven teacher-assessment schemes; a pricey new bureaucracy of McKinsey-style reform consultants, deployed even as classroom budgets were gutted.

Ravitch had taken to social media with the fervor of a teenager, and she responded to critics with fire-hose blasts of tweets and blog posts. Plainly thrilling to the role of polemicist, she accused one “loathsome” reformer of having “ruined the life” of a career educator “for filthy lucre.” Her opponents gave as good as they got. Whitney Tilson, a financier renowned for circulating pro-reform e‑mails, denounced Ravitch’s “thuggery.”

Ravitch was no longer engaging with her critics. She was rallying a base that grew rapidly as anti-testing fervor spread. This spring, she helped found the Network for Public Education to fight high-stakes testing and what she calls the privatization of public schools. (Meanwhile, Ravitch’s ideological adversaries have poured money into school-board and congressional races.) In less than three years, she has become the public face of a counterrevolution that shows no signs of abating, as many educators and parents now balk at the Common Core State Standards, a newly ambitious set of academic guidelines and accompanying assessments.

Ravitch presents Reign of Error as an overture to dialogue with opponents, but her subtitle suggests otherwise: The Hoax of the Privatization Movement and the Danger to America’s Public Schools. Her tour of the research is littered with bumper-sticker slogans—she indicts, for example, the “Walmartization of American education”—likely to put off the unconverted. The book reads like a campaign manual against “corporate reformers.” The first half challenges the claims of their movement; the second offers Ravitch’s alternative agenda. Her prescriptions include universal pre-K, smaller class sizes, better teacher training, and more measures to reduce poverty and school segregation.

These are worthy goals—and not one of them is necessarily incompatible with many reformers’ own aims. Yet Ravitch doesn’t address competing priorities or painful trade-offs. Further reducing class size in better-off suburban districts, for example, may leave less money for more urgently needed early-childhood programs in poorer communities.

Ravitch the counterrevolutionary may be right that the reformers’ cause is primed for derailment. But Ravitch the historian once foretold what typically follows a contentious drive for school improvement: “It was usually replaced,” she observed in 2003, “by a movement called ‘back to basics,’ or ‘essentialism,’ ” which didn’t herald new progress but rather “a backlash against failed fads.” Ravitch herself is the “essentialist” now, urging that we go back not to basics but to a past when issues of equity and adequate funding dominated debates about education. At a time of growing income inequality, this correction is overdue.

But let’s not get too nostalgic about those old debates. There’s a reason the younger Ravitch was impatient decades ago to discover new choices for families in America’s worst-off districts. I hope I’m not alone in searching her new book for traces of the writer who, as recently as 2010, could still see beyond a politicized landscape to understand what draws many hard-pressed parents to charters. They’re not set on this curriculum or that pedagogy, as some reformers suggest. They’re looking, as Ravitch appreciated, for academic “havens”—which is what parents at the inner-city school where I teach, once nominally parochial and now a charter, often tell me. They want a place where their children can join peers already driven to achieve in school—a search with another bleak trade-off. The departure of these students leaves other peers, without parents resourceful enough to find better alternatives, stranded in schools that become all the harder to improve.

In Reign of Error, Ravitch does outline the beginnings of a potential compromise with her former pro-charter allies, which she isn’t trumpeting on Twitter, but should be. Instead of trying to eliminate charters altogether, she sounds ready to work toward making them better. Some of the greatest failures and outright frauds of the charter movement, she rightly observes, are in its for-profit sector. Schools shouldn’t be in the business of figuring out how to maximize investor returns—in fact, they shouldn’t be in business at all. No top private or parochial school operates this way. Ravitch is less persuasive when she attacks charter networks. Why not scale up programs that work? Some of the best charters, like KIPP, are chains run by nonprofits.

If the reform movement hopes to retain the public’s trust, insisting that reputable charters expel their for-profit brethren is a sensible place to start. Ravitch also argues convincingly that charters should accept a fairer share of the toughest-to-educate students. For her part, Ravitch might lead her own followers to recognize that the desire to improve teacher quality isn’t tantamount to teacher-bashing.

“If my child were in a school where he was not learning,” Ravitch wrote in the not-too-distant past, “I would not wait for a gathering of social scientists to tell me whether it was okay for me to put him in another school.” A reform movement convulsed by extremism shouldn’t hinder parents, or children, either. If only Ravitch, too, would dedicate her zeal to a less divisive vision.

Moving on up in education gains

This from the Courier-Journal:

People alarmed by some of the more outrageous claims about the new “Common Core” standards — as well as the accompanying “Next Generation Science Standards” — should breathe easier following recent developments.

One bright spot is that, as the first state to adopt the Common Core’s more rigorous academic standards in math and language arts, Kentucky is making significant progress.

Kentucky’s high school graduation rate has increased and students are better prepared for college, according to preliminary information based on testing during the 2012-13 school year that Gov. Steve Beshear and Education Commissioner Terry Holliday released Tuesday.

The other good news is that the national business community, concerned by a seemingly irrational backlash against Common Core, is rallying to support the need for the more rigorous educational standards, particularly in science, engineering, math and technology.

Some conservative groups have begun attacking — with no basis in fact — the voluntary, state-led effort to upgrade standards as a “federal government takeover” of education or some sort of liberal indoctrination of students. Many object to the fact the standards call for teaching evolution without including creationism, the religious belief God created the world, and also that they include climate change.

Exxon Mobil Corp. CEO Rex Tillerson, a member of the prestigious Business Roundtable, suggests in a recent opinion piece in The Wall Street Journal that it’s time to put an end to such nonsense and rally around Common Core for the sake of a better educated workforce.

“With these education standards under attack in many states where they have been adopted or are being considered, the Common Core needs support now more than ever if America is going to reverse its education decline and prepare its young people to compete in today’s dynamic global economy,” he wrote.

Mr. Tillerson said that states must be willing to upgrade standards and develop more rigorous curriculum so students will graduate with skills they need to meet the demands of employers.

And it’s not just business and industry that need more qualified people. Mr. Tillerson points out that the U.S. armed forces must turn away about 30 percent of high school graduates who can’t pass the entrance exam.

Lee Todd, the former president of the University of Kentucky and a graduate of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, had a similar message when he appeared before a state legislative committee in June to urge lawmakers to move forward with all possible speed on the new standards.

“Speed is important,” he said. “We can’t take time to gnaw on things.”

It’s a message not all Kentucky lawmakers have embraced. Last week a panel rejected new science standards developed by national experts and designed as a companion to Common Core standards in math and language courses.

Gov. Beshear, who has the power to enact the science standards, did so anyway.

And Tuesday, he joined Commissioner Holliday to report that the state’s prior adoption of Common Core standards is paying off in improved graduation rates and college readiness among Kentucky’s high school students.

“It’s a story that needs to be told,” Gov. Beshear said, according to a story Wednesday by The Courier-Journal’s Antoinette Konz.

Kentucky’s education leadership is a refreshing contrast to that of Indiana, where fainthearted officials backed down after a misguided group called “Hoosiers Against Common Core” began whipping up opposition “against the federal and corporate takeover of our children’s public school classrooms.” The standards have been suspended in Indiana.

Kentucky must press on. As Mr. Todd said, “Speed is important.”

Diane Ravitch And The ‘Error’ Of American School Reform

In an interesting, but unusually contentious discussion for NPR, Tom Ashbrook interviews Diane Ravitch about her new book Reign of Error. I just bought my copy this afternoon.

This from NPR's On Point:

Listen here: 48 mins.

Education icon Diane Ravitch championed education reform from vouchers to charter schools. Now she champions against all that. Calls it a mistake. We’ll ask why.

For years, Diane Ravitch was a big voice in hard-nosed school reform. Working under President George H. W. Bush and after, she wanted teacher accountability. She wanted school choice.  She wanted charter schools. In the years that followed, we got No Child Left Behind, Race to the Top, the Common Core — and lots of charter schools. But Diane Ravitch has jumped ship. Reform has become an attack on public education itself, she now argues. A Trojan horse for privatization. And the real problem is poverty. 

Diane Ravitch Responds To Questions at NPR.

Q:  Here in Chicago, 50 schools were closed yet CPS plans to open 50+ more, staffed mostly by Teach for America – with public funds but with no accountability. Meanwhile, public schools are being held more accountable than ever. How is this acceptable?

It is outrageous that Rahm Emanuel, the mayor of Chicago, closed 50 public elementary schools. This is unprecedented in the history of US education. Every school that closed was a dagger in the heart of the community. In most communities, the public school is the most stable institution in the community. Why didn’t CPS help the schools that needed help instead of closing them? Having claimed that the schools were “underutilized,” CPS now plans to open 52 charter schools under private management. These schools will be staffed by teach for America, and very likely will be non-union. Thus, CPS will cut costs by laying off experienced teachers and replacing them with poorly trained temps who will leave within 2-3 years. The responsibility of the board of CPS and the mayor is to improve public schools, not to destroy them.

Q:  How are the statistics by state affected by square miles and population of each state?

In my book, I document the performance of states and the nation. The single most reliable predictor of test scores is family income. The widest achievement gaps are between the haves and the have-nots.

Q:  How do you rate a teacher? Better yet tell me what the mission is for a school?

The best way to rate a teacher is not by test scores — which say nothing about teacher quality but everything who was enrolled in the classroom–but by informed professional judgment. By that, I mean that those best qualified to do know if the teacher is doing a good job is the teacher’s principals and peers. There is actually an outstanding evaluation program in Montgomery County, Maryland, called “peer assistance and review.” Every new teacher gets a mentor teacher who helps the teacher learn the ropes; every tenured teacher who gets a low rating from his or her principal is assigned a mentor teacher to help them improve. The mentor teachers report to a committee made up of principals and teachers; they recommend whether the teachers are improving, or whether they need more support, or whether they should be terminated. The committee decides. It has terminated over 200 teachers. The system works. It has the trust of teachers and principals. It is professional.

Q:  Don’t the wealthy already have a huge advantage in education? The parents are usually well educated, a major advantage to their children, they can send their children to private schools of their choice, they can live in communities with the best schools.

Of course the wealthy have huge advantages. Not only can they pay for private schools, they can pay to live in rich suburbs with public schools that can afford every advantage for their children. Meanwhile, when state budgets hit, the wealthy districts can raise their local property taxes to make up for any cuts, but the urban districts lay off teachers, librarians, guidance counselors, nurses, eliminate the arts, increase class sizes. We have a deeply unequal means of funding our public schools, based mostly on property taxes. We also have a higher degree of income inequality than at any time in the past century. The children with the low test scores need smaller classes; they need schools with guidance counselors and social workers; they need highly experienced teachers; they need health clinics; they need libraries; they need the arts. Instead, schools in urban districts are losing everything that kids need. This is a disgrace. What do we give them instead of what they need? Tests, test prep, and more tests.

Q:  I do not understand why having the ability to choose a school that fits an individual personality, learning style, and skill set and the ability to walk away from a school if it is not working for them (or not working period) can be anything but good.

When you walk away from the public responsibility to maintain a good public school in every neighborhood, you abandon the civic mission of public school. You abandon an institution that is a pillar of our democratic society. You turn citizens into consumers who feel no obligation to other people’s children, only to themselves. Many people look enviously at the high-performing nations of Finland and Korea. There are no charter schools or vouchers in Finland or Korea. They have built a strong education profession and strong schools in every neighborhood. The more choice, the more inequality, the more segregation. Do we really want to go in that direction?

Q:  Would Diane make private schools illegal if she could?

Absolutely not. I have a basic principle: if people want to pay for private schools, go right ahead. It is a free country. Private money for private schools; public money for public schools. If the philanthropists decided to support catholic education, it would be handsomely endowed. Instead the Walton family foundation is pouring hundreds of millions into campaigns to divert public money to privately managed schools and religious schools. We need a strong publicly funded public school system and a good public school in every neighborhood. 

Q:  Why can’t students be educated like athletes? Have business come in & recruit the best for jobs!

Business doesn’t know best how to educate children, we have many examples of that. Business operates on the basis of profit and loss. They engage in “risk management.” they throw out the slow learners; they exclude the ones with low test scores; they keep out the kids with disabilities and the English language learners; and that is how they can produce high test scores. Read “the blueberry story” in my book. American schools have to educate all, not just those who are likely to get high scores. Furthermore, as an aside, if you knew how flawed the tests are, you would not put so much stock in scores. The main thing you learn from test scores is the income of the students’ families. Some poor kids get high scores, and some rich kids get low scores, but they are outliers.

Q:  Where is the middle of the road argument? Let’s improve traditional public schools AND fix how charters operate.

Charters started as a means of helping and collaborating with public schools. Over the past 20 years, they became a vehicle for libertarians and others who hate public education and who want to transfer public funding to private management. Read in my book about ALEC, about the Walton family foundation, and the extremists in Tennessee, North Carolina, Louisiana, Wisconsin, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and other states who are attacking public education and want to replace it with vouchers and for-profit entrepreneurs. The middle of the road is when those who support a vibrant and successful public school system agree that charters must agree to accept the same proportion of English language learners and students with disabilities as the neighboring district. The middle of the road will be reached when charter supporters agree that collaboration is better than competition and that they must be both transparent and accountable and play by the same rules as public schools.

Q:  What about busing and destroying the integrity of community in public schools?

I believe that integration is important but that it is best promoted by providing federal incentives for housing integration and attracting children from diverse communities to go to school together. The federal government, state governments, and local governments created segregation (I document this in my book). Today, the federal government could offer incentives and rewards to districts and schools that promote integration to overcome the effects of past policies. Imagine if the $5 billion that was wasted on Duncan’s “race to the top” program had been spent to incentivize districts to show how they could promote integration? It would have had far better impact on communities, schools, and children than blowing those billions away to encourage more testing and more school closings and more privatization.

Reviews of Reign of Error

From Jersey Jazzman: "Ravitch’s book is firmly planted in the here-and-now: she is a devastating social critic who is well aware of the current political environment in which what she calls “corporate reform” exists. But I got the sense while reading Reign of Error that Ravitch is able to skewer this agenda so efficiently because she’s seen it all before: “corporate reform” is merely the latest iteration of the age-old practice of blaming America’s schools for problems that they didn’t create and won’t be able to solve on their own."

From Amazon: "From one of the foremost authorities on education in the United States, former U.S. assistant secretary of education, “whistle-blower extraordinaire” (The Wall Street Journal), author of the best-selling The Death and Life of the Great American School System (“Important and riveting”—Library Journal), The Language Police (“Impassioned . . . Fiercely argued . . . Every bit as alarming as it is illuminating”—The New York Times), and other notable books on education history and policy—an incisive, comprehensive look at today’s American school system that argues against those who claim it is broken and beyond repair; an impassioned but reasoned call to stop the privatization movement that is draining students and funding from our public schools."

From The Atlantic: "The survival of the school-reform movement, as it’s known to champions and detractors alike, is no longer assured. Even a couple years ago, few would have predicted this turn of events for a crusade that began with the publication of A Nation at Risk in 1983, gathered momentum as charter schools and Teach for America took off in the 1990s, and surged into the spotlight with No Child Left Behind in 2001. As a schoolteacher, I know I didn’t anticipate this altered landscape. If one person can be credited—or blamed—for the reform movement’s sudden vulnerability, it’s a fiercely articulate historian, now in her 70s, named Diane Ravitch."

From Jose Vilson: "Anyone with a sharp eye for societal dynamics understands that our current wave of education reform is code for “getting the Black and Latino kids educated,” and Diane Ravitch spends an appropriate amount of time speaking about the dynamics of race, speaking on the effects of segregation and immigration in a way that makes her sound, yes, reasonable and hip to the way the education landscape currently operates. In fact, she makes the case that all children can succeed and have raised their success rate across the board, but the gaps exist due to poverty and not race." 

From EduShyster: "The hoax in the book’s subtitle refers first and foremost to the deception that our public schools are in decline. As Ravitch documents in detail, test scores are at their highest point ever recorded, while high school dropouts are at their lowest point and more students are graduating from high school than at any point in American history. But the best hoaxes are impervious to facts and the one about our failing schools is no exception."

From Imagine Wisconsin: "Public education advocates will also not be surprised to see the free market reformers lash out with well-funded, emotional messages attacking Ravitch. Reign of Error outs the reformers trying to raze public education. Their typical defense is to speak loudly and attack the messenger. This is, after all, just part of the free market process. For market-focused reformers to get ahead, government-run education must not succeed. Free marketeers pretend to be reforming when they are actually focused on destroying. Sadly, America’s neediest kids get pinned under the rubble." 

From Nicholas Tampico: “Ravitch believed otherwise in the 1990s and early 2000s when she allied with conservative politicians, scholars, and institutions, but she changed her mind about market-based education reforms after she examined their early results. Ravitch once endorsed voluntary national education standards; her modified position now is that state education departments should provide curriculum frameworks. A critique of Reign of Error is that state control still means that people in faraway places can determine how our children are educated.”

From Deborah Meier: "Reign of Error lays out step by step the relentless thirty year drive to either centralize the education of the young—on one hand—or divest it entirely into privatized hands on the other. Finally, the two sides have joined forces on a strategy that simultaneously does both. While this coalition has many old roots, in its current form it began with the fanfare around the publication of A Nation at Risk (1983). Ravitch was, at that time, a supporter of this bold statement that more or less accused America’s teachers and school boards of a plot to undermine American health and welfare of the international scene."

From Seattle Education: "Dr. Ravitch breaks down the amount of money spent on students in charter schools as opposed to students in public schools. Charter schools spend significantly less on their pupils than their public school counterparts and instead spend more money on administration, not teachers."

From OpEdNews: "Reign of Error: The Hoax of the Privatization Movement and the Danger to America's Public Schools' 'Dr. Ravitch shatters one corporate reform myth after another with clarity providing excellent background information in the Notes and Appendix. This book is a reference guide to all things ed reform. Don't understand much about test scores? Check out the chapters 'The Facts About Test Scores' and 'The Facts About International Test Scores'. Don't know the history of Michelle Rhee? Go to 'The Mystery of Michele Rhee'. How about the Parent Trigger? Read the chapter 'Parent Trigger or Parent Tricker'."

From Random House: "​In Reign of Error, Diane Ravitch argues that the crisis in American education is not a crisis of academic achievement but a concerted effort to destroy public schools in this country. She makes clear that, contrary to the claims being made, public school test scores and graduation rates are the highest they’ve ever been, and dropout rates are at their lowest point. She argues that federal programs such as George W. Bush’s No Child Left Behind and Barack Obama’s Race to the Top set unreasonable targets for American students, punish schools, and result in teachers being fired if their students underperform, unfairly branding those educators as failures. She warns that major foundations, individual billionaires, and Wall Street hedge fund managers are encouraging the privatization of public education, some for idealistic reasons, others for profit. Many who work with equity funds are eyeing public education as an emerging market for investors.

Anyone with a sharp eye for societal dynamics understands that our current wave of education reform is code for “getting the Black and Latino kids educated,” and Diane Ravitch spends an appropriate amount of time speaking about the dynamics of race, speaking on the effects of segregation and immigration in a way that makes her sound, yes, reasonable and hip to the way the education landscape currently operates. In fact, she makes the case that all children can succeed and have raised their success rate across the board, but the gaps exist due to poverty and not race. - See more at: http://thejosevilson.com/im-diane-ravitch-im-tired-shit-review-reign-error/#sthash.Ep35mfAB.MidDSdaO.dpuf

Anyone with a sharp eye for societal dynamics understands that our current wave of education reform is code for “getting the Black and Latino kids educated,” and Diane Ravitch spends an appropriate amount of time speaking about the dynamics of race, speaking on the effects of segregation and immigration in a way that makes her sound, yes, reasonable and hip to the way the education landscape currently operates. In fact, she makes the case that all children can succeed and have raised their success rate across the board, but the gaps exist due to poverty and not race. - See more at: http://thejosevilson.com/im-diane-ravitch-im-tired-shit-review-reign-error/#sthash.Ep35mfAB.MidDSdaO.dpuf

Anyone with a sharp eye for societal dynamics understands that our current wave of education reform is code for “getting the Black and Latino kids educated,” and Diane Ravitch spends an appropriate amount of time speaking about the dynamics of race, speaking on the effects of segregation and immigration in a way that makes her sound, yes, reasonable and hip to the way the education landscape currently operates. In fact, she makes the case that all children can succeed and have raised their success rate across the board, but the gaps exist due to poverty and not race. - See more at: http://thejosevilson.com/im-diane-ravitch-im-tired-shit-review-reign-error/#sthash.Ep35mfAB.MidDSdaO.dpuf

From Accountable Talk: "I'd like to just briefly recommend this book to teachers everywhere. The book is a thorough excoriation of the reform movement. Starting with who the major players are and how they stand to benefit financially from their "reforms", Ms. Ravitch unravels, one by one, all the myths spun by the corporate raiders looking to cash in on public education dollars. She lays bare the truth about all the favorite tropes of the reform movement, such as test scores, the achievement gap, PISA, high school and college graduation rates, merit pay, and many others."

From Daily Koz: "To be clear, it is not that Ravitch believes our schools are fine as they are, or were before the recent generations of "reform."  Far from it, she points at many places where changes are needed.  But she starts from an understanding that seems to escape many on the other side of the educational debate."

From the New York Post: "The book veers between argument and rant. Ravitch seems scarcely able to stop sputtering out meaningless and irrelevant buzzwords that she hopes will inspire ill will towards school choice. Again and again — hundreds of times — she tosses out words meant to stir up irrational hatred. I refer to words like “privatization” (which no one is proposing), “entrepreneurs,” “corporations,” “profits” and (most hilariously) “creationism,” which she claims is one of the hidden agendas of school reformists."

From Ed Notes Online: "Ravitch covers a lot of ground, using lots of charts and graphs to show how the claims by education deformers (Ravitch refers to them as “corporate reformers”) that our nation’s schools are in crisis and are failing and declining compared to other nations is not only not true but part of a design by people tied into the educational-industrial complex to get their mitts on a large chunk of the billions spent on education in this country."

From AlterNet: "Now, with Reign, we have Ravitch 3.0, displayed in a comprehensive work that in many ways echoes not only her own blog, but the growing arguments among educators and scholars that much of the reform agenda lacks evidence and that alternative commitments to education reform need to address poverty, equity, and opportunity."

From Leonie Haimson: "Her book shows that within the historical context, student performance across the country has never been better if measured by test scores and graduation rates, and that even as the achievement gap stubbornly persists, the problem should be addressed by narrowing the opportunity gap.  This can be done by directly addressing poverty and by providing more equitable school conditions, with resources invested in reforms that have actually been proven to work, including preK, smaller classes, a well-rounded education and wrap-around services. These are the programs and conditions that the wealthy demand for their own kids.  Poor and disadvantaged children need the same things – only more so.  She also explains how schools, especially those with high-needs students, will only be further undermined by the corporate reform agenda of test-driven accountability, weakening of teacher tenure, merit pay, and online learning."

Ky. shortchanges public education

Study shows how funding falls short 

This from the Herald-Leader:

Gov. Steve Beshear and many lawmakers have consoled themselves with the soothing fiction that, despite deep cuts in everything from child care to State Police, Kentucky weathered the Great Recession without cutting basic state support for public schools.

While that might be technically true, the real-life effect of years of flat appropriations, while costs grew, is a decline of almost 10 percent in per-student funding from fiscal 2008 until this year.

That's according to a new report  by the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities, which discovered Kentucky is not alone: When you adjust for inflation, at least 34 states are providing less funding per student for the 2013-14 school year than they did before the recession.

Kentucky's 9.9 percent decline ($477 per student) in inflation-adjusted spending is the 14th deepest among the states.

The report looked just at funding levels through each state's basic school funding mechanism, which in Kentucky is the SEEK formula. It did not attempt to calculate education cuts outside the basic formula which in Kentucky have been drastic in such areas as professional development, after-school tutoring and textbooks.

While school funding is starting to recover in most of the 34 states where it has declined in real terms, there's no rebound in Kentucky.

In fact, Kentucky is one of 15 states providing less inflation-adjusted funding per student to local school districts in this new school year than a year ago. Kentucky had the fifth-biggest year-to-year erosion in core education funding, according to the report.

Sadly, even if the state's economy takes off, Kentucky's support for education will not rebound in any appreciable way because our tax system is too outdated to capture growth in the modern economy.
Without tax reform, state support for education in Kentucky will continue to fall further behind, costing the state hard-earned gains in education achievement.

The fact that Beshear and lawmakers have been so eager to embrace the belief that school funding has been sacrosanct shows that they know how important education is.

The state's economy and future depend on better educating more Kentuckians.

Kentucky can't wait much longer to translate that recognition into action by tackling tax reform that generates more money for all levels of education, from early childhood to graduate school.

Read more here: http://www.kentucky.com/2013/09/18/2828115/ky-shortchanges-public-education.html#storylink=cpy

More at KSN&C here.

Waters Clarifies BIPPS' Anti-Public School Posture

The folks at the Bluegrass Institute used to bristle at the suggestion that BIPPS has an anti-public school agenda. I guess those days are over. In their never-ending effort to grab as much public money as possible and move it into private hands for all kinds of private purposes, the clearly anti-public school Bluegrass Institute is now touting Education Debit Cards.

 BIPPS's President Jim Waters clarified BIPPS' overall objective in a blog comment this evening saying,

If educational labor union bosses and other school-choice opponents wonder if the Bluegrass Institute views charter schools as an opportunity to get “the camel’s nose under the tent” in order to open the floodgates to ALL types of school choice, they would be ABSOLUTELY RIGHT! Getting a public charter school law passed is an important step … but it’s only the first step.

"Open[ing] the floodgates to ALL types of school choice" can include many things. And a lax Kentucky charter school law would invite all of the problems that have plagued many charter schools in other states.

Perhaps Mr Waters, a professed creationist, would open a charter school for families who want intelligent design to shape their children's understanding of science. Is that really what Kentucky students need to be successful in the 21st century?

The types of choice typically touted by anti-public school groups include:

Vouchers which allow public money to flow to both religious and non-religious private schools, using all or part of the public funding set aside for a child's education.

Education savings accounts allow public funds to be deposited into an account that can cover private school tuition and fees, online learning programs, private tutoring, community college costs, and other higher education expenses.

Tax-credit scholarships allow taxpayers to receive full or partial tax credits when they donate to nonprofits that provide private school scholarships.

Through individual tax credits educational expenses, which can include private school tuition, books, supplies, computers, tutors, and transportation, can be written off to lower one's taxes.

Schooling options that benefit from choice options include:

Private schools are educational institutions run independently of the government. A private school’s focus can be religious-based, academic-intensive, and/or specialized for specific groups of students.

Charter schools are independent public schools exempt from many state and local rules and regulations in exchange for increased financial and academic accountability.

Homeschooling is an alternative form of education for children outside of public or private schools, typically within their own homes.

Online learning allows students to work with their curriculum and teachers over the internet—in combination with, or in place of, traditional classroom learning.

This from Logan Morford at the Bluegrass Institute:

Another school choice option: education debit cards

The most common form of school choice discussed are charter schools. There are other forms of school choice available though, sadly, none of them are legal within Kentucky’s borders. The Friedman Foundation for Educational Choice just published a research piece on Arizona’s use of Education Savings Accounts.

From the executive summary:

With Empowerment Scholarship Accounts, Arizona has created a model that should be every state policymaker’s goal when considering how to improve education: funding students instead of physical school buildings and allowing that funding to follow children to any education provider of choice. Such control over education funding ensures parents have access to options that meet their children’s unique learning needs and ultimately can move beyond the worthwhile goal of school choice to choice among education service providers, courses, teachers, and methods.

I don’t know about you but that sounds like a heavy dose of common sense to me.
You can download the report here. You may also want to forward this on to your state representative.
It is time for Kentucky to legalize school choice.

Comments

Jim Waters says:

September 17, 2013 at 5:58 pm

If educational labor union bosses and other school-choice opponents wonder if the Bluegrass Institute views charter schools as an opportunity to get “the camel’s nose under the tent” in order to open the floodgates to ALL types of school choice, they would be ABSOLUTELY RIGHT! Getting a public charter school law passed is an important step … but it’s only the first step.

Kentucky's graduation and college-readiness rates rise sharply

This from the Courier-Journal:

Kentucky’s high school graduation rate jumped to 86 percent last year, among the highest in the nation, and college readiness among the state’s graduates climbed above 50 percent for the first time, according to preliminary figures released Tuesday by state officials.

Gov. Steve Beshear and Kentucky Education Commissioner Terry Holliday both hailed the findings as an indication that state education has shown “measurable transformational improvement over the past four years.”

“We are doing this to reassure parents and businesses that our schools are producing graduates who are equipped to succeed in this increasingly sophisticated world,” Beshear said during a press conference Tuesday. “It’s a story that needs to be told.”

The figures, based on testing data from the 2012-13 school year, show that Kentucky’s graduation rate increased 7 percentage points from last year, and the state’s college- and career-readiness rate, a measure of whether students are prepared to be successful after high school graduation, improved 20 percentage points from 2010, when only 34 percent of students were considered ready for college or the work force.

Graduation rates and college and career readiness data for individual schools and districts across Kentucky won’t be publicly released until next week, but officials said they wanted to release the state results early because they are so promising.

“Years ago, Kentucky’s national story when it came to education and school performance was cause for some embarrassed cringing,” Beshear said. “Scores were poor and on most measures, we lagged behind. But thanks to decades of hard work and aggressive policy changes, Kentucky has carved out a new reputation — a reputation as a reform-minded state that is innovative, bold and relentless in moving forward.”

During the press conference, Beshear and Holliday pointed to the passage and implementation of Senate Bill 1 in 2009 as the beginning of the latest and most significant round of focused improvements in Kentucky.

The bill requires more rigorous standards, aligned assessments, a balanced accountability system and support for educators to implement the new system. Since 2009, Kentucky schools have implemented more meaningful and data-driven assessments, and national organizations have recognized Kentucky’s education reforms.

“Across the country, educators are rushing to prepare their students to meet the complex and constantly evolving demands of the new global economy,” Holliday said. “I’m proud that we are on the forefront of that effort here in Kentucky, but I am most excited about what it means for our students.”

This is the first year Kentucky is using a different way to measure the number of students who graduate — the formula nearly every other state uses to measure graduation rates — allowing the state to compare itself with its peers, Holliday said.

The new formula tracks individual students who enter ninth grade for the first time and revisits their status four years later.

“Everyone predicted that our graduation rates would go down with this new measurement, so we were just elated to see these numbers,” Holliday said.

Between 60-70 percent of Kentucky’s high school graduates go on to pursue post-secondary opportunities each year, Holliday said. Three years ago, 80 percent of those enrolled in community colleges and 30 percent enrolled in four-year colleges or universities needed remedial courses, he said.

“It used to be that only a third of our graduates were ready to move on to college-level work, now we are at over half,” Holliday said. “We want to put our colleges out of the remediation business.”

And while Holliday said he couldn’t provide specific numbers in regards to Jefferson County Public Schools, he said he is “so impressed” with the increases some schools have posted that he will be attending a press conference with Superintendent Donna Hargens Sept. 27 to discuss the results.

“We’ve seen some schools in Jefferson County jump from a 50 percent graduation rate to 80 percent graduation rate and college and career readiness numbers that have doubled,” he said. “There are going to be quite a few good stories coming out of Jefferson County next week.”

Guggenheim surprises with a big wet kiss to teachers

I finally got around to viewing Teach today, Davis Guggenheim's follow-up film to the slanted and contrived Waiting for Superman. I confess, I wasn't anxious to see another of his films. But in this one he leans the other way. Teach follows four dedicated teachers and attempts to document what the life of a teacher is like. 

Shelby Harris, 7th grade math teacher at Kuna Middle School, Kuna, Idaho; Joel Laguna, a 10th grade AP World History teacher at Garfield High, Los Angeles, California; Matt Johnson, a 4th grade teacher at McGlone Elementary, Denver, Colorado; and Lindsay Chinn, a 9th grade Algebra teacher at MLK Early College, Denver, Colorado.

If this film is an apology, or "a valentine to the teaching profession," as the New York Times suggests, so be it. Apology accepted. As with Superman and his An Inconvenient Truth, Guggenheim sets a course, and stays the course.

These teachers are not portrayed as incompetent union-card-holding slackers. They are not dashing the hopes and future productivity of their public school students who failed to win a charter school lottery. They are everyday heroes who battle to overcome society's ills as they are manifested in our children. These heroes don't leap tall buildings. They engage with real problems and they suffer the kinds of setbacks every dedicated teacher understands.

As Hechinger's Sarah Butrymowicz reports, 

One of the most intriguing dilemmas highlighted in the film occurs in Lindsey Chinn’s ninth-grade algebra class in Denver. Her students are exceeding district averages on the material that she has covered thoroughly, according to mid-year assessments. But the class is behind schedule. Chinn and her administrator debate if it is better to cover less material, but truly master it, or teach everything that will be covered on the end-of-year standardized tests, knowing the pace would be too fast for most students to grasp the concepts.

It’s an important issue and one that gets to the heart of the debate on standardized testing for accountability. But after raising the question, the film doesn’t address possible answers for teachers trying to encourage mastery while simultaneously trying to cover all the material on the test. Thus, “Teach” misses the opportunity to have a real conversation about the quality and use of the standardized tests and ways in which they might help and hinder teaching.

But for all of its good intentions, I'm not sure Teach gets us any closer to understanding the complex nature of teacher effectiveness.

This from Take Part:

We all have had a teacher who’s shaped us, inspired us, even scared us, and whom we can credit with having empowered us to become who we are today. In his third documentary to look at education in America, Davis Guggenheim brings us “TEACH,” which asks the question: what does it take to be a teacher? Offering a rare glimpse inside four public school classrooms, Guggenheim invites us to follow the struggles and triumphs of America’s education system through the eyes, minds and hearts of its most essential resource: teachers.

Intense and emotional, this year-in-the-life of four public school teachers illustrates how tenacity, innovation and a passion drives these educators as they navigate the ups and downs of the 2013 school year...

These educators mentor their students to overcome obstacles and strive for success. While they all aspire to be the best at their jobs, Guggenheim’s subjects are diverse in every way, implementing unconventional and collaborative methods, teaching different subjects and age groups in a range of communities. Yet, they all have one common denominator—the grit and resolve to hang in and make a difference to their students.

This from the New York Times:

A Soft Pitch on Education From a Hard Hitter

Davis Guggenheim Goes to School With New Film

People tuning into “Teach” on CBS on Friday night [Sept 6th] because they see Davis Guggenheim’s name attached to it and expect another barn-burning look at dysfunction in the educational system may find themselves asking, “What have you done with the real Davis Guggenheim and who is this bouquet-lobbing impostor?” 

In 2010, Mr. Guggenheim caused a stir in the educational world with his documentary “Waiting for ‘Superman,’ ” an unflattering examination of American education that was particularly hard on teachers unions. But “Teach,” hosted by Queen Latifah, is more or less the opposite of that film. It’s a valentine to the teaching profession, following four relatively young teachers through a school year as they ardently try to raise test scores and bring stragglers up to grade level. 

Nothing wrong with that. There are plenty of energetic, committed educators; why not start off the school year by giving them a pat on the back? The real shortcoming of “Teach” isn’t its lack of teeth; it’s that the camera-in-a-classroom approach, a favorite of documentarians trying to say something about schools, is rarely very illuminating. How learning happens can’t be reduced to a film clip, even a two-hour-long one. 

The four stars of “Teach” are Matt Johnson, a fourth-grade teacher in Denver; Shelby Harris, a seventh-grade math teacher in Kuna, Idaho; Lindsay Chinn, a ninth-grade algebra teacher in Denver; and Joel Laguna, who teaches advanced-placement world history to high school students in East Los Angeles. All seem like the kind of teacher you want your child to have — tireless, innovative, determined — and their students don’t try to intimidate them or crush them with indifference or act up in class. But, of course, there are cameras in the room; it’s impossible to tell how they affect the behavior of adults or students. 

The film does at least convey what these teachers are up against as they try to improve results: a wide swath of skill levels, with many students arriving in their class already considerably behind. “When Shelby looks at the data from her students’ test results,” the narration says, “she realizes she is standing in front of a class whose abilities range from third to 11th grade.” 

The teachers experiment with alternatives to stand-and-lecture instruction, and all four hit a wall at midyear, turning to mentors to talk them through their discouragement. It’s moderately interesting but seems artificial. The film barely looks beyond the classroom, even though learning is a complex process that involves extracurricular activities, the home front, peer groups and more. A “Glee” episode is more revelatory than much of “Teach.” 

That said, it’s nice to see four educators who care more about their students than they do about salaries or tenure. And it’s certainly true that while a documentary that looks only at the classroom is not going to give the full educational picture, no learning is likely to take place without a good teacher in the mix.