ESSA Goes After NY Community High Schools

There are 51 of them in New York City, and they serve transfer students whose circumstances made it impossible to work through a regular high school.  Students receive counseling, career guidance, and other social services that allow students to actually learn while finish high school at a decelerated pace.

Now those schools are under threat from ESSA, which could have never passed without the support of corporate reform protection units of NEA, AFT, NPE, and FairTest:

The schools are small, and many of them work with community-based organizations to offer counseling, college and career advising, and internships. They have a significantly better track record than other high schools in graduating students who are two or more years behind. But because students often enter transfer schools with few credits, it can take them six, seven or even eight years in total to graduate.

Now advocates and city education officials fear the schools may be in danger. On Monday, the State Education Department is expected to present the Board of Regents with regulations to conform with the Every Student Succeeds Act, the successor to No Child Left Behind. Under the expected regulations, the vast majority of the city’s transfer schools would be designated as “in need of improvement” and could be at risk of being closed.

Under the regulations, schools that fall short of a six-year graduation rate of 67 percent would be put on a list to receive “comprehensive support and improvement.” Only four of the city’s 51 transfer schools currently meet, or are on track to meet, that benchmark.

Riding the 'turnaround' merry-go-round in the continuing assault on Philadelphia public schools: Part VI - Who is Afton Partners?

 by Ken Derstine
@ Defend Public Education
March 14, 2016

The previous article in this series was posted June 2, 2016. This series has detailed the assault on Philadelphia public schools by corporate education reform business and financial interests. At the last posting, the Philadelphia School Reform Commission had not acted on the non-renewal recommendation of its charter office for Aspira, Universal, and Mastery charters. 

Pennsylvania law mandates that a charter term is five years and must undergo a renewal process after that.  There is a stipulation in the law that the renewal process can be extended for one year, if there are mitigating circumstances.  That one-year extension can only be used one time. They have been postponing the renewals month after month since April 2016. Aspira’s was postponed without the SRC even taking a vote in 2015.

Now, as can be seen in Part VI in this series, the privatization merry-go-round is spinning ever faster in the assault on Philadelphia public schools.

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In a recently released report by Afton Partners, the cost of students leaving Philadelphia public schools to transfer to charters was examined. The study had been commissioned in February, 2015 by the School Reform Commission, which functions as a school board and makes all final decisions for Philadelphia schools.

Click here to read the entire Afton report.

In “is the glass half full or half empty” coverage, the Philadelphia Inquirer published Report: Philly schools still face costs when students go to charters vs. the Philadelphia Public School Notebook’s Students leaving Philly schools for charters less costly than once thought.

According to The Notebook article, the resolution calling for the contract with Afton said the analysis would take place between February 20, 2015 and May 1, 2015. SRC officials claim the report “got lost in the shuffle as old administrators left and new administrators replaced them.” The District’s Chief Financial Officer Uri Monson, appointed February, 2016, said he first got word of the report last summer and has been working with Afton “to make sure the report addressed all questions.”

Why is the report being released now? Could it have something to do with a bill in the Pennsylvania House introduced by Speaker Mike Turzai on March 6th which would require the Philadelphia School District to add 3,000 charter seats per year? This bill would undercut the charter oversight authority of the Philadelphia School Reform Commission (SRC). The establishment of the SRC in 2001, as part of the state takeover of the School District, abolished local control of public schools, along with any hope of any type of democratic process.  A 2014 bill passed by the legislature imposed a $2/pack cigarette tax for school funding; it included a last-minute provision that the SRC consider applications for new charters each fall.  Rejected applicants would be able to appeal to the state Charter Appeal Board.

Now, invoking the states rights' provisions of the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA), Turzai wants to completely take even this oversight from any local influence. He has been agressively intervening in the SRC's charter approval process lobbying for approval of charters that the SRC has rejected. The SRC's Uri Monson said the bill is unessessary because in the SRC's five year financial plan presented last year there is an already projected annual growth of charter enrollement of between 2,700 and 3,000 seats.

Click here to read the rest of the article.

What Ending Regulations on ESSA Will Mean

Yesterday, Diane Ravitch had this bit of news at her blog:

. . . .The Senate also voted to roll back an Obama administration rule to “hold schools accountable,” which passed by only 50-49, over vociferous Democratic opposition. Frankly, I don’t know which rule this is. If it was the Obama-Duncan-King test-based accountability, then I think its repeal or elimination is a step forward. As we saw again and again over the past eight years, the Obama Department of Education had an obsessive devotion to test-based accountability that harmed students, teachers, and schools. If this is what the Senate knocked down, count me in. Even the znational Academy of Sciences issued a report critical of test-based accountability, but Duncan was as smitten with standardized testing as DeVos is smitten with vouchers.

Now we all know that Diane is busy, but is she too busy to find out that the squeaker bill resulted from a joint resolution introduced by Ravitch's close friend and former boss, Lamar Alexander.  

Is she too busy to find out before posting at her blog that this bill has nothing to do with ending test-based accountability? Did she not do her due diligence to find out the facts, or was she too much in a hurry to use opportunity to bash Obama, while ignoring the potential for this dangerous Congressional action by her chum, Lamar?

Whatever the reason for her shabby reporting, later yesterday she posted this:

The U.S. Department of Education may pull this off its website.

https://www2.ed.gov/policy/elsec/leg/essa/essaassessmentfactsheet1207.pdf

Download it now. These are John King’s accountability regulations, based on FLORIDA accountability, including A-F ratings for every school!

The Senate voted to revoke them by 50-49.

Farewell and good riddance!

Apparently, someone tipped off Diane to the fact that Alexander's resolution, which passed both Houses and is now headed to Trump for his signature, is to discard the guidance in the USED Regulations for implementing ESSA.  

ESSA stays intact, with all the requirements for annual testing and required shuttering of the lowest 5 percent of schools, along with gargantuan charter school grants, relaxed oversight for charters, and all the huge new incentives for more screen-based schooling for kids.

Also staying intact, too, in the ESSA are requirements for school rating systems, even though they may not be “A-F.”

As she waves a “farewell and good riddance” to the guidance contained the Regulations, Ravitch does not tell her readers that ESSA remains entirely intact, which is to say, it is the same piece of dreck that she and her pal Lamar pushed through in late 2015.

In fact, there is reason to believe that that the removal of federal regulations could escalate the move to state voucher programs that hand over cheap vouchers to the poorest children to “choose” a charter school or a below-average private school.  States will be free to make it up as they along, as long as they stay true to privatization intent and methodology within ESSA.

There is also reason to believe to that the removal of federal guidance for ESSA may result in more special needs children and ELL students going unidentified and unserved.

In fact, there are some former Obama officials who point out a host of things that will be lost by losing the federal guidance.  

No doubt I and everyone else will find some elements of the trashed guidance as awful as the ESSA itself, but I would argue that some guidance is better than none, especially when you have Trumpists ready to burn down all public institutions, without forethought of consequence.  

Here's a few aspects of the trashed guidance that might have helped provide consistency, transparency, or clarity:

States must develop a uniform procedure for reporting per-pupil expenditure data, ensuring uniformity in how this new information is conveyed across all districts in the state. Similarly, each must develop a common way for reporting of new educator data, defining terms like “inexperienced” and “out of field” teachers.

Each state’s accountability system must be statewide—in other words, a single system used throughout the state, with a uniform methodology for differentiating and identifying schools for improvement.

Any state choosing to include former English learners and/or students with disabilities in its accountability system cannot cherry pick which students to include; all former students in those subgroups must be captured.

States must identify all schools with a subgroup performing similarly to the lowest-performing 5 percent of the Title I schools for “additional targeted support” in 2018–19, but states do not have to begin annual identification of schools with consistently underperforming subgroups of students for targeted support until 2019–20—clarifying the two distinct kinds of targeted support schools, with different identification and exit criteria.

States must make their exit criteria for identified schools transparent and publicly available, just as districts must ensure that school improvement plans are publicly posted to build awareness and understanding among the local community

.

States that permit students in comprehensive support schools to transfer to another school must ensure that the receiving school is higher-performing—that is, that it is not (1) among the lowest-performing 5 percent of schools in the state or (1) a high school with graduation rates below 67 percent.

States must identify low-graduation-rate high schools using the four-year adjusted cohort rate; the statute is silent on the graduation rate measure that should be used here even though the four-year rate must be used for goal-setting under the law.

In addition to identifying the local education agency for each charter school on its district report cards, report cards must also indicate the relevant charter authorizer for the school to provide greater transparency in states with multiple authorizers.

States must communicate with parents and other stakeholders in a manner that is accessible, including by providing written information in languages that parents can understand and, where practicable, by providing information in alternate formats for parents with disabilities.

States must develop their state ESSA plans by conducting meaningful stakeholder engagement with a broad array of groups (beyond those listed in the statute) and take into account feedback at all phases of the process—planning, drafting, implementation, and revision (which the rules clarify must occur at least once every four years). Furthermore, many of these principles also apply to the collaborative process districts and schools must use to develop school improvement plans in partnership with their local communities. 

And here are a few flexibilities that will no longer be afforded, as Diane “waves farewell and good riddance” to ESSA regulations:

States can stagger their implementation timelines so that they use indicators based on the 2017–18 school year to identify their first cohort of low-performing schools in 2018–19. States may also have a planning year so that interventions in these schools must fully kick in by the 2019–20 school year.

States can use the Academic Achievement indicator to give schools partial or extra credit, via an achievement index, for students that are either approaching or exceeding proficiency.

States may develop varying methodologies to differentiate and identify low-performing schools in order to include special kinds of schools in their statewide system (such as newly opened schools, very small schools, schools with non-traditional grade configurations, schools without tested grades, and schools designed to serve unique populations like newcomer schools).

States may use graduation rate data for accountability purposes (especially identification of low-graduation-rate high schools) that lag a year behind other accountability data to account for summer graduates.

States can use a hyperlink to another part of their state website to provide parents and other users with a full description of their school accountability system on district and school report cards, enabling states to reduce the length of their report cards and preventing duplicative information.

States must ensure that at least one intervention in identified schools will be evidence-based, but all activities in the school’s improvement plans do not need to be supported by evidence (as defined in ESSA).

States may provide school improvement funds under section 1003 funds to any school identified for comprehensive or targeted support and improvement, even if the identified school is not a Title I school.

States may create lists of evidence-based interventions to better support school improvement plans developed by districts and schools; use of the list may be optional or required, depending on the state’s policy preference.

While comprehensive support plans must be approved by the state, district, and schools, the regulations provide states the final authority to ensure these plans pass muster, are completed, and can be implemented, particularly if districts or schools disagree on elements of the plan and are at an impasse.

States can tailor their English language proficiency (ELP) goals for different groups of English learners, rather than setting a single timeline for achieving ELP that all students must meet; the timeline applied to a particular group of English learners can vary depending on the characteristics of those students.

States can include the test scores of former students with disabilities in subgroup data for up to two years for accountability purposes.

States can include both former English learners and students with disabilities in the respective subgroups for any indicator that is based on state test scores, rather than only the Academic Achievement indicator.

States may include both former English learners and students with disabilities in calculating graduation rates if they were part of the subgroup at any point during high school, even if the student exited during high school.

States can take advantage of both statutory exemptions for including recently arrived English learners in accountability systems, using student-level characteristics to determine which exception is appropriate for which students.

States may use a composite score within their accountability systems in order to include English learners with disabilities in cases where students cannot be tested on all four ELP domains.

States may count recently arrived English learners in participation rate calculations if that student is included in the accountability system by using an exception where they take the state’s ELP test instead of its English language arts assessment.

Personalization or Profiling? Childhood in the Ed-Tech Era

from Wrench in the Gears
October 30, 2016

As states pull together their plans for ESSA (Every Student Succeeds Act) it's important for parents and teachers to understand what the next phase of education reform looks like. This slide share presented at the Movement of Rank and File Educators' Social Justice Curriculum Fair in New York City recently provides a good introduction. Click on the graphic above for the slide show and be sure to explore the links that are included.

FairTest Fumes and Obfuscates

There was much disgust expressed when Diane Ravitch promoted FairTest's NEA-supported report, Assessment Matters: Constructing Model State Systems to Replace Testing Overkill.  In the report, FairTest managed to do some major league pimping for the New Hampshire competency-based child plug-in learning model and competency-based assessment pilot.  

Here is heart of Monty Neill's response, with my comments interspersed in italics.

First, there is no doubt that corporations backed by some foundations and politicians are promoting a version of schooling that is built around computerized packaged programs that combine curriculum, curricular materials, instruction and testing. The tests are in most cases multiple-choice and short-answer with occasional write-to-a-prompt items, to be machine graded. They seriously narrow and diminish education and should be exposed and stopped.

. . . . not one of the examples in FairTest’s report rely on these kinds of computerized packages. Each one is teacher controlled and very much teacher controlled. We clearly support and praise those that allow significant student voice and control over the learning and assessment processes. New Hampshire fought for a deal that has opened doors that have been nailed shut since the start of NCLB and thus deserve serious credit. As we point out, we can learn from and improve on what they have thus far done, and that ESSA makes it easier for that to happen.. . .

The New Hampshire example that FairTest studies is Rollinsford Grade School, which DOES NOT participate in the frenetic attempts in the other dozen or so NH assessment pilot venues, where Gates Foundation know-nothings are supervising the construction of a Rube Goldberg assessment system that tries to standardize the unique and to quantify the unquantifiable.  Why, pray tell, does Monty not examine a system that is plugged in to the NH pilot project, which is meant to look like this:

Monty Neill continues: "People can choose to believe the fight is over because corporations are trying to seize control of terms such as personalized and competency-based. We believe that is a mistake. It is not over, and one part of the battle is the fight to own the terms. The more important fight is the one to determine the shape of education, whether it is built on human relations among teachers and students, with parents and other community people also engaged; or it is based on computer algorithms and subordinating human relations to the computer packages.

FairTest fights for the former. We think that is clear in what we call for and the programs we highlight. If people have questions about that, they should read what we actually write and then follow it up, looking at the programs themselves."

The resistance to corporate education does not believe the fight is over, despite FairTest's surrender to the ESSA charter and CBE stimulus package passed last year.  If FairTest were fighting, why do we not see any outlined strategy to expose the hazardous and reckless advances of the child plug-in model for poor schools that is being advanced by Gates and Silicon Valley?  

While FairTest promotes its progressive boutique alternatives to the unhealthy and intrusive plug-in competency-based model, neither FairTest nor NEA/AFT has one word of warning or concern for parents, educators, or students who will be the victims of this miseducative money-making scheme if it goes forward.


FairTest is fighting for FairTest and the NEA agenda, which is the corporate agenda and the Clinton agenda and the Wall Street agenda.  Nothing will block their train until the tracks are removed.

Got Poverty? Call a Positive Psychologist

As the educational profiteers and snake oil salesmen dig into the text of ESSA to find problems that their phony solutions can be retrofitted to "fix," we are sure to see some real doozies coming down the line. 

Seems the "fix the child, not the problem" school of educational thought disorder is already testing out worn-out ideas in West Virginia, where poverty and hopelessness are being treated with 19th Century conditioning and more jobs for positive psychologists.

If Martin Seligman's mind fixes cannot be shown to have any positive effect on GIs suffering from PTSD in Iraq and Afghanistan, maybe they will work on unemployed coal miners' children.  There's plenty of money provided by ESSA to find out how to make poor children immune to economic disability while ignoring poverty for another generation.  

As noted below by the psychologist, Paul Baker, children need to learn "you can shake off what's going on" outside school.  It's all a part of Baker's "multi-tiered" behavioral intervention system that would be entirely appropriate if children were rats.

The Martin County school district, in eastern Kentucky near the West Virginia border, wrestles with poverty and high unemployment rates with the decline of the coal-mining industry. The county is losing population, and 75 percent of its 2,000 students are eligible for free or reduced-price lunches.

In 2014, the county was awarded a $310,000 federal school-climate-improvement grants, which it used to start a multitiered behavioral-support system.

Paul Baker, the lead school psychologist for the district, said that the school system is approaching the problem from several directions. It hired two more school psychologists, so that they'd be available to provide more counseling to students who need it. The district also forged robust ties with county agencies that are able to provide additional support.

In addition, the school system created a team-based model that allowed it to pinpoint behavior problems more accurately and to more quickly devise a plan for fixing them. . . .

. . . .Overall, Martin County has adopted the idea that teaching social skills is as much a part of its job as teaching academics, Baker said.

"A school's role is to help mold a child into a productive member of society," he said. "We're trying to teach them how you can shake off what's going on [outside school]. That's a skill that has to be taught."