Alter lives in Montclair, but his kids attend(ed) the private Newark Academy. At least one was still enrolled this past year. So segregated corporate chain gang schools with white missionary temps are fine with Alter for the urban poor, but his kids, not so much (ht to Stan Karp)
Situated on a 68-acre wooded campus in suburban Livingston, Newark Academy's average class size: 13. Eighty percent of the faculty hold advanced degrees; 7 have earned doctorate degrees. On average, the faculty has 22 years of teaching experience. Eight outdoor athletic fields on site. Each year NA has three major drama productions, two dance concerts, and multiple performances in 12 choral and instrumental groups. Offers AP courses in 15 subjects. Upper School students are required to engage in cultural or environmental exploration. Currently, there are 10 programs for extended off-campus study in six states and four countries. Tuition is $28,775 plus another $1700 in fees plus transportation.
"A Newark Academy education represents an investment in your child’s future, and we recognize that choosing an independent school education requires a significant commitment to financial planning and prioritizing by families. Allocating resources to secure the best education for your children enables them to develop the tools necessary for success: self-confidence and determination; disciplined analysis and creativity; empathy and integrity; and character and intellect."
http://www.newarka.edu/support/annualgiving
"The school has an annual fund that raised $1million in 09-10 because "the cost of an independent school education is such that tuition and fees do not cover the total cost of educating each student. Our full tuition pays for 82 percent of actual "cost to educate." As is the case with many other independent schools, our fundraising efforts seek gifts in order to bridge the gap between tuition and the actual cost of operating the school."
12/2/2010
Students in Newark Academy’s politics of change class had the opportunity to view the thought-provoking documentary film, "Waiting for Superman." Renowned journalist and current parent Jonathan Alter is one of the educational experts featured in this film.
Alter himself attended Phillips Andover. His wife is a producer for Stephen Colbert. which is no doubt one reason Colbert has repeatedly had Rhee, Guggenheim, & Canada on his show.
There's an old quote that comes out the early labor movement: "First they ignore you. Then they ridicule you. And then they attack you and want to burn you. And then they build monuments to you."
From the heat coming off the attacks from ed journalism's junkyard jackass opinionator, Jon Alter, there is a fire being stoked by the Billionaire Boys Club, where an inability to buy the truth has reached a crisis point that demands that the truth tellers, now, be burned at the stake.
Long before the stakes were set and the wood piled, however, Alter was the well-worn, um, tool, shall we say, for the corporate thrusting that has long sought to degrade and humiliate those resisting the corporatization of schools. A couple of earlier examples that would come to inspire the likes of Governor Scott Walker and Chris Christie, the first from 2008, when Alter was writing for the bankrupt rag, Newsweek:
. . . .Railing against the tyranny of tests is fashionable, but it isn't going to save our children and our economy in the 21st century. Nor will more money for important programs like art and music. The more basic problem is that we have no way of determining which teachers can actually teach. That's right: teaching is arguably the only profession in the country with ironclad job security and a well-honed hostility to measuring results.. . .
. . . .General elections are won among moderate swing voters, many of whom would respond well to a Democratic candidate willing to show he can slip the ideological stranglehold of a retrograde liberal interest group. Obama's right that the NCLB-inspired testing mania is out of control, but wrong to give teachers "ownership over the design of better assessment tools." That's a recipe for no assessment, because the teachers unions, for all their lip service, don't believe their members should be judged on performance. They still believe that protecting incompetents is more important than educating children. . . . .
This rant goes on with all the Gates/Broad/Walton talking points, expressed through Alter's tough-twerp rhetoric, but here is my favorite part, where Alter suggests holding back Title I funds (for those poorest children that Alter wants to help) as a way to bribe school systems (RTTT, anyone?) to make alterations in collective bargaining arrangements with teachers:
Obama should hold a summit of all 50 governors and move them toward national standards and better recruitment, training and evaluation of teachers. He should advocate using Title I federal funding as a lever to encourage "thin contracts" free of the insane work rules and bias toward seniority, as offered by the brilliant new superintendent in Washington, D.C., Michelle Rhee. . . .
He [Gates] called President-elect Obama last week and reports back cheerily that Obama "said all the right things" about including big money for education in the stimulus package and making fundamental school reform (not the fake kind pushed by teachers unions) a priority. . . . When I lumped Gates in with the "bomb throwers" on education, he chuckled and didn't disagree.
And a gem from 2010, again part of another borderline-erotic tribute to Alter's "micro-hard hombre" patron, Bill Gates:
There’s a backlash against the rich taking on school reform as a cause. Some liberals figure they must have an angle and are scapegoating teachers. But most of the wealthy people underwriting this long-delayed social movement for better performance are on the right track.
I can see them, all former Corps (TFA) members, sipping lattes and hugging their clipboards around the table at the Gates Foundation and singing KIPP Shall Overcome.
The latest from Alter came yesterday, this poorly-written and hurried piece of drivel that recycles Alter's previously-used Whitaker Chambers insult aimed at Diane Ravitch, for whom the bonfire is now laid. Alter was even handed a jibe to throw in from Oligarchs' chief stooge at ED, Arne Duncan:
Arne Duncan, President Barack Obama’s normally mild- mannered education secretary, has finally had enough. “Diane Ravitch is in denial and she is insulting all of the hardworking teachers, principals and students all across the country who are proving her wrong every day,” he said when I asked about Ravitch this week.
Eight pro-Ravitch comments were posted at the Bloomberg site before they stopped taking any more, even though hundreds of anti-Alter tweets have been posted.
The Oligarchs' strategy is obvious: Invite the shrinking minority of teachers at schools that haven't been blown up yet to the bonfire, where the stakes are in place for those who speak the truth. Hope to divide--hope to conquer--burn the rest. This came from Arne's press secretary yesterday afternoon:
EDPressSec @arneduncan: @DianeRavitch in denial & insulting hardworking teachers, principals & students proving her wrong every day me.lt/760ka
I hope everyone reading this has a hundred characters or so to say on the matter.
The conflict of interest inherent in having a media company owned by a powerful politician would probably be easier to explain away if that media company's new opinion arm refrained from directly attacking prominent critics of the boss. But Bloomberg View, like Bloomberg himself, doesn't care what nitpicking critics say. That's why no editor there thought it unseemly of Bloomberg View to run a Jonathan Alter piece attacking education policy expert Diane Ravitch, a vociferous critic of Mayor Bloomberg's handing of the New York City schools system.
There was already a minor controversy when it was reported that the opinion arm of Bloomberg's media company -- a company he is not supposed to be directly running while he's mayor -- would be located not at corporate HQ, but at the offices of the Bloomberg Family Foundation, where the mayor is allowed to participate in day-to-day operations.
Alter, formerly of Newsweek, is no lazy hack. He is smart and hard-working. Mayor Bloomberg didn't directly assign some shameless attack dog to go after one of his critics. Alter obviously sincerely agrees with the Bloomberg philosophy. But it still looks seriously inappropriate, like Mayor Mike's P.R. department firing off a response to this recent Ravitch op-ed.
And Alter's piece is not very impressive or convincing! It basically says that Alter and his friends are right and Ravitch is wrong, and it is full of very un-self-aware passages accusing her of caricature while very clumsily caricaturing all of Ravitch's arguments.
Ravitch is the author of a very good book that deflates many of the "success stories" and arguments of the very well-funded and powerful education reform movement, a movement supported by the elites in both political parties and on almost every editorial board in the nation. All the money is behind it. The only powerful institutional force that isn't gung-ho about the McKinsey-ification of public schooling is the teachers' unions, and so Ravitch is generally painted as a pawn of that particular "special interest." (Right-wing think tankers, millionaire centrist liberals, and highly paid corporate consultants are not a "special interest," they are just the people who are right about everything.)
When Alter says Ravitch "uses phony empiricism to rationalize almost every tired argument offered by teachers unions," we're meant to hiss at the invocation of the bad guy in this story. "Phony empiricism" means "data that contradict data used by pro-reform sources." Like the data that showed that the miraculous test score gains made by New York school children after two terms of complete control of the school system by Mayor Bloomberg were illusory.
But it's fine for Alter to disagree with Ravitch or accuse her of misusing statistics or insulting hard-working MBAs opening up for-profit charter schools across this great nation. It's just doesn't seem right to read this side of the argument under the name "BLOOMBERG."
Tom Friedman and Jonathan Alter have a couple of things in common besides their principle concern for having others listen to them without interruption.
Both share an abiding faith in technocracy to solve the problems that technology creates, and both embrace a blithely-oppressive brand of self-consuming and human-gobbling capitalism that places Man squarely under the unholy, heavy Thumb of the Market's invisible Hand. Their shared religion often brings them together to sit at the feet of high priest, Bill Gates, with their notepads at the ready to receive the Word on any number of problems, real or manufactured, that Gates pretends to know something about, while the millionaires at Microsoft scurry around developing the product lines to make Bill's wise solutions realizable in ways that increase market share
Gates had turned his eye toward the half-trillion dollars that Americans spend on education long before Rupert Murdoch hired the hapless Joel Klein to advise News Corporation on how to get in on the ed bonanza. In fact, Gates's recent enthusiasms for hand-held data phasers led, I would guess, to Murdoch's ridiculously-overpriced purchase of Wireless Generation, the company that had NYC Schools as a client during Klein's lucrative tenure. We must wonder how long it will take Microsoft to gobble up Wireless Generation if their ridiculous gadget can be made indispensable by the ed marketeers.
So combine Alter's worship of Gates with his schoolyard bully's attitude toward public education, and you have a very valuable propaganda weapon that Team Oligarch uses on a regular basis to soften up the ground ahead of new corporate ed campaigns. Alter delivers in his most recent piece in the bankrupt Newsweek rag, with so many malicious distortions and sucker punches that it will take more than a single post to sort them out. The first one comes in the lead paragraph as a familiar form of fearplay that predictably precedes the outright assault. Ladies and gentlemen, the education crisis redux, once more, again:
Bill Gates is raising his arm, bent at the elbow, in the direction of the ceiling. The point he’s making is so important that he wants me and the pair of Gates Foundation staffers sitting in the hotel conference room in Louisville, Ky., to recognize the space between this thought and every lower-ranking argument. “If there’s one thing that can be done for the country, one thing,” Gates says, his normally modulated voice rising, “improving education rises so far above everything else!” He doesn’t say what the “else” is—deficit reduction? containing Iran? free trade?—but they’re way down toward the floor compared with the arm above that multibillion-dollar head. With the U.S. tumbling since 1995 from second in the world to 16th in college-graduation rates and to 24th place in math (for 15-year-olds), it was hard to argue the point. Our economic destiny is at stake.
Let's look at some facts before we go any further, rather than taking seriously Alter's distortions and lies that he uses to create the illusion of a disaster and, thus, making the Gates plan inevitable and urgently needed. First off, a good reporter goes beyond Wikipedia to get his facts. The U. S. is, in fact, 12th and not 16th in college graduation rates when compared with other developed nations. And rather than "tumbling" down to the 12th spot, other countries, rather, have moved up faster percentage-wise in comparison to the U. S. Finland, for instance, more than doubled the percentage of its population with bachelors' degrees from 1995 to 2007 (from 20% to 46%), while the U. S. moved up a single point from 33% to 34%. We must wonder how much Finland's K12 reforms have contributed to this surge in college completion. Perhaps there is some legitimacy to reforms built on rich curriculums with supportive and challenging schools for all, high-status professional teaching, and the elimination high-stakes standardized testing.
Even with eleven other countries leading the U. S. in percentages of college grads, this kind of statistic is highly misleading, as Bracey pointed out many times. Finland's population is about 5.3 million souls, while the U. S. population exceeds 310 million. When extrapolated from the entire population, Finland's 46 percent would represent about 2.4 million folks with degrees, whereas the U. S.'s 34 percent would represent 105 million individuals with degrees. End of emergency, crisis, disaster, etc.
The 24th spot in math for 15 year olds is another distortion, when we take into consideration the actual numbers of American students scoring at the highest levels, when compared to Finland, Singapore, etc. From Bracey, December 9, 2008 at HuffPo:
Principle 23 of the "principles of data interpretation" that organize "Reading Educational Research: How to Avoid Getting Statistically Snookered," reads "If the situation really is as alleged ask, 'So what?'" The question does not call for some smart-ass response, it calls for an evaluation of the consequences of the situation. So the U. S. is not #1 in mathematics or science testing. So what? So, very little.
First, comparing nations on average scores is a pretty silly idea. It's like ranking runners based on average shoe size or evaluating the high school football team on the basis of how fast the average senior can run the 40-yard dash. Not much link to reality. What is likely much more important is how many high performers you have. On both TIMSS math and science, the U. S. has a much higher proportion of "advanced" scorers than the international median although the proportion is much smaller than in Asian nations.
This was not true on PISA, another international comparison that tests 15-year-olds. Only 1.5% of American students scored at the highest level compared to top performing New Zealand at 4% and second place Finland at 3.9%. Yet the proportion of Americans at the highest level meant that 70,000 kids scored there compared to about 2,000 for New Zealand and Sweden. No one else even came close--Japan was second with about 33,000 top performers. These are the people who might end up creating leading edge technology in the future. Who cares if Singapore, with about the same population as the Washington Metro Area, and Hong Kong, with about twice that number, score high? There aren't many people there. (And, as journalist Fareed Zakariya found out, the Singapore kids fade as they become adults. More about that in a moment). The bad news is that the U. S., on PISA anyway, had many more students scoring at the lowest levels; these kids likely can't compete for the good jobs in the country.
Brief interruption: The U. S. has much a higher ranking in another important category that is not on Gates's or Alter's radar screens:
According to data compiled by the OECD in 2008, the United States has a child poverty rate of 20.6%, which makes the United States rank fourth out of thirty OECD countries ranked in that category. Turkey ranks first, with a child poverty rate of 24.6%.
(Click chart to feel sick).
Back to Bracey's beautiful rant:
Second, test scores, at least average test scores, don't seem to be related to anything important to a national economy. Japan's kids have always done well, but the economy sank into the Pacific in 1990 and has never recovered. The two Swiss-based organizations that rank nations on global competitiveness, the Institute for Management Development and the World Economic Forum, both rank the U. S. #1 and have for a number of years. The WEF examines 12 "pillars of competitiveness," only one of which is education. We do OK there, but we shine on innovation. Innovation is the only quality of competitiveness that does not show at some point diminishing returns. Building bigger and faster airplanes can only improve productivity so much. Innovation has no such limits. When Zakariya asked the Singapore Minister of Education why his high-flying students faded in after-school years, the Minister cited creativity, ambition, and a willingness to challenge existing knowledge, all of which he thought American excelled in. But, as Bob Sternberg of Tufts University has pointed out, our obsession with standardized testing has produced one of the best instruments in the nation's history for stifling creativity.
But really, does the fate of the nation rest on how well 9- and 13-year-olds bubble in answer sheets? I don't think so. Neither does British economist, S. J. Prais. We look at the test scores and worry about the nation's economic performance. Prais looks at the economic performance and worries about the validity of the test scores: "That the United States, the world's top economic performing country, was found to have school attainments that are only middling casts fundamental doubts about the value and approach of these [international assessments]."
Third, even if comparisons of average test scores were a meaningful exercise, it only looks at one dimension--the supply side. Predictably, the results gave rise to calls for more spending on science instruction. This ignores the fact that we have more scientists and engineers than we can absorb. In one study, Lindsay Lowell of Georgetown University and Harold Salzman of the Urban Institute found that we mint three new engineers for every new job (this is from permanent residents and citizens, not foreigners). More disturbing was the attrition rate. While educators fret over losing 50% of teachers in 5 years (and well they should), Lowell and Salzman found that engineering loses 65% in two years. Why? Low pay, lousy working conditions, little chance for advancement. American schools of engineering are dominated by foreigners because only people from third world nations can view our jobs as attractive. In fact, long-time science writer, Dan Greenberg, invented a new position for those emerging with Ph.D.'s: post-doc emeritus.
Schools are doing a great job on the supply side. Business and industry are doing a lousy job on the demand side. The oil industry, responding to increased demand for oil exploration raised the entry-level salaries for petroleum engineers by 30-60%. The number of students lining up to be petroleum engineers has doubled and enrollment at Texas Tech has increased sixfold.
As usual in these comparisons, Americans in low-poverty schools look very good, even in mathematics. They would be ranked third in the 4th grade (among 36 nations) 6th in the 8th grade (among 47 nations). This is important because while other developed nations have poor children, the U. S. has a much higher proportion and a much weaker safety net. When UNICEF studied poverty in 22 wealthy nations, the U. S. ranked 21st.
Finally, there are some curiosities that will take some time to analyze. Critics are fond of pointing to the Czech Republic as a nation that spend much less than we do on schools but scores much higher. Not this time. The Czech Republic has seen catastrophic drops in its math scores since 1995, 54 points in 4th grade, 63 points in 8th grade and is now well below the United States in both grades.
Forty-percent of Koreans reached the highest level in 8th grade math. In PISA, only 1.1% did. Note that that is fewer than the 1.5% of American students at the highest level in PISA.
Then there are the gender differences: For some countries there are huge differences in 8th-grade mathematics---favoring females. Of the eight countries with the largest differences, only Thailand is not an Islamic nation. Does this reflect which girls get to go to school in these countries? I don't know.
P. S. Overall the U. S. did pretty well in both subjects at both grades.
Newsweek's Jonathan Alter is one of the go-to guys on MSNBC who can be counted on to offer the current centrist cynicism with a touch of irony for most all political issues worth the gossip. Alter is smart and somewhat personable, though I suspect his hair shortage has left him a bit bitter. Alter is well-connected, nonetheless, in Washington and knows all the corporate talking points on education, but unfortunately for his readers, that's all he knows on the subject.
Two days ago Caroline Grannam took to task NBC for some inflated numbers they used regarding how many former KIPPsters are in college. Rather than going to the other end of the horse where NBC got their numbers, Grannan went to the horse's mouth, KIPP's home office. Instead of 12,800 students in college, there were last summer 447:
Actually, KIPP runs almost all middle schools and has only been running a few long enough to have their graduates finish high school and go to college. I pinned them down on the number after Newsweek wrote in July 2008 that 12,800 KIPP graduates had gone on to college.
The actual number of KIPP alumni who had started college, KIPP spokesman Steve Mancini said at that time, was 447. Again, that's the number of KIPP graduates who had started college by 2008. (KIPP claims to track them carefully even though of course they're long gone from KIPP by that time.)
I went to the July 21, 2008 Newsweek, and sure enough, there was Alter's shiny pate beside his cheerleading article full of misinformation about KIPP. Here's the clip:
The irony is, we know what works to close the achievement gap. At the 60 KIPP (Knowledge Is Power Program) schools, more than 80 percent of 16,000 randomly selected low-income students go to college, four times the national average for poor kids. While KIPP isn't fully replicable (not enough effective teachers to go around), every low-income school should be measured by how close it gets to that model, where kids go to school from 7:30 a.m. to 5 p.m. and part of the summer, and teachers are held strictly accountable for showing student improvement.
The reason that KIPP "isn't fully replicable," Jonathan, is not because there are not enough good teachers but, rather, there are not enough good teachers who can give up their lives to the total compliance of KIPP's missionary sect. KIPP could not, in fact, operate without the constant infusion of two-year Ivy League temps from Teach for America, untrained neophytes who know less about teaching than they do about the psychological manipulations of Dr. Martin Seligman. This is from a 2008 SRI International study on the five KIPP schools in the Bay Area:
Since 2003-04, the five Bay Area KIPP school leaders have hired a total of 121 teachers. Of these, 43 remained in the classroom at the start of the 2007-08 school year. Among teachers who left the classroom, at four of the schools they spent a median of 1 year in the classroom before leaving; at one school, the typical teacher spent 2 years in the classroom before leaving (32).
SRI researchers found teachers committed but clearly doubtful of their capacity to continue under the stress of 65 hours of school-related work per week (includes 2 hours per night for telephone homework assistance).One veteran teacher told researchers: “The consequence is I can’t do this job very much longer. It is too much. I don’t see any solution with our structure and our nonnegotiables. No one has really presented any way to solve that problem” (35).
And so TFA continues to spend more each year on recruiting new replacement neophytes than it does on training them to teach in KIPP's psychological sterilization camps.
NBC's recent coverage of KIPP had another lie from the same Jon Alter paragraph cited above. Alter puts the percentage of poor kids entering college at 20 percent, whereas the percentage of KIPP kids going to college he puts at 80 percent. This 20 percent figure was parroted in the NBC report. Here is some context for these numbers, which has everything to do with washouts, pushouts, dropouts, and lies outright .
In the SRI study of five KIPP schools in the Bay Area, researchers found that 60 percent of 5th grade students in five Oakland KIPP schools who began KIPP in 5th grade did not finish 8th grade:
Together, the four schools began with a combined total of 312 fifth graders in 2003-04, and ended with 173 eighth graders in 2006-07 (see Exhibit 2-3). The number of eighth graders includes new students who entered KIPP after fifth grade (12).
If, then, the 40 percent of children who survive KIPP from grade 5 through 8 all finish high school, then 30-35 percent of children who began KIPP in fifth grade will eventually go on to college. That would still be an impressive percentage if we were to accept Alter’s claim that, nationally, only 20 percent of poor kids go to college. According to a 2008 report from the National Center for Public Policy and Higher Education, however, the percentage of “poor kids” attending college after high school is, in fact, 52 percent, rather than 20 percent as Alter claims:
In terms of family income, 91% of high school students from families in the highest income group (above $100,000) enroll in college. The enrollment rate for student from middle-income families (from $50,001 to $100,000) is 78% and for those in the lowest income group ($20,000 and below) the rate is 52% (p. 7).
A correction or a retraction will be accepted from NBC and from Newsweek.
