NPE Pal, Lamar Alexander, Celebrates School Choice Week

To paraphrase Jonathan Kozol:

GOP's idea of school choice is to offer a $7,000 voucher for parents to send their kids to a marginal private school with no oversight. When you and your conservative pals are willing to give poor kids a $25,000 voucher to attend Ensworth, that's when I will become a Republican. https://t.co/BwRYmTkDJH

— James Horn (@Ontogeny100) January 24, 2018

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.

Lamar Alexander, Another Lame Duck

I don't know why we, over time, don't make every public school a charter school....You could not do it overnight, but you could do it over 20, 25 years." --Lamar Alexander, 2013

Even if the former "Education Governor" of Tennessee has not decided on whether or not to run again in 2020 when his current term in the U. S. Senate is up, the people of Tennessee have enough evidence to know if Alexander if fit for another term.  

His tyrannical control of the Senate committee considering Billionaire Betsy for Sec. of Ed., and his decision to turn off his phones to his constituents trying to make their voices heard, and his unwavering support for someone whose only education qualification is in killing public schools, has made him a pariah among public school advocates everywhere, especially in Nashville.

Perhaps Alexander's coming out of the Trumpeteer closet will cause some of the teachers who have been fed the Ravitch/Alexander propaganda on how great ESSA is will begin to have a second look at what amounts to a charter stimulus bill, minus federal oversight.  Lamar knows Betsy is the perfect Secretary to direct traffic in DC, as corporate trucks back up the Department of Education for their loads of tax money intended for education. 

Lamar Alexander Assures Diane Supporters about DeVos

When Diane Ravitch wanted her flock to be herded into supporting the federal charter school expansion legislation known as ESSA, she called upon Lamar Alexander's office to offer a nine-part spin session (see below) designed to mislead, obfuscate, and soothe any remaining skeptics. After all, Diane's support prior to ESSA passage was seminal in neutralizing early resistance to the new blueprint for Ed Reform 2.0.  The least that Alexander could do, as the Bill's co-sponsor, was to offer up his propaganda chief to help baffle any remaining ESSA doubters with tons of regulatory bullshit.

Though Diane's most recent ESSA campaign of political treachery essentially signaled the end of the Fall and Rise of the Reign of Ravitch, she continues to try to distinguish her own policy agenda from the neoliberal ed policies that her actions consistently support, even as she disavows them.  The most recent example can be found in her incessant lambasting of Billionaire Betsy as the educational anti-christ, when, in fact, Betsy DeVos serves as the perfect foil for Ravitch's long-time allowances for corporate welfare non-profit charter schools in her education ecosystem. 

The biggest differences between Betsy and Diane is that Betsy likes any kind of privatization and is proud of it, while Diane has a selective criteria for draining public education funds with segregated charters, and she doesn't like to talk it--at all.  Ravitch would rather pretend, in fact, that she is leading the opposition, even if it directly down the rabbit hole.

Maybe, just maybe, Alexander's office can put to rest any skepticism that remains about Billionaire Betsy.  The temporary delay in her confirmation has not at all altered Alexander's enthusiasm for her eventual rise to power.  His office enthuses:

“Betsy DeVos is an outstanding nominee who has complied with all of the committee’s requirements and no one doubts that she will be confirmed as Education Secretary,” an aide to Alexander said. “This hearing delay is simply to accommodate the Senate schedule.”

Let's see now--how does that old saying go: a friend of my friend is my, what is it, now?

Ravitch Charter Position Gets the Jay Mathews Seal of Approval

Yesterday on "Giving Tuesday" both FairTest and NPE were beating the bushes for donations to prop up their unacknowledged corporate union support of privatization via charter schools and depersonalized learning via computer screens. 

A year ago NPE and FairTest were appealing for support for passage of ESSA, whose chief architect and Senate sponsor, Lamar Alexander, supported a states rights model for ESEA that would give conservative state legislatures (two thirds are Republican) control of billions of Federal dollars that, historically, have been used to provide educational resources for the disadvantaged.  With AFT and NEA on board the Alexander money train, NPE and FairTest could not afford to remain on the platform.

Lamar's version of ESSA passed, of course, and Diane Ravitch turned over her blog to Alexander's Washington office to explain to her readers the virtues of what is essentially a massive federal giveaway program for segregated charter privatization and deeper infusions of the computer tutor to replace teachers.  

Last week Ravitch gave Jay Mathews the chance to announce her support for "non-profit" charter schools and to, therefore, soften the blow for teachers when they see the same charter-friendly rhetoric coming from their union reps.  

Ravitch's position mirrors the Weingarten/Clinton position, which supports more disabled children in the "no excuses" non-profit" segregated hell schools where special services are few or none.  

Ravitch could have made her support for charters conditional on school climate, classroom management conditions, or socioeconomic mix, but she did not. Oh well.

With regards to charter schools, then, the difference between Ravitch and Betsy DeVos is that DeVos also supports for-profit charters.  

As for Lamar Alexander, he loves both Diane and Betsy.  Then, why wouldn't he?

The Alexander-Ravitch Policy Era Grinds On

Valerie Strauss is publishing interviews by oddball and Disruptor Foundation Fellow, C. M. Rubin, who is in the process of interviewing six "potential" candidates for Secretary of Education under the next President Clinton. 

Diane Ravitch's is the most recent interview offered at Valerie's WaPo blog.

Ravitch begins her first response to the first question by labeling our sordid modern history of racist standardized testing the "Bush-Obama policies." Even though the standardized testing ideology has been around for over a hundred years, Diane would have been much more accurate to label the modern-day fixation on testing as the "Alexander-Ravitch policies," as Lamar and Diane provided the foundation upon which Bush II and Obama built their shaky edifices.

After all, it was during the mid-to-late 1980s that Lamar gained national prominence as the nation's first "Education Governor" by instituting some of the first high stakes grade-level tests in Tennessee and by initiating bonus pay for teachers based on evaluations. 

In 1991, Alexander leveraged his bullshit reforms in Tennessee into the Secretary of Education slot under Bush I.  With recommendations from Checker Finn, Lamar hired Diane as his Assistant Secretary in charge of research at ED, even though Ravitch had never even written a doctoral dissertation.  But that did not matter: Diane had attended elite colleges, had never trained as an educator, had never been a teacher, and she marched to drummers at the Hoover Institution.  

In the years leading up to her post at ED, however, Diane had already gained lot high-level experience in using test scores to demonize public schools.  She was part of Washington's inner circle of former Reaganites and corporate enemies of public education who pushed through a set ridiculous cut scores for NAEP in 1992, in order to exaggerate the weaknesses of public schools:

In 1993, the National Academy of Education argued that NAEP’s achievement-setting processes were “fundamentally flawed” and “indefensible.” That same year, the General Accounting Office concluded that “the standard-setting approach was procedurally flawed, and that the interpretations of the resulting NAEP scores were of doubtful validity.” The National Assessment Governing Board, or NAGB, which oversees NAEP, was so incensed by an unfavorable reportRequires Adobe Acrobat Reader it received from Western Michigan University in 1991 that it looked into firing the contractor before hiring other experts to take issue with the university researchers’ conclusions that counseled against releasing NAEP scores without warning about NAEP’s “conceptual and technical shortcomings.”

In addition, NAGB absorbed savage criticism from the National Academy of Sciences, which concluded in 1999 that “NAEP’s current achievement-level-setting procedures remain fundamentally flawed. The judgment tasks are difficult and confusing; raters’ judgments of different item types are internally inconsistent; appropriate validity evidence for the cut scores is lacking; and the process has produced unreasonable results. ... The results are not believable.”

Oh, did I mention that Diane was a member of NAEP's governing board from 1995 to 2004?  Did she help to fix any of the preposterous benchmarks while she was a Board member? No, she did not.

As recently as 2009, the U.S. Department of Education received a report on NAEP from the University of Nebraska’s Buros Institute. This latest document expressed worries about NAEP’s “validity framework” and asked for a “transparent, organized validity framework, beginning with a clear definition of the intended and unintended uses of the NAEP assessment scores. We recommend that NAGB continue to explore achievement-level methodologies.” In short, for the last 20 years, it has been hard to find any expert not on the Education Department’s payroll who will accept the NAEP benchmarks uncritically.

In all of her truth-telling about corporate ed reform since her 2009 reprogramming by Randi Weingarten and Richard Rothstein, has Diane ever admitted that NAEP benchmarks are a joke?  

Nah, in fact she holds up NAEP as the gold standard, and in her interview with Rubin she pretends to advocate, even though her support for ESSA shows otherwise, for a national testing policy that emphasizes tests "only for diagnostic purposes."  With cut scores like NAEP's "diagnostic tests," who needs anything more, right?

The most troubling aspect of the latest Ravitch interview, however, comes when Ms. Rubin asks her what the role of education should be in solving the problems of income inequality.  

Q) What should the role of education be in solving our income inequality problems? 

A) Education is opportunity. For some children, it will be their path out of poverty. For many others, schools are unable to overcome the burdens of poverty. We most certainly have far too much income inequality. 

The best way to solve it would be for government to provide children’s grants so that no child grows up in abject poverty. 

That, plus investing in the rebuilding of our infrastructure so that there are jobs for those who are able and willing to work. As Bob Herbert demonstrated in his book “Losing Our Way,” we need to rebuild our bridges, tunnels, highways, and other parts of our infrastructure. There should be enough work for all.

Education should offer equality of educational opportunity to all children. Schools in every neighborhood, regardless of zip code, should offer an excellent education, including the arts, foreign languages, play, technology, history, literature, the sciences, mathematics, and opportunities to create and make things.

Education is opportunity?  Really, Diane?  Not only does she show a thorough lack of imagination in advocating for what amounts to a child poverty voucher that would would be applied to remove "abject" from the poverty that children struggle in, but she ignores the Coleman research and the half-century of research since on the power of socioeconomic integration.  

Does Diane really believe that a poverty voucher and an enriched curriculum in a high-poverty segregated school is what education can do to address income inequality? Does Diane remember that the Supreme Court agreed unanimously over a half century ago that separate education is inherently unequal? Can she be so out of touch with the research and the social realities on the ground? 

If she does believe this backwards nonsense that she is espousing, then she is truly qualified to be the next Secretary of Education, since that is exactly what Hillary Clinton will be looking for.

But don't count on Ravitch leaving her present position any time soon.  She is much too valuable as a dependable shepherd for the Washington establishment, patiently leading her sheep into a box canyon by talking tough and pretending to advocate against policies that she and Lamar have supported for a long time.

States Rights and ESSA

by Ken Derstine
March 3, 2016
Also blogged at Defend Public Education!

President Obama signing the Every Child Succeeds Act

There is an aspect of ESSA that I fear is being overlooked by those examining this complex bill, but is the thief in the night that will advance the corporate reform agenda. That is the aggressive promotion of states rights in ESSA. This is a special project of Senator Lamar Alexander as the article linked below details.
 
States rights has historically been the most reactionary aspect of the U.S. Constitution. The authors of the Constitution needed the slaveocracy to support the new Constitution, so they instituted the "Three-Fifths Compromise" which gave the slave states the power to continue slavery and count slaves as part of their state representation. This gave the slave states a third more seats in Congress and dominance of the Supreme Court for a century.

Though the Civil War and the 13th and 14th Amendments ended the slavocracy, states rights was the main method of continuing slavery under another name through the maintaining of Jim Crow segregation and opposition to the federal government enforcing civil rights.

So it is disturbing to see states rights being a central plank of ESSA. Thirty years of neo-liberal federal education policy, especially promoted by Bill Clinton, has made people think that, most recently, the legacy of Arne Duncan, to be continued by John King, means we must return to state control of education. The corporate reform agenda promoted by the federal Department of Education will now be promoted in each states' Department of Education.

Look at this article in Ed Week last week:

NGA Organizes Coalition of Education Groups to Monitor ESSA Implementation | State EdWatch - Ed Week

The Coalition listed in the article includes:

In addition to the NGA, the network is made up of the National Association of State Boards of Education, the National School Boards Association, AASA, the School Superintendents Association, the National Association of Elementary School Principals, the National Association of Secondary School Principals, the American Federation of Teachers, the National Education Association, and the National PTA. 

President Obama shaking Randi Weingarten's hand at the signing of ESSA.

Lamar Alexander is behind Obama.

Why are the AFT and NEA joining with the National Governors Association and the anti-Opt Out National PTA among others in promoting this reactionary policy? This gives the corporate privatizers unregulated powers within states to privatize public education through such organizations as ALEC. This can be seen in Chicago where the Chicago Public Schools Board is being blocked by the Illinois State Charter School Commission from closing three charter schools.

CPS, CTU unlikely allies against state charter commission | Chicago Sun Times

The abolition of the Department of Education has long been the goal of the extreme right in America precisely over the issue of states rights. What needs to be changed is the political leadership at all levels of government. The neo-liberal agenda has been the wolf in sheep's clothing which has taken us backward.

We need a federal Department of Education free of all corporate interests and headed by experienced educators and academics with knowledge in child psychology and pedagogy which will advance the development of a democratic society.


Also see:

Lamar Alexander's ESSA: Room for John King, but not Opting Out
duetch29 - March 2, 2016

WARNING Connecticut–They are coming for your schools and your democratic rights!
Wait What? | March 6, 2016
If you think states rights means more local control, read this!

My Chief Concerns about ESSA
deutsch29 - March 7, 2016

Cashing in on Kids: 172  ALEC Education Bills Push Privatization in 2015
Truthout - March 9, 2016

This is where right-wing radicalism is festering: While the nation watches the presidential race, there are scary things happening at state legislatures
Salon - March 13, 2016

On Line...All the Time?
Educationalalchemy - March 15, 2016
Morna McDermott on how ALEC is promoting CBE in state legislatures.

Non-Transparent Delaware
Exceptional Delaware - March 17, 2016
Delaware is another example that the states rights provisions of ESSA are a reactionary attack on education.

ESSA is Designed to Quell Opting Out. It Won't Work.
deutsch29 - March 18, 2016

Pearson: ESSA Won't Hurt Us a Bit (But Karma Might): AFT, Pearson, and Karma
Curmudgation - March 21, 2016 



With Friends Like These... | Defend Public Education! - July 20, 2015

With Friends Like These... redux | Defend Public Education! - August 3, 2015