Bill Gates Among Top Quartile of Aspiring Wizards

One of Obama's bosses on education is making news noise again, with his corporate-spun notions on how to make the next generation of children the servants of Microsoft. Among his favorite ideas is turning urban education over to the KIPP-inspired brainwashers and prison guards trained in the happy talk pop psychology of CIA advisor, Dr. Martin Seligman, whose mind fix for the poor is viewed as the affordable solution to a social fix that is much too expensive for the richest men in the world to consider. Never mind that these KIPP testing chain gangs have teacher and student attrition rates that make such "schools" entirely unsustainable beyond the boutique model within which they now grind out their test scores while turning poor children into automatons.

Another of Bill's favorite ideas is a pay-per-score plan that rewards good teaching. What is good teaching? Well, good teaching produces good test scores. And what makes good test scores? Well, it's good teaching, of course. As the good professor explained about the origin of turtles, it's turtles, then, all the way down.

. . . .Fixing what is wrong with American learning, Gates said, requires new ways of looking at its problems.

Teachers are rewarded for "seniority and master's degrees," he said, and that is not the best way to ensure educational quality.

Critical in determining whether a student will drop out of high school, he said, is whether he or she connects with a good teacher in the fifth to eighth grades and develops a passion for lifelong learning.

A quality teacher would boost scores by 10 percentage points in a single year, Gates noted. "What that means is that if, in the United States, for two years, our teachers were all top-quartile teachers, the differences between the United States and the very best scores in the world would go away," he said. "We should identify those teachers, we should reward them, we should retain them, we should make sure other teachers learn from them."

The economic-recovery money creates new opportunities for public and private partnerships. . . .

And how would Bill have our teachers crank out the highest test scores in the world? Simple, he would have all teachers improve so that they would produce test scores that would put them in the top quartile of test score producers, i. e., test score producers such that they would be more effective than 75-99% of all teachers. Even for a duplicitous jerk like Bill Gates, this is an astonishing expectation to put on teachers, here or in Timbuktu. Here's why, as patiently explained by Richard Rothstein in Class and Schools . . . (2004):

. . . improving teacher quality so that all teachers rise to the top quintile of effectiveness is a fanciful goal. Policy makers who cite Dr. Sanders [or Bill Gates] do not appreciate how unattainable is a 40 percentile gain--voving teachers from about the 50th percentile in effectiveness to about the 90th [or 87th]. This is more than what researchers call a full standard deviation. In no field can a policy reform reasonably aim for such enormous gain.

And here is an analogy that Rothstein offers to "help think about whether we can possibly recruit or train teachers to be as good as the 90th [or 87th] percentile group:"

In 2000, real median household income in the U.S. was $42,000 a year. The 90th percentile income was $112,000 a year, nearly three times as much. We could imagine radical labor market or macroeconomic policies that might raise typical household incomes up to, say, $45,000 or even $50,000 in a few years. But policies to move the median to $112,000 are unimaginable. Improvement of 40 [or 35] percentile points up a distribution is not a real world aspiration (p. 65).

The value for Gates and the other Oligarchs of such fanciful thinking comes from putting the achievement bar at an unachievable level. In doing so, teachers, students, administrators will never do enough to satisfy the corporate bosses who stand on the sidelines with their junk science, their media scourges, and their big scary threats about China and India and Korea eating our lunch. See NCLB.

If Gates had his way, of course, none of us on this side of the curtain would know enough to peek backstage. That is not the case, however, yet. In fact, you can come out from behind the curtain now, Mr. Gates: your balloon is ready to take you aloft.

$350M For "World Class" Test: $0 For "World Class" Standards

With few takers for Dunc's $5 billion set aside for bribing states into more charter schools, pay-per-score plans, and lifelong data surveillance systems, Arne has put aside $350 million for the testing companies who have pencil-ready projects ready to go into action. Does the announcement in Cary, NC mean that SAS's Bill Sanders has a 10 minute head start?

What about standards, you say, upon which to build the new super tests? If that work is to be done at all, it will be done by educators, so there is no need for any extra money to do it. Most likely this new unidirectional and mono-cultural dead end will have the same cart full of bubble sheets leading the same old horse, See Basics, long beaten to the ground by repeated generations of bold backwards thinkers.

. . . .Any tests developed for the new standards would probably replace existing ones.

Asked to explain the money's focus on developing more tests, Duncan said developing the standards themselves would be relatively inexpensive.

Developing assessments, by contrast, is a "very heavy lift financially," he said, expressing concern that the project could stall without federal backing. . . .

To have such an opportunity for the rebuilding and renewal of American public education put in the hands of such arrogant morons is truly a crime against American children.

Michelle Rhee And the Venture-Philanthropic Conspiracy

conspiracy, noun, pl. -cies.
1. the act of conspiring; secret planning to do something unlawful or wrong.

From American Prospect's Tapped:

WHERE WOULD THE D.C. MERIT PAY MONEY COME FROM?

An ongoing mystery in the D.C. teachers' contract negotiations has been exactly which private philanthropies have promised schools chancellor Michelle Rhee millions of dollars to fund her aggressive proposed merit pay plan. . . .

. . . .A FOIA request for Rhee's schedule, made by the Washington City Paper, now confirms what many edu-wonks have long guessed: that Bill Gates and real-estate mogul Eli Broad are likely behind the D.C. reform plan. Rhee met with the Gates Foundation 10 times since June 2007, and with the Broad foundation 11 times. She also had 8 contacts with the New Schools Venture Fund, which supports public charter schools such as the KIPP network, as well as the for-profit Edison schools. And sure to be controversial in Democratic D.C., Rhee also met multiple times with the Annie E. Casey Foundation, run by a Reagan administration vet, and with the Walton Family Foundation, the Wal-Mart family's charity, which has focused on school "accountability" efforts.

None of this is particularly surprising, considering Rhee's history as the founder of the New Teacher Project, an entrepreneurial, union-skeptic organization supported by some of these same philanthropies. But the City Paper's digging serves as a reminder of the ideological commitments of those who are supporting Rhee's reform efforts.

Please do check out the impressive list from Washington City Paper, which should be applauded for doing the work of journalists, while the corporate test company, the Washington Post, remains one of those outfits in secret meetings with the Queeen of Pain:

THE WASHINGTON POST CO.

Calendar Clout: At least two dozen contacts since June 2007

Key Rendezvous: With chairman Don Graham at DCPS headquarters on April 9, 2007

The Skinny: The titan of city journalism has given Rhee its unalloyed editorial support since before her appointment was even announced. Rhee’s schedule shows at least a half-dozen contacts with Jo-Ann Armao, the chief writer of local editorials, or the editorial board at large. That’s in addition to lunches with columnists Colby King and William Raspberry. She’s certainly no stranger to Graham; she scheduled a meeting with him, also a Federal City Council honcho, in her office last April. The Post Co.’s philanthropic arm, the Philip L. Graham Fund, hasn’t particularly focused on education, but it did donate $100,000 to New Leaders for New Schools and $150,000 to Venture Philanthropy Partners in 2007.

When Will WaPo Move Jay Mathews to the Opinion Pages?

Every Monday, testing industry lackey, Jay Mathews, gets paid by his patron, Kaplan, Inc, to offer a steamy pile of propaganda under the wildly-inaccurate rubric of "News." If Mathews's cheerleading for corporate welfare schools for the poor, union busting, and more testing is, indeed, news, we must wonder which of the Washington Post's education news we should believe: the Mathews rendition or the one reported by the journalists at WaPo who earn their salaries by the stories they file, rather than which side they take in the stories they file.

Mathews's piece yesterday was aimed principally at praising the Queen of Hearts, Michelle Rhee, for her attempt to bring down tenure and due process for teachers in D. C. schools, all for the sake of, yes, the children. Only secondarily was yesterday's piece aimed at praising the KIPP chain gang schools as the final solution to tenure, to achievement, and to every other shortcoming of the public schools that may be as yet devised. The opening salvo:

Sarah Hayes, principal of the KIPP DC:KEY Academy, realized that two new teachers were not working out. Their résumés and recommendations had been good. They were nice people. But their classes were disorganized, their standards low. Efforts to help them improve had little effect.

If KEY were a traditional school, Hayes's only reasonable option would have been to mentor the teachers, note her dissatisfaction on their evaluations and recommend that they not be kept after a two-year probation. That is the way it goes in most school systems. Staffing rules, tenure agreements and low expectations tend to favor weak teachers unless they do something awful.

But KEY is a public charter school, one of many in the District that do not have such rules. Hayes was able to get the teachers out of her middle school by Christmas and replace them with proven talents, who were freed from other duties at KEY because of flexibility allowed such schools. . . .

The only problem for the Washington Post and for a fact-challenged Jay Mathews is that one of the Post's real reporters, Bill Turque, was filing a story yesterday, too, on the facts surrounding the shortfall of teachers in D.C. classroom five weeks into the first term.

Washington Teachers' Union President George Parker said the high number of vacancies at this point in the school year is a consequence of Rhee's decision to fire 270 teachers over the summer. About 70 were on probation, meaning they had less than two years' experience and could be terminated at any time under District rules. About 200 others were let go after failing to meet a June 30 deadline to obtain certification.

Whoops! Did Mathews just tell an intentional lie or is he so out of touch that he knows not of what he speaks? It's a problem for the Washington Post, either way you look at it.

What I really enjoyed in yesterday's WaPo, however, was the skewering of Mathews by a couple of readers, who commented thusly:

qaz2 wrote:

You have the facts wrong. In the first two years in DCPS teachers are on probation and are easy to dismiss. Teachers become challenging to fire after they have passed the probation period when they shouldn't have been retained if they weren't performing, that is the current standard. I also notice in your example the principal at Key didn't just let them go after a few days of failure, it took months to find replacements, during which I'm sure they tried to train these teachers up in the mean time. With Rhee's strategy only the charters have this option now. We in DCPS now are starving for teachers. Lots of teachers took the buyout seeing this woman is gunning for them. Now we don't have enough teachers to go around. A DCPS school principal with an incompetent teacher on probation can't let them go, because no competent teacher wants to enter the green tier. Not with the Queen of Hearts who is clear that she doesn't have to justify any firings she makes. I would not take a job anywhere that she had the authority to fire me. Job descriptions and employee evaluations are niceties she has made clear she cannot be bothered with.

There is another big problem with this example. Ms Rhee is suggesting we hire lots of inexperienced teachers. Most teachers take a few years to learn the ropes, and depend on mentoring from good experienced teachers. A good principal knows new teachers with just a degree in education and a license to teach are a management challenge. They may have the book knowledge on teaching but they haven't learned practical classroom skills. Let alone the Teach for America folk that Rhee is a big booster of, who come with enthusiasm and little training at all. The problem with her model is it takes the teaching team at each school and tells them not to play together. You are in it for your bonus and retention. Time you spend helping your colleagues is time you could be investing just in your classroom making sure you get the big bonus. Good schools are like a sports team, to be successful they need to work together. Yes sometimes you have to replace people, but more often you succeed by giving your existing players what they need to succeed. The Green tier does away with that. You are in it for your bonus, not the school, not your colleagues, and educating kids is not the end, it is a means to gain the end of the big payout. Talk about creating incentives to cheat on tests!

And then came this smackdown on Mathews's unceasing crowing about the test score accomplishments of the KIPPsters, who put in 12 hour weekdays and every other Saturday grinding away at test prep:

AttorneyDC wrote:

As always, people lauding charter schools and their teachers fail to mention the one very critical difference between charter and public schools: admission and retention of their students.

Schools like KIPP take only those students who apply, and whose families agree to abide by all the extra strictures of the KIPP schools. Note that the great proficiency numbers posted in this article for KIPP only apply to those students who remain at KIPP for all four years. Of the students who are motivated enough to apply to KIPP, many drop out before 8th grade.

It's not surprising that a school which hand-selects its students from a pool of those motivated enough to apply, and then can expel students who do not live up to the rules and expectations, would be left with relatively high-achieving students at the end of the day.

The success of some charter schools to post successes with the subset of their pre-selected students who are not expelled or asked to leave has NO bearing on firing DC public school teachers. Mathews should know better than to make this kind of specious cause and effect argument.

The Test-Textbook Cartel

What is that worthless thirty pounds that cost a hundred dollars in your child's backpack? Why, that is the latest tool developed by the education industrial complex to make the vast majority of children equally stupid around the world, or shall we say, as educationally flat as the EEG readings from Margaret Spellings' frontal lobes. But the children of the oligarchs and their guardians? No, no, they are still reading real books, so civilization is safe.

A sobering piece from the Guardian:

Exam boards are to review the way school textbooks are endorsed after leading authors complained that they are being leant on to write more simplistic texts to win the multi-million pound contracts.

Textbook writers today claim that they are being told to write books which encourage "parrot-learning" to get pupils through exams at the sacrifice of wider critical thinking and learning.

There is widespread concern that children are reading fewer books, losing confidence in reading and enjoying it less after an international study this week found that England had slipped to 19th of 45 countries and provinces in reading skills, down from third five years ago.

The Society of Authors says that in the competition to get an exam board's seal of approval and gain popularity in schools, publishers are producing increasingly narrow textbooks. Elizabeth Haylett, secretary of the society's educational writers group, said: "The textbooks that are being used are being reduced to answer books for the exams. There's no opportunity for children to read beyond the test. They are learning parrot-fashion."

One author of a science textbook, who asked not to be named, was told to write a factually incorrect answer because the mistake had been made in the curriculum and the book had to match. The guidelines say that examining bodies can endorse textbooks but not any one exclusively - schools have to be given options. Publishers cannot explicitly reference where the books' authors have been involved in the exam or curriculum design.

Sue Palmer worked in educational publishing from 1980 until four years ago when she left to write the book Toxic Childhood, which was highly critical of the government's testing regime. She said the guidelines were not being followed.

"It's a cartel - people are writing the exam and then the textbook. The long-term effect is it just becomes a tick list of learning."

Graham Taylor, of the Educational Publishers Council, said: "The idea that a textbook might be tailored to an exam curriculum is logical. Schools want to buy books which will help pupils. It's the schools making the decision and the publishers following."

John Dunford, general secretary of the Association of Schools and College Leaders, said: "Schools want good textbooks geared to the exam syllabus. There's nothing wrong with that but it has gone too far. The textbook should open up new areas of study as well as connecting with the syllabus."

A spokesman for the Joint Council for Qualifications, which represents the major exam boards, said: "Members of JCQ will be meeting next week to review the code of practice."

The educational publishing industry is worth hundreds of millions of pounds a year. Pearson, the largest educational publisher, projected profits of £491m last year.