A New Generation of Corporate Spinners at Ed Week

I read the corporate media's flagship education magazine, Education Week as a reliable barometer of the story lines being pushed by corporate education reformers.  As in the recent coverage by reporter/editorialist, Madeline Will, who is listed on Ed Week's "Experts" page as having a bachelor's degree in journalism/political science from UNC (Class of '14).

I would expect Ms. Will to move up quickly within the corporate ed reformer reporter ranks at EW, for she already demonstrates strong potential in bending news to fit the ideological needs of a penurious corporate edugarchy that has damn near demolished the idea of school as a humane and creative public space for learning and working.

A couple of Ms. Will's recent pieces demonstrate that she is more than willing to manufacture division out of unity and to take old news and give it new spin.

In "When Strikes Happen, Teachers' Aides Have the Most to Lose," Ms. Will tries to make a distinction between teachers who don't get paid for strike days and teachers' aides who don't get paid for strike days.  What results is a subtle propaganda piece that attempts to create division among the teachers, aides, parents, and kids who are now bonded together in a growing number of states attempting to reclaim the potential for public schools to serve the public, rather than to exploit the public.

It must be scary, indeed, for the billionaires' educarchy and their stooge unions (AFT and NEA) to see a unified front of adults and children who are willing to finally stand up and say, ENOUGH!

Ms. Will's other piece says plenty about her focus with just the title: "Nearly Half of Public School Teachers Are Satisfied with Their Salaries, Data Show."  Another way to report the same facts might have used a headline that aims to capture the bigger point, which is, of course, that 55 percent of teachers were willing to say they were dissatisfied with their salaries, even when the Feds came asking.  Why not use a more appropriate headline: "The Majority of Public School Teachers Are Dissatisfied with Their Salaries, Data Show?"

More puzzling, still, is the use of data that Ms. Will refers to as "a new analysis."  The data, in fact, are from a 2015-2016 survey, which was reported out almost a year ago in August 2017.  What is new, however, is the spin on the data provided just this week by Betsy DeVos's Dept. of Education, which, by the way, focused also on the percentage of "satisfied" teachers.

So even though a new generation of "journalists" is moving to center stage at Ed Week, readers can count on, it seem, a magazine that continues its long tradition of kow-towing to the corporate misleaders and miseducators who have run public education into the ditch.  

Tami Abdollah and John Deasy gush that 'Size Matters'

"Just continue to follow the money. This Race to the Trough will make the Reading First crooks under Bush look like dopey Boy Scouts." — Professor Jim Horn

The neoliberal cabal at Southern California's KPCC can't cheerlead for school privatization loud or frequently enough. Not content with Pat Morrison lobbing softballs to Broad Superintendent Academy graduate and former Gates Foundation employee John Deasy once a week, KPCC's intrepid education beat reporters are always looking for the latest anti-public-school story angle.

Tami Abdollah's latest piece, Size matters in new district-level 'Race to the Top' competition, is a fluffy homage to Deasy and fellow poverty pimp Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa. The light-on-facts article enthusiastically reports the Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD) "has worked to institute a lot of the" corporate reforms and privatization requirements that Duncan, Gates, Broad and Coleman want to see for Race to the Top.

I chimed in with the following commentary:

There's a fundamental misunderstanding of Race to the Top (RTTT) in this article. RTTT funds, if granted, are not for things that actually improve education like smaller class sizes or researched backed academic programs including project based learning and the like.

Instead RTTT funds are earmarked for The Gates Foundation and Education Department's pet projects that don't help educational outcomes at all. If anything, they exacerbate problems. RTTT funds are for more profligate data tracking systems. More mind-numbing standardized tests and test preparation for students already averse to school because of a glut of standardized tests. Moreover, RTTT is to be used for highly discredited pseudo-sciences including VAM/AGT.

The district would be better off finding legitimate sources of funding that they can put into classrooms and school libraries. RTTT represents a windfall for testing companies, publishers, and technology firms, but offers nothing for actual improvement to pedagogy. Pearson, Microsoft, and McGraw Hill stand to gain from LAUSD garnering RTTT.

Schoolchildren, educators, and our communities all stand to lose if LAUSD does somehow get tangled up in Duncan's RTTT bribe scheme.

Corporate Education Reform's Slime Machine Goes After NRC Report

Hoover Institution economist, Eric Hanushek, is one of the chief think tank hacks for corporate education reform and the testing-industrial complex.  His work consistently reminds us of the definition of "ecomomist" as "an expert who will know tomorrow why the things he predicted yesterday did not happen today."  As a perfect example of this characterization, Hanushek much prefers to use empirical data to speculate his way toward a shared acceptance of his plutocratic patrons' preconceived notions by building a statistical house of cards inside a hypothesized future that we can only appreciate in the end for its entertainment value, rather than its factual veracity.

For example, econometric fantasizing has come to be Hanushek's stock-in-trade, as is evidenced in a number of Hanushek's recent non-peer reviewed "working papers." In a recent one that was picked up and reprinted as if it had been published in a peer-reviewed journal, Hanushek claims that "replacing the bottom 5-8 percent of teachers with average teachers could move the U.S. near the top of international math and science rankings with a present value of $100 trillion."

Really?

This past Monday, Harvard's edu-biz magazine, Education Next, published Hanushek's latest attack piece on the National Research Council's Incentives and Test-Based Accountability in Education, a report released last spring with the results of a 9-year investigation into the effectiveness, or lack thereof, of high-stakes tests in U. S. schools for raising student achievement.  Reported in Ed Week and ignored by New York Times (what's new), the NRC's blue-ribbon panel reached two core conclusions that no one, including Hanushek, has refuted or can refute, regardless of how much magical thinking and statistical hyperventilating they engage in:

• Some incentives hold teachers or students accountable, while others affect whole schools. School-level incentives like those used in No Child Left Behind produce some of the larger achievement gains, the report says, but even these have an effect size of only around .08 standard deviations – the equivalent of moving a student currently performing at the 50th percentile to the 53rd percentile. For comparison, raising student performance in the U.S. to the level of the highest-performing nations would require a gain equivalent to a student climbing from the 50th to the 84th percentile (NRC Press Release).

• the use of high school exit exams decreases the high school graduation rate without increasing achievement (PDF Summary).

Since few read Harvard's Education Next outside the corporate foundations and think tanks, the oligarchs' media men pitched the Hanushek retread story to one of those rare paid reporters from Huffington Post, whose work load obviously demands stories more numerous than they are researched.  The result is an uninformed and fawning gloss that leaves unchallenged Hanushek's right-wing misinformation.

Below are a few clips from the HuffPo story that require some clarification or outright challenge:

The question of the effects of testing has long plagued education. Few dispute the need to have some way to take stock of what students learn from their teachers. But critics assert that an emphasis on test-related incentives, such as grades for students and grade-based funding for schools, has tamped down on creativity in the classroom, treating kids like identical items on an assembly line -- without the product.

My dear overworked HuffPo reporter, it is not "the question of the effects of testing that has long plagued education," as you write in your piece.  It is the effects of testing, themselves, that have long plagued education, especially since the inception of NCLB and its fanciful testing targets that have blown up so many public schools over the past nine years.  These negative effects have been documented in a mountain of research and by good reporting over the past decade.  As a place to begin, I highly recommend Tested . . . by reporter, Linda Perlstein.  And criticism of the current testing mania is not aimed at criticizing the grading of students, as you clearly suggest.  Rather, the criticism stems from the counterproductive use a single test of questionable quality to determine the futures of children and their teachers and their schools.

The 112-page-long NRC study came at a critical point during the NCLB discussion -- and it read as a manifesto against the use of testing as a tool to promote learning, Hanushek claims.

Please!  A manifesto sets out a platform, a direction, an agenda, a strategy, etc.  The NRC Report is anything but a manifesto, and it does not read like one, as Hanushek would have you, dear HuffPo reporter, believe.  In fact, one of Hanushek's criticisms in the Education Next piece is that the NRC Report lacks specificity in its recommendations, something never missing in a manifesto.  The NRC Report, rather, is the result of a 9-year empirical research study by a group of scholars that the mainstream Education Week called a "veritable who's who of national experts in education law, economics and sciences."  Notably, it does not include Eric Hanushek. 

Importantly, the NRC Report does not compare effectiveness of NCLB to some other testing universe with low stakes, as the following quote from the HuffPo piece indicates.  This is not only misleading--it is dead wrong.

The report found NCLB to be the most effective test-based policy, but even then, it found that the law's programs moved student performance by eight hundredths of the standard deviation, or from the 50th to the 53rd percentile. Other more low-stakes tests were found to show "effectively zero" effects on achievement. According to the NRC report:

Test-based incentive programs, as designed and implemented in the programs that have been carefully studied, have not increased student achievement enough to bring the United States close to the levels of the highest achieving countries.

This is where taking time to read the NRC Report would have been very helpful in reporting on someone else's version of what the Report said. 

Finally, I take exception with this bit of nonsense from the HuffPo article:

Hanushek, an economist, claims that the .08 standard deviation increase in student learning is not as insignificant as the report makes it sound. According to his calculations, the benefits of such gains outweigh the costs: that amount of learning, he claims, translates to a value of $14 trillion. He notes that if testing is expanded at the expense of $100 per student, the rate of return on that investment is 9,189 percent. Hanushek criticized the report for not giving enough attention to the benefits NCLB provided disadvantaged students.

The report, Hanushek said, hid that evidence.

In the very next paragraph, however, HuffPo quotes Hanushek as saying that his wild claim was, indeed, noted in the Report, even though Hanushek clearly believes that his speculations should be regarded as empirical data that the NRC should have highlighted.  This kind of extrapolated nonsense reminds me of another testing guru from a hundred years ago, eugenicist and IQ test promoter, Lewis Terman. Terman, too, was an accomplished propagandist, and he got great reception in the mass media by coming up with IQ test scores out of thin air for historical figures, everyone from J. S. Bach to George Washington and Abraham Lincoln.  While pulling numbers like this out of your, um, hat makes for great parlor entertainment, no one should take these speculations seriously. Pure hokum, but no less so than Hanushek's econometric hyperbole of $14 trillion or $100 trillion in added value for some, otherwise, worthless test scores.

Finally, HuffPo obviously follows Hanushek's advice and spends the last five four paragraphs documenting the opinions of Paul Hill, one of the NRC panelists whose livelihood is tied directly to the good will and open checkbook of the Gates Foundation.  It would seem that the current mission by the Business Roundtable and the education industry to slime the NRC Report requires the public bad-mouthing even by those panelists who are willing, if their best financial interests require them to do so.

Hill said he was slightly concerned with the report itself, and that its tone was a product of a committee comprised of experts with mixed views on testing. "It said that test-based accountability alone won't raise achievement," he said. "I believe that. Test-based accountability, though, with reasonable supplementary policies … is a good idea."

The apparent anti-testing bias, Hill said, came from those on the committee with backgrounds in education. 

Yes, of course, those ax-grinding educational researchers whose 3 members on the NRC Panel overpowered the other 14 members to hijack a report that would have otherwise presented the worldview of the next generation of testers and tabulators, those visionaries who live for the end of the achievement gap and by its non-arrival.

The Corporate Oligarchy's Mis-Education Nation 2010: Review #2 of Microsoft-NBC's Coverage

Conservative pundit, John Merrow weighs in on the all-out corporate blitzkrieg against public education on Microsoft-NBC.  From a post at HuffPo:

. . . Which brings me to Education Nation, the extravaganza hosted by NBC and broadcast on NBC and MSNBC. It had it all: good, bad and ugly.

You probably know the basics: a huge commitment by NBC to cover 'the crisis in public education.' Everyone got into the act: Matt Lauer and the President on the Today Show, David Gregory on Meet the Press on Sunday, and Brian Williams on NBC Nightly News.

Education Secretary Arne Duncan seemingly dropped everything to be on hand. On Monday he participated in a long one-on-one live broadcast about teaching as a career with Tom Brokaw with cutaways to correspondents on four university campuses. He announced a new federal loan forgiveness program (eerily similar to one that existed in the 1970's). On Tuesday he took part in the final wrap up session with governors, US Representatives, Mayors, school principals and teachers and even one student.

All good so far, right? Who can be against public discussion of education's importance?
Usually the devil is in the details, but in this case the devil was right there in the basic skeleton and structure of the event. This wasn't even remotely a search for truth or an exercise in journalism. It was pretty much Johnny One Note, with no room for depth or dissent.

The message was pretty simple: We have an education crisis because we have bad teachers who are protected by evil teacher unions, and the solutions are good charter schools and great teachers. That sounds suspiciously like "Waiting for 'Superman,' " and so you won't be surprised to learn that one of the opening events of Education Nation was a screening of the movie. (I missed that because I was flying home from Texas.)

I kept hoping that someone would be even a tiny bit skeptical about our test-score driven schools. Wouldn't just one person wonder whether we should stop asking 'How intelligent are you?' and ask instead 'How are you intelligent?' (Never happened, not in any session I attended.)

With the awful truth that 6,000 kids drop out every school day staring them in the face, wouldn't someone question the wisdom of extending both the school day and the school year? I mean, what are these dropouts leaving behind? (Never happened, far as I heard.)

People on the stage moaned about the antiquated (agrarian) calendar and the fact that schools still look and act as they did 50 or 75 years ago -- and then suggested that what our kids need are more hours and days of this!

When the details of the event were first announced, the blogosphere lit up with protests about the lack of teachers. NBC responded immediately and recruited perhaps 50 teachers, bringing them to New York all expenses paid (the Waldorf!). Some were asked to present 'mini-lessons' at the beginning of sessions, and the ones I caught were lively and challenging.

When some thoughtless soul at NBC named the session on New Orleans "Does Education Need Another Katrina?" the blogosphere erupted again, and that session was promptly renamed.

Unfortunately, NBC never did respond to calls for diversity of thought, and respected folks like Diane Ravitch were excluded (despite her willingness to participate, from what I heard).

Education Nation was basically a series of panel discussions. I paid particular attention to the moderators because I do a fair amount of that sort of work. Brian Williams gets an A in my grading book. He was beyond good. He was well informed, funny, provocative and fair.

And now to ugly. The one panel that had some real diversity of opinion was ruined by inept moderating by Steven Brill, who brought to the table his own strong views about unions and didn't even attempt to be fair. It's fine for a moderator to be skeptical -- I believe that's part of the job description -- but it's essential to spread that skepticism around evenly. Mr. Brill kissed up to the side he favors (Geoff Canada and Michelle Rhee) and jumped all over Randi Weingarten of the AFT and Dennis Van Roekel of the NEA. What could have been a powerful conversation about contracts, seniority and tenure turned into an embarrassing food fight. Mr. Brill gets an F, but so does whoever at NBC chose him in the first place.

So why wasn't Education Nation set up to be real journalism? Was it the sponsors, The University of Phoenix and the Broad and Gates Foundations? I have had grants from those two foundations and have not found them to be interfering in our journalism, even though both have agendas. Did it on this occasion? I don't know. Why on earth would NBC accept the sponsorship of an education event from a for-profit education organization that is under investigation for some of its practices?

Some critics of Education Nation are finding the silver lining, saying things like, "A national dialogue is a good thing."

Well, I'm looking hard for signs of a dialogue, but what I am finding instead are lines hardening between two camps. Scarily, it reminds me of the abortion/choice battle. Right now it's in the naming stage. Those who were excluded from Education Nation are calling their opponents 'anti-teacher' and 'anti public education,' while the Education Nation crowd is labeling its antagonists 'defenders of bad education' and 'protectors of inept teachers'.. . .

. . . .

NBC says it's going to do this again next year. Let's hope so. There's certainly room for improvement.

Why Time Magazine Deserves the Same Fate As Newsweek

Recently the scandalously vapid and opinionated "news" magazine, Newsweek, sold for one dollar to the highest bidder, Sidney Harmon.  Not long before it went broke, it published one final salvo of public school bashing in an issue that was universally panned as one-sided, unfair, and inaccurate.

Now it looks as though Time is following the same pattern, choosing to pick up where Newsweek's failure left off by choosing to print as news the perspectives of the ed industry and the vulture philanthropists.  The latest example is last week's issue on education, which provided Morning Joe and his wifey-styled sidekick, Meek Mika, all the research they needed to reinforce the neoliberal party line to the hundreds who watch them every day. 

My favorite example of Time's editorial position gone wild is in this question from its survey of public views on teachers and ed issues:

7. Do you support or oppose tenure for teachers, the practice of guaranteeing teachers lifetime job security after they have worked for a certain amount of time?

Which one of Eli Broad's underlings could have written this kind of question that perpetuates a basic lie about what tenure is?  Sadly, any one of hundreds who have infiltrated the corporate media to spread the gospel according to the Oligarchs.

 

For those who would like a thumbnail on what tenure really is, here is a pretty good gloss:

The term tenure has different legal definitions. In real property law, it refers to landholding of any type; it usually implies, however, that the landholder does not have absolute possession but derives the right from some other person.

The common usage of the term tenure relates to the employment of teachers. Tenure is a guarantee of due process for a tenured teacher facing dismissal charges. Tenure is not a guarantee of a teaching job for life. Tenure laws are designed to protect the free speech rights of teachers and minimize the political pressures affecting their performance in the classroom. Under state laws, which vary by state, the teacher tenure law sets out strict termination and due process requirements for teachers, whether or not they have tenure. It covers certified professional employees below the rank of superintendent employed by a board of education for at least a minimum time period. . . .

Challenging the Corporate Media on Education Coverage

"In Extra!, I find all the news that the Respectables find unfit to print.
It is great therapy for me; it keeps my blood pressure down and my skull from going numb."
—Studs Terkel

Extra! September 2010

Tea Party vs. U.S. Social Forum
Mass movements that matter for media—Round 2
By Julie Hollar

First, Bash the Teachers
Media find a scapegoat for educational failure
By Peter Hart

Right-Wing Tilt on Sunday Morning
The conservative records of talking-head lawmakers
By Jim Naureckas and Alyssa Figueroa

Articles only available in print:

Teach for America’s Opaque Agenda
Journalist Barbara Miner confronts a media darling
by Janine Jackson

‘A Deeper Truth Than Newspapers and Networks Are Likely to Provide’
Jonathan Kozol on media and education

‘Race to the Top’ and the Bill Gates Connection
Who gets to speak about what schools need?
by Susan Ohanian

Media’s Favorite School ‘Reformer’
D.C. Schools Chancellor Michelle Rhee
by Zein El-Amine

Right-Wing Tilt on Sunday Morning
The conservative records of talking-head lawmakers
by Alyssa Figueroa and Jim Naureckas

Good Reporting on Whiteboards at WaPo: A Model for Education Writers

Anyone interested in whiteboards?  Anyone?  Do you know what whiteboards are?  Anyone, anyone?  Well, Stephanie McCrummen at WaPo does because she's done her homework.  She not only visits a classroom where a whiteboard is in use, but she interviews industry spokesmen, classroom teachers, vendors, and even four or five education professors.

My question is this:  If WaPo reporters can do such a fine job reporting on a technology issue, why can't, or why won't, they and the rest of the education reporters do something similar when reporting on policy issues?

Rather than coughing up the same quotables from Finn, Hess, Walsh, Greene, Haycock, and Rotherham on any policy question, why not choose some of hundreds of other policy researchers who have the same kind of expertise in policy as the ones quoted in McCrummen's piece do on technology?  Does anyone know?  Anyone, anyone?  EWA?  Anyone?

Here is a chunk of Stephanie's article.  I hope you follow the link to read it all:

. . . .Increasingly, though, another view is emerging: that the money schools spend on instructional gizmos isn't necessarily making things better, just different. Many academics question industry-backed studies linking improved test scores to their products. And some go further. They argue that the most ubiquitous device-of-the-future, the whiteboard -- essentially a giant interactive computer screen that is usurping blackboards in classrooms across America -- locks teachers into a 19th-century lecture style of instruction counter to the more collaborative small-group models that many reformers favor.

"There is hardly any research that will show clearly that any of these machines will improve academic achievement," said Larry Cuban, education professor emeritus at Stanford University. "But the value of novelty, that's highly prized in American society, period. And one way schools can say they are 'innovative' is to pick up the latest device."

The appeal
Federal dollars for educational technology, minuscule until the mid-1990s, grew to more than $800 million last year, and industry analysts estimate that federal, state and local expenditures will total $16 billion next year. Money that once bought filmstrips and overhead projectors has spawned a thriving industry of companies that pitch their products as a way to help schools meet the federal priorities of the day. Glossy brochures that claimed whiteboards would help teachers reach Bush's No Child Left Behind goals, for instance, now say the devices will help schools win "Race to the Top" grants from the Obama administration.. . . .

New York Times Spins NAEP

With an editorial board that remains epically stupid on K12 education matters, it is not surprising to see Sam Dillon's news story today on the new NAEP reading data that preserves the warm glow that the Times always casts on the test and punish corporate reform model for schools. In fact, the headline points away from the disastrous NAEP reading scores released yesterday to the more rosy picture presented in the '09 NAEP math scores.

The scores continue a 17-year trend of sluggish achievement in reading that contrasts with substantial gains in mathematics during roughly the same period.

“The nation has done a really good job improving math skills,” said Mark Schneider, a vice president at the American Institutes for Research and a former official at the Education Department, which oversees the test, known as the National Assessment of Educational Progress. “In contrast, we have made only marginal improvements in reading.”

As Dr. Schneider is a political scientist who worked in Bush II's education department, he fails to point out that most of those gains occurred before the high stakes madness of NCLB started (click chart from NYTimes to enlarge). In fact, the gains since NCLB have been incremental, with 8th grade math scores of late flat-lining.

Now today's Times story does have something about the cratering NAEP reading results for 2009, but this, too, is placed on the sunny side of life inside the direct instruction hell holes once known as elementary school. With no good news of any significance to report about the world of parrot reading without comprehension, reporter Dillon goes to corporate reform insider, consultant, and attorney, Susan Pimentel, who has this to say despite all the evidence that indicates otherwise:

For example, Susan Pimentel, an expert on English and reading standards who is a member of the governing board that oversees the test, said that American schools were fairly efficient at teaching basic reading skills in the early grades. . .

Dillon also goes to Hoover Fellow and Koret Task Force member, Tom Loveless, to find something to celebrate :

One group of students, though, has made significant gains in reading over the last decade: the nation’s worst readers. The average scores of fourth graders in the bottom 10 percent for reading increased by 16 points from 2000 to 2009. In contrast, the average scores of the nation’s best fourth-grade readers, those in the top 10 percent, rose by only 2 points during the same period.

“All the progress in reading is being made at the bottom,” said Tom Loveless, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution. “Our worst readers are getting better, but our best readers are staying about the same.”

Our worst readers are getting better? Really, Tom and Sam? What the sunnysiders don't bother to report is that 11 of those 16 points gained, indeed, occurred between 2000 and 2003--before NCLB was instituted (click on chart to expand).

Also unreported by Tom or Sam are the 8th grade results for the poorest readers (click chart to enlarge). Here we see NAEP scores actually going down a point since 2002. Of course, Loveless or the Times would prefer to ignore the facts, which show the present day orgy of tabulation as another immoral, damaging, and wasteful episode in American educational history.

Ravitch on the Newsweek Disinfomercial Against Teaching

Last week I posted a response to the ghastly Newsweek propaganda piece against teachers. Ravitch has a reaction this week at Bridging Differences:

Dear Deborah,

Did you see Newsweek last week? What a stunning and uninformed attack on teachers and teachers' unions. The cover of the magazine told the story: The Key to Saving American Education, by Evan Thomas and Pat Wingert. It was printed on a classroom blackboard. In the background, on the same blackboard, was the handwritten phrase, repeated again and again, "We must fire bad teachers."

The story itself is a parody of a right-wing rant. It seems that the nation's classrooms are overrun with "bad teachers," pedophiles, "weak" teachers, ineffective teachers, dumb teachers, and others who remain in the classroom only because they have "lifetime tenure." Evil teachers' unions protect these people who are harming our nation's children. Researchers now know, the writers say, that if we could fire all these malingerers, the notorious achievement gap between the races would soon close and America would once again lead the world in education.

The writers hold out hope: non-union charter schools and Teach for America will "save" American education.

Leave aside the odd assertion that "much of the ability to teach is innate." (How do they know?) Leave aside the adulation for Michelle Rhee, Wendy Kopp, KIPP, and anyone who fights teachers' unions. Leave aside the horror stories about teachers accused of abusing students and keeping "a stash of pornography and cocaine at school." The article is a flamboyant example of outright hostility to teachers, to the organizations that represent them, and to public education itself.

Nowhere does the article mention that the highest-performing state in the nation is Massachusetts, where all or almost all teachers belong to unions; nor does it mention that the highest-performing nation in the world is Finland, where all or almost all teachers belong to unions. Nowhere in the article is there an example of a non-union district or state in the United States that has achieved high academic performance.

Instead, the article baldly asserts that "New Orleans has made more educational progress than any other city, largely because the public-school system was wiped out." Hurricane Katrina made it possible to get rid of public education and to wipe out unions, which the article claims are the biggest impediments to high academic achievement.

No use to point out that TFA, with its 4,100 new teachers every year and its 17,000 alumni, is not going to "save" American education or replace a teaching force of 4.6 million. No mention of the many studies that show that TFA often does not outperform ordinary, experienced teachers. No reason to note the high attrition rate of students at charters like KIPP and YES Prep or to acknowledge that teachers at such schools typically work 50-60 (or more) hours each week, which is not sustainable. (By the way, all of this is documented in my book.)

The Newsweek writers applaud the firing of all the teachers at Central Falls High School in Rhode Island. It doesn't bother them that teachers were not individually evaluated, but fired en masse. But that is not enough. They won't be satisfied until large numbers of teachers are dismissed, teachers' unions are crushed, and public education is replaced by non-union charter schools.

Never mind that the research on teacher effectiveness on which they rely is highly speculative and highly contested. Never mind that non-union charters, on average, do not outperform regular public schools. Why bother with such details?

Newsweek, it seems, speaks for the Jack Welch School of Management: Fire the bottom 10 percent every year. A friend said the other day, "If Newsweek is so smart, how come the magazine is in such deep financial trouble? Maybe they need to fire 10 percent of their staff every year." A dose of their own medicine?

Diane

Boycott Newsweek Disinfomercials

"There just is very little evidence in terms of what works in quickly turning around a persistently low-performing school," said Grover "Russ" Whitehurst, a Brookings Institution scholar who oversaw education research under President George W. Bush. --Washington Post

If Obama is willing to go in the dark where even Bush feared to tread, and if Arne Duncan is reckless enough to proceed where even Margaret Spelling drew the line, you can bet that there is enough corporate-government money in the current reform school agenda to buy the media and the research and the politicians needed to push forward with the continued demolition of American public education.

The only problem: no one with any brains believes any of the Gates-Broad-Walton propaganda, and resentment against the Oligarchs is growing as the force of their iron fists becomes felt. With the news last week that the Borg might have blinked in Central Falls, and with the very public defection of Diane Ravitch from the deformer ranks, Gates and Broad are paying big bucks to yellow rags like Newsweek to print lengthy disinfomercials in support of the demolition of public schools.

Newsweek has brought out top guns Evan Thomas and Pat Wingert to offer two such blatantly-biased features in the same issue that they would make Armstrong Williams blush. Check out the screeching pic of union leader, Weingarten, next to the calm resolve of the Oligarchs' poster girl, Michelle Rhee. A couple of short samples will suffice:

The relative decline of American education at the elementary- and high-school levels has long been a national embarrassment as well as a threat to the nation's future. Once upon a time, American students tested better than any other students in the world. Now, ranked against European schoolchildren, America does about as well as Lithuania, behind at least 10 other nations. Within the United States, the achievement gap between white students and poor and minority students stubbornly persists—and as the population of disadvantaged students grows, overall scores continue to sag.

Yes, it reads like a fairy tale, which, of course, it is (see Bracey). The fact is that the population of "disadvantaged students grows" as a result of policy decisions, and indecisions, made by corporations and government, not because teachers won't work longer and more days for free. And nothing is being done to help the growing throngs of the poor except to devise schemes to contain them in segregated ghetto chain gang schools that prepare them for a non-thinking future. Try on some of these irrefutable facts from the Alliance for Excellent Education:

• The United States has an average number of students who perform at the highest proficiency levels, but a much larger proportion who perform at the lowest levels. The United States is the only member country to have relatively high proportions of both top and bottom performers (OECD 2007b).

• Although American white students’ average science score of 523 ranked above the OECD average, Hispanic American (439), American Indian and Native Alaskan (436), and African American (409) students all fell far below (U.S. Department of Education. National Center for Education Statistics 2007). These groups scored similarly to the national averages of Turkey and Mexico, the two lowest-performing OECD member countries.
  

• The difference between the science scores of two students of different socioeconomic backgrounds is higher in the United States than in almost any other country (OECD 2007b).
  

• First-generation immigrant students in the United States lag an average of 57 points behind their native counterparts, which is the equivalent of nearly two years of schooling. Second-generation U.S. immigrants perform no better than first-generation immigrant students (OECD 2007b).
  

• Four of the five member countries that have higher proportions of immigrants than the United States also have higher national scores than the United States (OECD 2007b).
  

But back to the Newsweek disinfomercial:

For much of this time—roughly the last half century—professional educators believed that if they could only find the right pedagogy, the right method of instruction, all would be well. They tried New Math, open classrooms, Whole Language—but nothing seemed to achieve significant or lasting improvements.

Sadly, the group of educational antiquarians who have been in charge of national ed policy for the past 30 years continue to ignore the failure of their own failed and repeatedly failed test and punish policies that have turned American schools toward penal pedagogy as a solution to low test scores that are getting worse as poverty gets worse. The canaries in this deepening and empty mineshaft of the reform schoolers are, of course, the children, the poorest and the most vulnerable.

No one believes these deformist lies any longer, whether they are printed in Newsweek or the New York Times, and the desperation of the increasingly-unpopular, though bare-knuckled, corporatistas has American parents, students, and teachers at the edge of open revolt. Let us all be revolted in order to revolt!

The Gates-Broad-Walton phalanx is now preparing for the final slaughter of DC teachers. Stay tuned and be ready with your pitchforks.

BFT (Bloomberg's Federation of Teachers) President Gets Glowing Coverage from Corporate Media

No caption is required for this photo. Worth a thousand words? Every bit. (By Yanina Manolova, AP)

Matt Taibbi, in Rolling Stone, has the history of Wall Street's string of market manipulations from the 1930s to today. No, there are no hired czars to mete out punishment for the "misconduct" that created misery on a colossal scale for hundreds of millions of people, and there was, nor is, no orchestrated media campaign to publicize it, as there was yesterday when Bloomberg's Federation of Teachers President, Randi Weingarten, offered her bold new oligarch-approved plan to make teachers pay for the malignant neglect of poverty, apartheid, and the education debt to the poor that remains unpaid.

Bob Herbert for the NYTimes and Kaplan stooge, Jay Mathews, for WaPo had opinion boosters in print before Weingarten could unfold her speech, and Nick Anderson had a glowing report beforehand that could find no one in disagreement with Randi's visionary capitulation. And so did Greg Toppo for USA Today, who could not wait until the speech was given to report the historic event.

Washington Post Reports on Stanford Charter Study Months After Study Released

Better late than never, I guess. But too bad, really too bad, that Nick Anderson reports on the CREDO study by suggesting equal validity for the empirically-challenged Caroline Hoxby advocacy piece. Anderson treats the two as examples of just another "he said, she said" kind of ideological debate.

If Anderson had bothered to read the two studies with an eye for comparing apples with rotten apples, he may have noted the alarm bells ringing over the Hoxby study, while the CREDO study notes reservations of the type that are common to this kind of large-scale longitudinal research. For Anderson to give equal weight to these two pieces of research is like saying that that the Creation Museum in Petersburg, KY is of equal scientific value to the Smithsonian Museum of Natural History in DC.

The telling press release for the Hoxby review entitled "Headline-Grabbing Charter School Study Doesn't Hold Up to Scrutiny" with links to the study may be found here. The following is the concluding paragraph from the review, itself.

As a result of the potential sources of bias and the lack of detailed information in the reports to assess the extent of such bias, it is not possible for this reviewer or other readers to determine the degree to which the estimated charter school effects in grades 4 and above are valid. Policymakers and educators should therefore not rely on these estimates until the bias issues have been fully investigated and the analysis has undergone rigorous peer review. Given the quality of the data, however, a revised version of the analysis could provide a more definitive answer regarding the effectiveness of New York City’s oversubscribed charter schools (p. 14).

And below is the concluding paragraph from the review of "High Quality Charter School Report Confirms Past Research. Press release and link to the study may be found here.

The CREDO researchers noted that this report would be followed by two additional reports. The relative strength and comprehensiveness of their data set, as well as the relatively solid analytic approaches of the researchers, makes this first report a useful contribution to the charter school research base. The two future reports should add further information that will be useful for policymakers. This review does point to some weaknesses and areas for improvement, many of which represent limitations—not outside the range of limitations that are inherent in other studies on student achievement in charter schools—that should be shared in the technical report. The review offers suggestions that we hope will help improve the subsequent reports produced by CREDO based on this multi-state data set (pp. 10-11).

As for the newspaper of record, the New York Times, we are still waiting almost 6 months later for them to report on the Stanford CREDO charter study. In the interest of fairness, however, it should be noted that they did report the Hoxby study before it was actually released. Jennifer Medina, 9/22/09:

Students who entered lotteries and won spots in New York City charter schools performed better on state exams than students who entered the same lotteries but did not secure charter school seats, according to a study by a Stanford University economist being released Tuesday.. . .

Ah yes, the fairness and the balance of the corporate media--and this is the ultra-liberal NYTimes, mind you.

Romero's RTTT Bill Stalls in California Assembly

I most always have a link to the news story that I am blogging, but in this case there is not one. While Eli Broad's LA Times has this story about Romero's bribe acceptance bill squeaking through the California Senate, there is no mention in any newspaper that the Bill then stalled in the Assembly before the Assembly went home until 2010. So much for special sessions. And so much for corporate media coverage of the corporate ed reform smackdown. And so much for the Big Mo for the "Bribe to the Flop."

Day 3: NYTimes and WaPo Continue to Ignore National Charter Study

Do you want to guess how many seconds it would take the NY Times, WaPo, or the Boston Globe to report that a national peer-reviewed study showed that there was a 2-1 margin of good charters to bad charters? Now that the CREDO study shows that there is a 2-1 margin of bad charters to good charters, these big city reporters are nowhere to be found after 3 days. At least there is the LA Times and good ole U. S. News and World Report:

June 17, 2009 12:58 PM ET | Zach Miners | Permanent Link | Print

On average, charter schools are not performing as well as their traditional public-school peers, according to a new study that is being called the first national assessment of these school-choice options. The study, conducted by the Center for Research on Education Outcomes at Stanford University, compared the reading and math state achievement test scores of students in charter schools in 15 states and the District of Columbia—amounting to 70 percent of U.S. charter school students—to those of their virtual "twins" in regular schools who shared with them certain characteristics. The research found that 37 percent of charter schools posted math gains that were significantly below what students would have seen if they had enrolled in local traditional public schools. And 46 percent of charter schools posted math gains that were statistically indistinguishable from the average growth among their traditional public-school companions. That means that only 17 percent of charter schools have growth in math scores that exceeds that of their traditional public-school equivalents by a significant amount.

In reading, charter students on average realized a growth that was less than their public-school counterparts but was not as statistically significant as differences in math achievement, researchers said.

"We are worried by these results," Margaret Raymond, director of CREDO and lead author of the report, Multiple Choice: Charter School Performance in 16 States, said at a news conference. "This study shows that we've got a 2-to-1 margin of bad charters to good charters." . . . .

Washington Post Cheerleading for Duncan

If Maria Glod had read anything more than the talking points provided to her by the Duncan PR folks, she might have found out a few facts about the Chicago Public Schools miracle and its "portfolio manager," Arne Duncan that may have offered some heft for her journa-mercial for "change" in today's WaPo. But that would have ruined Maria's gushing puff piece for the dunking Duncan, who has brought forth a model of change, according to Glod, that we should all believe in.

In doing a little Googling, which Glod didn't bother to do, I came across a couple of sites that offered some troublesome facts about the Chicago Miracle that extra pay to teachers (and students) for test scores has not yet resolved. A few facts:

• Chicago Public Schools (CPS) rated a 3 (out of 10) on the Great Schools rating scale, which is based on test scores for the most recent year. When compared to nearby Illinois city school systems, Chicago was near the bottom, with only one other school system, Broadview, receiving a 3. Two others, Cicero and Maywood, earned 2s. Fourteen other systems ranked higher than Chicago, with ratings from 4 to 10.

• Chicago Public Schools have not made Adequate Yearly Progress (AYP) as a school district since the State of Illinois began keeping records in 2004.

• While test scores for elementary age children on the Illinois Standards Achievement Test (ISAT) generally show an upward trend since 2001, the percentage of low income children meeting or exceeding the standard has not kept pace with gains by non-low income children. The reading and math scores from 2003 to 2008 for grades 3-8 offer a good example. In math the achievement gap between low income and non-low income widened by 5 percentage points over five years, and in reading the achievement gap increased by 11 percentage points during the same time.

• The percentage of Chicago (CPS) high school students meeting the College Readiness Benchmark as measured by the ACT has remained flat or gone down since the State began maintaining this record in 2006. Reading readiness has gone from 23% in 2006 to 21% in 2008. Math readiness inched up from 14% who are ready for college to 16%. Science, the most dismal of all, clicked up from 8% to 9% of students who are ready for college science. And English went from 41% to 39% from 2006 to 2008.

• The other high school exam that the State tracks is the Prairie State Achievement Examination (PSAE), and results here are stunning. This composite score (PSAE) is derived by combining the ACT and three other tests given over two days, and they are used to measure academic strengths and weaknesses relative to the Illinois Learning Standards. Results of the PSAE are used, too, to determine high school AYP. While scores for Chicago white students show steady, if small, declines from 2003 to 2008, minority achievement scores fell off the cliff. The percentage of black students meeting or exceeding the state standard went from 35% in 2005 to 22% in 2008. Hispanic achievement showed a 12-point drop from 40% to 28% of students meeting or exceeding the state standard. Asian students dropped from 64 to 53, and Native Americans sunk from 71% to 44%.
  

If you were to ask me, Maria, just from this cursory glance at the numbers available online to anyone willing to look, I would say that Arne Duncan's PR firm is doing a heckuva job--and that your editors are doing a helluva coverup.

Michelle Rhee In Black Astride Her Broom--Hmm

Time Magazine now joins Newsweek and Bill Gates's $3 billion in blasting away at the due process and collective bargaining rights of teachers, while pumping the brass knucks approach to charter reform schools that has made Michelle Rhee the cover girl for the anti-public-education movement. This week's salvo from Time pulls out the big guns, with senior writer, Amanda Ripley assigned the duty of creating a major piece of teacher bashing and public school castigation.

Predictably, Ripley begins with same lies that mainstream corporate media have been using since Ronald Reagan came to town:

The U.S. spends more per pupil on elementary and high school education than most developed nations. Yet it is behind most of them in the math and science abilities of its children. Young Americans today are less likely than their parents were to finish high school. This is an issue that is warping the nation's economy and security, and the causes are not as mysterious as they seem. The biggest problem with U.S. public schools is ineffective teaching, according to decades of research. And Washington, which spends more money per pupil than the vast majority of large districts, is the problem writ extreme, a laboratory that failure made.

Or is that a failure that Ripley made with her lazy and biased generalizations that are not supported by anything more than the media mythology she inherits from her privatization preferring predecessors. If Ripley were to look beyond the talking points prepared for her by pay-based-on-test-scores advocate and Hoover Fellow, Eric Hanushek, she would see that it is not teacher rights that are eating away DC Schools nearly so much as it is a long-standing malignant neglect and a continuing history of unaddressed poverty. If teacher job security and unions were the culprit, it seems that the suburban schools would be suffering the same as the urban schools, yes Amanda?

And yet, as the chart (click to enlarge) shows from the research by Boe and Shin from the University of Pennsylvania (published in Kappan, October 2005), white American students, when compared to the average scores from the G5 countries, are doing just swell in the international test score comparison derby. Knocking them dead, in fact. It is only when you add in the poor students scores, both brown and black, that the comparisons become usable by the school privatization crowd to perpetuate their myth of failing Amerian schools. The failure is the American failure to address the disgrace that is povety. When will the media ever include these facts in a story on American public education? Ever?

Do a little reading, Amanda Ripley, before you put the Dragon Lady up for Time's Person of the Year. It might save you some real embarrassment down the road. Here is a clip to get you started, the conclusion from the Kappan piece by Boe and Shin:

Based on our review of the results of six international achievement surveys conducted from 1991 to 2001, we conclude that U.S. students have generally performed above average in comparisons with students in other industrialized nations. Certainly there is variability in performance, with the U.S. scoring above average in reading and civics, average in science, and somewhat below average in mathematics. But even in mathematics at the middle and secondary levels, the U.S. did not perform “poorly.” On the positive side, U.S. aggregate scores were above average in all subjects at the elementary levels and in reading and civics across grade levels.

How then can we explain the common perception that the U.S. generally performs poorly in the international achievement horse race? There are several plausible reasons for this, all of which might be partly correct. First, many consumers of comparative achievement statistics simply are not aware of the results of the full array of surveys that have been conducted in recent years. This may be due, in part, to the selective reporting of bad news and neglect of good news common to the press.23We hope the results reported here will provide more comprehensive factual information on which anyone can base generally valid conclusions about the achievement of U.S. students in international comparisons.

Second, it may be that others are aware of the achievement results of the full array of surveys but simply view average results as poor because they expect the U.S. to be “first in the world” academically, as it is in economic strength and military power. In this view, anything less than first place is regarded as a poor performance. Some actually might have taken seriously the political hype represented in the able public monopoly that must be privatized as much and as quickly as possible. The biased selection of evidence is not a surprising or uncommon strategy for advocates of a particular cause and may have strong policy and political impact.26

Is it reasonable to expect that in the next few decades U.S. student achievement in mathematics and science will improve to the point where assessment scores are substantially and consistently well above average? Regardless of current efforts to improve public school outcomes, this seems most unlikely. At best, we can hope for incremental improvement such as that which seems to have occurred in recent years based on our results in comparison with international surveys administered before 1991.27

A major impediment to higher average achievement scores in the U.S. is the performance of its black and Hispanic students. The achievement gap goes back decades and is not closing rapidly (if at all). Moreover, demographic trends exacerbate the impact of the achievement gap on U.S. mean achievement scores. In 1991, the population of public school students was 70% white and 26% black and Hispanic. By the year 2000, black and Hispanic students represented about 34% of the student population, a stunning growth of 8% during a 10-year period (or growth of nearly 1% per year).28 If the achievement gap remains constant, we can predict that U.S. mean scores will decline as the minority population increases as a percentage of the total.

This article should not be read as a defense of the status quo or an apology for inadequacies in U.S. public education. There is always room for improvement. In fact, all nations seem to be displeased with their education systems and levels of attainment. In the mid-1990s, the OECD sponsored an international study of innovative methods in mathematics and science instruction in 23 nations.29One of the interesting findings was that none of these nations, including some that performed well above average in the international horse race, was satisfied with their mathematics and science teaching and learning. All were striving to improve, just as the U.S. has been — especially since the release of A Nation at Risk in 1983.

In recent years, the U.S. has not performed “poorly” in international comparisons in a statistical sense. Consequently, an allegation of poor performance should not be used to tarnish the constructive work of the majority of public educators and the genuine attainments of U.S. students. Nonetheless, the public and policy makers should continue to expect and demand improvements in instruction from educators and the educational system and improvements in learning from students — especially in those subjects and grade evels where student achievement plainly lags. Likewise, the public and policy makers should give credit where due and recognize genuine achievements in providing effective instruction by educators and in effective learning by students.

Best Education Reporting 2008: The Missoulian

Beyond the big corporate desks of the Times, the Post, the Trib, and the Times (LA), there are medium and small town papers around this great country with some first-class reporters who still believe in collecting, writing, and reporting the news without the filters of editorial boards paid for by the education-industrial complex. Even with all the resources available to them, I have not seen anything in the "newspapers of record" that comes close the scope and clarity of this piece on NCLB by Michael Moore (not that one) for the Missoulian:

Educators say No Child Left Behind has blocked progress
By MICHAEL MOORE of the Missoulian

The next Congress has the task of renewing and likely revising the federal No Child Left Behind Act, a law that is applauded in theory and mostly despised in practice.

Passed in 2001, the law embodied the notion of school accountability, then proceeded to set standards that will ultimately categorize nearly every school in the country as a failure.

“Accountability is a good thing, but what the law really is is a recipe for failure,” said Jack Sturgis, a veteran teacher and president of the Missoula Education Association. “The bill is designed to fail public education.”

Said Alex Apostle, superintendent of Missoula County Public Schools: “No Child Left Behind is punitive. It actually makes what we do - and what we do is student achievement - more difficult.”

Nearly every education-related group in Montana has come together to push for changes in the law, which is essentially the current incarnation of the historic 1965 Elementary and Secondary School Act.

“We've all come together and produced a position paper that lays out the problems as we see them,” said Linda McCulloch, state superintendent of public instruction.

That paper is five pages long and details problems the law has created in Montana, where schools never suffered from some of the ailments the law was designed to fix.

“This law is basically designed to deal with large metropolitan school districts - Houston, Texas, to be specific - and it's not very well suited to helping with the problems we have here in Montana,” McCulloch said. “I'm very hopeful that we can see some changes made.”

No Child Left Behind increased the standards of accountability for schools, school districts and states in two areas - reading and math.

Not surprisingly, that's one of the complaints about the law.

“If you are an elementary school teacher and you are supposed to focus on math and reading, that means more minutes,” said Sturgis. “More minutes for reading and math means less minutes for social studies and science and art and music. Why are those subjects suddenly less valuable?”

The law set an escalating series of goals - dubbed AYP, for adequate yearly progress - with the ultimate goal of 100 percent proficiency in math and reading by 2014. The 100 percent means exactly that: One child can fail a school.

That, educators say, is a horrible burden to place on students, teachers and parents.

“It's not possible for all children in all schools to be proficient,” said Gail Becker, assistant superintendent for MCPS. “And it's not fair to put that on the backs of those students and their parents.”

In the most recent round of tests, which take place in March, three of every 10 Montana schools fell short of No Child standards, even though most schools improved year over year. The year before, the number had been one in 10, and the decline is directly linked to the escalating standards of the law.

For 2007-08, the proficiency threshold for reading moved from 74 percent to 83 percent. Math targets climbed from 51 to 68 percent.

For Missoula County schools, districtwide proficiency numbers beat the standards, but 10 of 14 schools failed to meet AYP.

“What's unfortunate is that, even though all our schools showed improvement, it's not enough to meet the targets,” said Becker. “So we're improving our scores, but we're designated a failure.”

That's another complaint about the law. Instead of measuring progress and encouraging improvement, No Child Left Behind sets unachievable goals that even the best districts and schools can't meet.

Montana education groups have this to say about 100 percent proficiency in their position paper:

“If unchanged, it will make every public school a ‘failure,' without helping individual children. This in turn harms public support for education by giving the completely false impression that public schools are not providing a good education.” And that's not true, Sturgis said.

“There is an assumption that we weren't doing the job in this country before No Child Left Behind,” he said. “We are the most productive society in the world, so it's not like public schools have somehow failed this country. Could we do better? Sure. But we're not failures.”

That said, educators don't have a problem with the fundamental idea behind NCLB - accountability.

“This district is all about student achievement,” said Apostle. “And there's no question we need to be accountable in terms of achievement.”

But No Child issued a mostly unfunded mandate about achievement and “high-quality teachers” that schools and districts can't abide.

“The funding for NCLB is widely acknowledged as insufficient to meet the mandates of the law,” the Montana position paper states. “In addition, NCLB expects all students to achieve proficiency, yet the major federal program (IDEA, or special education) to fund one of the subgroups most in need of services to achieve that goal is sadly underfunded.”

That points to another aspect of No Child Left Behind that works in theory but not in practice. The law rightly notes that certain subgroups - the poor, special ed students and Native Americans - need additional help to meet the goals, but does nothing to affect the root causes of problems for those groups.

“If you look across the country, you see schools in the most poverty-stricken areas failing the worst,” McCulloch said. “NCLB rightly focuses attention on the shortfall those children have in performance, but it doesn't do anything about the conditions that create the problem.”

Jack Sturgis has a story about a young girl at Missoula's Hawthorne School, but it could be any school.

She's a smart girl, but nearly everything in her life has gone wrong.

“Her life is pretty miserable, she's homeless some of the time,” Sturgis said. “Her parents are divorced and abusive. We have a whole raft of people working with her and what they want is to let her sit in the back of the classroom and maybe grasp a little bit of what's going on.”

That would probably be a good thing, but there's a problem.

“I would love to do that, if that would make her happy, but there's a problem,” he said. “I have to get her to pass a test in March and she's not going to do that. Everything is stacked against her. So she fails and I fail and the school fails.”

McCulloch, Becker and Sturgis all said the law takes almost no notice of how children differ, how they learn differently, how some measure of improvement for a child might be an incredible accomplishment rather than a failure.

“It does a pretty poor job of recognizing that kids are all different,” McCulloch said.

Special education students, the Montana consortium argues, deserve special attention, but they should be evaluated based on a plan designed specifically for each child, not by some broad, federal standard. The same is true of children in poverty, children who are still learning English and some ethnic minorities.

“While we strongly support focusing on subgroups of children such as ethnic minorities, the AYP structure means they can be blamed for the failure of a school,” the Montana position paper states. “This has already caused increased racial tension in Montana. Education should make it easier for us to live together, not harder.”

While NCLB recognizes the disadvantages of some students, it's created a dynamic where some of the best students get less attention from teachers who are trying to rescue the low achievers.

“It's a pretty simple equation,” Sturgis said. “If you spend more of your time at the bottom, you're ignoring the top.”

So, what should be done with a law that purports to fix a problem but really just meddles with the symptoms?

Some educators nationwide are asking that No Child Left Behind be scrapped in favor of starting over.

Sturgis, McCulloch, Becker and Apostle don't go that far, but it's clear they'd love to see the Montana congressional delegation push for changes.

Better funding for federal requirements would help, of course, but Montana educators are suggesting more sweeping revisions. Here are the ideas, as set forth in the position paper signed by seven Montana education groups, including McCulloch's office:

Change the 100 percent proficiency.

Find a way to determine whether the focus on math and reading is harming students in other subjects.

Look at the requirements for “highly qualified teachers,” which create hiring difficulties for Montana's small, rural school districts.

Restore local and state control.

Don't stigmatize subgroups such as special ed students and Native Americans.

When there are consequences for schools that perform poorly, make them helpful instead of hurtful.

“We feel like those changes would make the law useful,” McCulloch said. “I'm hopeful and I think people in Montana, both Democrats and Republicans, would like to see the law change for the better.”

Sturgis wants the big changes, of course, but he also wants the small ones, the ones that help the girl at Hawthorne.

“You can't fix her problem with test scores,” he said. “You've got to look at the whole child. She's more than just her reading and math scores, and her success or failure is not measured by how she does on those tests.”

Reporter Michael Moore can be reached at 523-5252 or at mmoore@missoulian.com.

Why Does the L. A. Times Ignore the Facts on NCLB Proficiency Targets?

Maybe we can forgive the NYTimes and WaPo for not reporting the California research, but the LA Times? If the preeminent science journal, Science, printed a research report that showed all the public schools in my state would be listed as failures by 2014, don't you think that a newspaper calling itself the Los Angeles Times would find that worth a mention? Not yet.

On the contrary, the LA Times exhibits the same bare-knuckled, no-excuses position of the ed industry and the conservative privatizers, the same ones who have, since Bush came to Washington, accused anyone who questions the impossibility of their testing targets as engaging in the "soft bigotry of low expectations." Their bias is evident in the proficiency story the Times did run in early September when the latest state test scores were published. The headline: "Only 48% of California high schools meet federal standards, even with easier measure."

If the undisguised hostility in that headline is not enough to let you know where they stand, their refusal to print news on the research that helps the public understand the realities of NCLB makes it crystal clear. They are under the influence of the corporationists who have no problem engaging in the hard racism of impossible demands in order to crush the public schools and usher in charterization.

Here is a clip from the latest story on the Cardullo study, appearing in T.H.E. Journal. Title: AYP 'Balloon Payment' Coming Due, Say Researchers:

by Dave Nagel

He said, "For most schools, the greatest risk of failing AYP lies with ELA proficiency. It is the Socioeconomically Disadvantaged and English Language Learner subgroups within the schools that are most likely going to fail to meet AYP in California. Given the weakness of ELA progress, no doubt more emphasis needs to be placed on ELA. But what we emphasize in our paper is that schools are also in need of support in mathematics since the current data trends, if not altered, predict nearly 100 percent failure of all schools by 2014 in meeting AYP."

According to information released by UC Riverside, Cardullo and his colleagues are calling for "reforms based on research that would tie educational experiences to instructional challenges of a particular school, while focusing each school's resources to serve its own unique student population."

The research project was funded through NSF's Math and Science Partnership program. The complete paper can be read by AAAS members on the Science magazine Web site here. Additional details can also be found in an article published by NSF here. Supplemental materials, including methodology, can be downloaded in PDF form here. . . .

Education Week's History of Cozy Establishment Advocacy

Education Week's incestuous relationship with the Washington education establishment has finally been called out in a strong letter that challenges their ideologically-driven treatment of public school issues in their annual trademark piece called Quality Counts. With the kind of unacknowledged advocacy that Ed Week engages in regularly, who needs an editorial page!

The Letter:

IT’S TIME FOR EDUCATION WEEK TO CEASE ITS VIOLATION OF BASIC JOURNALISTIC ETHICS

The editors of Education Week claim to be objective journalists, but with their Quality Counts publication, they abandon objectivity and promote the standards-and-testing industrial school paradigm of No Child Left Behind (NCLB). In this context, they are no longer reporters; they have chosen to act as advocates.

The editors of Editorial Projects in Education (EPE), the nonprofit that publishes Education Week, say that their mission is to “help raise the level of awareness and understanding among professionals and the public of important issues in American education. We cover local, state, and national news and issues from preschool through the 12th grade.” Education Week does not publish its own editorials, and it claims not to advocate for particular ideological or policy positions.

Yet for more than a decade EPE has published its Quality Counts (QC) annual volume, purporting to assess the condition of American public schooling from a neutral and fair-minded vantage. Education Week has presented Quality Counts (QC) as if it were any other piece of journalism, that is, a piece of reporting. But a quick inspection of the 2008 volume reveals the dishonesty in this presentation. Quality Counts is not reporting in any normal sense of the word. Rather it is advocacy. Its assertions and conclusions often support particular policy positions. A few examples reveal these characteristics.

• QC embraces the position that state academic standards are a positive force in schooling (p. 45). This is an ideological position. QC offers no evidence to support this position. While most corporate and political leaders and many school leaders embrace this position, many educators and parents believe that standards constrain learning more than they enable it, that standardization of learning is an antiquated artifact of the 20th century that hinders creativity and the personalization of learning.

• QC accepts the criteria of an unpublished review of state standards conducted by the American Federation of Teachers, dated October-November 2007 (p. 45). This review judges state standards in terms of the following attributes: “clear, specific, and grounded in content.” Here QC is embracing an advocacy position of the AFT. To employ an unpublished document that cannot be reviewed is also bizarre for a publication that calls itself journalistic.

• QC awards positive scores to states that “assign ratings to all schools…” and “sanction low-performing schools. (p. 47). These are additional advocacy stances. There is no evidence that, for example, Florida’s crude A-F rating system does anything for children other than intensify test preparation. Nor does QC offer evidence that sanctioning “low-performing schools” does anyone any good.

• QC advocates for the ideological position that “all high school students…(should) take a college-preparatory curriculum to earn a diploma…” (p. 48) This is yet another value-based position, not reportage. While some politicians and educators support this goal, others note that a more differentiated high school curriculum is likely to better serve the very diverse high school population, particularly since a large percentage of new jobs in the decades to come will not require a college degree.

• QC awards points to states where “teacher evaluation is tied to student achievement” (p. 51). Such a policy is extremely controversial, given that many educators and analysts agree that efforts at this sort of simplistic cause-and-effect delineation both distort the complexity of causation in the schooling process and increase pressure for schools to become test preparation factories.
  

These examples and others in Quality Counts display the profound ideological bias in this document. In this volume the EPE editors— Virginia Edwards, the editor and publisher; Gregory Chronister, the executive editor; Lynn Olson, the executive project editor; Karen Diegmueller, the managing editor; and Mark W. Bomster, the assistant managing editor—are not journalists engaged in good faith, objective reporting. They are powerful advocates for a particular school ideology: state standards, the simplistic labeling of schools based on narrow indicators and the “sanctioning of low-performing schools,” “teacher evaluation tied to student achievement,” and so on—seemingly the whole industrial paradigm of schooling, from Ellwood Cubberly to George W. Bush.

If these EPE editors are not willing to publicly acknowledge their work as advocates in their yearly publication of Quality Counts, how can we trust the fairness of what they present each week in Education Week?

We call on Ms. Edwards and her colleagues to rectify this situation in which Education Week pretends to be a neutral reporter but actually engages in advocacy. Two obvious remedies come to mind.

1. EPE could cease to act as an advocate and thus cease to publish advocacy pieces such as Quality Counts.
2. EPE could play by the rules just as every other newspaper does and establish an identified editorial function. Then it would need to separate its reporters from its editorialists. Even the Wall Street Journal and the New Hampshire Union-Leader meet this standard.

It’s certainly long past time for Ms. Edwards and her colleagues to give up this charade of objectivity and play by the same journalistic rules as everyone else.

David Marshak
Philip Kovacs
Susan Ohanian
Jerry Bracey
William Spady
Deborah Meier