Exposing the Corporate Education Reform Fraud

The Obama Education Blueprint

Researchers Examine the Evidence

Edited by:
William J. Mathis, University of Colorado, Boulder
Kevin G. Welner, University of Colorado - Boulder

A volume in the series: The National Education Policy Center Series. Series Editor(s): Kevin G. Welner, University of Colorado - Boulder and Alex Molnar, Arizona State University
 
Published 2010
A Publication of the NATIONAL EDUCATION POLICY CENTER

In March 2010, the Obama administration released A Blueprint for Reform, setting forth its proposed revisions of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act. If enacted, the Blueprint will shape the curriculum, standards, assessments, and accountability systems of schools throughout the nation. It will also determine how and where federal education funds will be targeted, further increase federal control over K-12 education, and increase the private-sector role in the operation of public schools.

In advancing this agenda, President Obama and education secretary Arne Duncan have maintained that their Blueprint recommendations are grounded in research, and in May the U.S. Department of Education issued a set of six documents presented as summaries of the research supporting their plan.

As an extension of the ongoing Think Tank Review Project, the staff and Fellows of the National Education Policy Center examine these research summaries and assess how well they represent the full body of knowledge in each of the reform areas. In The Obama Education Blueprint, prominent education policy experts from across the nation offer a comprehensive analysis of the research support for the U.S. Department of Education’s plan for the reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act.

This volume is designed to provide policymakers, the media, and interested citizens with what the research actually says about the administration’s proposals.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Acknowledgements. 1 Introduction: Assessing the Research Base for A Blueprint for Reform, William J. Mathis and Kevin G. Welner. 2 A Review of College- and Career-Ready Students, Diane Ravitch and William J. Mathis. 3 A Review of Great Teachers and Great Leaders, Paul Shaker. 4 A Review of A Complete Education, Beth Warren. 5 A Review of Meeting the Needs of English Learners and Other Diverse Learners, Janette Klingner. 6 A Review of Successful, Safe, and Healthy Students, Gene V Glass, Steven Barnett, and Kevin G. Welner. 7 A Review of Fostering Innovation and Excellence, Clive Belfield. About the Authors.

Little Research and Less Science to Support Race To The Top Agenda

The Race to the Top (RTTT) appears more and more to be a Race over the Edge (ROTE). No one, conservative or progressive, outside the Broad and Gates green zones (where the money is) believes even an ounce of the propaganda tonnage that has been launched by the Oligarchs to justify the corporate takeover of American education. Clips from a piece in Ed Week by Debra Viadero:

. . . .With recently published draft guidelines for federal economic-stimulus money and Title I aid, critics are beginning to ask whether much has changed under the Obama administration.

“What is extraordinary about these regulations is that they have no credible basis in research. They just happen to be the programs and approaches favored by the people in power,” writes Diane Ravitch, a research professor of education at New York University, in her blog, Bridging Differences, which is hosted by edweek.org. She served as the Education Department’s assistant secretary for educational research and improvement under President George H.W. Bush.

For their part, department officials are not yet answering the criticism. They did not respond to repeated requests from Education Week to address such complaints.
. . . .

The lack of research reflected in some of the department’s school-improvement initiatives is a disappointment, though, to researchers and advocates who were encouraged by President Barack Obama’s Inauguration Day pledge to “give science its rightful place” in government decisionmaking.

An ‘Opposite Approach’
Both the Bush administration and President Obama “have supported using data to determine ‘what works,’ ” economists Sean P. Corcoran and Joydeep Roy of the Washington-based Economic Policy Institute write in a letter filed in response to the proposed guidelines for the $4 billion Race to the Top fund, part of the economic-stimulus legislation. Yet, in some areas, they say, the proposed rules “take the exact opposite approach.”

In particular, Ms. Ravitch, Mr. Corcoran, Mr. Roy, and scholars such as Duke University’s Helen F. Ladd oppose two priorities at the heart of the program that they say lack research evidence: evaluating teachers based on students’ standardized test scores and promoting the growth of charter schools.

“One theory of action seems to be that holding teachers more accountable for the gain in their students’ test scores will induce them to become better teachers,” writes Ms. Ladd, a professor of public-policy studies and economics. “At this point, I am not aware of any credible evidence in support of that proposition.”
. . . .

Skepticism of efforts to evaluate educators based on their students’ test scores was not universal among academics, though. “We strongly support the focus of the Race to the Top program on teacher effectiveness and achieving equity in distribution of effective teachers,” wrote eight academics in a comment letter submitted by Thomas J. Kane, a professor of education and economics at Harvard University in Cambridge, Mass., and the deputy director of research and data for the Seattle-based Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation’s education program. . . .

If you cannot believe economists about the economy, we must wonder how much credibility should be given economists about something they know even less about--especially when they work for the same corporatists who are behind the current takeover bid of American education.

Thin and Thinner
The evidence behind Race to the Top’s call for giving priority to states that don’t impose caps on the growth of charter schools, likewise, is far from definitive, various commenters said.

Recent studies in Boston and New York City have found that charter school students outperform regular public school peers who applied to charter schools but failed to win a seat. But a study of charters in 15 states and the District of Columbia by the Center for Research on Education Outcomes at Stanford University found that students in more than 80 percent of the charter schools performed the same as, or worse than, students in regular public schools on mathematics tests. Achievement from school to school was highly variable, the study found. ("N.Y.C. Study Finds Gains for Charters," Sept. 30, 2009.)

The American Educational Research Association, a Washington-based group that represents 25,000 education researchers, notes in its Race to the Top comments that “there has been much less research about the turnaround strategies identified in the proposed regulations than about charter schools, and, consequently, even less is known about conditions required for their success.”

Yet the Education Department, in both the proposed Race to the Top rules and in draft regulations governing the spending of $3.5 billion in new school-improvement aid for the nation’s 5,000 worst-performing schools, spells out specific interventions states should use to qualify for the funding. They range from implementing a mandatory basket of “transformation” strategies to closing the school and sending students to higher-achieving schools to “restarting” the school by turning it over to a charter- or education-management organization. . . .

All entirely without data to support the new educational empire where all decisions are data-driven. Are you lost in the funhouse, too? I am.

The Ugly Art of Manipulatiing Science

In the world of educational research, things changed when the Bushies came to town. Research questions whose answers could not be quantified by analyzing standardized test scores soon had less than a snowball's chance of rounding up federal research funding.

The education-as-social control fanatics and the educational testing industry leeches rose to new hegemonic heights, and to make sure their new postion was fortified, they pushed through an oppressive miseducative ideology that, 1) insisted on scientific evidence to support all educational decisions, 2) rewrote the definition of what could be defined as "scientific," and 3) used the new definition to devise studies that reinforced the conclusions of the oppressive ideology that had just redefined "scienfic." If no studies could could be cooked up to support some preferred component of the right-wing agenda, then the requirement for "scientifically-based" evidence was simply ignored (the corporate tutoring scam and the dumbing down of teacher preparation are just two examples).

Those in the media and the general public who did understand what had just happened didn't care that it had happened, and education academics limited their protests to writing tepid papers that they published in obscure journals or read to one another at annual meetings.

Outside the easily-controlled world of K-12 education, however, real science continued, generating findings that had all sorts of potential repercussions for the conservative ideological agenda. So instead of rewriting the books on how the science could be done, which was too big of a task even for the fundamentalist zealots who run the White House, they simply put gag orders on public servants such as the Surgeon General, so that the real science that challenged the official party propaganda was neglected, marginalized, or suppressed. Some clips from the NY Times:

WASHINGTON, July 10 — Former Surgeon General Richard H. Carmona told a Congressional panel Tuesday that top Bush administration officials repeatedly tried to weaken or suppress important public health reports because of political considerations.

The administration, Dr. Carmona said, would not allow him to speak or issue reports about stem cells, emergency contraception, sex education, or prison, mental and global health issues. Top officials delayed for years and tried to “water down” a landmark report on secondhand smoke, he said. Released last year, the report concluded that even brief exposure to cigarette smoke could cause immediate harm.

Dr. Carmona said he was ordered to mention President Bush three times on every page of his speeches. He also said he was asked to make speeches to support Republican political candidates and to attend political briefings.

And administration officials even discouraged him from attending the Special Olympics because, he said, of that charitable organization’s longtime ties to a “prominent family” that he refused to name.

“I was specifically told by a senior person, ‘Why would you want to help those people?’ ” Dr. Carmona said.

The Special Olympics is one of the nation’s premier charitable organizations to benefit disabled people, and the Kennedys have long been deeply involved in it.

When asked after the hearing if that “prominent family” was the Kennedys, Dr. Carmona responded, “You said it. I didn’t.”

In response to lawmakers’ questions, Dr. Carmona refused to name specific people in the administration who had instructed him to put political considerations over scientific ones. He said, however, that they included assistant secretaries of health and human services as well as top political appointees outside the department of health.

Dr. Carmona did offer to provide the names to the committee in a private meeting.

. . . .

Dr. Carmona is one of a growing list of present and former administration officials to charge that politics often trumped science within what had previously been largely nonpartisan government health and scientific agencies.

. . . .

On issue after issue, Dr. Carmona said, the administration made decisions about important public health issues based solely on political considerations, not scientific ones.

“I was told to stay away from those because we’ve already decided which way we want to go,” Dr. Carmona said.

He described attending a meeting of top officials in which the subject of global warming was discussed. The officials concluded that global warming was a liberal cause and dismissed it, he said.

“And I said to myself, ‘I realize why I’ve been invited. They want me to discuss the science because they obviously don’t understand the science,’ ” he said. “I was never invited back.”

. . . .

Dr. Carmona described being invited to testify at the government’s nine-month racketeering trial of the tobacco industry that ended in 2005. He said top administration officials discouraged him from testifying while simultaneously telling the lead government lawyer in the case that he was not competent to testify. Dr. Carmona testified anyway.

Sharon Y. Eubanks, director of the Justice Department’s tobacco litigation team, was in the audience during Dr. Carmona’s testimony.

“What he said is all correct,” she said. “He was one of the most powerful witnesses. His testimony was very important.”

Dr. Carmona said that he felt that the duty of the surgeon general, often called the “nation’s doctor,” was to tackle many of the nation’s most controversial health topics and to issue balanced reports about the studies underlying them.

When stem cells became a focus of debate, Dr. Carmona said he proposed that his office offer guidance “so that we can have, if you will, informed consent.”

“I was told to stand down and not speak about it,” he said. “It was removed from my speeches.”

The Bush administration rejected the advice of many top scientists on this subject, including that of the director of the National Institutes of Health, Dr. Elias Zerhouni.

Similarly, Dr. Carmona wanted to address the controversial topic of sexual education, he said. Scientific studies suggest that the most effective approach includes a discussion of contraceptives.

“However there was already a policy in place that did not want to hear the science but wanted to preach abstinence only, but I felt that was scientifically incorrect,” he said.

Dr. Carmona said drafts of surgeon general reports on global health and prison health were still being debated by the administration. The global health report was never approved, Dr. Carmona said, because he refused to sprinkle the report with glowing references to the efforts of the Bush administration.

“The correctional health care report is pointing out the inadequacies of health care within our correctional health care system,” he said. “It would force the government on a course of action to improve that.”

Because the administration does not want to spend more money on prisoners’ health care, the report has been delayed, Dr. Carmona said.

“For us, the science was pretty easy,” he said. “These people go back into the community and take diseases with them.” He added, “This is not about the crime. It’s about protecting the public.”

"Scientifically-Based" Teacher Preparation?

"Scientifically-based research" has been the new mantra for federal education grants since passage of NCLB in late 2001. The phrase, "scientifically-based," is mentioned in the context of reading instruction, alone, nearly 50 times in NCLB. In 2002, Grover Whitehurst, the head of the Institute of Education Sciences and final arbiter for federal grant apps, testifed before a Senate Committee about the necessity for federal funding to be based upon scientific data: "Whitehurst explains that adherence to scientifically-based research will be a critical factor in the funding decisions and endorsement of programs that fall under the purview of NCLB."

In fact, any materials purchased by principals to meet NCLB testing requirements must be validated by "scientifically-based research" before Federal dollars can be spent. (The implications of this requirement will be discussed in subsequent posts.)
The US DOE has gone so far, in fact, to write into its rules and regs requirements now that all federally-funded research must be scientifically based (Fed. Register 1/25/05):

We take this action to focus Federal financial assistance on expanding the number of programs and projects Department-wide that are evaluated under rigorous scientifically-based research methods in accordance with the ESEA of 1965, as reauthorized by the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001.

With all of this emphasis on science for Federal spending decisions, and with all the good research by Linda Darling-Hammond and other scholars that demonstrates the value of college teacher preparation for teacher candidates, one must wonder how the US DOE came to a decision to fund a reckless venture for teacher preparation that, 1) has no research to support it, scientific or otherwise, and 2) disregards all of the scientifically-based research that clearly shows teacher retention advantages and student learning advantage when teachers have been prepared to teach by university teacher education programs.

We are not likely to see a clearer domestic case of misappropriation of Federal monies, just as we are not likely to find a more hypocritical, cynical, and selective use of policy used to drive an ideological agenda aimed at the further weakening of public schools.