The Charlotte Danielson Who Is Getting Rich on the Misuse of Her Intellectual Property

Charlotte Danielson has built a fence between herself and the misuse of her teacher evaluation scholarship.   I call it scholarship rather than research because there is little hard evidence that her system works to improve teaching.  Even so, CorpEd has paid the Danielson Group millions to use her materials to create a ridiculous rubric for high stakes teacher evaluations, even as Danielson publicly decries (when asked by Chelsea Clinton) the use of teacher evaluations for high stakes purposes.

Perhaps when Danielson is named as a litigant in the lawsuits that are brewing over CorpEd's crackpot schemes to evaluate teachers, then she will have a bit more to say publicly on the subject.  As teacher Brandon suggests in the following post, she could save her reputation, perhaps, if she were to do the honest thing, rather than the most lucrative one.

This commentary is from Polite on Society:

Posted on October 11, 2013 by Brandon

The currents of education are turbulent and ever changing. Ask any teacher who’s been in the classroom for a certain numbers of years, and they’ll tell you about all the educational fads, jargon, and theories that have passed through their classrooms like water from a colander in their careers, and they’ll prove to you the fickle nature of educational trends. Unfortunately, there is a powerful stormbrewing, and many wonder if these current tides bring poor tidings for education and educators. Programs and theories have never seemed so powerful, all encompassing and engrossing, or downrightdamaging as they have in the past ten years or so, since the passing of the No Child Left Behind Act and have laid the heavy burden of standardized testing as the ultimate measure of teaching and learning upon the profession and calling of teaching.  This kind of testing has led to an entire dehumanizing movement that addresses teaching as “one size fits all” and also assesses teaching in the same manner.

While I could speak until I drop about the absurdity of standardized assessment as the heavy indicator in learning, what is equally—if not more baffling—is the way in which teachers are handled and currently evaluated according to new systems across the country. They are based on Charlotte Danielson’s Effective Teaching Rubric and the rubric, as implemented in New York and many, many other states, is composed of 22 domains and sub-domains of observable and non-observable teaching practices or requirements that are meant to determine not only the effectiveness, but the development of a teacher along a spectrum that ranges from ineffective to highly effective.

Teachers, of course, use rubrics all the time so it only stands to reason that they might be employed in their own professional evaluations, however not only is such a comically huge rubric off-putting and worrisome, this particular one has no scientific research, focus group, control group, or experimental backing—no evidence based research of the sort teachers are legally mandated to employ themselves in classroom practice—that has ever been presented to justify its ubiquitous installation in national standards.

Additionally, Charlotte Danielson herself appears to have very little substantial evidence to credential her existence. The artifacts are few and far between. There are rumors swirling that she is a fiction developed by the Danielson Group to propagate their highly lucrative consulting services and texts. Purportedly she appears and speaks about her research, and is generally dismayed at its usage…but there is no empirical evidence of this in the media, and the Google Results yield very little beyond corporate propaganda and this very theory.

If it were me, and I was disgusted at the use of my research in the way that the Danielson Rubrics have been weaponized against the very populations I aimed to help by developing them—especially on such a large national scale—I might find myself standing on my soap box and hollering pretty loudly on newsprograms, networks, and the internet as loud as I could. In fact, Diane Ravitch who helped helm the push and study that lead to the abominable NCLB legislation, does just that—not only apologizing for the error of her past thinking, now fighting the good fight to undo its destructive and confounding mandates. Ravitch is outspoken, visible, and passionate in the public eye—hardly a serious debate occurs without her being cited or paraphrased towards dispelling the curse and plague upon our nations education systems.

While Danielson is reported to have studied at such notable institutions as Oxford and Rutgers, and her group’s webpage describes her as a globally recognized expert on education, her absence from the politically charged debates swirling around education is painfully obvious. Who is this person that has designed the system by which we are all judged? What is her body of work experience? Where has she taught? There was an enormous credentialing movement (Birthers) based entirely on finding out President Obama’s background—and he empirically exists. There is actual evidence of his physical existence, regardless of his credentials or experiences. Where is the birther movement to prove the existence of Charlotte Danielson? It leads one to wonder “Who is Charlotte Danielson?” in much the same way Ayn Rand’s “oppressed” denizens of Atlas Shrugged despairingly exclaimed “Who is John Galt?” in disgust, defeat, and disinterest in the goings on around them.

Teachers are battered, afraid for their jobs, and confused at what the expectations are—not because they cannot read what rubrics ask of them, but because they are vague and largely untenable when placed in the context of reality. But some with gallows humor and others with the glint in their eye of a cornered animal, we soldier on. There are kids to teach and minds to feed…but that mindset is part of the problem too. Teaching is a profession and an occupation, sure, but as I stated earlier it is also a calling…and an idealistic one to boot.

We are blinded by this calling to keep taking, absorbing, feinting, bobbing, and weaving through the pugilistic critical blows dealt to our field out of a desire to continue teaching and provide our students with the academic (and sometimes emotional) support that they hunger for. With one arm around our students it’s hard to fight back and take a stand. This is especially true in a climate so very prepared to privatize the public system and break the backs of our unions, the last organization with any willingness to listen to us and hear our concerns and frustrations, our fear and our anger. The unions are the last ones willing to defend us rather than defund us, but even the unions can’t stop the Danielson and Common Core Learning Standards blitz.

When you compound Danielson with those equally nebulous and cumbersome Common Core Learning Standards, you get the “Perfect Storm” of obfuscation and miscommunication. These standards are so vaguely written that schools run weeks long Professional Development and Inquiry Time just to “unpack” them and “decode” them so that they can be understood and tackled from a practical perspective. Few people actually believe it because of the scape goating that has been practiced in the media over the recent years, but teachers are actually rather intelligent folks—what with their multiple higher education degrees and certifications—so if it takes weeks for a room full of them to inspect the nouns and then verbs of edicts, and then debate the best route to their implementation, something must be very wrong in the wording.

In that way, above all, Danielson and CCLS are a match made in committee-hell: deadly for the future of our children our education systems, and our nation on the whole. One is a weight upon evaluation and the other a weight upon instruction…and like prisoners in a medieval stretcher; teachers all across the nation are reaching a breaking point.

Those of us who are young in our practice are second guessing our choices and those of us who are veterans and masters of the art find themselves standing in landscape they’ve never seen, confused as to how or why they got there and how they can get back home. We’re left not only wondering “Who is Charlotte Danielson” to sit as our judge but also “What is the Common Core” by which we are bound?

At the center of all the drama, politics, and strong arming are two women—one fighting for vindication against research that was misguided and misappropriated, and another whom few could identify in a line-up but whose impact is felt exponentially as you walk from the Principal’s Office into the Classroom. Diane Ravitch and Charlotte Danielson—or at least their bodies of work—have been used to fundamentally quantify and dehumanize the American Education system. Ravitch has since begun to rage against the machine that she helped design while Danielson may be the very image of Big Brother on the viewing screen—a careful crafted face of intrusive oversight, the face of a clockwork machine with many unfeeling, ever spinning gears.

Regardless of the actual existence of the philosopher, the philosophy has been used to Machiavellian ends to assist in the destruction of public education by removing the art from teaching. There is no room for creative, thoughtful practice. There are no teachable moments. You have to follow the script outlined by CCLS and Danielson—this is the unfathomable “even worse” evolution of the boxed-curriculum. Both the CCLS and Danielson leave very little room for creativity—indeed they call for so much mathematical data and assessment they hardly leave time for teachers to have lives. If the turbulent tides of education don’t soon change course—almost entirely—you can expect that many teachers won’t hive livelihoods either, because the system and the expectation, in light of the disorganization, misinformation, and under-resourcing of public education is designed to drown the system and sink us all in the crashing waves of an engineered perfect storm.

We have to tread hard and fight the raging currents set against us.

Avoiding the toughest exam in the world .... so far.

A Sunday LA Times page one story had this headline: "China gives US schools budget help" (Oct 27). The subheadline: "Tuition-paying Chinese students are providing much needed money - and cultural exchange - to high schools here."

Our schools would not have these budget problems if we didn't waste so much money on standardized testing. And the budget crisis will get worse because testing will soon be online, which means massive and ever-increasing spending on technology.

Also, the article explains that a major motivation to doing high school in the US is to avoid the brutal gaokao the university entrance exam, considered by some to be the toughest exam in the world (http://www.businessinsider.com/maotanchang-gaokao-factory-town-2013-10).

But American schools schools are catching up. How long will it be until American students from wealthy families go abroad for school to avoid the common core tests?

Education Funders Sponsor a Great Study of NYC Small School Reforms but Will They Read It?

The Education Funders Research Initiative’s “New York City Schools: Following the Learning Trajectories of a Cohort," by Douglas Ready, Thomas Hatch, Miya Warner, and Elizabeth Chu, is excellent. It has the scholarly integrity of the research of the Consortium on Chicago School Research or Johns Hopkins’ Everyone Graduates. It also reads like a diplomatic call for New York City reformers to heed social science when taking the next steps towards improving the city’s schools.

The results of “New York City Schools” suggest positive outcomes associated with New York City’s small high schools initiative. It studies 77,501 students who entered ninth grade in 2005 and found that 67% graduated in four years. It adds to the evidence base that explains why all students benefit from a challenging curriculum and further documents the need to invest in socio-emotional supports.

The study was refreshingly open about the characteristics of the students who were more likely to benefit from recent reforms. In 2005, 75% of New York City students received free or reduced-price lunches. But, shockingly, only ½ of these incoming freshmen were low-income.

How is that possible?

Ready et. al were studying a sample that did not include students who were no longer enrolled in a NYC DOE school in ninth grade, or who were enrolled in specialized programs serving students in the criminal justice system, drug/alcohol rehabilitation centers, teen pregnancy centers, mental health facilities, etc. In other words, large numbers of harder-to-educate students were no longer being served by either traditional high schools or the new small schools.

Ready et. al also explain:

Only 2.7% of students who failed to meet the third-grade English Language Arts (ELA) standard went on to meet or exceed the ELA benchmark in eighth grade, and only one in three of the students who failed to meet the third-grade ELA standard graduated from high school.” Conversely, 91.3% of students who exceeded the ELA standard in third grade would meet or exceed the standard in eighth grade, and almost 90% of these students graduated within four years.

This bifurcation increased during high school, “the odds of graduation for a student who completed fewer than 10 ninth-grade course credits (five year-long courses) were 85% lower, while students who missed more than 15 days of school in ninth grade had odds of graduating that were over 60% lower.” Those students were less likely to attend a small school.

At this point, Ready et. al could have spun the data and claimed it was the higher expectations of small schools that caused more students to succeed and blamed educators in bigger high schools, and their higher suspension rates. At times, they seemed ready to proclaim more choice and Common Core as the solution.

Instead, “New York City Schools” acknowledged that these results “reflect relational rather than causal associations,” and they are similar to findings in other cities like Chicago. Ready et. al thus echo the findings of the Chicago Consortium of School Research, which documented the extreme difficulty of overcoming intense concentrations of generational poverty and trauma.

Ready et. al also sound like Robert Balfanz’s team at Johns Hopkins when recalling that “students do not experience the system all at once; students experience the system over thirteen years or more … That suggests that a generation of interventions might be needed to address systemic issues like the extent of stratification between and within the schools.”

The researchers asked questions which too many reformers say that educators are not supposed to ask. They asked whether it was segregation within neighborhoods and schools that caused the disparate outcomes. Ready et. al ask whether kindergarteners from similar income levels but from more diverse neighborhoods more likely to experience success in their schools than their peers in segregated neighborhoods. They conclude that interventions such as early education must begin before children have gone too far down the “dead end track.” “It is difficult to conceive of truly substantial improvements in the ‘whole system,’" they conclude, "if children do not enter the system until they are five or six years.”

Then, Ready et. al even questioned some reformers’ blind faith in Common Core as the answer for poor children’s educational problems:

This report highlights the problems that can come with inequitable and inconsistent expectations and reinforces the need to maintain clear, high standards for all. However, there is a complicated relationship between holding all students to high common standards and ensuring that students at all levels of development and performance experience appropriate support. For struggling students, repeatedly confronting demands for performance they cannot reach can undermine the motivation and confidence they must have to persist in school.

Education funders love individual success stories and Ready et. al agree that they need to be documented. The quick and easy answer would be to assume, against evidence and common sense, that small schools would have had equally good results if they had the “same students,” and they would have won a fair competition with the big traditional high schools. Certainly, the Bloomberg administration would like to proclaim a victory for small schools and keep up the high-stakes competition with traditional schools. But, the authors caution, “it is the rare occasion when these local solutions apply across all students and contexts. More than focusing on what it takes for small numbers of schools and students to beat the odds, we need a systemic approach to policy and practice that changes the odds so success is the expectation for all rather than an exception to the norm.”

They politely advance the case that “many in education who have attempted to develop new schools and programs often describe their challenge as one of trying to build a plane while flying it.” To tackle the problems of extreme poverty, however, reformers must address “dual demands” that may be even more complex. “We have to learn how to fly the plane while we take it apart.”

I have concerns regarding some of the study’s proposed solutions. Yes, we need to reduce suspensions, but I worry systems will respond by simply cutting the number of consequences that are assessed, and not address the root causes and the behaviors that lead to those suspensions. I also question their otherwise sensible suggestion “Rethink the focus on time and ‘credit.’” (Emphasis in the original) Given New York City’s flagrant abuses of “credit recovery,” that could open the door to a new generation of gamesmanship to “pass on” students to make graduation metrics look better.

Ready et. al recommend that the city “explore different possibilities for choice procedures in middle and high school; ways to make the choice procedure and the consequences of those choices clearer.” If I am correct in reading between the lines, they may be open to choice that encourages socio-economic integration. If so, I wish they had been more explicit. On the other hand, these scholars chose their words carefully. They are better qualified than I to know how to articulate suggestions to the billionaires who have funded New York City’s reforms.

The bottom line, as far as I’m concerned, is that reformers prejudged that competition was the only way to transform New York City schools. They granted small schools the autonomy to provide personalized instruction. They gave numerous other advantages to small schools, but they were not satisfied with that. NYC reformers actively damaged traditional schools in order to make sure that their vision of reform would win. They dumped large numbers of “Over the Counter” kids and other at-risk students on the most challenged schools, as they micromanaged instruction in ways that further assured the defeat of traditional schools. Reformers damaged kids in the righteous faith that once their old under-performing schools were destroyed that small schools could be further scaled up.

I read “New York City Schools” as a scientific call to move beyond such wishful thinking. It graciously praises the policies that worked for small schools, as it astutely analyzed what it would take to improve outcomes for more difficult-to-educate students. If reformers read the study with an open mind, we might see a new generation of win-win, science-based policies to help all children.

Shelby County Plans to Whiten Suburban Schools and to Drop Civil Rights Lawsuit

In a plan drawn up in the back rooms of the local political elites, Shelby County stands poised to do what most thought impossible: to make Shelby County Schools more segregated.  The plan calls for the County to hold on to three schools in Germantown and one in Millington, where significant numbers of  black non-municipal County children live who are now attending the four schools that are within the boundaries of Germantown and Millington, respectively.  

At the same time that this plan moves forward, the County Commission is poised to drop the civil rights lawsuit they previously filed to stop the creating of municipal boutique school districts--a lawsuit that claimed that such leafy boutiques would resegregate schools.  Now that the County Schools have joined in the resegregation plan, I supposed it would not be fitting for the County to sue itself.

According to the Commercial Appeal,  SCS is suddenly concerned with the negative aspects of disruption for the children of the leafy suburbs. It would seem that SCS is 100 percent in support of disruption when it comes to closing schools in the City, firing teachers, moving children, and confining them in segregated corporate charter schools.

To further illustrate SCS hypocrisy, we find Mr. Hopson, the Superintendent, suddenly concerned that county children attending muni schools will not be represented by a school board member, where they can take their concerns and grievances. Where is Mr. Hopson's concern for the thousands of Memphis children contained in lockdown corporate reform charters who have no school board representation or any public protection from the clueless missionaries who have been put in charge of the ASD assigned chain gangs?

United Way of Central Indiana to Start the Mitch Daniels/Dennis Bakke/Bart Peterson Handouts to the Corporate School Wealthy

by Doug Martin

While some United Way branches across the Hoosier state are investing in early learning initiatives like Success by Six, the United Way of Central Indiana, now run by former Mitch Daniels, Dennis Bakke, and Bart Peterson operative Ann Murtlow, is planning on handing out cash  to charter schools in Boone, Hamilton, Hancock, Hendricks, Marion ,and Morgan counties.  In a press release to Inside Indiana Business and other outlets, United Way of Central Indiana officials write that “Grants for one to three years can range from $50,000 to $750,000” and will target poverty-stricken schools not doing well on standardized tests.

Even though the United Way of Central Indiana says it plans to also set aside money for traditional public schools, the history of its new CEO raises serious questions.  First off, Ann Murtlow has worked with the fake liberals at the Mind Trust who claim they are out to benefit poor kids and teachers as they connive to funnel money to blended learning schools run by their friends like Earl Martin Phalen (who was just rewarded the Mitch Daniels Leadership Foundation Award) and replace real teachers with boot-camp trained corporate teachers at Teach for America and the New Teachers Project.  Among other things, the Mind Trust plan is actually the pseudo-liberal Center for American Progress and rightwing Fordham Foundation  plan:  eliminate local school boards so that mayors can replace them with people who will hand more taxpayer money to wealthy charter school operators. 

Murtlow used to be the senior vice chair of the Mind Trust, and the United Way of Central Indiana was funding the school privatizing group even before Murtlow was hired to run it.  From 2011 to 2012, the United Way of Central Indiana handed $25,000 to the Mind Trust (page 111 in PDF) and another $25,000 (page 46 in PDF) from 2010-2011.  This is sure to escalate now that Murtlow is in charge.

But United Way of Central Indiana’s CEO Ann Murtlow has ties to other shady characters in the Indiana corporate school complex, specifically Mitch Daniels and Dennis Bakke.  Murtlow is a former bigwig at the Indianapolis Power and Light Company (IPALCO) and previously worked as an AES Corporation liaison at the same time Mitch Daniels was an IPALCO board member, then joined IPALCO in 2002.

AES, IPALCO, Mitch Daniels, and Dennis Bakke—who now steals taxpayer money through his for-profit charter school outfit Imagine Schools—were up to serious monkey business a few years back.  As Ifirst noted in the Indianapolis Star  in November 2010 and later at Bloomington’s Common Errant,  in 2001 Mitch Daniels was on the board of the Indianapolis Power and Light Company, which merged with Bakke’s then-company AES, a monster utility corporation.  Daniels and others on the IPALCO board dumped their own stock before the merger took place. Afterwards, IPALCO stockholders and workers lost millions, including their 401k packages.  In fact, as a result of this merger, both Daniels and Bakke were sued for insider trading together in 2003.  While IPALCO board members and officials went home, “according to the lawsuit filings, with an estimated $43.6 million in profits and golden-parachute benefits,” retirees and IPALCO workers lost $95 million, says a Republican lawyer who represented the workers and shareholders in an insider trading lawsuit against Daniels, Bakke, and others in 2003.  Dan Coats, now an Indiana U.S. senator, and Barry Sharp, who works for Bakke’s Imagine Schools, were also involved.  No criminal charges were ever filed, and the courts, quite conveniently, dismissed the civil lawsuits.

Dennis Bakke is also the billionaire member of the Fellowship, better known as the Family, a Christian Right biblical capitalism secretive group in DC.  His Imagine Schools is one of the most corrupt for-profit charter school outfits in the nation and in Indiana, known for its rent schemes which funnel millions to him and leave kids without textbooks.  Bakke’s outfit runs the Imagine Indiana Life Sciences Academy West in Murtlow’s United Way of Central Indiana’s backyard. The United Way of Central Indiana, headquartered in Indianapolis, has plenty of shady for-profit charter schools in the city to choose from, many of them failing and not being held to accountability, and Imagine Schools is a perfect candidate for a bailout.  

Dennis Bakke knows a lot about government bailouts.  Besides getting $11 million from Obama’s Recovery Act (to supposedly put people back to work after the Dennis Bakke’s of the world crashed the economy), Bakke’s Imagine Schools was allowed to keep millions in Indiana taxpayer money when Ball State (after years of playing dumb so they could get the sponsorship fee) closed Imagine’s Fort Wayne school.  To solve that problem and rake in a few more millions, Bakke and crew merged with the Horizon Christian Academy and will now collect state money through vouchers.  In fact, its $3.6 million charter school taxpayer loans were forgiven by the state and details of the merger with the private Christian school were not released to the public.

Some of the United Way of Central Indiana’s money may indeed go to worthy traditional schools for well-needed programs, but Murtlow’s history with those out to privatize Indiana schools tells me something else is going to happen here and it’s not going to be pretty.  Neither does its board of directors which includes Mitch Daniels sister, Deborah J. and a whole slew of school privatizers and behind-the-scene players: hedge fund Democrat for Education reform lawmaker Mary Ann Sullivan, Mind Trust donor Beverley Pitts, Tindley charter school's John Neighbors, IPS corporate school board member Sam Odle, and Mark Miles.  Miles, if we remember, was crafting the corporate school overhaul in Indiana before even Tony Bennett knew what was going on.  Speaking of hedge funds, the United Way of Central Indiana has $5.2 million invested in them (see page 27 in PDF). In fact, if you turn to page 29 of the group’s tax forms, you see these hedge funds are operated in Central America and the Caribbean.  And let’s not forget this board gave $9,000 to the Mitch Daniels-founded Oaks Academy private school (see page 145 in PDF) between 2011 and 2012 and $10,000 in (page 50 in PDF) from 2010 to 2011.

It’s not known yet how much money Murtlow is raking in by running the United Way of Central Indiana, but the past CEO made over $250,000 in total compensation in 2012 (see page 18 in PDF) And let’s not forget, college-drop out and school privatizer Bill Gates is a major funder of the United Way across the U.S.  I am sure Murtlow would like some of that Gates money to increase her take-home pay.  

 

 

 

 

KIPP Retooling? (Or Just a Nasty Piece at Education Next?)

As the wheels appear to be coming off the education reform bus, many reformers are scrambling to change the narratives, shift the arguments, and even retool their foundational commitments.

One such retooling may be Knowledge Is Power Program charters, if this piece at Education Next authored by Alexandra Boyd, Robert Maranto and Caleb Rose is any indication: “The Softer Side of ‘No Excuses.’”

I probably wouldn’t have spent much time on this article since it comes from two people connected with the University of Arkansas’s Walton-funded Department of Education Reform. No need to read because charter schools and school choice receive the same distorted advocacy from the DER’s crowd of endowed chairs as cigarettes did by the scientists working for Big Tobacco in years gone by.

But I noticed something interesting in the opening paragraphs, me (and a fellow KIPP critic, Jim Horn):

Also not surprisingly, KIPP and other No Excuses schools have no shortage of critics. Furman University education professor P. L. Thomas, who admitted in a recent speech at the University of Arkansas to never having been in a No Excuses charter school, complains in a widely referenced 2012 Daily Kos post that in such schools, “Students are required to use complete sentences at all times, and call female teachers ‘Miss’—with the threat of disciplinary action taken if students fail to comply.” Regarding KIPP in particular, Cambridge College professor and blogger Jim Horn, who admits to having never been inside a KIPP school, nonetheless has referred to KIPP as a “New Age eugenics intervention at best,” destroying students’ cultures, and a “concentration camp” at worst.

Please continue reading HERE.

School-wide Parent Boycott of Tests for K-2 Brings Down Test

This is what OPTOUT looks like.  From RealNews:

The Mismeasure of Education Documents Tennessee as a Cautionary Tale

Jim Horn’s and Denise Wilburn’s The Mismeasure of Education chronicles the history of test-driven accountability that true believers in accountability-driven reform have ignored. Sadly, Horn and Wilburn document the timeless truth that “the past is prologue.” The history that contemporary school reformers do not know has come back, and I would not be surprised if Tennessee is their Waterloo. A first post focused on Horn’s and Wilburn’s history of the roots of accountability-driven reform. This one will concentrate of their account of Tennessee’s recent history and how it has become the classic example of the logic and practice of outputs-driven school reform.

I saw much of the early history described in The Mismeasure of Education as a blue collar worker in another Sunbelt state, Oklahoma. With the Energy Crisis of 1973, the deindustrialization of America sped up. It was accelerated by competition between states to give tax breaks to big business. In Oklahoma, 10% of jobs disappeared in 1983 as the Reagan Administration gave three sets of tax breaks for closing profitable factories and relocating them. Reaganism also turned a blind eye to corporate raiders, who used those subsidies to purchase companies, fire workers, sell off assets, and invest their profits overseas.

Obviously this unrestrained greed and subsidized competition was a disaster for families in the industrial north. The overnight disappearance of an economic future wrecked communities, created intense concentrations of extreme poverty, and killed the hope that is the key to successful schools and societies.

In the short run, however, Southern states like Tennessee and Oklahoma seemed to be winners. For the price of some tax breaks, automobile and tire factories, not to mention blue jeans factories and food processing plants, relocated to border states. Had we adopted the common sense approach and invested this new-found bounty (that, of course, was gained at the expense of Northern workers), the quality of life in poor Southern states would have increased. Had we really believed the rhetoric about competing in a global marketplace and invested in the “human capital” that would be required for good jobs, maybe trickle down economics would have benefited us, as it impoverished our fellow citizens.

In my home state, however, jobs disappeared overnight in the inner city and reappeared in the exurbs. It did not take long before the good and the lousy jobs were relocated to Mexico, then, China, then Vietnam, and to the latest place where wages remained lower.

Until reading The Mismeasure of Education, however, I had forgotten that Tennessee was the highest-profiled example of the Sunbelt’s embrace of corporate reforms of all types. Tennessee, of all places, was positioned to prosper in the global marketplace. And, if you believe their hype, it did. Japan invested in union-free car manufacturing. Remember the 1990s claims that Big Data had put an end to economic cycles? Memphis, being the site of Fed X, was supposed to to be the archetype of a 21st century economy with overnight delivery and instant adjustments to the market’s demands.

As Horn and Wilburn explain, since the 1990s, Tennessee became a leader in privatization and replacing the post-New Deal/Fair Deal public social safety net. It invested in private prisons and was almost successful in attempts to privatize the state prison system. TennCare was the name for the new model of health care delivery, which funneled huge sums of public monies to health management organizations. And, outputs-driven accountability would supposedly allow school reform to create a workforce to compete in the international marketplace.

Horn and Wilburn briefly describe Tennessee’s educational reforms within the context of its reforms in health, prisons, and corporate salesmanship. They provide a reminder that turning public welfare over to the market did not work any better in other sectors than it did education. They then give an in-depth analysis of how the state’s commitment to using a statistical algorithm, in lieu of real investments in the human side of schooling, was bound to fail.

Tennessee’s iconic contribution to data-driven school reform was its TVAAS, or its value-added model for using test scores to drive school improvement. Developed by William Sanders, a local agricultural statistician, value-added became the cornerstone of the market-driven school reform model. Armed with value-added, it was claimed, a revolution in teacher quality could overcome intense concentrations of generational poverty and trauma.

Drawing on state studies and the work of value-added scholars, Horn and Wilburn showed how Tennessee’s model could only predict the effect of demographics and socio-economic status in school systems where student were consciously integrated by race. This should have been no surprise given the findings of James Coleman (who they had previously discussed in detail.) For instance, in a middle school in Knox County where teachers only had a 1% chance of teaching a black student the state’ accountability model, TVAAS gave them an “A” for producing a 2.1 gain score. In the same county, teachers with a 68.7% chance of teaching a black student had a -1.1 test score, earning an “F” and a “D” on the state metrics. TVAAS might document the way that black and poor students tended to “fall further back over time,” but it offered no solutuion.

Before long, value-added became the quick fix for whatever ailed reformers. As the flaws inherent in No Child Left Behind became obvious, Tennessee became one of the primary sites of a pilot study using growth models to fix NCLB’s discredited API targets. And, when Bill Gates became a convert, value-added became foundation of his “teacher quality” approach to reform. Then came the RttT …

As Horn and Wilburn note, Tennessee was poised to come in first – or last – in the Race to the Top. The state was first in hyping William Sanders’ miracle cure of value-added, but its actual record was bleak, and the RttT grant application required evidence that states would follow through on their promises. Due to Tennessee’s long history of using “accountablism” or outputs-driven accountability as a shortcut towards educational equity, the state had conducted audits of both its testing metrics and the capacity of its education department to monitor reforms. Both were found wanting. Tennessee was notorious for its low learning standards, and yet it had to promise to implement college-ready standards.

Tennessee not only won in the first round of RttT competition, but it carved out a space as #1 in terms of commitment toward the corporate reform policies that earned it the $500 million grant. An Achievement School District (ASD) was created in order to move the state’s bottom 5% of schools into the top 25% in five years. The ASD was flush with cash for converting traditional public schools into charters and contracting with charter management organizations. Top-down “turnarounds” were mandated. In contrast to other RttT winners, even those who were true believers in value-added teacher evaluations, Tennessee rushed full speed ahead with their theories. Tennessee hired former Teach for America attorney, Kevin Huffman, the ultimate reform ideologue, to frantically implement Common Core, as it also attempted to meet its promises in terms of school readiness, 3rd grade reading, and special education. And, in Memphis, reformers tackled all of those challenging as they faced the daunting prospects of merging the urban school system and suburban districts.

Memphis brings the story of Tennessee full circle. As Horn and Wilburn explain, the Coleman Report documented the need for desegregation as the most method of raising achievement. With the end of race-based desegregation efforts, socio-economic integration became the most promising solution. As in the rest of the Sunbelt, globalism provided Tennessee a burst of economic opportunity that could have been invested in creating equitable social, educational, and health services. It would not have been cheap or easy to create the supports necessary to build economic opportunities for all, and the temptation to take the accountablism shortcut proved irresistible.

I have no idea if the Memphis and Shelby County merger would have created socio-economic desegregation and laid a foundation for real justice and schools where everyone would enjoy the educational opportunities to compete in the global marketplace. It would have been a great experiment in democracy. The idea that Memphis could implement those democratic reforms, while also implementing corporate reform on steroids, is implausible.

Finishing The Mismeasure of Education, the real question seems to be whether Tennessee’ RttT will end as a tragedy or a farce. The state’s experiment in market-driven reform is likely to be the next most-watched experiment in corporate reform. Just as spectators in sports events are told, “you can’t tell the players without a program,” outsiders can’t fully understand Tennessee’s experiments without a written guide. Horn and Wilburn have provided that document for watching the story unfold. Unless I miss my guess, as the RttT craters, we will need to keep dog-eared copies of their great book handy. I expect that their narrative will predict with great accuracy the future of test-driven reform in Tennessee and much of the ways that the market-place mentality will drive national school improvement efforts.

The Scum at the Top of the Private Prison Empire for the Young

An amazing piece of reporting by Chris Kirkham at HuffPo reveals a seedy empire of corporate welfare bottom feeders preying on juvenile offenders.  Find Part One here with intro clip below, and at left is James Slattery, Chief Executive Scumbag of the worst offender, Correctional Services Corporation.

From a glance at his background, one might assume that James F. Slattery would have a difficult time convincing any state in America to entrust him with the supervision of its lawbreaking youth.

Over the past quarter century, Slattery’s for-profit prison enterprises have run afoul of the Justice Department and authorities in New York, Florida, Maryland, Nevada and Texas for alleged offenses ranging from condoning abuse of inmates to plying politicians with undisclosed gifts while seeking to secure state contracts.

The Huffington Post uploaded and annotated the documents — including court transcripts, police reports, audits and inspection records — uncovered during this investigation.

Hover over the highlighted passages to see the source document behind each fact.

Click here to browse all the documents behind this report »

In 2001, an 18-year-old committed to a Texas boot camp operated by one of Slattery’s previous companies, Correctional Services Corp., came down with pneumonia and pleaded to see a doctor as he struggled to breathe. Guards accused the teen of faking it and forced him to do pushups in his own vomit, according to Texas law enforcement reports. After nine days of medical neglect, he died.

That same year, auditors in Maryland found that staff at one of Slattery’s juvenile facilities coaxed inmates to fight on Saturday mornings as a way to settle disputes from earlier in the week. In recent years, the company has failed to report riots, assaults and claims of sexual abuse at its juvenile prisons in Florida, according to a review of state records and accounts from former employees and inmates.

Despite that history, Slattery’s current company, Youth Services International, has retained and even expanded its contracts to operate juvenile prisons in several states. The company has capitalized on budgetary strains across the country as governments embrace privatization in pursuit of cost savings. Nearly 40 percent of the nation’s juvenile delinquents are today committed to private facilities, according to the most recent federal data from 2011, up from about 33 percent twelve years earlier.

Over the past two decades, more than 40,000 boys and girls in 16 states have gone through one of Slattery’s prisons, boot camps or detention centers, according to a Huffington Post analysis of juvenile facility data. . . .

Does Chinese literacy need to be "revived"?

Sent to the Wall Street Journal, Oct 22
 
As is the case in the US, China thinks that literacy is declining and that part of the solution is a TV spelling bee in Chinese ("Chinese TV's Latest Hit Features a Character-Driven Plot: Show Aimed at Reviving the Country's Written Language Explodes."October 20).
 
There is no evidence of a decline of literacy in China and no evidence of a decline in the US.  The fact that only 30% of the adults in the audience of the TV show could spell spell "toad" correctly in Chinese characters suggests that there has been no decline: even adult Chinese speakers make mistakes.

It is interesting that  the winner of the spelling bee attributes her success to extensive reading for pleasure.  This agrees with research in both Chinese and English showing that pleasure reading is the major source of literacy development: those who read more read better, write better, spell better, have larger vocabularies, and better grammar. 

The way to prevent a decline in literacy is through more access to interesting reading materials: libraries, not game shows.

Stephen Krashen

Sources:
No evidence of a decline: Krashen, S. 1993. How well do people spell? Reading Improvement 30: 9-20.
Pleasure reading  and development:
Krashen, S. 2004. The Power of Reading. Portsmouth: Heinemann and Westport: Libraries Unlimited.
Krashen, S. 2010. Does the power of reading apply to all languages? Language Magazine 9 (9): 24-27.

original article: http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702304410204579141422985199050?mod=djemITP_h