Technology upgrades for national tests: Is it worth it?

Sent to The Phoenix, Muskogee, OK, June 5

"Schools search for money for technology upgrades," (June 5) tells us that the new national tests based on the national standards are going to cost a lot of money, far more than we realized.

There is no evidence that the new standards and tests will work, and the money is badly needed elsewhere. Also, if the new standards and tests fail to produce results, our children will suffer, but the testing and computer companies will make substantial profits regardless.

We can also be sure that as soon as the new system is in place, marketing will begin to sell us a new, improved system: National Test Battery 2.0.

Stephen Krashen

Original article: http://muskogeephoenix.com/local/x1315239890/Schools-search-for-money-for-technology-upgrades

The evidence on libraries and librarians

The evidence on libraries and librarians

Sent to the New York Times, June 5

Missing from "Learning to read on zero dollars a day" (June 4) is the fact that what is happening in Boise High is happening all across the country: School library funding is decreasing everywhere, and school librarians' hours are being cut back, and some are loosing their jobs.

Also missing is the consistent finding that students get a large percentage of their reading material from school libraries. For children in high-poverty areas, the library is often the primary source of reading material.

Also missing is the consistent finding that better school libraries are associated with higher reading scores, and the presence of a credentialed librarian makes an independent contribution to reading achievement.

Critics everywhere are insisting on evidence and accountability. The research has supplied the evidence in support of libraries and librarians. Why is it ignored?

Stephen Krashen

Sources:

School library funding is decreasing …: American Library Association, 2010. The State of America's Libraries. American Libraries (Special Issue).

Students get a large percentage …: Krashen, S. 2004. The Power of Reading. (Libraries Unlimited, Heinemann, second edition); "Primary Sources: America's Teachers on America's Schools" http://www.scholastic.com/primarysources/download.asp (March, 2010)

Better libraries, librarians associated with higher reading scores: Research reviewed in Krashen, 2004, op. cit, also studies by Keith Curry Lance, http://www.lrs.org/impact.php

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/05/opinion/05doerr.html

Op-Ed Contributor

Learning to Read on Zero Dollars a Day

By ANTHONY DOERR

Published: June 4, 2011

MEET Pat St. Tourangeau, a school librarian at Boise High. Her eyes are pale blue; her hair is straight; she has an indomitable look, as though this morning, while you slept, she might have baked a mean batch of cookies, towed someone out of a ditch and repaired a snowmobile.

I ask her how the library is doing.

“Our budget next year is going to be zero,” she says. “Again.”

Zero?

Our two local papers, like yours perhaps, are awash in articles about embattled teachers, increased class sizes and diverted education money. But I had foolishly assumed school libraries were something sacred. Picking on libraries is like picking on premature babies: what sort of person would actually do it?

Apparently my naïveté knows no bounds. Pat makes a circle with her thumb and forefinger. “Zero,” she repeats.

Boise High and its more than 1,400 students sit four blocks from the Idaho Statehouse, where the Legislature votes on budgets. Its library is a bright little place full of posters; there are aisles of metal shelves, wooden chairs at veneered tables, twin rows of outdated computers with big black monitors. But this is not the school library of 20 years ago: Pat blogs, uses Twitter and teaches students to make video book trailers; she throws out the names of online databases as if they’re ice cream flavors.

“Twenty years ago,” she says, “we had challenges helping kids find enough information. Now we have the opposite problem. There’s plenty of information out there. Now it’s a matter of training students to think critically about what they find. Because 90 percent of what they find on the Internet is garbage.”

It’s not as if the research skills that students learn, online or off, are becoming less relevant, or are in less demand. There’s a little counter on the turnstiles into the Boise High library: in February 2010, it had 6,787 visitors. A year later, it had 7,331. From last September through February, students logged over 110,000 minutes just on reference databases from Gale Cengage, a library information service.

Pat’s job title is teacher-librarian. She says she thinks of herself as an information specialist. Except lately, her job title might more appropriately be fund-raising specialist. When she found out, last spring, that this year’s budget for the district libraries would be zero, Pat held brainstorming meetings, wrote grants, sold coupon books and organized the school’s calculator rental program. For alphabetizing and distributing student photos, the library got the Associated Student Body Fund to pay $1 a packet.

Including income from fines, the library staff managed to raise almost $20,000 last year. That’s the budget for everything: buying books, videos and magazines; replacing furniture; subscribing to newspapers; and updating technology.

That last one is critical: all of their computers are five years old, and some are seven or eight. “And they’re busy all the time,” says Pat. “This is the only place in the school kids can drop in and use computers.”

But that was last year; now the library faces another year with no budget.

“It has been very difficult to continually write grants and send out pleas for donations,” Pat says. “I think we all have post-traumatic fund-raising syndrome, an almost chronic inability to face a grant application — again! — or set up another book fair.”

When I was a kid, my mother, a schoolteacher, turned to the library to solve basically any problem. How should we make costumes for Halloween? What’s that rash on your leg? What phylum do trilobites belong to? Off to the library!

Thanks to her, in my imagination libraries were little holy lands, as integral to a school as functioning toilets, or lockers, or bad pizza. They were a place where a child could learn that books could be mind-blowing, unpredictable, bawdy and frightening, that books could break down the divisions between nations, between foundations of thought, and between fantasy and reality.

I sit in the Boise High library for a half-hour or so and watch. Classes come and go with waves of noise. A boy peers into a computer screen; two girls work on a project together. It is a glorious spring day: little silver clouds blow past the windows.

And in the corner, at a back table, one boy I hadn’t noticed sits alone: a lean, muscular kid. Hunched over his knees. With a book open in his lap.

Anthony Doerr is the author, most recently, of the short story collection “Memory Wall.”

Coming Soon to An Oligarchy Near You

The invention of lying and educational policy

Posted as a comment on "The invention of lying" – an interview with Naomi Oreskes, by Robert Eshelman,

The first two paragraphs of the interview:

Despite this spring's ferocious weather, which scientists warn could become more commonplace as the planet warms, climate change denial is en vogue, particularly among congressional Republicans. They claim the science is unsettled, and seek deep cuts in programs that would research and prepare for climate-change.

The GOP's current attacks on climate science, though, are part of a decades-long narrative that questions scientific authority. In Merchants of Doubt, Naomi Oreskes, a professor of history and science studies at the University of California, San Diego, and her co-author Erik M. Conway detail the right-wing's history of obscuring connections between tobacco smoke and cancer, sulfur dioxide emissions and acid rain, and, currently, fossil fuels and climate change. The Prospect talked with Oreskes about the denial; why tornados, floods, and wildfires should come as little surprise; and how Cold War ideology continues to define political debates -- even around climate change.

http://prospect.org/cs/articles?article=the_invention_of_lying

MY COMMENT

Education "reformers" (which include Arne Duncan, the current US Secretary of Education), have gone far beyond sowing seeds of doubt into well-established findings. Through the force of PR and money, they have promoted a view of learning that not only conflicts with the data but are making it national policy and federal law. As is the case in other areas, alternative "research institutes" have been set up to promote these views, but in the case of education, the traditional sources of knowledge now play little or no role in shaping policy.

Just a few examples:

The claim has been made that "intensive systematic phonics" is best way to teach reading, despite studies showing that intensive phonics has no significant impact on tests in which children have to understand what they read. In addition to controlled studies, Reading First, a program based on intensive systematic phonics, was shown to be no better than regular instruction, even though it included more instructional time. The current effort is to expand the Reading First approach to all grades (the "LEARN Act").

There is massive research published in "respectable" journals and books showing that better libraries are related to better reading achievement, and that self-selected reading results in profound improvement in nearly all aspects of literacy. Yet school and public library funding is declining nation-wide and the federal government has dropped funding of a program providing help to school libraries in high-poverty areas.

The US Dept of Education is vigorously pushing the most aggressive and expensive testing program ever seen in our history, despite evidence showing that more testing does not result in higher achievement.

At the state level: Study after study has shown that children in bilingual programs do better than children in all-English programs on tests of English reading. Yet bilingual education has been dismantled in several states. Follow-up studies have shown no improvement in English language development.

Duncan and BBC (Billionaire Boys' Club) Go After Ravitch

There's an old quote that comes out the early labor movement: "First they ignore you. Then they ridicule you. And then they attack you and want to burn you. And then they build monuments to you."

From the heat coming off the attacks from ed journalism's junkyard jackass opinionator, Jon Alter, there is a fire being stoked by the Billionaire Boys Club, where an inability to buy the truth has reached a crisis point that demands that the truth tellers, now, be burned at the stake.

Long before the stakes were set and the wood piled, however, Alter was the well-worn, um, tool, shall we say, for the corporate thrusting that has long sought to degrade and humiliate those resisting the corporatization of schools.  A couple of earlier examples that would come to inspire the likes of Governor Scott Walker and Chris Christie, the first from 2008, when Alter was writing for the bankrupt rag, Newsweek:

. . . .Railing against the tyranny of tests is fashionable, but it isn't going to save our children and our economy in the 21st century. Nor will more money for important programs like art and music. The more basic problem is that we have no way of determining which teachers can actually teach. That's right: teaching is arguably the only profession in the country with ironclad job security and a well-honed hostility to measuring results.. . .

. . . .General elections are won among moderate swing voters, many of whom would respond well to a Democratic candidate willing to show he can slip the ideological stranglehold of a retrograde liberal interest group. Obama's right that the NCLB-inspired testing mania is out of control, but wrong to give teachers "ownership over the design of better assessment tools." That's a recipe for no assessment, because the teachers unions, for all their lip service, don't believe their members should be judged on performance. They still believe that protecting incompetents is more important than educating children. . . . .

This rant goes on with all the Gates/Broad/Walton talking points, expressed through Alter's tough-twerp rhetoric, but here is my favorite part, where Alter suggests holding back Title I funds (for those poorest children that Alter wants to help) as a way to bribe school systems (RTTT, anyone?) to make alterations in collective bargaining arrangements with teachers:

Obama should hold a summit of all 50 governors and move them toward national standards and better recruitment, training and evaluation of teachers. He should advocate using Title I federal funding as a lever to encourage "thin contracts" free of the insane work rules and bias toward seniority, as offered by the brilliant new superintendent in Washington, D.C., Michelle Rhee. . . .

And this from December, 2008, again reporting for his patron, Bill Gates:

He [Gates] called President-elect Obama last week and reports back cheerily that Obama "said all the right things" about including big money for education in the stimulus package and making fundamental school reform (not the fake kind pushed by teachers unions) a priority. . . . When I lumped Gates in with the "bomb throwers" on education, he chuckled and didn't disagree.

And a gem from 2010, again part of another borderline-erotic tribute to Alter's "micro-hard hombre" patron, Bill Gates:

There’s a backlash against the rich taking on school reform as a cause. Some liberals figure they must have an angle and are scapegoating teachers. But most of the wealthy people underwriting this long-delayed social movement for better performance are on the right track. 

I can see them, all former Corps (TFA) members, sipping lattes and hugging their clipboards around the table at the Gates Foundation and singing KIPP Shall Overcome.

The latest from Alter came yesterday, this poorly-written and hurried piece of drivel that recycles Alter's previously-used Whitaker Chambers insult aimed at Diane Ravitch, for whom the bonfire is now laid.  Alter was even handed a jibe to throw in from Oligarchs' chief stooge at ED, Arne Duncan:

Arne Duncan, President Barack Obama’s normally mild- mannered education secretary, has finally had enough. “Diane Ravitch is in denial and she is insulting all of the hardworking teachers, principals and students all across the country who are proving her wrong every day,” he said when I asked about Ravitch this week.

Eight pro-Ravitch comments were posted at the Bloomberg site before they stopped taking any more, even though hundreds of anti-Alter tweets have been posted.

The Oligarchs' strategy is obvious: Invite the shrinking minority of teachers at schools that haven't been blown up yet to the bonfire, where the stakes are in place for those who speak the truth.  Hope to divide--hope to conquer--burn the rest.  This came from Arne's press secretary yesterday afternoon:

EDPressSec @arneduncan: @DianeRavitch in denial & insulting hardworking teachers, principals & students proving her wrong every day me.lt/760ka

I hope everyone reading this has a hundred characters or so to say on the matter.

I was going to respond specifically to Alter's attack, but it seems that Alex Pareene at Salon has beat me to the punch.  And a good response it is:

By Alex Pareene 

AP/Bbsrock/Wikipedia

Michael Bloomberg and Jonathan Alter 

The conflict of interest inherent in having a media company owned by a powerful politician would probably be easier to explain away if that media company's new opinion arm refrained from directly attacking prominent critics of the boss. But Bloomberg View, like Bloomberg himself, doesn't care what nitpicking critics say. That's why no editor there thought it unseemly of Bloomberg View to run a Jonathan Alter piece attacking education policy expert Diane Ravitch, a vociferous critic of Mayor Bloomberg's handing of the New York City schools system.

Bloomberg View is the unasked-for opinion arm of Bloomberg L.P., the financial information company founded and owned by the billionaire mayor of New York City. Before it launched, one of its editors promised that it would run only "ideology-free, empirically-based editorial positions about the pressing issues of our time," because the ideology of the wealthy elite does not count as ideology.

There was already a minor controversy when it was reported that the opinion arm of Bloomberg's media company -- a company he is not supposed to be directly running while he's mayor -- would be located not at corporate HQ, but at the offices of the Bloomberg Family Foundation, where the mayor is allowed to participate in day-to-day operations.
Alter, formerly of Newsweek, is no lazy hack. He is smart and hard-working. Mayor Bloomberg didn't directly assign some shameless attack dog to go after one of his critics. Alter obviously sincerely agrees with the Bloomberg philosophy. But it still looks seriously inappropriate, like Mayor Mike's P.R. department firing off a response to this recent Ravitch op-ed.

And Alter's piece is not very impressive or convincing! It basically says that Alter and his friends are right and Ravitch is wrong, and it is full of very un-self-aware passages accusing her of caricature while very clumsily caricaturing all of Ravitch's arguments.

Ravitch is the author of a very good book that deflates many of the "success stories" and arguments of the very well-funded and powerful education reform movement, a movement supported by the elites in both political parties and on almost every editorial board in the nation. All the money is behind it. The only powerful institutional force that isn't gung-ho about the McKinsey-ification of public schooling is the teachers' unions, and so Ravitch is generally painted as a pawn of that particular "special interest." (Right-wing think tankers, millionaire centrist liberals, and highly paid corporate consultants are not a "special interest," they are just the people who are right about everything.)

When Alter says Ravitch "uses phony empiricism to rationalize almost every tired argument offered by teachers unions," we're meant to hiss at the invocation of the bad guy in this story. "Phony empiricism" means "data that contradict data used by pro-reform sources." Like the data that showed that the miraculous test score gains made by New York school children after two terms of complete control of the school system by Mayor Bloomberg were illusory.

But it's fine for Alter to disagree with Ravitch or accuse her of misusing statistics or insulting hard-working MBAs opening up for-profit charter schools across this great nation. It's just doesn't seem right to read this side of the argument under the name "BLOOMBERG."

• Continue reading

• Alex Pareene writes about politics for Salon. Email him at apareene@salon.com and follow him on Twitter @pareene More: Alex Pareene

A comment on Ravitch's NY Times article: School Miracles, Slow Learners and Access to Books

First-class investigative reporting by Diane Ravitch revealed that when schools seem to have overcome poverty and have achieved "stunning results," it is usually "the result of statistical legerdemain," and that "the only miracle at these schools was a triumph of public relations." (Waiting for a School Miracle, http://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/01/opinion/01ravitch.html).

The media and politicians are slow learners (see eg Jonathan Alter's remarks on Ravitch's column. Alter focuses on two small details but ignores the other cases, past and present; http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-06-03/don-t-believe-critics-education-reform-works-jonathan-alter.html). Gerald Bracey regularly reported cases like this years ago, and I contributed an analysis as well. We both concluded that there were very very few cases in which schools in high-poverty areas achieved high scores on tests.

Individual cases of overcoming poverty are rare as well. When individuals do succeed despite poverty, they often give credit to the fact that they became voracious readers: Access to books is rare in high-poverty communities, but they found a way to get access to books, and gave reading the credit for their school success (I describe some cases, including Geoffrey Canada, in Krashen, 2011). Oddly, providing access to books through support for school libraries and librarians does not seem to be a feature of school "reform" these days.

Bracey, G. 2007. It's being done. Oh really? http://www.huffingtonpost.com/gerald-bracey/its-being-done-oh-really_b_63067.html

Krashen, S. 2002. Don’t trust Ed Trust. Substance 27 (6): 3. (http://sdkrashen.com/index.php?cat=7)

Krashen, S. 2011. Protecting students against the effects of poverty: Libraries (New England Reading Association Journal) http://sdkrashen.com/

Big Time Self-Plagiarism, Punked Web Lemmings, and Chain Gangs for All? Part 1

Part of my unpaid job is to sniff out the grisliest of educational abuses and to publicly ridicule them in ways that are reality-based, researched, honest, and entertaining.  That is why I spend so much time on KIPP, which I view as the greatest threat to the possibility for humane and healthy schooling for poor children. 

And if that is not enough reason to give it my top priority, then there is today's troubling coalition of both ramrod conservatives and neoliberals who embrace these segregated sweat boxes in much the same way the same unnatural allies did at about this time last century, when America became swept up in the Hitler-inspiring pseudoscience of eugenics, or How to Create a Pure and Efficient Race by Doing What is "best" for the Defectives.  Ah, Race to the Top--I get it now.

What first gained popularity through county fair contests for the best examples of the whitest and healthiest babies around 1910 (complete with blue ribbon sashes) had become institutionalized by 1925 with eugenics courses offered at Harvard, Cornell, Columbia, etc.  As a demonstration of a bad idea gone viral, by 1935 over 30 states in the United States of America had compulsory sterilization laws in effect for some categories of those with "defective germ plasm." In 1956, 27 states still had compulsory sterilization laws on the books.  It took until 2001 for the first state legislature, Virgninia, to condemn the eugenics-inspired sterilization laws.  Others followed suit 4 years ago in 2007.

Today's defectives have been identified not for their defective germ plasm, but for their equally-inheritable defective cultural traits, as the Thermstrom argument goes and that is what the No Excuses school such as KIPP and its thousands of emulators want to do:  to rid poor children, urban and rural, of their defective cultures, which keep them from working hard enough and being nice enough to some day, as the Business Roundtable mantra goes, compete in the global economy.  And so we have KIPP offering its one-two punch of never-ending test prep 10 hours a day, ever imbued with a junior police state regimen of behavioral neutering and psychological sterilization.

All of this self-blinkered white privileged social work to put a Band-Aid on the gaping wounds from the old slasher, Poverty, is supported vigorously by the entire School for Rigor contingent of non-educators, from Education MisTrust to the Manhattan Institute, from Bill Gates to the Koch Brothers, from Harvard U. to Liberty U., from the Center for American Progress to the John Birch Society, from W to Obama. 

There is so much enthusiasm, in fact, that when a Gates-sponsored report from 2010 that lauds the work of one KIPP in Lynn, MA is upgraded with a new abstract, some new references on page 1, and a brand new date, the eager supporters a more perfect and efficient corporate state rush to report it as more scientific evidence that the culturally-denuding KIPP is great for kids, while ignoring the fact that this "new report" is just this terrific example of self-plagiarism from the highest levels (Haavard and MIT):

When plagiarism is conceptualized as theft, the notion of self-plagiarism may seem impossible.  After all, one might ask: Is it possible to steal from oneself?  As Hexam (1999) points out, it is possible to steal from oneself as when one engages in embezzlement or insurance fraud.  In writing, self-plagiarism occurs when authors reuse their own previously written work or data in a ‘new’ written product without letting the reader know that this material has appeared elsewhere.  According to Hexam, “… the essence of self-plagiarism is [that] the author attempts to deceive the reader”. 

In February 2010 this paper was published, and here is the "new paper" with new date (2011), abstract, and a few new intro elements.  Everything else, even the charts that the punk'd Kevin Drum puts up at Mother Jones today, are the same ones in the 2010 report. Drum, as well as Iglesias and Kain, reference economics consultant and KIPP enthusiast, Adam Ozimek, whose enthusiasm to have Diane Ravitch get on the KIPP bandwagon will apparently go to any end.

Matthew Yglesias has this little gush after citing Ozimek:

The most scrutinized of these successful charter networks is the Knowledge Is Power Program and the latest research (PDF, via Adam Ozimek) once again shows substantial KIPP-linked gains for poor kids, especially the weakest students and special ed kids. 

Hey, Matt, you reported on this same piece of research in February 2010, and if you had bothered to look at this "latest research," you would have noted that it is the same piece today as it was then.

I have more to say about Matt's and Adam's others' enthusiasms for neo-eugenic schooling, but that will come in Part II.  This is already too long.  We'll have to let the Committee on Publication Ethics do their thing.

Duncan Caves to the Billionaires of the For-Profit Exploitation Colleges

From TICAS:

Statement on Final Gainful Employment Rule 

Pauline Abernathy, Vice President, The Institute for College Access & Success

Background:  Today the U.S. Department of Education issued a final “gainful employment” rule to enable enforcement of the federal law requiring any post-secondary career education program receiving federal financial aid to “prepare students for gainful employment in a recognized occupation.”  The final regulation applies to all career education programs, whether offered by a public, non-profit or for-profit college.

“The final gainful employment rule is a first step towards preventing federal taxpayer dollars from being wasted on career education programs that leave students with nothing but insurmountable debt. Unfortunately the final rule will allow many programs that over-charge and under-deliver to continue to receive federal student aid. It also fails to address the recommendations of a broad coalition of student, civil rights, consumer, higher education and college access organizations to strengthen the modest draft rule published last July. While the final rule is a step in the right direction, it is substantially weaker than the draft rule and it will take longer to protect students and taxpayers from the worst of the worst programs. 

“Since the draft gainful employment rule was issued, evidence of rampant fraud and abuse in the for-profit career college industry has continued to mount: 11 state attorneys general have launched a joint investigation of the industry; the Justice Department and state attorneys general joined a whistleblower lawsuit against one of the largest publicly traded career college corporations; a Government Accountability Office undercover investigation found 15 out of 15 career colleges engaged in deceptive and misleading practices; and a Senate committee investigation has uncovered company documents encouraging unseemly, high-pressure recruiting tactics.  

“This year alone, taxpayers are expected to underwrite more than $30 billion in federal loans and more than $9 billion in Pell Grants to students attending for-profit career colleges.  However, the evidence is clear that many of these programs are fleecing both taxpayers and students.  The industry enrolls about one in ten college students, but it accounts for one in four federal loan and grant dollars and for nearly half of all defaults on federal student loans. 

“More needs to be done to prevent the waste of taxpayer dollars and protect students, including veterans, from programs that swindle them rather than prepare them to succeed in the workforce.”

An independent, nonprofit organization, the Institute for College Access & Success works to make higher education more available and affordable for people of all backgrounds. For more about our programs and initiatives, including the Project on Student Debt, see http://ticas.org. For more information about support for a strong gainful employment rule, see www.ProtectStudentsandTaxpayers.org. 

National Curriculum and National Testing

The Gates, Walton, and Broad Foundations have bought up all the time and energy they can from academics, teachers, and policy people whose time and energies can be bought to pursue the one best curriculum and one best test for the nation's schoolchildren.  One nation, under Gates, with liberty and justice for corporations. 

In various parts of the country, checks are being distributed to state governments to fund special classes this summer to get administrators and teachers trained in the latest corporate scam to come along:  national standards, national curriculum, and a national test.  Begun from a Business Roundtable effort called the American Diploma Project to shape the American high school curriculum state by state, the new effort at nationalizing K-12 schooling (paid for by ED, Gates, and Broad) makes the ADP seem like child's play in comparison. 

Today the corporate sell-out Randi Weingarten, the academic mercenary, Susan Neuman, and the once-upon-a-time Republican Tom Kean (who by today's GOP standards is a socialist), have a guest column in the Star-Ledger to accompany the roll-out of the Common Core that has come to Jersey to replace state and local curriculum and assessment.  It is appropriate that Neuman would be chosen as the mouthpiece for the Gates and Obama folks now, since it was Neuman who was so enthused in 2002 by the new NCLB promise to bring an end to experimental and creative teaching methods that she said this:

"It will stifle, and hopefully it will kill (them)," said Neuman, U.S. assistant secretary of education. "Our children are not laboratory rats."

Susan's latest enthusiasm promises to finish what NCLB started, for now the Gates folks are busily canning a national curriculum, while spending tens of millions to produce DVDs of "exemplary lessons" that essentially will offer a replacement for teacher preparation for the de-skilled temp workers that the corporations plan to put in urban classrooms to replace professional teachers, until such time that schools for the poor can be put entirely online (hi Bill!) for distance schooling of those for whom the lily-white and postivized Gates folks would like to keep the most distance from.

Notice in the following clip how Susan, Randi, and Tom acknowledge that national curriculum, instruction, and testing provide “guidelines in the core academic disciplines, specifying the content knowledge and skills that all students are expected to learn, over time, in a thoughtful progression across the grades.”  Also note the denial that these specifications of content, skills, and pacing, or the entire scope and sequence process of curriculum, do not impose "rigid pedagogical formulas."  If we mean by "pedagogical" the art and science of teaching, then their denial is simply a bald-faced lie:

. . . some commentators have claimed that we are calling for what they describe as one “national curriculum,” “national standards” and even “national tests.” This completely mischaracterizes what our statement says and what we want to achieve.

By “curricula,” we do not mean any of these, nor are we calling for lesson scripts or rigid pedagogical formulas. We do mean “guidelines in the core academic disciplines, specifying the content knowledge and skills that all students are expected to learn, over time, in a thoughtful progression across the grades.” We also argue that curricula should provide a practical design for achieving the standards in the limited instructional time available to teachers, and an understanding of how children learn at various stages in their development.

We are very clear these model curricula should be voluntary and that educators should have access to multiple sets of them. Some of this is beginning to unfold with states and school districts, teachers, publishers and foundations combining their resources to craft their own guides and teaching materials. Especially during a time of tight education budgets, these are generally welcome additions that will prevent teachers from being forced to make up designs for teaching all of this content as they go. Of course, good curricula must be developed with strong input from teachers, curriculum specialists and content experts [the ones on the Gates payroll--see above].

Tennesseeans Undergo Propaganda Barrage from Corporate Charter Industry

A Tennessee teacher, James Gifford, has an op-ed in The Tennesseean (May 25) entitled Closer look shows charter schools' 'success' is deceiving.  It did not take long for the KIPP PR machine to swing into action, with its own piece today by KIPP Nashville’s CEO, Randy Dowell.

While Dowell certainly did not mean to do so, his piece today proves Gifford’s point exactly. A few quotes from Dowell will show his deception writ large:

. . . Mr. Gifford asserts that some charter schools nationwide “do not even enroll many of the neediest students.” This is simply untrue for charter schools in Tennessee, all of which serve the neediest students.

Like the rest of the schools in the national network of KIPP schools, KIPP Nashville is an open-enrollment, public charter school explicitly designed to serve the neediest students. We serve a student population that is 92 percent African-American.

Ninety-two percent of our students are eligible for free or reduced lunch, which is above the average for Metro Nashville Public Schools. 

First, notice that Dowell says nothing about charter/KIPP enrollment of English language learners (ELLs) or special needs students, who represent the two categories of “neediest” to which Gifford refers.  Whether Tennessee, Tucson, or Toledo, charters, on average, enroll significantly fewer students in both of these categories.  A study by researchers at Western Michigan University published in March of this year found that

During the 2007-08 school year, the new study found that 11.5 percent of KIPP students were ELLs, compared with 19.2 percent of students in their local school districts. The numbers for special education students showed an even wider gap for that school year; 5.9 percent of KIPP students had disabilities, compared with 12.1 percent of students in the local school districts (Ed Week, 04/11/11).

Other earlier studies demonstrate the same phenomenon, which has become a scandal within the charter industry. There is no way that Dowell could be ignorant of these facts, and one must wonder if he thinks the Tennesseans are just too stupid to know otherwise. 

But on to Dowell’s other deceptions:

Our students typically enter fifth grade at KIPP two to three years below grade level, and make 1.5-2 years of academic growth each year while at KIPP.

Given the fact that KIPP’s 10 hour days, Saturdays, and summer school adds between 50 and 60 percent more time in the classroom, and considering the fact that KIPP has been shown to lose along the way a disproportionate number of its low performers in comparison to neighboring public schools, and considering the fact that the KIPP curriculum is entirely test-centered with a total compliance behavioral catechism, then one would expect higher test scores.  Also keep in mind that there is a self-selecting high support parental component that is not to be dismissed.

Mr. Gifford cites a study from four years ago that asserts that 60 percent of KIPP fifth-graders in northern California do not complete middle school in four years. This is outdated and does not reflect the current reality. At KIPP Academy Nashville, we only lose about 13 percent of our students annually, which is well below the average of 20-25 percent for Metro Nashville middle schools with comparable demographics.

I’m not exactly sure what Dowell means by research being “outdated.”  Does he mean that the facts uncovered in the Bay Area KIPPs do not apply 3 years after the study was published?  

In the Bay Area KIPP schools studied (pdf here) in that antique 2008 report, five Bay Area KIPPs lost 60% of their students between 5th and 8th grade:

Together, the four schools began with a combined total of 312 fifth graders in 2003-04, and ended with 173 eighth graders in 2006-07. The number of eighth graders includes new students who entered KIPP after fifth grade (p.12).

Dowell’s 13 percent annual attrition rate conceals another important fact that KIPP doesn’t talk about: based on 2011 research findings from the Western Michigan study, between grades 6 and 8, KIPP cohort sizes shrink by at least 30% due to nonreplacement of students who are lost each year:

The departure of low-performing students helps KIPP improve its aggregate results. Unlike local school districts, KIPP is not replacing the students who are leaving. When a student returns to a traditional public school after the autumn head count, KIPP retains most or all of the money (the amount depends on the particular state) allocated for educating that student during that school year. Traditional public schools do not typically benefit in the same way when they experience attrition, since vacancies are typically filled by other mobile students, even in mid-year.

Dowell’s final deception comes in claiming that the Gifford op-ed suggested that charters/KIPP are held to different accountability standards.  Gifford suggested no such thing, but the false accusation that he did gives Dowell an excuse to crow about KIPP having the highest TCAP scores in Nashville. Which leaves me wondering, not really, why Dowell does not say anything about KIPP having the highest per-pupil spending available in Nashville.  From Bloomberg News in late March:

KIPP schools are also more richly funded than traditional public schools, the Western Michigan and Columbia study found. KIPP received $12,731 per student, compared with $9,579 for the average U.S. charter school and $11,937 for the average U.S. public-school district, according to researchers’ analysis of 2007-2008 federal data. 

Adding another $5,760 in private contributions, KIPP received an average of $18,491 per student, or $6,500 more than local districts, the researchers said, citing public tax filings. The higher funding levels contradict the idea that KIPP can serve as a model for cash-strapped public schools, Miron said (Bloomberg News). 

So cash-strapped Nashville citizens, beware.  Do not be deceived by KIPP's corporate cult and multi-million dollar PR machine, whose segregated, inhumane, total compliance chain gangs should serve as a model for no one, especially poor urban kids.  Ask the middle class parents of Bell Meade if they would allow their children or grandchildren to be treated as children are treated in the KIPP behavioral sterilization camps.  See what they say.

As for the rest of the charters, in 2009 Stanford U's CREDO published the first nationwide assessment of charter school test performance, which compared 70 percent of the nation's charters to matched public schools.  From the Press Release:

Stanford, CA – A new report issued today by the Center for Research on Education Outcomes (CREDO) at Stanford University found that there is a wide variance in the quality of the nation’s several thousand charter schools with, in the aggregate, students in charter schools not faring as well as students in traditional public schools.

While the report recognized a robust national demand for more charter schools from parents and local communities, it found that 17 percent of charter schools reported academic gains that were significantly better than traditional public schools, while 37 percent of charter schools showed gains that were worse than their traditional public school counterparts, with 46 percent of charter schools demonstrating no significant difference. . . .

Who's kidding who here?