School "Reformers" most went to private schools

In Public School Efforts, a Common Background: Private Education

by Michael Winerip  New York Times  April 18, 2011

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/18/education/18winerip.html

Ten years ago, the No Child Left Behind bill was passed by
the House of Representatives, 384 to 45, marking the first
step toward a major transformation of public education in
America. The law has ushered in what its supporters like to
call the "reform movement."


No longer did a person with a clipboard have to spend days
observing a school to determine whether it was any good.
Because of the law, it is now possible for an assistant
secretary of education to be sitting in his Washington
office and, by simply studying a spreadsheet for a few
minutes, know exactly how a school in Juneau is performing.

Each year since then, researchers have found new things to
assess. The New York City Department of Education, a pioneer
in the science of value-added assessment, can now calculate
a teacher's worth to the third decimal point by using a few
very long formulas. (No word yet on whether department
researchers have developed a very long formula to assess
chancellors and mayors.)

For a while it appeared that the Republicans were way ahead
on the reform front, but in 2007, Whitney Tilson, a hedge
fund manager and Democratic fund-raiser, founded Democrats
for Education Reform to help his party catch up. By all
accounts, it has worked. Today, the consensus is that there
is little difference between President Obama and former
President George W. Bush when it comes to education policy.
Nor is it easy to distinguish differences between the
secretary of education under Mr. Bush, Margaret Spellings,
and the current secretary, Arne Duncan.

Those who call themselves reformers are a diverse group, men
and women of every political stripe and of every race and
ethnicity.

But there is one thing that characterizes a surprisingly
large number of the people who are transforming public
schools: they attended private schools.

Which raises the question: Does a private school background
give them a much-needed distance and fresh perspective to
better critique and remake traditional public schools? Does
it make them distrust public schools - or even worse -
poison their perception of them? Or does it make any
difference?


Your call.

Following is a list of some of these national leaders and
the private schools they attended:

*  Senators Judd Gregg (Phillips Exeter, Exeter, N.H.) and
Edward M. Kennedy (Milton Academy, Milton, Mass.) and
Representative John A. Boehner (Archbishop Moeller High
School, Cincinnati) were three of the four Congressional
sponsors of the education legislation, which was signed into
law by Mr. Bush (Phillips Academy, Andover, Mass.) on Jan.
8, 2002. (Representative George Miller was the fourth
sponsor.)

*  Mr. Obama (Punahou School, Honolulu) will be remembered
for his signature education program, Race to the Top. This
program rewards states with hundreds of millions of dollars
in grants if they develop systems to rate teachers based on
their students' test scores and if they agree to fire
teachers and principals based on those scores. In contrast,
Michelle Obama, who attended public schools (Whitney Young
High, Chicago), has frequently spoken out against the
education law's reliance on testing. "If my future were
determined by my performance on a standardized test," Mrs.
Obama has repeatedly said, "I wouldn't be here, I guarantee
that."

Michelle A. Rhee (Maumee Valley Country Day School, Toledo,
Ohio), the former Washington schools chancellor and a
founder of StudentsFirst, an advocacy group, is probably the
No. 1 celebrity of the reform movement. She is education's
Sarah Palin.

*  As governor, Mitt Romney (Cranbrook School, Bloomfield
Hills, Mich.) brought accountability to Massachusetts.

*  Bill Gates (Lakeside School, Seattle) has donated
billions of dollars to public schools with the proviso that
they carry out his vision of reform, including tying teacher
tenure decisions to students' test scores. In November, Mr.
Gates and Mr. Duncan (University of Chicago Laboratory
School) called on public school leaders to increase class
size as a way of cutting costs in these hard times. The two
men suggested that schools could compensate by striving to
have an excellent teacher in every classroom. The private
school Mr. Gates attended has an average class size of 16,
according to its Web site. The home page says the best thing
about Lakeside School is it "promotes relationships between
teachers and students through small class sizes." Mr.
Duncan's private school has an average class size of 19.

*  Jeb Bush (Phillips Andover), the former governor of
Florida and the founder of the Excellence for Education
Foundation, is responsible for making Florida a pioneer in
the accountability movement by issuing report cards for
every school based on test results. In the process he had to
overcome many obstacles, including how to explain why his
state's rating system was so badly out of whack with the
federal government's rating system. One year the state
report cards gave two-thirds of Florida's schools A's or
B's, while the federal system rated two-thirds of Florida
schools as failing. As a result, there was widespread
confusion among parents who couldn't tell if their child's
school was succeeding brilliantly or failing miserably.

*  Chester E. Finn Jr. (Phillips Exeter) is the president of
the Thomas B. Fordham Institute and a senior fellow of the
Hoover Institution, two of the country's leading
conservative research groups. Mr. Finn is the scholarly
counterpart of Ms. Rhee. Early on, he supported the
privatization of public education, the use of vouchers and
the development of a national core curriculum, which could
possibly mean every public school would be teaching the same
thing at the same time. His recommendation for reforming the
public school system: "Blow it up and start over."

*  David Levin (Riverdale Country School, the Bronx) is a
co-founder of KIPP, the nation's biggest charter chain.

*  Cathleen P. Black (Aquinas Dominican High School,
Chicago), the former chancellor of New York City schools,
had just 95 days to put her reform agenda into place before
she was asked to leave.

*  Merryl H. Tisch (Ramaz School, Manhattan), chancellor of
the New York State Board of Regents, along with David M.
Steiner (Perse School, Cambridge, England), the New York
state education commissioner, have fine-tuned the state's
extensive testing system pioneered by the former state
commissioner, Richard Mills.

*  Steven Brill (Deerfield Academy, Deerfield, Mass.) is
perhaps the charter school movement's most literary
advocate. He is working on a book about public school
reform.

*  Marc Sternberg (Episcopal School, Baton Rouge, La.), a
New York City deputy chancellor, has been a path finder in
the practice of moving charter schools into district school
buildings.

*  Davis Guggenheim (Sidwell Friends School, Washington) is
the producer and director of "Waiting for Superman," the
widely acclaimed 2010 film that championed charter schools
and dismissed traditional public schools as dropout
factories. Mr. Guggenheim's film begins with him driving his
children to their private school and feeling guilty about
all the bad Los Angeles public schools he is passing. This
is not the first time this happened to Mr. Guggenheim. As a
child, he passed bad Washington public schools on his way to
Sidwell Friends.

When President Bush signed the No Child Left Behind
legislation, he expressed his hope that it would combat the
"soft bigotry of low expectations." Indeed, the law could
not have higher expectations: every child in the nation is
required to be proficient in math and English by 2014.
Schools that do not meet their proficiency goals, which are
raised every year, are labeled as failing.

Last month, Mr. Duncan predicted that by the end of this
year, 82 percent of schools will miss their goal. At this
rate, it is highly likely that in a few years, every single
public school in the United States will be labeled a
failure.

This article has been revised to reflect the following
correction:

Correction: April 20, 2011

The On Education column on Monday, about leaders of the
public school "reform movement" who attended private
schools, misstated the name of the advocacy group founded by
one such leader, the former Washington, D.C., schools
chancellor Michelle A. Rhee. It is StudentsFirst, not
Sunshine First. The column also misstated the name of the
organization founded by Whitney Tilson, a hedge fund manager
and Democratic fund-raiser. It is Democrats for Education
Reform, not Democrats for Educational Reform. In addition,
the article misspelled the given name of the chancellor of
the New York State Board of Regents. She is Merryl Tisch,
not Merryll Tisch.

A version of this article appeared in print on April 18,
2011, on page A13 of the New York edition with the headline:
In Public School Efforts, a Common Background: Private
Education.

==========

How Bill Gates misinterprets education data

Posted at 5:00 AM ET, 03/11/2011

How Bill Gates misinterprets ed facts

This was written by Richard Rothstein, a research associate at theEconomic Policy Institute, a non-profit created in 1986 to broaden the discussion about economic policy to include the interests of low- and middle-income workers. This appeared on the institute's website.

By Richard Rothstein
Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates authored an op-ed published in The Washington Post late last month, “How Teacher Development could Revolutionize our Schools,” proposing that American public schools should do a better job of evaluating the effectiveness of teachers, a goal with which none can disagree. But his specific prescriptions, and the urgency he attaches to them, are based on the misrepresentation of one fact, the misinterpretation of another and the demagogic presentation of a third. It is remarkable that someone associated with technology and progress should have such a careless disregard for accuracy when it comes to the education policy in which he is now so deeply involved.

Gates’ most important factual claim is that “over the past four decades, the per-student cost of running our K-12 schools has more than doubled, while our student achievement has remained virtually flat.” And, he adds, “spending has climbed, but our percentage of college graduates has dropped compared with other countries.” Let’s examine these factual claims:

Bill Gates says: "Our student achievement has remained virtually flat."

The only longitudinal measure of student achievement that is available to Bill Gates or anyone else is the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP). NAEP provides trends for 4th, 8th, and 12th graders, disaggregated by race, ethnicity, and poverty, since about 1980 in basic skills in math and reading (called the “Long Term Trend NAEP”) and since about 1990 for 4th and 8th graders in slightly more sophisticated math and reading skills (called the “Main NAEP”).[*]

On these exams, American students have improved substantially, in some cases phenomenally. In general, the improvements have been greatest for African-American students, and among these, for the most disadvantaged. The improvements have been greatest for both black and white 4th and 8th graders in math. Improvements have been less great but still substantial for black 4th and 8th graders in reading and for black 12th graders in both math and reading. Improvements have been modest for whites in 12th grade math and at all three grade levels in reading.

The following table summarizes these results, for the earliest and most recent years for which disaggregated data were collected.

We can see that in 4th grade math, black students now have higher average achievement than white students had when the assessments began. Average black students’ gains have been a full standard deviation, a rate of progress that would be considered extraordinary in any area of social policy. The black-white score gap has narrowed some, but not very much, because white students have also shown improvement.

Bill Gates may think that these improvements are insufficient, and perhaps he is correct. But, as Daniel Patrick Moynihan reportedly quipped, “everyone is entitled to their own opinions, but not to their own facts.” No rational reading of these NAEP data can support Bill Gates’ claim that “student achievement has remained virtually flat” over the last four decades.[†] And, to repeat, no other longitudinal data are available that describe student achievement over time.

These facts also don’t support the story that the typical teacher of disadvantaged children is ineffective. Certainly, some teachers are ineffective, and schools should do a better job of removing them. But that should not, if facts are to be believed, be the main story.

Yet it seems to be. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan recently asserted that “many, if not most, teacher-training programs are mediocre.” This may be true, but how does he know? What is his evidence? It wouldn’t seem that mediocre teacher training programs could consistently be turning out teachers who have posted the kinds of gains we’ve seen on NAEP in the last generation and more.

It is important to investigate why, in the most recent period, typical teachers have been more effective with elementary school children than with high-schoolers, but curiously, the reforms Bill Gates and like-thinking policymakers are pursuing concern elementary school teachers almost exclusively – because the student value-added scores on NCLB-required standardized tests by which they propose to evaluate these teachers are available only for elementary, not secondary school students. It is also important to investigate why teachers have apparently been more effective during most (though not all) of the last few decades in teaching math than reading, but it is difficult to motivate anyone to investigate this if our vision is clouded by the myth that all student achievement has been flat.

Bill Gates says: "The per-student cost of running our K-12 schools has more than doubled."

Here, Bill Gates is nominally correct, but misleading. When properly adjusted for inflation, K-12 per pupil spending has about doubled over the last four decades, but less than half of this new money has gone to regular education (including compensatory education for disadvantaged children, programs for English-language learners, integration programs like magnet schools, and special schools for dropout recovery and prevention). The biggest single recipient of new money has been special education for children with disabilities. Four decades ago, special education consumed less than 4% of all K-12 spending. It now consumes 21%.[‡]

Detailed tables documenting these trends are available here.

American public education can boast of remarkable accomplishments in special education over this period. Many young people can now function in society whereas, in the past, children with similar disabilities were institutionalized and discarded. But it is not reasonable to complain about the increase in spending on such children by insisting that it should have produced greater improvement in the achievement of regular children.

The increase in regular education spending has still been substantial, even if not nearly as great as Bill Gates implies. Should this spending increase have produced even greater improvement in achievement than has in fact occurred? This is a more difficult judgment to make. But in light of the actual achievement improvements documented by NAEP, it is not reasonable to jump to the facile conclusion of a productivity collapse in K-12 education. A more reasonable story is that spending has increased and achievement has increased as well. Perhaps we have gotten what we paid for.

Bill Gates says: "Spending has climbed, but our percentage of college graduates has dropped compared with other countries."

This is the Bill Gates claim that can properly be called demagogic. It attempts to agitate readers by presenting a positive development in a negative light. A climb in spending should produce an increase in the percentage of college graduates. And it has. In the last four decades,the percentage of college graduates in the United States has nearly doubled. In 1970, 16% of young adults (ages 25 to 29) were college graduates. Today, it is 31%. The improvement has been across the board: the share of African-American young adults who are college graduates has gone from 10% to 19%; for whites it has gone from 17% to 37%. Somehow, Bill Gates saw fit to present this as an indictment.

Should our college graduation rate be rising faster? Of course, that would be a good thing. Should the spending increases we have experienced have generated a faster increase in college graduation than, in fact, they have? That would be worth exploring, but Bill Gates’ phrasing suggests to the less-than-careful reader that spending increases haven’t been productive at all, because our college graduation rate has “dropped…” Would a faster increase require even greater increases in spending? That is also likely, but it is not a conclusion that Bill Gates intends to suggest.

It is commonplace to imply, as Bill Gates does in his Washington Postop-ed, that our failure to increase our college graduation rate “compared with other countries” will prevent us from “build[ing] a dynamic 21st-century economy.” Certainly, we need a sufficient number of well-trained college graduates for such an economy, but there is no reason to believe that a graduate rate in excess of 30% is too small for this purpose, or that economic dynamism can, after reaching sufficiency, increase linearly with increases in the share of young people who graduate from college. The threats to a dynamic 21st century economy are likely to come from a failure of macroeconomic policy, regulation of speculation, and investment in education, not from inefficiency in the investment we already make.

We only need to examine the list of international college graduation rates to see the absurdity of efforts to make a direct link between college graduation rates and economic success. The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) publishes comparative data.

One country that outranks the United States in college graduation rates is Ireland, whose economy has now collapsed because its regulation of the real estate bubble was even more careless and corrupt than ours. Another is Portugal, whose economic health is also worse than that of the United States.

Of course there are also nations on the list that are not on the verge of bankruptcy, but the chief lesson of the list is this: provided a nation has a sufficient number of college graduates for a dynamic economy, rankings above that point are irrelevant. Of course we should increase our college graduation rate, and there are many civic and cultural reasons to do so, even if we may already produce (as some analyses suggest) an apparent surplus, for economic purposes, of science, technology, engineering, and math graduates.

Education is complex, and the relationship between education and the economy even more so. Our ability to grapple with the challenges these present is not enhanced by factually inaccurate and hyperventilated appeals from those who should know better.

[*] In theory, the Long Term Trend (LTT) is distinguished from the Main Assessment because the LTT assesses the same skills, whereas the Main Assessment changes over time, as the curriculum changes. But in fact, the LTT also changes somewhat over time, and the Main Assessment is sufficiently stable to make longitudinal comparisons.

[†] If the data are further disaggregated by decade, there have been some interim periods of flatness within the overall growth. For example, gains were strongest for black elementary students in the LTT in the 1980s and 2000s, and flat in the 1990s, but on the Main Assessment they showed strong gains in the 1990s as well. Twelfth grade LTT reading scores have been mostly flat since 1990, after a dramatic leap of 24 scale points for blacks in the 1980s. Fourth grade LTT reading scores fell for blacks in the 1980s, but rebounded in the 1990s and jumped even more strongly in the 2000s. The tables showing these disaggregated data are posted here.

[‡] Detailed tables documenting these trends are available here.

-0-

Bill Gates tells nation’s governors that budget cuts do not have to limit school learning.

 Really Mr. Gates ? This argument is more than a little truth challenged.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/02/28/bill-gates-budget-cuts_n_829218.html

From earlier posts on this blog. 

Diane Ravitch  “How did right-wing ideas become the education agenda of the Obama administration?”My sense is that it has a lot to do with the administration’s connections to the Gates Foundation and the Broad Foundation. Although both are usually portrayed as liberal or at least Democratic, their funding priorities have merged with those of the very conservative Walton Family Foundation. I explain this curious power elite in a chapter of my book called “The Billionaire Boys Club.”

Joanne Barkan.

Got Dough? Public School Reform in the Age of Venture Philanthropy
Joanne Barkan, Dissent Magazine: "The cost of K-12 public schooling in the United States comes to well over $500 billion per year. So, how much influence could anyone in the private sector exert by controlling just a few billion dollars of that immense sum? Decisive influence, it turns out. A few billion dollars in private foundation money, strategically invested every year for a decade, has sufficed to define the national debate on education; sustain a crusade for a set of mostly ill-conceived reforms; and determine public policy at the local, state, and national levels. In the domain of venture philanthropy - where donors decide what social transformation they want to engineer and then design and fund projects to implement their vision - investing in education yields great bang for the buck."
Read the Article

I have a suggestion of how Mr. Gates could assist the schools. He, and Microsoft could pay their fair share of taxes. And, he could talk to his many billionaire friends to pay their fair share of taxes. If the rich paid their share, the entire budget deficit could be ended in two years.

While  Americans are being asked to sacrifice, major corporations continue to use the rigged tax code to avoid paying any federal taxes at all. If you have “one dollar” in your wallet, you’re paying more than the “combined income tax liability of GE, ExxonMobil, Citibank, and the Bank of America“:

“I have one dollar in my wallet. That’s more than the combined income tax liability of GE, ExxonMobil, Citibank, and the Bank of America. That means somebody is gaming the system.”

See the Fair Share effort at United for a Fair Economy. Here. http://www.faireconomy.org/

Second, we should have a 2% tax on sales of shares, stocks, and bonds. I pay 8% on gas and clothing. A financial transaction tax would resolve the budget crisis in a year. I wonder why it hasn't been adopted?  Then, with tax fairness, we should continue to consider school reform.

Michelle Rhee's claims fail the smell test

Check out this entry from Jay Matthews on how Rhee's claims of taking students to the 90th percentile have been totally debunked by G.F. Brandenburg.  Even better, check out the stinging rebukes  in the comments section...


http://voices.washingtonpost.com/class-struggle/2011/02/michelle_rhees_early_test_scor.html#more_/
 

California fails to adequately finance its schools

CALIFORNIA SCHOOL FINANCE LITIGATION

Robles-Wong v. California

Fact Sheet

Overview

• Robles-Wong v. California asks the State of California to fulfill its constitutional

obligation to support our public schools and students. This historic lawsuit was

brought forth by a broad coalition of students, parents, school districts and educational

organizations.

• Education is a fundamental right of every child in California. California’s Constitution

requires a school system that prepares students to become informed citizens and

productive members of society.

• This lawsuit declares that California’s unsound, unstable and insufficient school

finance system is neither aligned with required educational programs nor with student

needs. The amount of funding provided to education is not enough to deliver the

required programs to all students so that they meet the State’s educational goals, and

the funding system causes unequal learning opportunities.

• California has set clear requirements for what schools are expected to teach and what

students are expected to learn. The State has failed in its obligation to provide the

resources necessary for students to meet the required standards.

• The State’s failure to support the required educational program adversely affects all

students. Academic achievement measures show California’s broken school finance

system denies students the opportunity to become proficient in the State’s academic

standards.

• This lawsuit seeks to remedy the broken school finance system by (1) declaring that it

is unconstitutional and (2) requiring state lawmakers to uphold their constitutional

duty to design and implement a school finance system that provides all students equal

access to the required educational program.

Plaintiffs

California education budget is a shell game: Schrag

Yes, it is. He has it right.

Nonetheless, there was a lot of gubernatorial crowing when the governor signed the last of the legislation which, in the words of a Schwarzenegger press handout in January made “California highly competitive for $700 million in federal education funds.”  

But California’s real problem isn’t in charter caps or in barriers to the use of student test scores in evaluating teachers, stupid as those barriers seem. . Even where test scores can legally be used, there’s no certainty that they can be used wisely. Nor are charters any magic bullet: Some are excellent; many are no better than comparable public schools in their student outcomes, and often worse; some are rip-offs.

What’s currently tripping up California in Washington is that the state has been caught in a shell game. While the state acknowledges that the state is spending less per student this year than last (and will probably be spending still less next year), the governor claims that it’s spending an equal portion of its general fund on schools as in the past and thus is not failing in maintenance of effort.

But he can do that only through an accounting gimmick in his proposed budget. In a letter to state officials the federal Department of Education cites letters from California education and civil rights groups pointing out how the proposed budget “seeks to eliminate a State sales tax on gasoline and substitute…an excise tax on gasoline in order to remove revenues from the state’s general fund and effectively render the Proposition 98 [minimum school funding] guarantee inapplicable to those funds.”

In addition, the feds raise a series of other accounting questions about the state’s application for a new round of federal stimulus funds, funds which are conditioned on the state’s fulfilling the maintenance of effort commitment it made when it got the first round of education stimulus money last year. Until it answers the questions, the feds say, no decision will be made on whether California will get another round of federal stimulus money.

And under that problem lies a more fundamental one: the state’s chromic unwillingness to adequately invest in its schools and its ongoing disinvestment in its colleges and universities. Depending on how you count we’re now somewhere in the forties among the fifty states in what we spend per pupil in our K-12 schools – far below the U.S. average, and even further below most of the major states -- and lower than that if you measure education spending as a percentage of income. How short-sighted and stupid.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Peter Schrag, whose exclusive weekly column appears every Monday in the California Progress Report, is the former editorial page editor and columnist of the Sacramento Bee. He is the author of Paradise Lost: California’s Experience, America’s Future and California: America’s High Stakes Experiment. His new book, Not Fit for Our Society: Immigration and Nativism in America will be published in 2010.