Trump orders DeVos to do a study. Why?

Today's Washington Post reports that Trump will sign an executive order requiring Education Secretary Betsy DeVos to study how the federal government “has unlawfully overstepped state and local control."

This raises some obvious questions. First, why does the president need an executive order to make his hand-picked ed secretary do a study? Can't he just pick up the phone and say, "Hey Betsy. Get one of your peeps to knock out a study for me by next week showing... blah blah blah"?

Secondly, why do they even bother calling it a "study" when the conclusions are known in advance? I know what you're thinking: Klonsky, stop being naive. This is the nature of education research these days.

Yes, you're right, with some exceptions (Congrats Kevin Welner). That's why we need to look at all research with a critical eye--especially studies coming from contracted think-tanks and university centers. But this Trump-ordered study is farcical on its face, although the topic of federal overstep is worth talking about.

No Child Left Behind was clearly federal overstep, with Bush's D.O.E. leveraging its relatively small amount of federal dollars to mandate overuse of standardized testing. The same can be said for Arne Duncan's Race to the Top, which imposed massive school closings, teacher/principal firings and the unrestrained growth of privately-run charter schools on local school districts.

But clearly, those aren't the target of Trump's executive order. What he's aiming at are the system's already dwindling civil rights protections.

According to WaPo:

Obama’s Education Department was notably aggressive on civil rights in schools, not only in directing schools to allow transgender students to use the bathrooms matching their gender identity, but also in pushing for school-discipline reforms and in pushing colleges to overhaul their handling of sexual assaults on campus.

Those efforts, coupled with the department’s sometimes wide-ranging investigations into thousands of complaints of alleged discrimination against students nationwide, also led to complaints of federal overreach in some quarters. But advocates who welcomed the attention on civil rights fear that the Trump administration’s campaign to shrink the federal role in education will translate into weaker protections for vulnerable students.

The only thing I would disagree with here is this praise for Obama's Ed Dept's "aggressive" stand on civil rights. My take is that Arne Duncan's D.O.E. was halfhearted in its enforcement of federal law and that Duncan, despite his oft-repeated claim that school reform was the "civil rights issue of our time," didn't do nearly enough.

I'm thinking here, about the time when Duncan undermined Obama's Justice Dept. just when Atty. General Eric Holder was about to take legal action against Louisiana's voucher program which discriminated against minorities. Duncan pressured Holder to pull back his federal lawsuit for fear it would interfere with "choice" (charters and vouchers). Duncan also admitted that he was opposed to "forced integration."

But forced integration was exactly what much of civil rights law was all about -- as opposed to forced segregation. Rather than federal overstep, what we saw from Duncan's D.O.E. was federal conciliation with racists and school segregationists such as then-Sen. Jeff Sessions and then-governor of Louisiana Bobby Jindal.

Trump's latest executive order is aimed at eliminating what's left of Brown v. Board of Ed and the rest of existing civil rights oversight of public education.

U.S. schools get a C on Quality Counts Report. Here's why.

Massachusetts defends schools from privatization. Ranks #1 in Quality Counts.

Edweek's annual Quality Counts report gives the nation's increasingly two-tier school system a letter grade C, as it almost always does. Thirty years of corporate-style school reform under both Democratic and Republican regimes hasn't moved the needle very much.

My problem with the report is that,in reality, there is no national school system or one set of standards for them to be graded on. This will be increasingly so during the Betsy DeVos era.  So Edweek creates its own, as well as its own grading metrics. 

As you can tell, I'm skeptical. What they've done here, as most of these studies do (without a mention of race or poverty, by the way) is to throw together into one pot the nations's wealthy schools with those with concentrated poverty, as if they were all one thing that could be graded on the same rubric. If the nation's wealthiest schools were separated out, they would likely get an A grade, using Edweek's indices. Resource-starved, racially isolated schools with high concentrations of children living in poverty would likely get an F. Mush them all together and you inevitably wind up with a C.

Here are the indices they use:

• The Chance-for-Success Index uses a cradle-to-career perspective to examine the role of education in promoting positive outcomes throughout an individual’s lifetime.

• The school finance analysis evaluates spending on education and equity in funding across districts within a state.

• The K-12 Achievement Index, last updated in 2016, scores states on current academic performance, change over time, and poverty-based gaps.

A case could also be made for giving an F for having a highly segregated, two-tier public education system in the first place.

When the study looks at schools on a state level, it's more compelling. While the national grade is always a C, there's slightly more mobility and variance in state grades. Massachusetts, for all its social inequality, is still a wealthy state and spends more on public ed and early childhood ed, has strong teacher unions, and generally defends its public sector against privatization with a cap on charter school expansion. So as expected, Massachusetts takes first place among the states for the third year in a row, with aB grade (A- in Chance for Success).

At the bottom, as you might expect, sits Mississippi with a limited safety net, itslegacy of segregation and Jim Crow, the highest concentrations of poverty in the country, few dollars spent on public ed and no teacher unions allowed.

You don't need much of a study to figure how this will turn out. Rich will get richer.  The poor will be taken over or privatized

New study provides more good reasons to vote NO on 2 in Massachusetts

On Tuesday, voters in Massachusetts will decide whether or not to lift the cap on their state's privately-run charter schools. I hope they will consider the findings in a newly-released study done by Michael Robinson, who describes himself as a concerned parent, taxpayer, and private citizen, and vote NO on Question 2.

Like Mr. Robinson, who has children of his own with disabilities, this issue is more than academic for me, both as an educator and grandparent of a Chicago student with disabilities. The unconstrained expansion of charters has not only drained badly-needed resources from our city's public schools, it has led to further segregation of special-needs and disabled students and less than adequate services delivered to those students within the charters themselves. 

Robinson's study confirms a pile of anecdotal evidence showing that MA charter schools underserve students with disabilities and attempt to improve standardized test performance by using discipline (especially suspensions) as a punitive lever, which many of these schools use to encourage attrition for this resource-intensive population.

This new report on Massachusetts charters, released today, found "91.3% of districts with highest discipline rates for special education students are charter schools" and 25% of charters have no full-time special educators.

The movement against raising the charter cap is growing. Recent polls show the ballot measure failing by 11 points overall, with Democrats opposing it 64 to 30%.

A VOTE NO rally is planned for Nov. 1 in Dorchester at 6:30 PM. Boston City Councilor Ayanna Pressley, Boston City Councilor Tito Jackson, NAACP New England Area Conference President Juan Cofield, and more will be speaking.

Sen. Elizabeth Warren has joined Attorney General Maura Healey and Boston Mayor Marty Walsh in opposition to Question 2. In so doing, she echoes the national Democratic Party's 2016 platform which has a strong plank on public education, including this statement:

Charter schools must reflect their communities, and thus must accept and retain proportionate numbers of students of color, students with disabilities and English Language Learners in relation to their neighborhood public schools. 

As Robinson's study shows, they don't.

Flood of dark money backing Question 2 an *assault on democracy* says @MassPolProfMo https://t.co/BtjQVAE6U7 #ThreeCardMonte

— EduShyster (@EduShyster) October 21, 2016

WEEKEND QUOTABLES

Amy Goodman

Amy Goodman

"I came back to North Dakota to fight a trespass charge. They saw that they could never make that charge stick, so now they want to charge me with rioting. I wasn't trespassing, I wasn't engaging in a riot, I was doing my job as a journalist by covering a violent attack on Native American protesters." -- Huffington Post

Racist Derek Black's epiphany 

He studied the 8th century to the 12th century, trying to trace back the modern concepts of race and whiteness, but he couldn’t find them anywhere. “We basically just invented it,” he concluded. -- Washington Post

Cornell William Brooks, president and CEO of the NAACP

“The NAACP’s resolution is not inspired by ideological opposition to charter schools but by our historical support of public schools ― as well as today’s data and the present experience of NAACP branches in nearly every school district in the nation. Our NAACP members, who as citizen advocates, not professional lobbyists, are those who attend school board meetings, engage with state legislatures and support both parents and teachers.” -- Huffington Post

Northwestern Prof Joseph Ferrie on New inequality Study

 New research suggests that social mobility in America may be even more limited than researchers have realized. “Any measure of mobility we have is too high. Whatever you thought, it’s worse.” -- Washington Post

U.S. District Judge Mark Walker

“In our democracy, those who vote decide everything; those who count the vote decide nothing,” -- Miami Herald

Now reformers want to "give back" New Orleans charters. 'Can't avoid democracy forever'.

“You can’t avoid democracy forever, nor should you.” -- Neerav Kingsland, who worked for New Schools for New Orleans

In a move designed to, "close the wounds left by the state takeover" without threatening the power of private charter school management boards, the state of Louisiana is "giving back" the 52 charters schools it took from the New Orleans public school system in the wake of Hurricane Katrina.

According to the Washington Post:

In the decade since Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans and swept away its public school system, the city has become a closely watched experiment in whether untethering schools from local politics could fix the problems that have long ailed urban education.

Before we go any further, let's be clear about one thing. It wasn't Katrina that "swept away" the N.O. public school system. It was a gaggle of opportunistic profiteers and union-busters who made the hurricane their rationale for firing every public school teacher in the Big Easy and for breaking their union. What they did in N.O., Detroit and other cities was no natural disaster. It was man-made.

The district's charter operators are still fighting off attempts by their teachers to unionize.

As for the so-called "give-back", Karran Harper Royal, an advocate for special-education students and their families, called it a “Trojan horse.”

“This is the kind of bill you get when the charter schools want to give the impression that schools are returning to local governance,” she said. “It feels like a very patriarchal view of communities of color, and white people deciding that black people, or people of color, don’t deserve democracy.”

According to the Brookings Institute:

 The change in actual school functioning, at least in the short term, looks modest.  SB 432 preserves charter schools’ prominent role in the New Orleans school landscape.  It demands that local districts “shall not impede the operational autonomy of a charter school under its jurisdiction,” preserving the discretion over curriculum, instruction, and management provided to schools in their charters.

More from WaPo...Advocates for such choice frame it as a way to ensure that all children have fair access to good schools, no matter where their families live or how much money they earn. But critics argue that eliminating neighborhood schools has undermined the most vulnerable students by uprooting them from their communities and scattering them to schools citywide.

Harper Royal pointed to a 2015 Tulane University study estimating that there are more than 26,000 young people between the ages of 16 and 24 who are neither in school nor employed in the New Orleans metro area. They account for 18 percent of all the area’s young people, significantly higher than the national average of 13 percent.

Such high numbers of disconnected youth — as well as high rates of child poverty and unemployment — should factor into how the city’s education experiment is evaluated, she said: “You have to look at how it is working in the lives of the people, and it isn’t.”

She favors a competing bill that would have returned the schools to the Orleans Parish School Board without preserving the system of charter schools.

Louisiana has about 140 charter schools authorized by state and local school boards. The bill, signed by Democratic Gov. John Bel Edwards returns some oversight of charters to the Jefferson Parish School Board and  abolishes outside charter authorizer groups, who are not accountable to anyone but themselves. But the state will still have the power to overrule local districts when it comes to authorizing charters.

Unpacking Big Data...One of my current favorite thinkers on so-called school reform is Finnish educator and scholar, Pasi Sahlberg. His running theme -- If you really want to improve your system of education, do pretty much the opposite of current U.S. ed-reform policies.

In their May 9 WaPo piece, Pasi and Jonathan Hasak, take a hammer to one cornerstones of corporate-style school reform, the reliance on big data to drive policy.

One thing that distinguishes schools in the United States from schools around the world is how data walls, which typically reflect standardized test results, decorate hallways and teacher lounges.  Green, yellow, and red colors indicate levels of performance of students and classrooms. For serious reformers, this is the type of transparency that reveals more data about schools and is seen as part of the solution to how to conduct effective school improvement. These data sets, however, often don’t spark insight about teaching and learning in classrooms; they are based on analytics and statistics, not on emotions and relationships that drive learning in schools. They also report outputs and outcomes, not the impacts of learning on the lives and minds of learners.

 You can follow @pasi_sahlberg and @JonathanHasak on Twitter. I do.

LABOR DAY WEEKEND QUOTABLES

Kim Mead, president of the Washington Education Association 

"Instead of diverting taxpayer dollars to unaccountable charter schools, it’s time for the Legislature to fully fund K-12 public schools so that all of Washington’s children get the quality education the Constitution guarantees them." -- WA Supreme Court rules charters unconstitutional

Valerie Strauss

 Thus, while claiming to be “public,” and while having some elements that are public (most importantly, public funding for a no-tuition education), their operations are basically private. -- Washington Post

Jitu Brown on meeting with Arne Duncan

"He was sympathetic. He said that he would talk to the mayor. I think it was interesting because...in 2008 Dyett had the largest increase of students going to college in all of Chicago Public Schools. And Arne Duncan and Mayor Daley did a big press conference at Dyett and he stood right next to me and asked me, "How did you all do this?" -- Melissa Harris-Perry interview on MSNBC

Jeannie Oakes

Jeannie Oakes, AERA president

I have reviewed the plan in light of my decades of experience as an educational researcher by training and profession. As a UCLA professor, I have spent years studying efforts to create high quality and equitable schools for young people living in communities like Dyett's -- communities of concentrated poverty and racial isolation. I currently serve as president of the American Educational Research Association, an organization of more than 25,000 educational researchers. Based on my experience and educational expertise, I find the coalition's plan to be outstanding. -- Answer Sheet 

"In essence,CPS killed a school that was on the rise." Jitu Brown on #FightForDyett on the @MHPshow today: http://t.co/e1SmTYgdj0 #Phled too

— Caucus of Working Ed (@CaucusofWE) September 5, 2015

Professional Debasement

Here's another study that tells us what every teacher already knows. District-run professional development is at best, a boring, irrelevant waste of time and money. At worst, it's downright indictable, as in the SUPES case.

Dejernet Farder, a first grade teacher at Morton School of Excellence on the West Side of Chicago, is part of Educators for Excellence and said, although her school does a pretty good job with development, many of the districtwide trainings are not helpful.

“I’ve been to many that just kind of feel like a powerpoint slide, it’s just an adult talking at us,” Farder said. “There’s no room for discussion, no room for exploration. And just like kids don’t learn that way, adults don’t learn that way either.” -- WBEZ

Class Size: The Common Sense Bus doesn't stop on School Reform Blvd.

Reformers say: "But there's no research on benefits of smaller class size."

I'm increasingly confronted by some local, self-described school reformers who minimize the effects of rising class sizes on effective teaching and learning. "There's no research supporting smaller class size", they tell me. Of course, they are wrong.

But even showing them a pile of evidence, including the famous STAR study, doesn't seem to do much good. Actually, I don't think they are really into "looking at the data." Evidence seems to confuse or bore them. Instead they seem content to merely repeat what they hear from teacher-bashing, budget-slashing politicians like Mitt Romney or corporate-style reformers like Bill Gates and Secretary Arne Duncan, who claim that fewer, higher-paid teachers teaching larger classes is the solution to the budget crisis.

Higher teacher pay does sound nice. But, as you might expect in these difficult times, what we really end up with are massive increases in class size, downward pressure on teacher pay and our best, most experienced teachers being replaced by cheaper newbies or TFAers.

Kindergarten class with 51 children 

My argument now has been reduced to an appeal to common sense. I say, just try teaching a kindergarten class with 51 children or a first-grade room with 48 kids likes the ones at Avalon Park Elementary, a school with nearly all African-American kids from low-income families on Chicago's south side. I don't care how accomplished an early-childhood teacher you are, you are being set up to fail.

Unfortunately, the common sense bus no longer stops on School Reform Blvd.

The numbers cited above are not isolated examples but typify the conditions for thousands of CPS students who started this year in grossly overcrowded classrooms and will likely face even worse conditions in the coming school year. They come from a new report from Sarah Karp at the Better Government Association (BGA) who writes:

System-wide, about 1,600 elementary classrooms – or about 20 percent of the nearly 8,500 non-charter elementary classrooms in the 2014-2015 school year – exceeded CPS’ own standards, the BGA found. Two-thirds of those overcrowded classrooms are on the South and West sides. About half have 90 percent or more low-income students.

There are no formal penalties for exceeding classroom size standards.

Even though the teachers union is technically barred under recent legislation from negotiating down class size, you can bet that it’s an issue at the center of current contract negotiations.

CTU Vice President Jesse Sharkey says,

"We are worried about [CPS] devastating class sizes. We are worried about them herding students into classes, like animals into stockyards. We are looking for some assurances, especially in the lower levels."

At some point, I'm hoping the reformers will be forced to come to their senses. More research probably won't do it. But maybe growing community anger will.

After all, even the neo-confederates in South Carolina have now agreed to take down that flag.

Mucking up the data on post-Katrina New Orleans: A tale of two headlines.

"No Excuses" N.O. charter  (Mario Tama / Getty Images)

In our doc seminar at DePaul, my students like to compare and contrast quantitative (statistical) and qualitative (interpretive) methods. Some argue that statistical research is more "objective" while qualitative research, ie. ethnography, participatory action research, etc... is open to interpretation (actually requires it). But every once in a while, real life jumps up and mucks up the data.

For example, here's headline on a story latest study of school improvement in post-Katrina New Orleans. The report comes from Tulane's Cowan Institute whose research has been touted by numerous news agencies, charter school support groups and the Louisiana Department of Education.

NOLA schools show dramatic improvement post-Katrina

Here's the headline above a similar story on the same study. This one is published in EdWeek.

 10 Years After Katrina: New Orleans School System Still in Flux, Report Says

Remember, they're reporting on the same statistical study based on hard numbers on test scores and dropout rates. So which is it? Dramatic improvement or still in flux?  Or both? Can the same numbers tell two different stories depending on whose reviewing the data? Of course.

After Katrina

Readers might recall the last study published by the Cowan Institute in November, 2014, touting the great gains supposedly made since the hurricane by the Recovery School District's privately-run charter schools. But a scandal erupted and the study had to be retracted when it was learned that the hired-gun researchers had used a "value-added" model to predict academic performance at 25 high schools, based on students' socio-economic standing and past testing history. We were told that the researchers' conclusion -- that many high school-ers do better than expected, given their background -- was inaccurate due to their flawed methods.

According to reform critic and ed historian Diane Ravitch:

 The sponsors of the district from a public school district to an all-charter district celebrate the amazing progress that followed the elimination of public schools and the teachers’ union.  

Because so many hundreds of millions of dollars have been spent to “prove” that privatization works, we will see many more such declarations of success.

On the other hand, critics say that none of the data is trustworthy. They say the state department of education and the Recovery School District (the all-charter district) manipulate statistics.

Ravitch goes on to quote Mercedes Schneider, a Louisiana high school teacher with a doctorate in research methods and statistics, who has been relentless in dissecting the narrative produced by apologists for the RSD. In her latest post, Schneider looks at the tale of graduation rates.

The Louisiana Department of Education (LDOE) hides information and releases delayed or partial information in an effort to keep the public ill-informed regarding the state of education in Louisiana and especially as concerns the now-all-charter Recovery School District (RSD) in New Orleans, which White and other well-positioned, well-financed privatizing reform cronies actively endeavor to market as a national model. 

What the RSD is best at, she says, is marketing and sales.

 So much for objectivity vs. interpretation.

Here's the problem with 'data-driven" school reform. You need good data.

 

Rahm projected an 82% graduation rate when he ran for office.

“No one questions the facts: more CPS students are graduating than ever before, those students are more prepared for their futures and we’re making huge strides in helping struggling kids graduate." -- Rahm Emanuel

With all due respect, Mr. Mayor, some folks are questioning the your facts.

Becky Vevea/WBEZ and Sarah Karp/BGA certainly are:

Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel has been talking proudly about something that is really a bit of a miracle: Even during a time of tight budgets and leadership chaos, Chicago Public Schools graduation rates have climbed to a record 69.4 percent. But new data obtained by WBEZ and the Better Government Association shows that number is wrong.

CPS records recently obtained under the Illinois Freedom of Information Act show at least 2,200 students from 25 Chicago high schools were counted as having transferred out of the district between 2011 and 2014. In reality, they were dropouts. The transfers aren’t factored into CPS graduation rates, while dropouts are. (Emanuel touts bogus graduation rate)

Cooked books. No problem. 

The worst part of this is that Rahm and CPS officials admit that the books are cooked but basically say, "Don't confuse us with facts. We know what we want you to know." They are also muzzling principals while the Ministry of Lies and Deception (MLD) goes into to full ass-cover mode.

CPS spokesman Bill McCaffrey also refused to make any principals available to talk about this story. McCaffrey acknowledged that the district has a problem, but said officials don't plan to go back and adjust the rates because of the “billion dollar deficit.” 

Curie Principal Phillip Perry did not respond to phone calls or emails. When reporters stopped by his school, they were not allowed past the front foyer and escorted out by a security guard and a woman who identified herself as a police officer, though she did not have her badge evident and was not in uniform.

Well, maybe that's not the worst part. The worst part may be that researchers at the University of Chicago’s Consortium on Chicago School Research appear to shrug off the deceptive reporting on graduation rates as simply "coding errors" at the school level. They appear to use a method that assumes misreporting that goes both ways, cancelling each other out. The Consortium's Emily Krone says:

In fact, UChicago CCSR research finds double-digit improvements in graduation rates over the last several years, even using a very conservative method of calculation that counts every student who transfers or goes to an alternative school as a dropout.

That's not a "conservative method.. It's a bad guess as well as an unsolicited confession on her part.

CCSR Director Elaine Allensworth claims that coding errors go both ways — some students counted as dropouts did legitimately transfer. Maybe so, but it's not a valid or reliable way to report dropout rates, especially when you have a mayor running for office by boasting of an 82% graduation rate.
The credibility of the researchers is also at stake here.

Okay, so maybe even that's not be the worst part. The worst part may be the complete loss of confidence and trust in administration transparency at the very time when the district needs to go begging for financial support for its schools and when the city's credit rating has been reduced to junk. Remember, it's not just about the false reporting of graduation rates.

They are also misreporting the city's crime rate; did the same on the missing children resulting from the school closures; they overestimated savings from controversial janitorial services with Aramark, partly by forgetting to count 22 entire schools; Rahm's promise to save $60 million by switching garbage collection from a ward-by-ward to a grid system fell $42 million short; and the D.O.T.'s
Inspector failure to report 53% of all requests for pothole and other street repairs.

Figures don't lie but liars can figure.

Goodhart's Law of unintended consequences

Goodhart's law is named after the banker who originated it, Charles Goodhart. Its most popular formulation is: "When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure."

In other words: “When you put a lot of weight on one measure, people will try to do well on that measure,” says Jonah Rockoff of Columbia. “Some things they do will be good, in line with the objectives. Others will amount to cheating or gaming the system.”

What are the consequences of grading teachers by the test? Economics writer Eduardo Porter's NYT piece refers to Goodhart's Law in the context of using high-stakes, standardized tests to grade teachers.

Luis Garicano at the London School of Economics calls it the Heisenberg Principle of incentive design, after the defining uncertainty of quantum physics: A performance metric is only useful as a performance metric as long as it isn’t used as a performance metric.

Porter quotes Randi Weingarten:

“People who claim to be market-based reformers want to sell the theory that there is a direct correlation between test scores, the effort of teachers and the success of children,” said Randi Weingarten, who heads the American Federation of Teachers. “It just ignores everything else that goes into learning.”

I only wish that Randi would have remembered that when she signed on to Arne Duncan's call for more and earlier national high-stakes testing. AFT’s position is detailed in a joint statement issued with the Center for American Progress, a Democratic Party aligned think tank.

“We propose to keep annual tests so parents have valid information about their children’s progress but want to ensure that any school accountability a system has a broader array of indicators that fully captures how our children are learning,” said CAP President Neera Tanden.

Randi and CAP's assumption here is that tests like the PARCC can really provide "valid information" even with Goodhart's Law in play.

Porter says:

Teachers argue there is no way they could isolate the impact of teaching itself from other factors affecting children’s learning, particularly such things as the family background of the students, the impact of poverty, racial segregation, even class size.   

As usual, the teachers are right.

Porter wimps out at the end of his piece, quoting rabid testing proponent and former NYC Chancellor Joel Klein who calls for reliance on so-called "value-added scores" in order "to penalize or reward teachers". Porter, like Weingarten, calls for grading teachers on student test scores along with "other measures." That is the current approach in most districts these days.

But even with the mixed-measures approach, the high-stakes tests when used to determine teachers' and administrators' salaries have more power than any of the softer measures of student/teacher performance and therefore are really all that counts. The unintended consequences include gaming the system and teaching to the tests. It also ignores the role that poverty and other out-of-school factors play on measurable student/teacher performance.

High-stakes, standardized testing is part of the problem. Not part of the solution. It shouldn't be used, even in combination with other more valid measures, to grade teachers.

WEEKEND QUOTABLES

A sign, with bullet holes, along the historic route from Selma to Montgomery

Joe Hopkins, Selma veteran

“My mother told me I could get killed, and I told her we’re all going to die one day, but I was 17 years old and quick so they couldn’t catch me.” — New York Times

Barack Obama

It’s the idea held by generations of citizens who believed that America is a constant work in progress; who believed that loving this country requires more than singing its praises or avoiding uncomfortable truths. It requires the occasional disruption, the willingness to speak out for what is right, to shake up the status quo. That’s America. -- Selma Speech

Jelani Cobb

Ferguson’s is not a singular situation. It is an object lesson in the national policing practices that have created the largest incarcerated population in the Western world, as well as a veil of permanent racial suspicion—practices that many people believe will deliver safety in exchange for injustice. What happened in Selma is happening in Ferguson, and elsewhere, too. The great danger is not that we will discount the progress that has been made but that we have claimed it prematurely.​ -- New Yorker

Jodi Cantor, author of "The Obamas"

 "Michelle and Rahm Emanuel had almost no bond; their relationship was distant and awkward from the beginning. She had been skeptical of him when he was selected, and now he returned the favor; he was uneasy about first ladies in general..." -- Ward Room

 Robert Putnam, author of "Our Kids"

“At the beginning you don’t know you’re doing a study of the collapse of American social life — you’re doing a study of PTA membership. 'Our Kids' was like that, too. The more we investigated, the bigger we realized the problem was.” -- Washington Post

In an effort to placate anti-PARCC activists, Mayor Emanuel has signed an executive order barring the PARCC exam at the U of C Lab Schools.
— Matt Farmer (@mifarmer) March 9, 2015

Chicago Area Researchers Slam Rahm's Failed Ed Policies

For Immediate Release

From Chicagoland Researchers and Advocates for Transformative Education (CReATE)

February 20, 2015

Contacts:
Isabel Nunez, CReATE Coordinator, (312) 421-7819
Mike Klonsky, (312) 420-1335
Brian Schultz, (773) 442-5327
David Stovall, (312) 413-5014

LOCAL EDUCATION RESEARCHERS SLAM MAYOR EMANUEL’S FAILED POLICIES

On the eve of the Chicago mayoral election, Chicagoland Researchers and Advocates for Transformative Education (CReATE), a network of 150 education researchers from universities in the Chicago area, is releasing Chicago School Reform: Myths, Realities, and New Visions (2015).

In response to Mayor Emanuel's claims of major success for his education policy initiatives, CReATE calls into question major parts of Chicago school reform under Mayor Emanuel's leadership. CReATE reviews how reforms of the past four years and earlier have impacted Chicago children, families and school communities.

In response to recent policy initiatives, CReATE proposes a series of research supported alternatives to mayoral appointed school boards, school closings, the ever-expanding chartering and privatizing of public schools, as well as the curriculum and teacher evaluation designs and increased high stakes testing being imposed by Common Core State Standards and the U.S. Department of Education's Race to the Top policies.

The position statement also includes contact information for university-based education researchers who can provide more detailed commentary on specific areas of education policy.

CReATE’s Statement on Chicago School Reform: Myths, Realities, and New Visions is available online at http://www.createchicago.org/

Rahm's school administrators cooked the books on dropouts

“The annual OIG report is a testament of our cooperation and demonstrates we do not tolerate any wrongdoing, and CPS has either addressed or is addressing all the issues in the report.” -- CPS spokesman Bill McCaffrey

CPS I.G. Nicholas Schuler

Ooooh that smell...While Rahm and BBB scrambled for media coverage about supposed record grad rates, CPS School administrators were busy "misclassifying" dropouts to make their schools look better. This according to the annual report from Rahm's own appointed schools I.G. Nicholas Schuler.

At one school alone, nearly 300 dropouts were wiped off the books since 2009. At another high school officials did the same thing for 18 students.

I don't necessarily blame U of C's Consortium on Chicago School Research for running with the numbers they get from CPS. I just think they should be cautious in how they spin those numbers. I guess I'm still pissed at the Consortium's lead author of it's report on grad rates, calling for a "celebration" of the reported 4% bump.

I also don't know if Rahm/BBB are actively pushing administrators to cook reported dropout rates (remember Bush's Texas "Miracle") or if they acted on their own. But bureaucrats know full well what numbers they're expected to produce if they are going to survive in a high-stakes "data-driven" system where the mayor runs the schools autocratically.

I doubt that Schuler's report, which may be giving up a little to hide a lot, will go anywhere except Rahm's circular file. The CPS I.G. can only make recommendations and has no power to force system-wide changes. Also, I'm pretty sure Schuler got the nod from Rahm's people before releasing the report, which mentions among other things,

• Nearly $900,000 stolen from two Chicago high schools.

• Lying CPS employees who skirted the system to get their own kids into the best schools.

• And a CPS administrator who “engaged in questionable conduct” when a nearly $100 million contract was in the process of being awarded.

With the election only weeks away, it's always better to get the dirt out yourself before your opponents do it. Then you can prime your troops with prepared media hokum, like the statement above from CPS spokesman Bill McCaffrey.

Not on Duncan's VIP list?...One thing you can probably count on is punishment of those teacher/parents who allegedly "skirted the system" to get their own kids into elite selective enrollment schools. I mean, who do they think they are, Gov. Rauner?

The data 'washing machine'

Rahm's red light cameras had no real safety benefits.

Ald. Anthony Beale, 9th, chairman of the council Transportation Committee, said the city's numbers come as no surprise: "Those numbers the city uses have never made any sense. Of course they are skewing the numbers."

Okay, I may be beating a dead horse here. In two previous posts, one on CPS's modest improvement in grad rates and one on supposedly rising growth scores, I added the following qualifier:

 If that is, you have faith in the transparency of the system and faith that the researchers are measuring the same thing. I don't. But that's for another blog post.

We'll here's another another post.

You see, in our new, data-driven world order, Rahm Emanuel's regime is quickly become number-one in lack of transparency and in data fudging. I actually started writing seriously about this last summer when the Chicago media couldn't get its numbers straight about how many shootings had taken place on a given weekend.

It was back in April when Chicago Mag writers Bernstein & Isackson kicked the whole thing off with their 2-part series, "The Truth About Chicago’s Crime Rates". They called the system of crime data collection, "the washing machine".

The city’s crime numbers seem too good to be true. One former lieutenant has a name for the system: the washing machine. “They wash and rinse the numbers,” the lieutenant says.

The pair went on to document how Chief McCarthy's boys had actually gone back in and reformed the crime data in the face of mounting criticism of how he and his boss, the Mayor, were handling the shooting pandemic on the west and south sides.

This morning's Tribune's report on Rahm's red-light cameras shows more of the same data washing. The Trib's study demolished the mayor's claims that the massively expensive installation of hundreds red-light cameras had large safety benefits for the citizens.

Emanuel has credited the cameras for a 47 percent reduction in dangerous right-angle, or "T-bone," crashes. But the Tribune study, which accounted for declining accident rates in recent years as well as other confounding factors, found cameras reduced right-angle crashes that caused injuries by just 15 percent.

 At the same time, the study calculated a corresponding 22 percent increase in rear-end crashes that caused injuries, illustrating a trade-off between the cameras' costs and benefits.

And then, when the numbers aren't there to produce the needed politically-necessary outcomes, the cheating begins. Just look at the national pandemic of cheating cases relating to standardized testing madness.

In the wake of Tribune revelations, the city's contractor was fired, that company's top executives were ousted and federal prosecutors charged a former City Hall manager with taking up to $2 million in bribes from the former CEO of the company, Redflex Traffic Systems, to build its Chicago business into the largest automated traffic enforcement program in the country.

But the real story here is about numbers and what meaning we make of them, whether about miracle jumps in test scores, and drops in crime statistics. The red-light cameras turn out to be just another regressive tax while the mayor's data-washing machine takes us all to the cleaners.

Does Rahm deserve the credit for bump in grad rates? Uh uh.

Mayor Rahm Emanuel and his schools chief Barbara Byrd-Bennett claim credit for a reported 4% bump in CPS grad rates. 

Rahm Emanuel has rankled the Pilsen and Little Village communities with a new campaign ad — one in which, anti-coal activists say. he attempts to grab full credit for closing two area coal plants, when in fact it had taken years of work. Community response has been quick and angry.

But I'm wondering why there isn't the same angry response from parents and educators as Rahm and CEO Byrd-Bennett try and take credit for the reported steady rise in CPS graduation rates which began more than 5 years ago when Daley was the mayor and the likes of Ron Huberman and J.C. Brizard were running the schools for him and all claiming credit for improved graduation rates? This is also part of a national trend that began about the same time as in Chicago.

Perhaps Rahm and BBB will claim credit for the upward national trend as well.

It's my hunch that few even know how graduation rates are determined or how much credibility goes with the latest calculations, let alone what's driving them.

University of Chicago researchers report that grad rates have increased by 15% since 2008. But given a 2011 change (see below) in the way graduation rates are measured, it's hard to know how they got that figure. They attribute the increases in large part to the power of their own research, which shows a strong correlation between freshmen being on-track and graduating on time.

A TIME Magazine report points to studies released in 2005 and 2007 by researchers at UC's Urban Education Institute’s Consortium on Chicago School Research which "made a simple but powerful finding: Graduation is mostly determined in the ninth grade year."

Institute leader Tim Knowles touted this research back in April:

Freshmen who are on track to graduate in the ninth grade (earning no more than one semester F in a core course and accumulating sufficient credits) are four times more likely to graduate than students who are off track. Researchers found that being on track in the ninth grade is a better predictor of high school graduation than a student's race, family income, the neighborhood they come from and prior test scores, combined.

 Suddenly, addressing the dropout problem was not about the host of factors over which educators have no control — neighborhoods, poverty, violence or prior academic achievement. There was a single, manageable intervention point: ninth grade course performance.

There! claims Knowles. Finally, a magic bullet. Just examine the Institute's data. Forget about all those silly distractions like race, poverty, gun violence, family circumstances and the decimation of neighborhoods (including the mass closing of neighborhood schools), over which we supposedly "have no control". Then implement a few early interventions in the freshman year -- not a bad idea but certainly not a new one -- and voila!

When I say it's not a new one, I'm thinking back to the small-schools movement of the early '90s in Chicago, where early interventions like freshman academies were short-lived. As for 9th-grade on-track rates, you can go back earlier than that. There are tons of early intervention studies showing, for example, that 3rd-grade reading proficiency drives future academic success and that retaining (failing) elementary grade students increases the probability of them dropping out by 5X.

This is not to say that there's no value in the U of C study. Consortium researchers like Melissa Roderick have been pointing to the need for early intervention to reduce high school dropouts for years, and without overstating the power of good data, she and they deserve lots of credit for their focus on urban schools and students.

But research aside, whenever there is reported progress in public education, you can bet your last buck that teachers will be the last ones to receive the credit. First in line are glory-grubbing politicians like Rahm Emanuel who are quick to claim all the credit for last year's bump in grad rates. This, even though his current approach drains these very schools of badly-needed resources and shifts them instead to crony-run charter networks like UNO as well as to pet selective-enrollment schools.

An all-too-compliant media is quick to play along, either rendering unto Caesar... or trying to be "balanced" (OMG, even my pal, the usually critical-thinking Ben Joravsky).

But whether you buy all of the U of C research or not, there is little evidence that the current mayor's top-down, imposed education policies; i.e., more seat time, mass school closures, replacing neighborhood public schools with privately-run charters, whitenizing the teaching corps, cutting community-based health clinics, etc... have anything to do with improved graduation rates.

Other factors to consider

• Has anyone considered the possibility that CPS' shrinking student population along with the mass exodus of nearly a quarter of a million African-Americans, including thousands of school-aged children, has impacted graduation rates?

• In 2011 new federal guidelines set up a single, uniform standard that all states must follow when calculating these rates. Now, the rate will be based on a strict measurement of what is called a “four-year adjusted cohort.” The formula divides the number of students who earn a diploma in four years or less by the number of students who formed the original cohort—that is, the number of students who entered 9th grade together—of the graduating class. So the question is -- how much of the small 4% increase should be attributed to the way dropouts and grads are counted? I'm thinking back a few years to 2006, when this same Consortium found that  only 6.5% of CPS freshmen went on to earn four-year college degrees by their mid-20s, and among African-American and Latino males, only 3%. I'd be curious to see how that number has changed.

• I still haven't seen how newly-reported graduation rates break out by school, neighborhood, race and poverty. As I reported before, I am concerned that the rate increase may be more reflective of the changing demographics in the city than any single school intervention. 

Time to unite and keep the struggle alive

By now, everyone's heard the news that Karen Lewis has come through surgery for a brain tumor and now faces the struggle of her life, a long, difficult road back towards recovery. Our thoughts are with her and her family.

We've also heard, loud and clear, that she's no longer in the race for mayor, a stunning blow with just a little over four months to go before the election. Despite this devastating set-back, the movement continues and hope remains that the young corps of leadership in and outside of the CTU will step up and fill the void.

As far as the election is concerned, Rahm is still not out of the woods. His poll numbers continue to plummet and Ald. Bob Fioretti is still in the race.

"I have the pleasure of calling her a friend, and I join many across this city in praying for her health today. I can understand the battle with illness, and how it can change the best thought out plans. But I also know that Karen is resilient and strong and will be back advocating for educators … students … and Chicagoans in no time," Fioretti said.
"With my friend in the race, it would have been a little bit different dynamics," Fioretti said. "I've always said ... the day after the February (election), if there was a runoff, it would have been Karen and I."

I think he's right. Time to unite and keep the struggle alive.

“Karen Lewis has decided to not pursue a mayoral bid,” Jay Travis, the head of her mayoral exploratory committee said in a statement Monday “Yet she charges us to continue fighting for strong neighborhood schools, safe communities and good jobs for everyone.

“The tens of thousands of signatures collected for Karen confirm what the polls have already said: Chicagoans from Beverly to Uptown want to feel safe in their neighborhoods; they want an elected representative school board; and they want political leadership at every level that is responsive and responsible.”

Rahm's Achilles' heel continues to be his disastrous school "reform" policies, including his engineering the largest mass school closings in history, a kick in the gut of black and Latino communities throughout the city, along with his infatuation with privately run charter schools (and all things privatization).

Orfield

Those policies took another major blow yesterday with the publication of a major study coming out of the University of Minnesota's Institute on Metropolitan Opportunity, headed by Myron Orfield. The study provides more compelling evidence that charter schools have worsened school segregation in Chicago and overall have had a crippling effect on the city's public schools.

According to Orfield's study:

Charter schools have become the cornerstone of school reform in Chicago and nationally.  Arne Duncan, who led Chicago schools and was a strong proponent of charters, became secretary of Education.  As Secretary Duncan has championed policies to dramatically expand the use of charters throughout the United States. Chicago, however, remains one of the nation’s lowest performing school districts.  Sadly the charters schools, which on average score lower that the Chicago public schools, have not improved the Chicago school system, but perhaps made it even weaker.  Further charters, which are even more likely to be single race schools than the already hyper segregated Chicago school system, have not increased interracial contact, an often- stated goal of charter systems.  Finally, the fact that Chicago charters use expulsion far more often that public schools deserves further study.  In the end it is unlikely that the Chicago charter school experience provides a model for improving urban education in other big city school districts.

And speaking of Duncan...his pal, Purdue University President Mitch Daniels, says he stands by his efforts to keep historian Howard Zinn's work from being taught in Indiana schools, saying the actions he took while governor were meant to keep the book out of the hands of K-12 students.

Daniels told reporters after a meeting of the board that a statement he made as governor that Indiana should "disqualify the propaganda" he saw being used in Indiana's teacher preparation courses was meant only to keep Zinn's "A People's History of the United States" from being taught in the state's K-12 classrooms.

Duncan & Daniels

Readers might remember how Ed Sec. Duncan traveled to Indiana in 2011 to embrace Tea Party Gov. Daniels' version of school reform.

"Now, few states have done a better job of coping with the recession than Indiana and I want to salute you -- Governor Daniels -- for your leadership and management skills. I also salute you for your leadership on education issues. You are among the 42 states that have voluntarily adopted college and career ready standards. You knew the bar here was too low and needed to be raised, even if that was hard to do. You are among the 46 states that developed bold reform plans to compete for Race to the Top."

Lie down with dogs, wake up with fleas.

Pension wars and Moore

Puerto Rican teachers strike: "No somos criminales, somos maestros." "We're not criminals."

The attacks on public worker pensions, especially teachers' pensions, has become a centerpiece of corporate reform strategy aimed at degrading the teaching profession, eroding public space and undermining union contracts. It's a response to the growing public-sector debt crisis that avoids taxing the corporate sector and puts the entire burden on the retired (or soon to be retired) public sector workers. But with it has come with growing resistance across the country and now in Puerto Rico. Since December 19, members of Puerto Rico's teachers union and their supporters have been protesting both inside the island's Senate chamber and outside its Capitol, including a 2-day strike, against the so-called "pension reform" legislation advocated by governor Alejandro Garcia Padilla.

Look who's defending Rauner

No surprise here. It's the Trib's Eric Zorn. He identifies with the Republican billionaire's clout problems.

I didn't have to play that game with my elder son, who easily tested into Payton in 2004, but I can't blame many of those who did. "Nothin' wrong" with asking for a favor, after all, when favors were going to be doled out anyway.

 Was it seemly for Bruce Rauner to then drop a quarter-million dollar donation on Payton Prep Initiative for Education in December 2009? Yes. Given the timing, not just seemly but generous, creditable and consistent with his charitable outreach to schools.

Does Rauner have anything to apologize for, other than dropping his "g's" to try to sound folksy? No. He didn't break the rules in place at the time and no one broke them on his behalf.

Has Ald. Joe Moore become a complete lap dog for the Mayor?

Yes he has. He ran as a progressive, but now has become an enemy of the teachers union and the leading Rahm apologist in the City Council. Moore argued Tuesday that City Hall spent $7.2 million on salt after the New Year’s Eve storm that preceded a polar plunge — and “wasted” tons of it — because it was trying to meet the “unrealistic” expectations of a demanding Chicago electorate. He may be right about the salt, but not about blaming Chicagoans' for their expectations. His was a conscious diversion from the real issue that has neighborhood folks so pissed off. While downtown and Boule Miche were plowed clean enough to eat off the streets, neighborhoods were barely touched. Dangerous potholes are everywhere in the neighborhoods. None downtown. It had nothing to do with salt. 

Congrats to ALEC, Brookings, Gates... on their Bunkum Awards 

“Congratulations, Brookings! You just won the Bunkum’s Grand Prize for shoddiest educational research for 2013.” -- NEPC

Here comes the annual back-to-school media campaign

'Research shows...'

Twenty-seven students who will enter fifth grade at receiving school,  Brennemann, 4251 N. Clarendon Ave., stood along the wall behind the podium during the event, all receiving handshakes from the mayor when he entered the room. (DNAInfo)

Amid the chaos of Chicago's mass school closings and draconian school budget cuts,the Mayor Rahm & Byrd-Bennett are launching their annual opening-of-school day media campaign. They want of course, to see more students in their seats in on opening day, which will generate more state funds for bankrupt CPS. I do too.

But the campaign so far is lackluster. For thousands of south and west side students there's little to get excited about this opening day, given the closing of their neighborhood school, the loss of their favorite teacher, destroyed special ed programs, limiting of arts and music, or maybe having to sit on a window sill or file cabinet in badly overcrowded receiving school classrooms. Or even worse, navigating their way to school across rival gang territory.

Byrd-Bennett plays the overused "research shows" gambit to make her case with the media.

“We know from all of the research, and I know from practice, that students who attend school on the first day are far more likely to attend school throughout the school year."

Um, exactly what research is that, BBB?

Actually, I've got some research of my own. It goes something like this:

Research shows that when you pack kids from low-income families into overcrowded class rooms bad things happen to kids and teachers.

Research also shows that when school closings destroy badly-needed special-ed programs, which are not replaced in the receiving schools, and when those kids' IEP are violated, special-needs kids will suffer.

How about this one -- research shows that most of the students forced out of closed neighborhood schools don't benefit academically and that the closings amount to little more that a new form of urban renewal.

Finally, research shows that a longer school day and more seat time, offers no real benefit to students unless it comes along with adequate resources and top-notch programs, including arts, music, and planning time for teachers.

So whether or not there's a real benefit to kids who attend opening day, or any other day, seems to depend on what's happening in those schools, what kind of culture and climate exists, whether nor not there are skilled, highly-qualified teachers in the classrooms (as opposed to TFA 5-week wonders) and whether or not there's resources available to deliver a high quality school day to the neediest children.

Research shows. But multi-million-dollar media campaigns just won't cut it.

Matt Farmer

Quotable Matt at the Board hearings...

Matt Farmer, one of the attorneys handling the Chicago Teachers Union-backed federal lawsuit that attempts to block the district from closing 49 elementary schools and a high school program, was among many speakers who said the budget cuts, like the closings, are a direct strike against neighborhood schools.

Farmer blasted the $20 million no-bid contract awarded by the district to a leadership training academy where Byrd-Bennett was once a paid coach. He brought audience members to their feet with a call to taking their anger to the streets and to the homes of CPS officials, including Chief Administrative Officer Tim Cawley, who presided over the hearing.

"We will see you in the streets," he vowed. "You will hear our voices in your sleep." -- Tribune