Bob Hughes, now at Gates & formerly New Visions, provides $14M to New Visions & $2M to Jim Liebman for "evaluation"

Last week, Bob Hughes, appointed director of the Gates Foundation K12 division in 2016, made his first big move.   

He announced $92 million in grants for the new Networks of School Improvement initiative to be given to 19 organizations, collaboratives and districts, out of 532 applications submitted.   

New Visions, the NYC-based organization that Hughes ran before coming to the Foundation, received the second largest grant at $14 million – to work with 75 NYC schools, as yet unidentified.

The grant was more than the amount given to the entire Baltimore system of public schools – despite New Visions’ spotty record.

Though Hughes admitted that there’s not much evidence behind the theory of network improvement, he’s determined to push forward nonetheless:

 “I don’t think the research base is fully developed, and that’s one reason we’re making these investments,” said Hughes.

Asked by EdWeek reporter Steven Sawchuk how the results of this new initiative would be evaluated,

 Hughes replied that “ the foundation is still formulating its research approach.” And:  

"We don't have details for you, but we remain deeply committed to a third party evaluation of all our work and transparency about the results of those evaluations so we can enable the field to understand what we do well and what we don't do well," he said. 

Yet it appears that The Center for Public Research and Leadership (CPRL) at Columbia Law School has already been chosen by Hughes to evaluate the networks initiative.

As the CPRL website notes, “In January 2018, CPRL received a two and one-half year grant to report on the research underlying the NSI [Networks for School Improvement] initiative and to use the research to design and conduct a formative evaluation of the initiative’s initial implementation.”

(Sure enough, the Gates Foundation lists a grant for $1.9 million over 31 months to be awarded “Columbia University”  to "support evaluation”.)

The first Gates-funded CPRL study was a literature review of network impacts.  The findings were described by Sawchuk this way:

A Gates-commissioned review of the research on the topic from Columbia University's Center for Public Research and Leadership noted that there are more studies on the norms and conditions needed to support healthy networks than on how they affect K-12 outcomes; most of the 34 studies were case studies or qualitative, rather than quasi-experimental designs that sought to answer cause-and-effect questions.

CPRL is headed by Columbia Law professor James Liebman, who was appointed head of the NYC Department of Education’s Accountability Office under Joel Klein, despite the fact that he had no K12 education experience either as a teacher, administrator or researcher.   

Liebman made a mess of the School Progress Reports at DOE, instituting  a volatile, unstable system in which school grades wildly veered from year to year.  A blog post by Professor Aaron Pallas in Edweek was memorably entitled, “Could a Monkey Do a Better Job of Predicting Which Schools Show Student Progress in English Skills than the New York City Department of Education?”  Under Liebman’s direction, DOE efforts were statistically inept and I would not trust his ability to undertake a credible  evaluation.

 Liebman also commissioned the  expensive ARIS data system, which lived up to none of its promises.  It was rarely used by parents or teachers and was finally ditched in 2015 after costing the city $95 million.

In any case, I hope the Gates Foundation has not decided against commissioning an evaluation from more experienced, credible organization like RAND.  

RAND recently released a highly critical analysis of the results of the Gates-funded Teacher Evaluation Initiative and before that, a skeptical evaluation of the Gates-funded NextGeneration Learning Challenge schools, those  that feature  “personalized [online] learning.”

John F. Pane, senior scientist at RAND and the chief author of the latter study frankly pointed out to Ed Week, the evidence base for personalized learning is still "very weak."

Hughes himself doesn’t have the greatest reputation for transparency.  In 2005, he tried to suppress a Gates-funded research study that contained negative findings about the  New Visions Gates-funded small schools initiative in New York City, a study that was subsequently leaked to the NY Times .  

In 2007, it was revealed that New Visions threatened these small schools that they would not receive their full Gates grants unless they chose New Visions as their DOE “partnership support network” and paid the organization a fee in return.

"I thought, 'Oh, my God, what a huge conflict of interest,'" a principal said. "We have to join their PSO and pay them for support in order to get this grant that we qualified for?"

Only time will tell, but the hints of insular cronyism in these decisions by Hughes to award grants to New Visions and to Jim Liebman’s outfit do not bode well for the future.

Your child's state test scores are now posted; read this advice first from Tory Frye

Dear Parents and Guardians,

Your child's scores are now available on ARIS Parent Link.  For what it is worth, there are a few things that I think we should all do:

1) Ignore the test results and do not tell our children what their "number" is, no matter how high or low;

2) Know that these tests are part of a movement to privatize public education by convincing parents that our children are underperforming, compared with other countries, and a massive restructuring of the public education system is the only thing that will save the future of the US; this would involve higher standards, better teachers (which requires a de-unionized teaching force), more charter schools, vouchers for private schools, and market-based methods to make parents consumers of "public" education; they say that this is needed because of the "new" US economy, where because of economic and labor policies, we have an increasingly bimodal distribution of jobs (you are either a Walmart Greeter or a Scientist, with few solid working- and lower-middle class options left);    

3) Recognize that no elite NYC private schools use high stakes standardized tests in this way and that the country that is held up as a model of universal, high quality public education, Finland, also does not use test scores in this way; 

4) Know that our state has purposefully set up our children to fail in order to "shock" us into submission and turn on our children's teachers and their unions;

5) Resist the urge to pressure our children's teachers and schools to do better on these tests; this will only totally eliminate the arts, sports, sciences, recess and other activities that have been diminished in the pursuit of high scores and that children desperately need; these are the things that keep some of our most vulnerable children in school;

6) Be aware also that our children's test scores are being given by the state to inBloom, a private company that will store all of children's data in a "cloud" and offer it to other private companies to make more educational "products" that are typically "personalized" and computer-based and designed to further undermine face-to-face instruction, classrooms and human teachers.  See here for inBloom: https://www.edsurge.com/inbloom-inc  See here for criticisms of it: http://www.classsizematters.org/inbloom_student_data_privacy/

7) Consider opting out of the tests next year as a way of resisting corporate education reform and the monetizing of our children's school experiences.

So that is what I think we should do; feel free to agree or disagree!

Best,

Victoria (Tory) Frye, D6 parent

One small win for humankind: Comptroller rejected $27 M no bid Wireless contract

One small but significant victory:  public outrage has managed to stop the state contract with Wireless Generation, owned by Rupert Murdoch and run by Joel Klein.   

As reported in today's Daily News, State Comptroller Di Napoli rejected the egregious $27 million contract that the NY State Education Department  wanted to award the company, to build a statewide data system modeled after the highly deficient city system known as ARIS.  

We were the first to post a petition to Di Napoli, the Regents, and the feds, after the Daily News broke the story, and many other petitions and letters to the Comptroller followed.

For some of the reasons this contract should have been rejected see here.

If you would like to thank Comptroller Di Napoli, you can send an email to: contactus@osc.state.ny.us

Keep safe everyone on the East Coast, from Hurricane Irene, but savor this win for accountability and for someone who dared to say NO to educrats , apparently intent on wasting taxpayer money and reward their friends and cronies with no-bid contracts. These wins have been few and far between in recent years.

Another super-mugging? NY State Education Department to award $27 no-bid contract to Joel Klein and Rupert Murdoch

From Rachel Monahan of the Daily News comes the startling announcement that the NY State Education Department is about to award a $27 million no-bid contract to Wireless Generation to develop a statewide student data system, and has apparently been granted a waiver by the NY state Comptroller to do so.  

Wireless, which received several no-bid contracts from DOE, is now run by ex-Chancellor Joel Klein and owned by Rupert Murdoch’s NewsCorp. 

Why did the state argue for this contract?  On the basis of Wireless’ record in developing ARIS, NYC’s much criticized $80 million data system.

Recently, Lindsey Christ of NY1 in an award-winning three-part series pointed out the glaring deficiencies of ARIS and the far superior data system developed by NYC teachers for relative pennies.  

Last  fall, Gotham Schools did a similar expose;  we featured critical observations from a teacher about the inadequacies of the system back in 2008.

The hi-tech community recognized  it a huge boondoggle and a “super mugging” when the no-bid contract was first announced in 2007.

Already, the state’s intention to grant this contract to Klein et. al. has been criticized by Susan Lerner of Common Cause: "It just smacks of an old-boys club, where large amounts of public money are spent based not on 'is this the best product?'  E.D. Kain  of Forbes writes that the decision “reeks of cronyism.”

In support of their request, SED claims that Wireless has received “national recognition from Arne Duncan.”  Of course, Duncan has also called Joel Klein, who stands to benefit financially from the deal, “a good, good friend of mine.”

The letter also reveals that the Gates Foundation, which pushed data systems and testing as part of "Race to the Top", has also selected Wireless to “build its national Shared Learning Infrastructure,”  in what is likely to prove a generous windfall for Joel Klein and Rupert Murdoch.

The SED letter requesting the waiver claims that Wireless has invested “significant time and resources in end-user research with NYC DOE educators to determine the ideal ways to display information for educators to engage in data-driven instruction…[including] focus groups of educators and administrators.” 

If so, they obviously learned nothing from any of these focus groups, as most teachers report the system is nearly worthless.  The SED letter also claims that parent find ARIS useful, while  I’ve heard mostly complaints that the system contains little more than their children’s test scores and attendance.

SED adds: “Wireless has “developed the vocabulary used throughout NY for student classification and demographic information” and, for example, “understands what ‘ELL’ (English Language Learner) means..” Wow! That should be worth a cool million there.

Finally, “New York is well aware of the risks of large-scale technology projects that to [sic] tend to run over budget, behind schedule and be under-whelming when delivered.”  Which is a perfect description of ARIS.

It is surprising that NY State Comptroller Di Napoli would provide this waiver after his 2009 audit, exposing DOE’s abuse of the no-bid contract process.  These are precious funds that should be used to benefit children, rather than line the pockets of Joel Klein and Rupert Murdoch.

Patrick Sullivan commands the stage at the PEP

Check out this video of Manhattan member of the Panel for Educational Policy Patrick Sullivan, fearless and brilliant, at the PEP December 20 meeting in the Bronx.

My favorite clip: when Patrick berates DOE officials for their "lack of fiscal discipline" -- their insistence on spending yet even more millions for yet another wasteful piece of software, a teacher training module that is supposed to be integrated into the $80 million super-computer super-mugging that is ARIS; meanwhile, school budgets are being slashed to the bone.

Hurray for Patrick! We are truly lucky to have him.

ELL, Federal Stimulus, and Technology Updates at February Panel for Educational Policy

Monday's Panel for Educational Policy meeting covered three topics. Presentations are available here:

English Language Learners Update

The ELL Performance Report for 2007-2008 is still not available although some statistics are provided here.

Federal Stimulus Bill

The DOE has looked closely at what funds will be available and intends to compete aggresively for discretionary funds, including the $650 million in "Innovation Funds". Given the apparent education priorities of the Obama administration, the focus for grants will likely include technology, testing, teacher merit pay and charter schools.

Technology Update

Another day, another reorganization; meanwhile more ARIS delays.

All the previous reorganizations (how many have their been? four? Five? Who can count them?) have caused nothing but chaos, confusion, and a massive waste of money. Each of them was supposed to cut the bureaucracy.

Yet somehow, the headcount (and salaries) at Tweed continue to grow, year after year.

Now, there’s yet another reorganization on the way .... but when Elizabeth Green reported this story about the latest reorganization (oh, I meant “reshuffling”) in the morning, she filed again in the afternoon, after Eric Nadelstern, the new "Chief School Officer" called back, to try to reorganize the spin on the reorganization.

If Nadelstern and all the other bumblers at Tweed really believe their own PR about giving principals the choice so they can be the CEO’s of their own buildings, they should privatize Tweed, set it up as a consulting company, and see if any of these CEOs would bother to hire them. I doubt they would – even those zombies trained at the Leadership Academy.

I was at a CPAC meeting this morning, and guess when Santi Taveras said that the vaunted $80 million supercomputer ARIS and its data would be accessible to parents? Not until May. How many months has this been delayed?

Here is an excerpt from the Oct. 24 NY Times:

James S. Liebman, the Education Department’s chief accountability officer, said on Thursday that the project was “proceeding in an appropriate manner” and “in the way we anticipated.” He said that parents would begin gaining access to the system in December, and noted that Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg, in his State of the City speech in January, said that ARIS would be online by the fall, not September specifically.

Well, no way you can redefine May as in the fall. Except perhaps in Australia, which perhaps is the last place in the world that Joel Klein is still popular.

About the only reorganization led by Tweed that would really improve the situation is if they reorganized themselves out of existence.