Tuesday's elections disastrous for inBloom: Seven states out, two to go

Big News from Jefferson County, the only inBloom pilot district in Colorado. Anti-inBloom candidates swept the school board elections on Tuesday night, on Thursday their Superintendent resigned, and the existing school board unanimously voted to scrap inBloom. The school board president, Leslee Dahlkemper, was quoted as saying,  "We decided that it was important to listen to the community."   Congrats to the parents of Jefferson County, and especially activist Rachael Stickland who led the fight! See Columbine Courier, Colorado News, Michelle Malkin’s column , Politico and EdWeek. 

Now, only two states remain from the nine original inBloom “partners”: New York and Illinois.  

In Illinois, the parent coalition More than a Score, along with the Chicago Teachers Union, have just begun the fight. The Illinois Federation of Teachers passed a resolution against sharing any personal student data to vendors without consent, and I am going to speak at a public forum on inBloom in Chicago on November 21.

Here in New York, we are gaining strength every day.  On Tuesday, New Yorkers elected Bill de Blasio as Mayor by a huge margin.  De Blasio is already on record against inBloom, having written a letter last spring to the State Education Department and the NYC DOE against this, repeating his opposition this fall, and vowing to pull student data out of the inBloom cloud as soon as possible. Here is an excerpt from his NYC KidsPAC candidate survey:

District leaders and school boards throughout the state are speaking out in protest, returning their Race to the Top funds,  and refusing to sign up for the inBloom-linked dashboards. Superintendents from the Lower Hudson region have decided to send letters to inBloom, citing the provision in the state's contract allowing districts to opt out, and demanding that their student data be deleted.  

They are also demanding that the corporation "immediately notify us so that we can consider next steps."  South Orangetown Superintendent Kenneth Mitchell, president of the Lower Hudson Council of School Superintendents said, "Based on the contract, we believe we can do this."  

More and more, it seems inBloom's days are numbered.  If the Gates Foundation is wise, they will drop this unethical data-mining privacy-violating project, before they are targeted with lawsuits and the ensuing controversy brings down the Common Core as well. 

Diane Ravitch asks: "Are we in an age of National Stupidity or National Insanity?"

In her latest posting, The Great Accountability Hoax, Ravitch points out that the so-called "accountability" policies being promoted by the Billionaire Boy's Club, the foundations, and now the Obama administration are a "great fraud and hoax, but our elected officials and policymakers remain completely oblivious to the harm caused by the policies they mandate."

Not only has the Chicago program of teacher merit pay proven to be ineffective, but a recent study shows that the similar NYC experiment that the administration spent $38 million on last year has shown no positive results:

"...we find little effect of the bonus program on student achievement in the first or second year of the program. We find no discernible effect on in-class or school-wide policies reported by students and teachers, such as additional tutoring sessions or increased use of student achievement data. Finally, we show that the bonus program had little effect on teacher turnover or the qualifications of newly hired teachers."

Roland Fryer's much bally-hooed experiments with paying kids for good test scores also failed miserably.

Nevertheless, the US Dept. of Education insists on increasing funding for merit pay through the Teacher Incentive Fund program to $900 million next year!

It appears that no amount of negative results will stop the privateers from continuing to promote their wasteful experiments on our kids in the name of "accountability," without acknowledging how their own behavior exhibits a failure of both financial and moral accountability.

Teacher performance pay: what a waste!

According to a new study from Mathematica, there’s no evidence for improved student achievement or teacher retention as a result of the highly touted teacher performance pay program in Chicago; despite protestations by Education Secretary Duncan, just as there has been no evidence so far of any benefits for the teacher bonus pay program in NYC that has cost at least $38 million this year.

The Teacher Advancement Program (TAP) was developed by the Milken Family Foundation in the late 1990s; yes, Michael Milken, former junk-bond salesman, indicted on 98 counts of racketeering and securities fraud. The TAP program is now being funded by a $27 million Teacher Incentive Fund grant from the U.S. Department of Education.

Nevertheless, Chicago and NYC will no doubt continue to waste more millions on these misconceived programs and the feds will continue to push states to adopt them; because our decision-makers seem happy inhabiting their evidence-free zones.

There are currently 34 districts and states across the country receiving federal money to implement teacher performance pay; according to EdWeek, and seven of them use a form of the same model now been proven to be ineffective in Chicago.

This push by the feds is counter to a huge amount of accumulated evidence in social science research that extrinsic motivators like performance pay don’t work and often do harm; for example, as explained in this lecture by Daniel Pink; or this study by researchers at the London School of Economics, or this literature review, published in Science magazine.

As the director of research at LSE, Luis Garicano has written, the evidence of the harmful effects of these programs indicate that instead, managers should “ reduce the power of incentives, so promotions would be again more based on seniority and less on measured performance. “ !!!!

Which of course flies in the face of the propaganda now being propounded by this administration, in their attempt to abrogate seniority-based protections in the teacher contract.

Teachers themselves consistently respond in surveys that monetary incentives like bonuses are unlikely to work to improve teacher effectiveness, in contrast to reducing class size, which more than 90% of teachers believe would be the best way to improve their effectiveness.

Yet even the Mathematica researcher who found no positive results in the Chicago program seems to advocate wasting even more money on this program, according to his quote in Edweek:

“You have to wonder whether the result would have been different if the payouts had been larger or more meaningfully differentiated,” Mr. Glazerman said.

Sure. When thousands of teachers are being laid off across the country, and class sizes are rising at unprecedented rates, why not waste even more millions on programs with no research backing?

Mayoral control in Chicago, DC and elsewhere

Check out the first hour of our terrific forum about Mayoral control elsewhere in the country, with Mary Levy, director of the Public Education Reform Project at the Washington DC Lawyers' Committee for Civil Rights, Julie Woestehoff director of Parents United for Responsible Education in Chicago, and Prof. Stefanie Chambers of Trinity College.

Video of part two of the forum, including questions from the audience is posted here; and part three is here.

Here are biographies of the three speakers; more information on the effects of Mayoral control in Chicago is topic is available through Julie's summary; Mary prepared a fact sheet on DC; and also a useful one-page chart about patterns of Mayoral control around the country.

What's going on with Mayoral control around the country?

On Friday, there will be a public discussion/forum on Mayoral control elsewhere in the nation; sponsored by the Parent Commission on School Governance. If you’ve come to one of our previous forums on governance, (see videos here and here), you know how good they’ve been. If you haven’t, it’s time you found out.

When: This Friday, Nov. 21 at 6:30 PM

Where: Judson Church Assembly Hall, 239 Thompson St. in Greenwich Village.

(Take A, B, C, D, E, F, or V trains to West 4th Street, or #6 train to Astor Place, or #1 to Sheridan Square)

What: A dynamite panel of experts including:

Mary Levy of Washington, DC: Parent advocate and Project Director of the Public Education Reform Project,Washington Lawyers' Committee for Civil Rights & Urban Affairs

Julie Woestehoff of Chicago: Executive Director, Parents United for Responsible Education (PURE);named one of the 100 Most Powerful Women in Chicago by the ChicagoSun-Times in 2004

Stefanie Chambers of Trinity College: Associate Professor and author of Mayors and Schools: Minority Voices and Democratic Tensions in Urban Education

If you think that all that is wrong with Mayoral control is Michael Bloomberg or Joel Klein – guess what! You might hear otherwise.

For more information, email parentcommission@gmail.com or call 917-435-9329.