A chat with the oligarchy of corporate education reform

Check out this from "Aunty Broad", one of our friends in Seattle: the education oligarchy (Rhee, Broad, Bloomberg, KIPP and Kopp) "should be cloned because they are so smart." More brilliant exposes from Aunty Broad are here.

Jonathan Alter blusters about KIPP and merit pay

Jonathan Alter blusters in a column in Newsweek about what Obama should do to reform our schools:

…. we know what works to close the achievement gap. At the 60 KIPP (Knowledge Is Power Program) schools, more than 80 percent of 16,000 randomly selected low-income students go to college, four times the national average for poor kids.

Here is the response of Caroline Grannam, a SF parent and blogger who is one of the few people to independently assess KIPP’s claims:

In the current Newsweek, columnist Jonathan Alter earnestly claims that 12,800 alumni of KIPP schools have gone on to college. Here's what Alter wrote: At the 60 KIPP (Knowledge Is Power Program) schools, more than 80 percent of 16,000 randomly selected low-income students go to college, four times the national average for poor kids. The actual number, according to KIPP itself, is 447.

It turns out that that 80% figure was derived from calculating the matriculation rates at only two KIPP schools.

Alter also omits to mention the self-selection process involved in applying to KIPP, well as the rigorous interview process the school uses that discourages less motivated students from enrolling, including making them promise to attend school six days a week and most of the working day. Nor the high attrition rates, with some schools losing 50 percent of their students over three years.

Yet Alter continues to spin wildly:

[Obama] …hasn't been direct enough about reforming NCLB so that it revolves around clear measurements of classroom-teacher effectiveness. Research shows that this is the only variable (not class size or school size) that can close the achievement gap. Give poor kids from broken homes the best teachers, and most learn. Period.

Where is the research base for this? Don’t bother to ask, as there is none.

We don’t even know how to identify potentially effective teachers, not to mention how to make them more effective once they’ve been hired. Aside from treating them like professionals, giving them a smaller class and persuading them to stick around in the profession longer.

More from Alter:

To get there, Obama should hold a summit of all 50 governors and move them toward national standards and better recruitment, training and evaluation of teachers. He should advocate using Title I federal funding as a lever to encourage "thin contracts" free of the insane work rules and bias toward seniority, as offered by the brilliant new superintendent in Washington, D.C., Michelle Rhee. He should offer federal money for salary increases, but make them conditional on differential pay (paying teachers based on performance and willingness to work in underserved schools, which surveys show many teachers favor) and on support for the elimination of tenure.

What? Surveys, including this one from Education Sector, which generally favors such proposals, show that teachers overwhelmingly oppose basing salaries on performance (read test scores.): “…one in three teachers (34 percent) favors giving financial incentives to teachers whose kids routinely score higher than similar students on standardized tests. Most teachers today (64 percent) oppose the idea, up 8 percentage points from the 56 percent who opposed it in 2003.”

Nevertheless, Alter continues in this same vein:

And the next time he [Obama] addresses them, he should tell the unions they must change their focus from job security and the protection of ineffective teachers to higher pay and true accountability for performance—or face extinction.

Good luck with that one. I’m sure the NEA and the AFT are quaking in their boots.

As Grannam points out about Alter’s error in reporting the number of KIPP students that have gone to college that could also be applied to his false claims about teacher surveys and class size:

It's ironic that Alter made that rather significant error in a column mostly devoted to blasting and blaming teachers for troubled schools and calling for getting rid of problem teachers, along with eliminating tenure and increasing "accountability" for teachers. I wonder how he feels about more accountability for journalists.

In case you’re interested, Alter lives in Montclair NJ, where no doubt the class sizes are small, and teacher tenure reigns supreme, along with high salaries, and performance pay is nowhere in sight.

But in a school district like NYC, with lots of immigrant and poor students, it doesn’t matter what class sizes they are crammed into or what overcrowding exists. All will be well and teachers will magically be able to reach all thirty plus kids per class, as long as the people in charge crack the whip loud and hard enough and can threaten them with losing their jobs if they don’t deliver.

A sure fire formula for success if ever I’ve heard it.

I’ll end with Grannam’s conclusion in her SF Examiner blog:

I suspect that anyone more familiar with the inside of a diverse urban classroom than Jonathan Alter is (it’s evident that such a setting is as familiar to him as the surface of Mars) would have the same reaction I did: Send that man to teach in an overwhelmed inner-city school for a few months, and then let’s see how he feels about blaming and bashing teachers for the challenges such schools face.”

Comments? Write to webeditors@newsweek.com; copy to jalter@newsweek.com

The lack of charter school accountability -- and does competition actually improve public education?

Today, the Daily News runs both an editorial and an oped, excoriating the State Comptroller for auditing charter schools, and supporting the charter schools' lawsuit in trying to block further audits. Here’s an excerpt from the editorial:

“Charter schools are more accountable than most parts of government. They answer to two layers of state regulation, and they must shut down if they don't meet educational goals within five years - a standard we'd love to see applied to the rest of the educational establishment.”

I would bet fewer charter schools have been closed down in NYC in recent years than regular public schools – and not because they’ve all been successful. In reality, they operate with very little supervision.

I recommend that if people took a look at the Comptroller’s Sept. audit, they’d realize how unaccountable many charter schools have been – and how lax both SED and DOE have been in terms of oversight. Amazing to me that any major media outlet would oppose strict accountability in the use of taxpayer funds in this way.

Despite the fact that all charter schools are required to report annually on their progress towards meeting the educational goals established when they were founded, and DOE is supposed to closely monitor their progress in achieving these goals, according to the audit, none of this has occurred.

The original goals and any information about progress made towards meeting these goals are supposed to be included on in the schools’ annual reports. Yet the DOE could provide only 10 of the 23 annual reports of the charter schools under its purview, and the Comptroller’s office obtained one more report from SED.

Of these 11, not one of them contained all the information required by state law, and more than half either omitted certain goals, misstated them, or did not discuss the progress made towards them. The audit found that the DOE had no formal process for reviewing these reports, no written records of the same, and no records of their decision-making process in approving the original applications of charter schools or calling for their renewals.

Nor were there any procedures or plans in place to call for improvements in their performance, or a corrective plan if there was failure. DOE also kept no records of the visits made to charter schools before approving the renewal of their charters. Not surprisingly, DOE recommended the renewal of all the charters in every case, for the maximum period of five years.

It sure doesn’t sound that there was real accountability here – as the Daily News editorial insists – or any evidence that any of these charter schools were “shut down if they don't meet educational goals within five years" – especially as DOE appeared to be ignorant of what their goals were.

Instead of criticizing the audit, if the editors of the Daily News really cared about accountability, they would be applauding the state Comptroller and criticizing the charter schools for suing to block them.

But there has long been a double-standard when it comes to charter schools; see the response of Chester Finn, for example, to the other recent audit which found KIPP using funds to send teachers on junkets to the Caribbean:

"I think they should be able to fly around the world in first class if administrators think that will keep up the good results."

Meanwhile, according to today's NY Sun, Sol Stern and some other conservatives are moving away from the idea that market incentives and competition (like more charter schools) will solve all the problems of public education– perhaps in part influenced by the failures here in NYC, where this administration has adopted this sort of market-driven ideology with a vengeance.

“There's a growing consensus that a market approach alone is not enough," the president of the Albany-based Foundation for Education Reform and Accountability, Tom Carroll, said. He added: "There's a need for a moment of reflection."

It was never clear to me why competition would be expected to work to improve the public school system. Here in NYC, there has always been a healthy system of competition from parochial and private schools, and rather than improving the public schools, it has been a way for the business and opinion elite and many members of the middle class to escape sending their kids to public schools, which has considerably diminished political pressure towards improving them.

If Bloomberg, Klein et al and their cronies on Wall St, as well as the editors of the NY Times and the Daily News, had children who actually attended NYC public schools, I’m convinced there would have been smaller classes years ago.

Charter School Report Cards: Apples, Oranges, and DNA

Yesterday’s glowing announcement of the “pilot test” release of School Progress Reports for 20 charter schools should hardly come as a surprise to anyone who has followed the DOE’s steady, five-year march toward privatization. “Charter Schools Outshine Others as They Receive Their First Report Cards,” hails Jennifer Medina’s report in the New York Times. Medina quotes the DOE’s Michael Duffy that, “As a group, they skew higher,” as he simultaneously took a backhanded slap at public schools by stating that accountability in charter schools is “baked into their DNA.”

The DOE’s pilot test Progress Reports rated 20 schools – eleven elementary or K-8 schools and nine middle schools. One school, Opportunity Charter, originally received an F, but the DOE has since retracted their Progress Report grade. They assigned letter grades to thirteen of the remaining schools: five A’s (middle schools all), five B’s (elementary or K-8 all), two C’s, and one F. Of the remaining six, their total scores as computed from the reported components (School Environment, Student Performance, Student Progress, and Closing the Achievement Gap (Additional Credit) suggest approximate letter grades of two more A’s, one B, one C, and two D’s. Overall, roughly 68% A’s and B’s, 16% C’s, and 16% D’s or F’s.

Leaving aside bias factors in the DOE’s demonstrated predisposition toward charter schools and the lack of class size data that might well correlate with and explain some of the skewing, a slightly deeper look at the DOE’s Progress Report data reveals several interesting facts.

-- School Environment comprises 15% of each school’s score, but for the charter schools, this measure consists entirely of Attendance. As a result, in seven of the 20 piloted schools, attendance accounted for over 20% of their cumulative scores, and in three of those schools, it accounted for well over 30%.

-- In seven of the nine middle schools, their peer indexes (the average of their students’ Grade 4 NYS ELA and Math exam scores) exceeded 3.0, and an eighth school came in at 2.97 (the lowest, Opportunity Charter, had a peer index of 2.54 and also happened to rate an F grade before it was retracted). Overall, these nine charter middle schools had an average peer index of over 3.13 (3.21 if we also drop Opportunity Charter out as the DOE did), suggesting that these schools succeed in part by siphoning away stronger students from other schools.

-- The four middle schools that rated letter grades of A had the following peer indexes: 3.45, 3.39, 3.36, and 3.34 (the fifth was 2.97). By comparison, the Clinton, Wagner, and Sun Yat-Sen middle schools in Manhattan had peer indexes of 3.53, 3.58, and 3.30, respectively, and the five middle school only (Grades 6 – 8) schools in District 4 had peer indexes of 2.82, 2.86, 2.87, 3.20 (Isaac Newton), and 3.65 (Manhattan East, on East 100th Street).

-- In what seems a near statistical miracle, the three KIPP schools each reported Attendance rates of 98.0%.

Given the obvious selectivity of the charter middle schools, the lack of intake information about charter elementary and K-8 schools, the absence of reporting on many charter schools, and the inaccessibility of charter school class size data, it seems disingenuous at best for the DOE to claim that charters “skew higher” from a sample of just 13 schools that the DOE itself chose for letter grade assignment.

All this is not to say that charter schools do not do good work in motivating and educating their students. Just once, however, it would be nice if the DOE would release enough data in format and content for independent voices to evaluate its public relations claims and provide a real basis for comparing apples to apples. Sadly, nothing in the past several years suggests that all those well-paid DOE executives recognize the differences between apples and oranges. Apparently, it’s all just fruit salad to them.

Update: here is an excel file with the charter school progress reports and their components.