Reign of Error: The Hoax of the Privatization Movement and the Danger to America's Public Schools - Diane Ravitch

Reign of Error: The Hoax of the Privatization Movement and the Danger to America's Public Schools by Ravitch, Diane (Sep 17, 2013)    

"From one of the foremost authorities on education in the United States, former U.S. Assistant Secretary of Education, “whistle-blower extraordinaire” (The Wall Street Journal), author of the best-selling The Death and Life of the Great American School System (“Important and riveting”—Library Journal), 

The Language Police (“Impassioned . . . Fiercely argued . . . Every bit as alarming as it is illuminating”—The New York Times), and other notable books on education history and policy—an incisive, comprehensive look at today’s American school system that argues against those who claim it is broken and beyond repair; an impassioned but reasoned call to stop the privatization movement that is draining students and funding from our public schools."

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Diane Ravitch Biography

Diane Ravitch

I was born in Houston, Texas, in 1938. I am third of eight children. I attended the public schools in Houston from kindergarten through high school (San Jacinto High School, 1956, yay!). I then went to Wellesley College, where I graduated in 1960.

Within weeks after graduation from Wellesley, I married. The early years of my marriage were devoted to raising my children. I had three sons: Joseph, Steven, and Michael. Steven died of leukemia in 1966. I now have four grandsons, Nico, Aidan, Elijah, and Asher.

I began working on my first book in the late 1960s. I also began graduate studies at Columbia University. My mentor was Lawrence A. Cremin, a great historian of education. The resulting book was a history of the New York City public schools, called "The Great School Wars," published in 1974. I received my Ph.D. in the history of American education in 1975. In 1977, I wrote "The Revisionists Revised." In 1983 came "The Troubled Crusade." In 1985, "The Schools We Deserve." In 1987, with my friend Checker Finn, "What Do Our 17-Year-Olds Know?" In 1991, "The American Reader." In 1995, "National Standards in American Education." In 2000, "Left Back." In 2003, "The Language Police." In 2006, "The English Reader," with my son Michael Ravitch. Also in 2006, "Edspeak." I have also edited several books with Joseph Viteritti.

My last book, "The Death and Life of the Great American School System: How Testing and Choice Are Undermining Education," was a national bestseller. It addressed the most important education issues of our time. It was read by teachers, parents, and students and was a source of great joy to me.

My newest book "Reign of Error: The Hoax of the Privatization Movement and the Danger to America's Public Schools" is a call to arms. It documents the false narrative that has been used to attack American public education, and names names. It also contains specific and evidence-based recommendations about how we can improve our schools and our society.

To follow my ongoing work read my blog at dianeravitch.net, where there is a lively conversation among educators and parents about the future of education.

Diane Ravitch

International test score comparisons are often misleading

"...one of our most cherished beliefs, that foreigners are threatening our future by producing much better schools."

"People like me sometimes exploit this fear of global inferiority."                                 -- Jay Matthews-Class Struggle-Washington Post-Click Here

"Education policymakers and analysts express great concern about the performance of U.S. students on international tests. Education reformers frequently invoke the relatively poor performance of U.S. students to justify school policy changes ...

"However, conclusions like these, which are often drawn from international test comparisons, are oversimplified, frequently exaggerated, and misleading. They ignore the complexity of test results and may lead policymakers to pursue inappropriate and even harmful reforms ... 

"Because social class inequality is greater in the United States than in any of the countries with which we can reasonably be compared, the relative performance of U.S. adolescents is better than it appears when countries’ national average performance is conventionally compared."

MORE HERE

"Martin Carnoy and Richard Rothstein, research associates at the Washington-based Economic Policy Institute, have no respect for American cultural and political tradition. Their latest paper challenges one of our most cherished beliefs, that foreigners are threatening our future by producing much better schools."

"People like me sometimes exploit this fear of global inferiority. To grab reader attention, I have pointed out, as U.S. business leaders and political candidates do, how far behind parts of Europe and Asia our students are in international tests. Carnoy, also a Stanford Graduate School of Education professor, and Rothstein undermine that argument by examining the test databases and discovering that when student results are broken down by social class, our schools are doing comparatively better than we thought." Jay Matthews - Class Struggle - Washington Post - Click Here

Corporate model school 'reforms' in 3 major cities sometimes harmed students

"The reforms deliver few benefits and in some cases harm the students they purport to help, while drawing attention and resources away from policies with real promise to address poverty-related barriers to school success…" Valerie Strauss - Washington Post - Click Here

Report-Market-Oriented education reforms rhetoric trumps reality

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"The children of the truly disadvantaged"

William Julius Wilson - Harvard University

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The executive summary of the report says that impacts of reform include:

• Test scores increased less, and achievement gaps grew more, in “reform” cities than in other urban districts.

• Reported successes for targeted students evaporated upon closer examination.

• Test-based accountability prompted churn that thinned the ranks of experienced teachers, but not necessarily bad teachers.

• School closures did not send students to better schools or save school districts money.

• Charter schools further disrupted the districts while providing mixed benefits, particularly for the highest-needs students.

• Emphasis on the widely touted market-oriented reforms drew attention and resources from initiatives with greater promise.

• The reforms missed a critical factor driving achievement gaps: the influence of poverty on academic performance. Real, sustained change requires strategies that are more realistic, patient, and multipronged.

Diane Ravitch at NSBA conference: Public schools facing ‘unprecedented assault’

"Public education is under attack. Local school boards are under attack. Local governance is under attack.

That was the blunt message delivered by Diane Ravitch at the closing General Session of National School Board's Association (NSBA) annual conference in San Diego.

A nationally recognized education researcher and author,Ravitch has become a fierce critic of many of the education reform models that, in the past decade, have been advocated by misguided state and federal policymakers, as well by wealthy ideologues. And she shared her criticisms and concerns with conference attendees. 

Diane Ravitch at National School Boards Association

“What I’m going to try to do today,’ she said, “is arm you with the facts you need to help you defend your public schools from an unprecedented assault.”

The repeated attacks on public education today—and the so-called reform proposals being touted as solutions—are both inaccurate and deceptive, Ravitch argued.

“These people who call themselves reformers, who say our public education system is obsolete, that it’s failing, that it’s broken … they’re wrong,” she said. “Our schools are not failing. Our system of public education is not broken.’

“Let me tell you what’s the problem—our federal education policy is broken,” she added. “Federal education policy is hurting our public schools. Federal education policy has abandoned the historic principles of federalism and is imposing mandates that are bad for children.”

The truth about public education and many of today’s reform ideas will be laid out in her upcoming book, Reign of Error: The Hoax of Privatization and the Danger to America’s Public Schools, she said.

The truth, she said, is something you don’t see on the evening news or in the daily newspapers. In reality, test scores on the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) are the highest in history. High school graduation rates are the highest in history. The nation’s dropout rates are the lowest in history."

CLICK HERE

NSBA

Confessions of a black school reformer

This book of fiction - "The Garden Path: The Miseducation of a City" is about the radical changes in New Orleans K-12 education after hurricane Katrina devastated the city. 

New Orleans is now charter school heaven - one of the most radical charter school experiments in educational history - made possible by politicians and reformers taking advantage of the hurricane Katrina natural disaster.
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Posted by Valerie Strauss on March 18, 2013 at 3:00 pm

 

"Here’s a post about a new book on school reform — “The Garden Path: The Miseducation of a City — by Andre Perry — that smacks opposing sides of the debate. This was written by Natalie Hopkinson. a contributing editor to The Root DC. E-mail her at NHopkinson@hotmail.com.  This appeared on The Root D.C."

Click Here

“We needed good ideas, but we also needed people to bring them to fruition and stay the course afterward,” he writes. “Change without community input spells danger and failure.”
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The Promise of Vouchers

Milton Friedman, Wall Street Journal, December 5, 2005

"Most New Orleans schools are in ruins, as are the homes of the children who have attended them. The children are now scattered all over the country. This is a tragedy. It is also an opportunity to radically reform the educational system."

Click Here  

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The Shock Doctrine: An Excerpt From the Introduction

"In sharp contrast to the glacial pace with which the levees were repaired and the electricity grid brought back online, the auctioning-off of New Orleans' school system took place with military speed and precision. Within 19 months, with most of the city's poor residents still in exile, New Orleans' public school system had been almost completely replaced by privately run charter schools."
  
Click Here 

Education Reform myths, fears and lies - an informative video

Christopher H. Tienken's new book - The Education Reform Landscape: Fraud, Myths & Lies

Standardize - Homogenize - Corporatize

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Corporate education reform is a fraud, driven by myths and sustained by lies, fear, greed and money.

"The current school reform landscape is categorized by policies that seek to standardize, homogenize, and corporatize public education.

A command control structure seems to pervade the policy making environment. Bureaucrats across the country have put their faith in one-size-fits-all policies and they don't seem to understand the complex nature of teaching, learning, or human development.

We're in a situation now where the solutions to any perceived education problem are to standardize curriculum, close schools, impose more testing, strip local control away from parents by having corporations who masquerade as nonprofits run our public schools.

I think the genesis of this kind of thinking is a combination of myths, fear and lies about public education being in some sort of crisis."

Education Rephorm Train - you don't need a ticket - just get on board

The 'Soul Train' had love, peace and soul.  

The 'Education Rephorm Train' has tests, punishment and gold.
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From Edushyster - Click Here

That scent in the air isn’t Memphis-style barbecue but the rich bouquet of education rephorm.

Today our tour of the rephormiest places in America takes us south, to good old Memphis, Tennessee. That unmistakable scent wafting through the air isn’t dry ribs slow cookin’ in a pit, but the rich bouquet of education rephorm. Reader: I give you the Achievement School District, a bold experiment in excellence and innovation that will take the bottom 5% of students in Tennessee and catapult them straight to the top 25%. What’s the ASD’s secret recipe? Take old, failing schools and replace LIFO lifers with fresh, new teachers and administrators. Now add high expectations, toss in a bushel of buzzwords — and don’t forget the spin. Presto chango — Elvis has left the building.

Less than a year into the New Orlean’s style rephorm-over, the Achievement School District’s numbers are off the charts. By numbers, I’m referring NOT to student test scores at the 6 ASD schools —they ranked in the 16th percentile in reading and math —but the eye popping salaries that district personnel are pulling down. Tennessee may be called the volunteer state, but in Achievement land, the “sweet salary state” might be a more accurate nickname. District head and TFA alum Christopher Barbic takes home nearly $18K —a month. A little perspective: that’s more than the governor of the state makes, and, believe or not, a hair more than Kevin Huffman, TFAster turned former Mr. Michelle Rhee turned chief rephormer for the state of Tennessee.

Chris Barbic, superintendent of the Achievement School District, earns more than the governor of Tennessee.

To be fair, Barbic has his work cut out for him. Not only must he work test score miracles in 5 years or less but he also presides over a sizeable rephorm crew. More than 145 people are on the ASD payroll (see complete list here), including someone whose sole responsibility seems to be monitoring and responding to comments on local Memphis media sites. Good news: there are plenty more positions still to be filled. If you have what it takes to Join Our Team (Big Challenges, Stunning Colleagues), contact a recruiter today—operators are standing by.

Like any rephorm train with a well-compensated captain at the helm, this one is quickly picking up speed. With a logic that will be familiar to anyone who has the misfortune to live in a district that has come down with rephorm fever, the Achievement School District will keep expanding, fueled by spin and “high expectations,” no matter what its actual results or how fervently local residents oppose it. Case in point: the hand-picked committee that is about to announce six more Memphis schools to be converted to charters next year. 

MORE - CLICK HERE
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People Get Ready - Eva Cassidy

Original by Curtis Mayfield/The Impressions

Education Reform ‘insanity’ in a single chart

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Reform ‘insanity’ in a single chart

From the Answer Sheet - The Washington Post
by Valerie Strauss on October 30, 2012
Click Here

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'Insanity is sometimes defined as doing the same thing over and over while expecting different results. Below is what Paul Thomas, an associate professor of education at Furman University in South Carolina, calls his “insanity chart” that starkly shows the problems facing public schools and the (same) approach taken to fix it by the “no excuses” brand of school reform espoused by Michelle Rhee and her supporters. This was first published on the Schools Matter blog. Thomas writes his own blog addressing the role of poverty in education.'

Public School Problem	“No Excuses” Reform
Poor, Latino/Black, special needs, and ELL students assigned disproportionately inexperienced and un-/under-certified teachers	Assign poor, Latino/Black, special needs, and ELL students Teach for America recruits (inexperienced and uncertified)
Public schools increasingly segregated by race and socioeconomic status	Charter schools, segregated by race and socioeconomic status
Three decades of standards-based testing and accountability to close the test-based achievement gap	Common Core State Standards linked to new tests to create a standards-based testing and accountability system
Inequitable school funding that rewards affluent and middle-class schools in affluent and middle-class neighborhoods and ignores or punishes schools in impoverished schools/neighborhood	Drain public school funding for parental choice policies that reinforce stratification found in those parental choices
State government top-down and bureaucratic reform policies that ignore teacher professionalism	Federal government top-down and bureaucratic reform policies that ignore teacher professionalism
Rename high-poverty schools “academy” or “magnet” schools	Close high-poverty public schools and open “no excuses” charters named “hope” or “promise” [see above]
Ignore and trivialize teacher professionalism and autonomy	Erase experienced teachers and replace with inexperienced and uncertified TFA recruits [see above]
Poor, Latino/Black, special needs, and ELL students assigned disproportionately to overcrowded classrooms	Poor, Latino/Black, special needs, and ELL students assigned to teachers rewarded for teaching 40-1 student-teacher ratio classrooms
Poor, Latino/Black, special needs, and ELL students tracked into test-prep classrooms	Poor and Latino/Black students segregated into test-prep charter schools; special needs and ELL students disregarded [left for public schools to address—see column to the left]
Teacher preparation buried under bureaucracy at the expense of content and pedagogy	Teacher preparation rejected at the expense of content and pedagogy
Presidents, secretaries of education, governors, and state superintendents of education misinform and mishandle education	Presidents, secretaries of education, governors, and state superintendents of education [most of whom have no experience as educators] misinform and mishandle education
Fail to acknowledge the status quo of public education (see above): Public schools reflect and perpetuate the inequities of U.S. society	Fail to acknowledge the status quo of public education [see above and the column to the left]: NER reflect and perpetuate the inequities of U.S. society

National Education Policy Center research on movement to privatize public education

"A lot of my current research has to do with the movement to privatize public education. This involves things like charter schools, even online charter schools, vouchers, tuition tax credits ..."

"There are very strong forces at work that are taking traditional public education and turning it into private and often quasi private and even profit-making ventures. And In my view these changes have not been beneficial - particularly to lower income families and children. I have a longstanding interest in issues of equity and they seem to be more serious now than they have ever been."  -- Gene V. Glass

National Education Policy Center Fellow Gene V Glass - University of Colorado at Boulder

National Education Policy Center - Click Here

 

University of Colorado at Boulder

Gene V Glass is currently a Senior Researcher at the National Education Policy Center and a Regents' Professor Emeritus from Arizona State University. Trained originally in statistics, his interests broadened to include psychotherapy research, evaluation methodology, and policy analysis. He was twice (1968, 1970) honored with the Palmer O. Johnson award of the American Educational Research Association; and in 1984, he received the Paul Lazarsfeld Award of the American Evaluation Association. He is a recipient of the Cattell Award of the Society of Multivariate Experimental Psychology. His work on meta-analysis of psychotherapy outcomes (with M.L. Smith) was named as one of the Forty Studies that Changed Psychology in the book of the same name by Roger R. Hock (1999). His Ph.D. was awarded by the University of Wisconsin, Madison, in educational psychology with a minor in statistics.

Why the United States Is Destroying Its Education System

Monday, 11 April 2011 04:13 By Chris Hedges, Truthdig | Op-Ed 

"A nation that destroys its systems of education, degrades its public information, guts its public libraries and turns its airwaves into vehicles for cheap, mindless amusement becomes deaf, dumb and blind. It prizes test scores above critical thinking and literacy. It celebrates rote vocational training and the singular, amoral skill of making money. It churns out stunted human products, lacking the capacity and vocabulary to challenge the assumptions and structures of the corporate state. It funnels them into a caste system of drones and systems managers. It transforms a democratic state into a feudal system of corporate masters and serfs.

Teachers, their unions under attack, are becoming as replaceable as minimum-wage employees at Burger King. We spurn real teachers—those with the capacity to inspire children to think, those who help the young discover their gifts and potential—and replace them with instructors who teach to narrow, standardized tests. These instructors obey. They teach children to obey. And that is the point. The No Child Left Behind program, modeled on the “Texas Miracle,” is a fraud. It worked no better than our deregulated financial system. But when you shut out debate these dead ideas are self-perpetuating."

MORE HERE
...  
 "In the past 10 years we’ve had the emergence of both [Mayor] Mike Bloomberg’s Leadership Academy and Eli Broad’s Superintendents Academy, both created exclusively to produce instant principals and superintendents who model themselves after CEOs. How is this kind of thing even legal? How are such ‘academies’ accredited? What quality of leader needs a ‘leadership academy’? What kind of society would allow such people to run their children’s schools? The high-stakes tests may be worthless as pedagogy but they are a brilliant mechanism for undermining the school systems, instilling fear and creating a rationale for corporate takeover. There is something grotesque about the fact the education reform is being led not by educators but by financers and speculators and billionaires.”

Corporate reforms will not create excellent schools

More Here

Posted on March 7, 2011 - 5:00pm by Erik

Increase competitiveness.

Focus on maximizing short-term output over long-term investment.
Layoff workers.
Squeeze more productivity from the remaining beleaguered workforce.
Demonize unions that oppose the changes.
And when the enterprise collapses, shut it down and outsource the work. 

 Sound familiar? 

This is not just the recipe for the current global financial crisis and economic meltdown.  It is the same corporate model that is driving much of what passes for education reform these days. 

It is a corporate model that prioritizes short-term production and profits - call them higher test scores - over long term investment. 

A model that focuses on outputs and accountability more than inputs - the economic, social and cultural context within which we try to educate children. 

A model that equates workers joining together to negotiate fair contracts with their employers in good faith as something evil and to be feared, rather than the fundamental foundation for democratic debate and cooperation. 

A model that lays off workers at the same time insisting that they are the most valued ‘asset.' 

And it is a corporate model that deskills education and applies economic rationalization (Taylorization) to pedagogical practice, rather than supporting and promoting what creates a team of highly motivated, collaborative, and skilled educators. 

This model hasn't worked so well for our economic well-being, nor do I suspect it holds much promise for our educational health, either. 

 

This is not to say that there are not real problems facing our public schools.  Too many students fall through the cracks.  The achievement gap between white students and students of color is alarming.  And too many students (although it must be said it is still a relatively small percentage overall) leave school ill-prepared to succeed.  But these are merely descriptions of impact, the symptoms caused by a problem, not the problem itself.  And as Dr. Lowell Levin has said, "Whoever defines the problem controls the range of solutions." 

On a flight to Boston this past year I sat next to an apparently high priced lawyer who was flying home after representing a student at a private school.  We started to talk about education and quickly shifted to education reform.  This attorney complained that it was incomprehensible to him why teachers opposed being tested on their subject matter to determine whether they were competent to teach.  "If they are scared to be tested because they will fail, no wonder we are having such problems in the schools," he lamented.

There are so many things wrong with his statement, but what I asked back was whether he thought the reason we were having "such troubles" in the schools was because the third grade teacher didn't know as much as her third graders.  He admitted they knew more.  "Why then," I asked, "did they need to be tested on content?" 

Many of the current reformers define the problem as a lack of accountability, inadequately trained or incompetent teachers, a public school monopoly that restricts competition,  recalcitrant unions, or poorly structured schools. 

The solutions then become almost self-evident: deliver rewards and sanctions based on increased testing and reporting; fire teachers or proscriptively prescribe how they should teach; break public school "monopoly status" through charter schools and vouchers; attack unions and either cow them into silence and acquiescence or put them in the impossible situation of choosing to defend their members (their legal obligation) over securing desperately needed "reform designated money"; restructure schools by centralizing control and imposing draconian personnel reshuffles with the same layoffs, job insecurity, job combination, increased workload, dislocation, instability and stress that accompany draconian restructurings in any private sector business. 

And for what real end? 

 Test scores may go up in the short term, perhaps - but so do short term profits in most corporate restructurings. 

The question is whether there is better teaching and learning?  Are students better equipped to lead successful lives in a rapidly changing world?  Are they more engaged democratic and global citizens?  Have they grown and developed into more full human beings?  Have they learned critical thinking and content other than literacy and math?   Beyond the anecdotal, heroic individual success stories the answer is almost always "no." 

 The problem with many education change initiatives are that they adopt unquestioningly the basic tenets of free-market fundamentalism and its corporate model that focuses on maximizing outputs without attention to making sure the inputs are right.  They narrow the focus of education just at the time it needs to be broadened.  And they erase the act of teaching and the culture that supports and nurtures it, just as corporate America routinely erases the lives, work, and communities of the workers who make our products.  (If you doubt this, recall how vociferously labeling laws and anti-sweatshop monitoring are fought by industry.)

So what is the problem? 

What truly impacts a child's ability to learn? 

And what is currently working? 

Certainly there are teachers that shouldn't be teaching, and there are unions that are stuck in models of operating that no longer make sense, just as there are incompetent and self-serving elected officials that shouldn't be in office, CEO's who shouldn't be running a business, parents who shouldn't be parenting, and foundations that promote extreme self-interest under the guise of the public good. 

The problem is not poorly skilled teachers or obstructionist teacher unions.  Poverty, violence, a culture of hopelessness and underachievement, lack of parental support - or no parents at all - the lack of health care, racism, deteriorating schools, and teachers and principals who have given up hope after having been asked to do the impossible are all far more likely to impact teaching and learning.  Schools are being asked to mitigate a series of social ills that are far beyond their scope or ability to address.  They are asked to heal catastrophic illness with Band-Aids. 

Rather than deal with these larger economic, social and cultural issues, which are far messier and could severely challenge the economic and political powers that created them, many of the corporate education reformers are content to focus on finding someone to blame, or on building intricate systems of goals and accountabilities, or simply restructuring the enterprise. 

So what creates better learning outcomes and a culture of success? A drive to learn and teach?  A sense of optimism and hope? 

There are a number of lessons that we can learn from Finland, whose schools are now vaunted as some of the most successful in the world after languishing in mediocrity for much of the last century. 

Their magical turnaround relies on no magic at all: Finland addresses poverty, lack of housing and health care as part of a national provision of social benefits.  Then they start with what drives a child to want to learn (for every kid is born hard-wired wanting to learn) and what inspires teachers to excel at teaching. 

Hint: It isn't through narrowing the curriculum to focus more rigorously on core subjects.  Nor is it to create more structured days, or more accountability to a unified curriculum, or more testing, or performance pay for teachers, or any of the myriad of other palliatives being offered up in the United States. 

 Rather, elementary school children in Finland play a lot.  They spend 75 minutes a day in recess, compared to about 25 minutes a day for American children.  They do mandatory art, music, and crafts classes, which become venues for learning math, science and reading.  Class sizes are small, and in high school science they are kept to 16 students to emphasize lab based activities.   Finnish children learn by doing.  Learning is exciting and fun, not the relentless drills on how to take multiple choice tests that many U.S. children endure. 

Teaching is not only a highly respected profession in Finland, but a highly sought after and competitive one.  Teachers must achieve the equivalent of a Masters degree before being hired and then they are paid well.  Finnish teachers are almost 100% organized in strong unions and they make about 105% of what their non-teaching counterparts earn with the same education, compared to about 70% for the United States. 

Finland uses national core standards as guidelines (rather than prescriptions) for teachers planning their curriculum, and schools are staffed so teachers have time during their day to create curriculum, plan collaboratively and discuss challenging questions around teaching and learning. 

Students are tested, but tests are used diagnostically, instead of being wielded as high stakes judgments to reward or punish schools and instructors. 

This creative teaching and learning environment is the high octane juice that fuels excellence.  The result: highly qualified, highly motivated, highly innovative teachers who are allowed to do what they do best - teach kids. 

Is this approach to reform cheap? - No.   But we have already seen the results of the cheap corporate turnaround models applied to public education: the quick grab for instant results, consultant driven panaceas, and the myopic narrowing of learning to higher reading and math scores. 

This is exactly the same short-term focus and restructuring that corporate America has pursued for the past three decades - merge, restructure, privatize, layoff, scapegoat and outsource - with dismal consequences.  

Free market fundamentalism didn't work for our economy or for workers and our communities; there is little reason to hope that this same corporate approach will produce anything better for our schools and children.

Posted on March 7, 2011 - 5:00pm by Erik