Real consequences of ‘school choice’

For years, policy initiatives stemming from right-wing belief tanks have been wrapped in the rhetoric of positive outcomes that are, in fact, the complete opposite of what the measures are really intended to do.

A bill called Clear Skies that called for more pollution. Another called Healthy Forests offered incentives for cutting down valuable trees. No Child Left Behind, perhaps the crowning glory of duplicity, worsened the education of disadvantaged children it was purported to magically improve.

But without a doubt the most enduring of these wolf-wrapped-in-sheep’s-clothing ideas is the promise of “school choice” that’s been promoted to parents since the presidencies of Nixon and Reagan.

Sold as a way to “empower” parents to improve the education attainment of their children, school choice initiatives take on many forms, including vouchers, “scholarships,” and tax credits. But the most radical form of school choice is the so-called “parent trigger.”

The parent trigger has been relentlessly marketed to parents and policy makers as an “empowerment” that enables parents to conduct a petition campaign in their community to fire their school’s staff and change its governance. This has all the rhetoric of democratic activism – a majority of the parents deciding “what’s best” for the education of their children. But what are the results?

So far, the trigger has only been carried out to its fullest extent in one school: Desert Trails Elementary School in Adelanto, California. A new video “Parent Triggers: Another Reform Misfires,” (see below) released by the Education Opportunity Network, recently looked at the results of the parent trigger in Adelanto and found that rather then uniting parents in doing what’s best for children, the parent trigger brought deception, division and disruption to the community.

Thus, parent trigger bills join the ranks of other school choice schemes that are proliferating across the country. And rather than giving parents more control of the trajectory of their children, these policies are leaving more parents overwhelmed and powerless.

So what should parents expect when the parent trigger or any other school choice scheme comes to town?

In New Orleans – perhaps America’s choiciest school district, where 70 percent of students attend charter schools – most of the schools remain the lowest performing in one of the lowest performing states, and parent activists have come to the conclusion that choice means “a choice to apply” while still remaining “trapped” in the same lousy schools.

A recent article in The Washington Post told the story of how the District of Columbia’s complex school choice landscape has led some parents to hire an educational consultant to navigate the public school system — and this is being seen by some as the wave of the future in districts around the country. More than 40 percent of the District’s 80,000 students attend charter schools. Even when parents do choose traditional public schools for their children, “more than half do not attend their assigned neighborhood school.”

“It’s just totally overwhelming,” one parent was quoted as saying in the Post story.

And the results? D.C. schools have among the lowest high school graduation rates in the country and the largest achievement gap of any urban school district.

According to this New York Times story, parents in New York City face a similar, if not more daunting, “school choice maze” that leaves thousands of children “shut out” of any real choice at all. Parents trying to navigate the complex system end up “feeling inadequate, frustrated and angry.”

Not to worry, school choice advocates reassure us. We’re told, as in this article at greatschools.org, to rejoice in the fact that while “it used to be that when it was time to find a school for the kids, most Americans looked no further than the neighborhood school.” Now we have a wonderful “open” system where our precious little darlings get to “compete” against the precious little darlings of our friends and neighbors.

Just make sure you’re one of the “smart parents” who knows how to “work the system.”

How could choice possibly lead to fewer options for parents?

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Working together for effective reform in America's public schools

Organized Parents, Organized Teachers - Working together for effective reform in America's public schools. Current national and local education policies often pit teachers and parents against each other, trapping them in a cycle of blame and mistrust. But in one Minneapolis community, parents and teachers decided to work together to make their schools better – with great results. This is their story.

Organized Parents, Organized Teachers - Working together for effective reform in America's public schools from Annenberg Institute on Vimeo.

For more, visit www.realparentpower.com

It's raining in Cleveland

We previously reported on the real story in Cleveland, so it was good to see this report of about Cleveland public school teachers rallying at the statehouse with a simple message to the Governor - it's raining in Cleveland.

Previously on JTF we reported on this funding crisis.

• No Laughing Matter
• Blind eyes and cruel intentions

Experience Counts

Among the more bizarre trends in education reform debate has been the emergence of an argument that experience doesn’t really matter. The problem appears to be that some researchers have not found ways to measure the importance of experience very effectively, and so, cheered on by cost-cutting and union-bashing allies, they tell us that after the first few years, teacher experience doesn’t matter. They have the test scores to prove it, they say.

I’m not here to argue the opposite. I’ve seen new teachers who have a skill set that rivals some of their veteran colleagues. However, I’ve never met a teacher who didn’t believe they could still improve. After all, we’re in the learning business. With experience comes not only time to learn more content and more pedagogy, but also to learn more about children, psychology and brain neurology, about working effectively with peers, administrators, and the community.

Think of other professions, and let me know if you know of any where experience isn’t valued. If education research isn’t showing the value of experience, then I think we should be asking questions like, “What’s wrong with their research methods? What’s wrong with the measures they’ve chosen? What’s wrong with schools and education systems that they can’t put experience to better use?”

This morning, I heard an interesting story about the oil industry, and the experience gap that is emerging among its engineers and other workers. To my untrained eye, this seems like an industry where experience wouldn’t matter. You’re dealing with physics, chemistry, machinery, manual labor – does the oil rig know or care how old or how experienced the workers are? Is there any chance that the properties of oil are unpredictable? If you can build, repair, or operate machinery in another industry, is the oil industry machinery so different?

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Has the Tide Turned Against ALEC?

If a children’s book were written about ALEC, the group that bills itself as an association of conservative lawmakers and supporters, it might be called “The Very Greedy Octopus.” It would read like one of those creepy 19^th-century fairly tales that most parents would never, ever read to their young ones—it’s just too scary.

For nearly four decades, the American Legislative Exchange Council has been working in the shadowy deep to rewrite the nation’s laws in favor of the wealthiest corporations and CEOs, no matter the loss to working families, communities of color, the environment or public education. One sad chapter in the book would tell how that sneaky, selfish octopus saw a school of fish and thought, “Hey, these schools are everywhere—how can I cash in?”

That’s right: ALEC has made it a top priority to fundamentally change the nation’s public school system, not only to divert taxpayer dollars to money-making ventures, but also to squeeze the life out of the unions that protect educators’ ability to advocate for students. Education-focused ALEC bills are tailored state to state, but many push to:

• Privatize education through charter schools, voucher programs and tax incentives, obscuring these programs’ true purpose with positive names like “parent choice” and “innovation schools”
• Clear the way for online (often for-profit) at-home schooling options that benefit corporations, not students
• Reduce local control of schools by school boards and parents, and increase the influence of the private sector
• Use “marketplace standards” to evaluate educators and students, which means more standardized testing and reporting
• Obliterate the unions that help keep our tax dollars working for students and schools

Trampling public education is just part of the story of ALEC—it has lots of other arms out there, and one has a chokehold on voters’ rights. The group’s efforts to disenfranchise those most likely to vote ALEC members out of office through laws meant to confuse and disqualify them on Election Day are well documented.

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Suspicious test scores

Here at JTF, we've been very quick to point out instances of cheating, either isolated, or systemic, as a quick search of our archives or twitter feeds will show. As public education is driven ever more into corporate types of management and measurement, coupled with high stakes tied to test scores, it should surprise no one that corporate types of behavior emerge - think Enron, Arthur Anderson, World Com, MF Global Holdings.

It is with that backdrop we turn to an investigative piece by the Dayton Daily News (DDN) in conjunction with the Atlanta Journal Constitution (AJC), titled "Suspect test scores found across Ohio schools".

Steep spikes and drops on standardized test scores, a pattern that has indicated cheating in Atlanta and other cities across the nation, have occurred in hundreds of school districts and charter schools across Ohio in the past seven years, a Dayton Daily News analysis found.

The analysis does not prove cheating has occurred in Ohio. But interviews and documents show that state officials do not employ vigorous statistical analyses to catch possible cheating, discipline only about a dozen teachers a year and direct Ohio’s test vendor to spend just $17,540 on analyzing suspicious scores out of its $39 million annual testing contract.

It's a weak piece that could be used and sensationalized by many, and the paper has come under almost instant withering criticism for it's approach.

One of the researchers involved in analyzing data for USA today's ground breaking cheating series took a look at the DDN analysis

Given my past role in reviewing data and methods used for detecting systematic cheating, I was delighted to have the opportunity a week ago to review Ohio assessment data that was being used as part of a national study released today by The Atlanta Constitution-Journal and affiliated Cox newspapers. My review, however, yielded serious concerns about the data used, the methods of analysis employed, and the conclusions drawn.
[...]
In short, here are some of my concerns about the methods:

• As noted, the analysis is based on school-level data and not individual student-level data. Accordingly, it was not possible to ensure that the same students were in the group in both years.
• The analysis of irregular jumps in test scores should have been coupled with irregularities in erasure data where this data was available.
• The analysis by Cox generates predicted values for schools, but this does not incorporate demographic characteristics of the student population.
• The limited details available on the study methods made it impossible to replicate and verify what the journalists were doing. Further, the rationale was unclear for some of the steps they took.

He wasn't the only expert to consider the DDN findings. Stephen Dyer, former newspaper reporter, architect of Ohio's prematurely abandoned evidence based model, and think tank fellow had this to say, after discussing similar analytical shortcomings as pointed out above

If you're going to write a story that suggests massive, statewide (and in AJC's case, national) cheating on standardized tests, you'd better be prepared to name the offenders and feel solid enough in your methodology to refute the state's education agency and largest teachers union, both of whom knocked the papers' methods. If you have to spend a large chunk of your story having competing experts defend and knock your statistical analysis, you need to re-do the analysis. Though it showed integrity for the paper to allow those critical comments in the story.

As a former reporter, I can say these issues would invariably pop up before big stories ran. Sometimes, it means delaying your story for a day or two, or in a few cases, never run them at all. As a journalist, you, as a general rule, cannot spend any time in your story defending your story. If you have to, it means you don't have it nailed down yet; it needs more time in the oven.

The DDN spend almost the entirety of their story defending their story.

Greg Mild, over at Plunderbund has an even harsher response, and points out some great absurdities of the DDN analysis

Furthermore, note that the “2,600 improbable changes” include spikes and drops in test results. These journalists are putting out this theory of irregularities and cheating by schools based on numbers that include falling scores! Right, because so many educators are interested in risking their careers by encouraging children to change their scores to incorrect answers to suffer a significant DROP in their test scores. Yet those numbers are touted by these “journalists” in their sweeping accusations of improbable scores and cheating.

We continue to believe that cheating is totally unacceptable and ought to be exposed when and where found, but the Dayton Daily News story, as they point out themselves, does not come close to demonstrating what they seem to want to sensationalize - widespread cheating, Atlanta style.

As we begin to rely more and more upon student test scores to measure schools and teachers, suspicions are going to grow, a few might be borne out, but many will be baseless - but each accusation serves to undermine public education and people's trust in it. It's another unintended failing of the corporate education reform schemes we're currently pursuing.