FIeld Trips as Test Preparation for Harlem Pre-kindergarten and Kindergarten Students

Read all about it at the New York Times. Field trips to farms (oops...make that field "studies") as test preparation for Harlem Success Academy pre-kindergarten and kindergarten children. After all, they must be prepared for the state tests they will take as third graders.

But it soon became clear that this was a field “study”— as the teachers called it — not a field “trip,” and the 75 Harlem kindergartners were going not only for a glimpse of rural life, but to rack up extra points on standardized tests.

“I want to get smarter,” 5-year-old Brandon Neal said.

“I want to do better on homework and tests,” added Julliana Jimenez, one of his classmates.

Don't get me wrong. I'm glad as can be the children got to go visit a farm.

But the motive for the field trip is sad. Not for learning for its own sake. Not simply for the joy of it. Not just for some good old-fashioned fun. Not just because it's a loving thing to do for children.

Not "I want to see where milk comes from!" but "I want to do better on homework and tests."

New York State’s English and math exams include several questions each year about livestock, crops and the other staples of the rural experience that some educators say flummox city children, whose knowledge of nature might begin and end at Central Park. On the state English test this year, for instance, third graders were asked questions relating to chickens and eggs. In math, they had to count sheep and horses.

So leaving no possible test point unexplored, the educators at the Harlem Success Academy, a fast-growing chain of four charter schools known for a relentless emphasis on data, have invented a form of test preparation. The schools haul their students to a farm each year, hoping to expose them to the rural life and lift their scores.

On a chilly morning last week, the kindergartners, in blue-and-orange school scarves, crowded around a corral at the Queens County Farm Museum to gaze at an elderly cow named Daisy and a sheep standing nearby. In the background, children from other schools giggled and played as the Harlem students huddled quietly

“Turn on your listening ears!” a teacher said. She talked about how a sheep’s coat could be turned into sweaters, and repeated the words yarn and wool until the children nodded in understanding.

Here's a spot-on comment left at the NYT by a NYC public school principal:

As a NYC educator (I am a principal of a public elementary school in Manhattan), there are a couple things that bother me about this article. First, the idea that one takes children on trips so that they can do better on tests. Wow. Whatever happened to the idea of nurturing curiosity about the world and building knowledge about things based on experience? Doesn't that have value without the specter of tests hanging over one's five year old head? I can only hope that the slant of this article -- that Harlem Success Academy plans its curriculum for enhanced test scores instead of the betterment of these lovely little human beings -- is merely a conceit of the New York Times. John Dewey would roll over in his grave.

Right. Aren't these children worthy of these experiences simply because?

The Caroline Hoxby Charter School Study and the State of Education Reporting

Recent editorials about the Caroline Hoxby charter school study in the New York Daily News, the Wall Street Journal, and the Washington Post are typical examples of the severely biased state of education commentary and reporting.

The Hoxby study concluded that NYC charter schools are better than traditional non-charter public schools. I am in no way an expert on the legitimacy of this particular study but I am highly skeptical.

I am skeptical because I believe that Caroline Hoxby, a Stanford economist, longtime proponent of privatization, and senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, has been involved in some very dubious research practices. Much more detail on that to follow. Think tanks like Hoover are hostile to the very idea of public education.

And I am skeptical because I read the testimony of real life New York City teachers and parents on their blogs. They can hardly compete with the billionaire-backed PR propaganda machine driving the charter school movement. And although I am a non-union teacher, every public school teacher in America is experiencing the weight and enormity of the efforts to undermine and take over our profession.

I will preface clips from the editorials linked above with some observations about think tanks in general, the powerful role they play in shaping public perception and public policy, and the Hoxby connection in particular. For the most part, think tank research is a joke, driven by blind ideology, the results pre-determined.

From SourceWatch:

A think tank (also called a policy institute) is an organization, institute, corporation, or group that conducts research and engages in advocacy in public policy.[1] Many think tanks are non-profit organizations, which some countries such as the United States and Canada provide with tax exempt status. While many think tanks are funded by governments, interest groups, or businesses, some think tanks also derive income from consulting or research work related to their mandate.[2] In some cases, think tanks are little more than public relations fronts, usually headquartered in state or national seats of government and generating self-serving scholarship that serves the advocacy goals of their industry sponsors.

Of course, some think tanks are more legitimate than that. Private funding does not necessarily make a researcher a shill, and some think-tanks produce worthwhile public policy research. In general, however, research from think tanks is ideologically driven in accordance with the interests of its funders.

Think tanks are funded primarily by large businesses and major foundations. They devise and promote policies that shape the lives of everyday Americans: Social Security privatization, tax and investment laws, regulation of everything from oil to the Internet. They supply experts to testify on Capitol Hill, write articles for the op-ed pages of newspapers, and appear as TV commentators. They advise presidential aspirants and lead orientation seminars to train incoming members of Congress.

Now, the Caroline Hoxby connection:

In the summer of 2004, the New York Times ran a front page article featuring a report by the American Federation of Teachers about data from the National Assessment of Educational Progress. The AFT report documented the inferior performance on average of charter schools compared with regular public schools. The report drew outrage from pro-charter, privatization zealots like Hoxby.

All hell broke loose. So great was the outrage that the offended parties took out a $125,000 ad in the New York Times, paid for by Jeanne Allen and her Center for Education Reform, alleging among other things that "the study in question does not meet current professional research standards." When addressing an audience at the conservative Manhattan institute, Hoxby said:

It would be a good idea for someone to produce evidence that addressed the AFT study's most egregious failings.

Who, of course, could take seriously a report by the American Federation of Teachers? A self-serving teachers' union!

Former Assistant Secretary of Education Chester Finn, Jr. (he is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, chairman of Hoover's task force on k-12 education, and president of the Thomas B. Fordham Foundation) labeled the analysis:

...a mischief-bearing grenade, hand delivered by the charter-hating American Federation of Teachers.

How odd. Were it not for the AFT's former head Albert Shanker, charter schools might never have gotten off the ground. Shanker was one of the earliest and most prominent supporters of charter schools. Before his death, however, he had become disillusioned with them.

Just weeks after the Times article featuring the AFT report, Hoxby rushed the dissemination of a paper claiming to offer a methodologically superior study of academic achievement in charter schools. Charter advocates and conservative think tanks promoted Hoxby's report as a complete refutation of the AFT's results.

Yet independent analyses of Hoxby's report by a number of researchers revealed that Hoxby's report violated a number of the very standards that she claimed the AFT violated. Lawrence Mishel's analysis can be found in the American Prospect and Gerald Bracey's chronicle of the events here. Among other things, it was found that when the background characteristics of the traditional public school students vs the charter school students were statistically controlled for, the charter advantage disappeared.

Then lo and behold, the U.S. Department of Education (no friend to public education for many years now) reluctantly released their own overdue report in 2005 and it corroborated the AFT report precisely. Although not all of the differences were statistically significant, the results favored pubic schools in 20 of 22 comparisons. And as Bracey noted:

Because of the reluctance of the U.S. Department of Education to hand over the results of its charter school studies, in November the New York Times had to use the Freedom of Information Act to pry loose another charter study, whose final report was delivered in June. Conducted largely by SRI International, this study also found charters performing less well than regular public schools.

Edward Fisk, a prominent journalist and former ed writer for the NYT, wrote of Hoxby's hypocrisy in an October 6, 2004 letter-to-the-editor in Education Week. He noted that in contrast to the AFT report, which was based on data for individual students, Hoxby used school averages, meaning she used no family-background data on students.

In addition, the events I have summarized here culminated in a book by Martin Carnoy, Rebecca Jacobsen, Lawrence Mishel, and Richard Rothstein of the Economic Policy Institute: "The Charter School Dust-Up: Examining the Evidence on Enrollment and Achievement".

Now fast forward to the present. Here comes Hoxby again with a groundbreaking longitudinal study being hailed as definitive truth by the corporate press, showing that New York City charter schools outperform the city's traditional public schools "by a mile".

The headline in the New York Daily News reads:

Acing the Test: Charter School Students Outperform Peers By a Mile in a Fair Test

A fair test? We shall see. But that's quite a claim about a study performed by a pro-privatization advocate with a history like Hoxby's.

The leading paragraph from the Daily News is so unprofessional it is embarrassing.

It's official. From this day forward, those who battle New York's charter school movement stand conclusively on notice that they are fighting to block thousands of children from getting superior educations.

How confident the pronouncements.

Note how the motives of those resisting the corporate takeover of public education are characterized.

And what is a superior education? Are children being better educated by the intrusion of business models in their schools, where they are viewed like outputs and commodities, with dog-eat-dog pressure and competition for the highest test scores no matter what the human cost? No matter the corruption, cheating, gaming, and shifting of students from here to there and back again to achieve the measurable results? No matter the demoralization and eventual disappearance (through dropping out) of students who don't measure up?

One of the most galling aspects of the current ed reform narrative is the blasting of our public schools by those in power for the huge dropout rates of poor and minority students. The reforms they have engineered guarantee higher dropout rates. The impact of high-stakes testing on dropout rates is well documented.

And there is this from the Daily News editorial:

But these are public schools. Charter public schools. Your tax money funds them, and you should be proud. Because they are saving kids' lives.

Saving kids' lives? Is the nation to believe that the single-minded pursuit of higher test scores through relentless test-prepping is saving kids' lives?

No, the misuse of testing is resulting in a very narrow and impoverished education for many of our children, and in unprecedented levels of corruption, manipulation, and gamesmanship to attain the all important numbers.

Although the wise and judicious use of assessment is not in question, Campbell's Law is being borne out with stunning accuracy in the sham called U. S. education reform:

The more any quantitative social indicator is used for social decision making, the more subject it will be to corruption pressures and the more apt it will be to distort and corrupt the social processes it is intended to monitor.

Saving kids' lives? Certainly not in Chicago. Have a look at how corporate-style reform is working out in Chicago .

These are public schools? We are being led on a trajectory to what will essentially be publicly funded private schools. Truly public neighborhood schools destroyed, public schools turned over to private management companies, billions of dollars that could be spent actually helping and improving the schools we already have diverted instead to private hands. Note how 'public' is being re-defined.

Here's what the Wall Street Journal had to say about the Hoxby study:

The New York results are not unique. In a separate study, Ms. Hoxby found Chicago's charters performing even better than the Big Apple's. Using the same methodology, other researchers have seen similar results in Boston.

Really? Check out a little fact sheet on Chicago's charter school success by Parents United for Responsible Education (PURE) in Chicago.

And Boston? As Jim Horn notes at Schools Matter, a new study of Boston charter schools "shows them to be more mirage than the miracle that the Boston Globe and the Boston Foundation would have the public believe."

By having almost no students who are Limited English Proficient (LEP), significantly lower numbers of special education students (with milder disabilities, by the way), and fewer poor students (FRLP), there is no wonder that the charterizers have been able to claim the test score edge.

The Wall Street Journal editorial ridiculously concludes:

Little wonder President Obama and Education Secretary Arne Duncan are pressuring states to become more charter-friendly. Why the Administration can't connect the dots from the evidence to other effective school choice reforms, such as vouchers, can only be explained by union politics. Caroline Hoxby has performed a public service by finally making clear that "creaming" is a crock.

Hmm. Beyond creaming, it is evident that sifting is also part of the recipe for cooked charter school data.

From the new Boston study about the sifting out of students:

This report shines a light on the shocking loss of students in most Boston charter schools between the year of initial enrollment and the final year," said MTA President Anne Wass. "Students who are not meeting a school’s academic and behavior standards are being sent back to district schools or to the streets, and then exaggerated claims of success are being made based on the small number of students who remain.

The new Boston study documenting very high student attrition rates and low enrollment of high-needs students in the city's charter schools was released by the Massachusetts Teachers Association. Uh-oh, a teachers union!

Like the 2004 AFT report that Hoxby assailed, it couldn't possibly be accurate, now could it?

Congress to Attack Poverty

In a rare move, Congress is giving children, teachers, and public schools across the nation a break rather than a black eye by passing a mandate to end poverty. Children will be required to do a much better job of selecting their parents and the circumstances into which they are born. Public school teachers will be held strictly accountable for seeing to it that every child has developed the critical thinking skills necessary for making sound birth decisions. A failing teacher will face salary and benefit reductions and be the subject of a scathing editorial by a wealthy, outraged pundit.

Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation to Offer Orthopedic Shoes to Failing Public School Teachers

For Immediate Release
Washington, D.C.

Newsspoof: Gates Foundation & DOE to Fund High-Performing Footwear Initiative


Whenever edu-philanthropreneur Bill Gates gets down and out about the state of public education, the severe economic downturn we are all are experiencing, and the staggering inequalities incurred on the nation by poorly performing public school teachers, he visits some exceptional schools to lift his spirits. On a visit to a KIPP school in Houston, Gates witnessed an "unbelievable thing" about its teachers, a phenomenon apparently unheard of in traditional public schools.

Now, there are a few places -- very few -- where great teachers are being made. A good example of one is a set of charter schools called KIPP. KIPP means Knowledge Is Power. It's an unbelievable thing. When you actually go and sit in one of these classrooms, at first it's very bizarre. I sat down and I thought, "What is going on?" The teacher was running around, and the energy level was high. I thought, "I'm in the sports rally or something. What's going on?" And the teacher was constantly scanning to see which kids weren't paying attention, which kids were bored, and calling kids rapidly, putting things up on the board.

And the more the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation apprised itself of top-notch research, the more apparent it became that the key to closing the achievement gap was to turn the nation's attention to teacher effectiveness as quantified by children's standardized test scores:

The more we looked at it, the more we realized that having great teachers was the very key thing. And we hooked up with some people studying how much variation there is between teachers, between, say, the top quartile -- the very best -- and the bottom quartile. How much variation is there within a school or between schools? And the answer is that these variations are absolutely unbelievable. A top quartile teacher will increase the performance of their class -- based on test scores -- by over 10 percent in a single year. What does that mean? That means that if the entire U.S., for two years, had top quartile teachers, the entire difference between us and Asia would go away. Within four years we would be blowing everyone in the world away! So, it's simple. All you need are those top quartile teachers.

"I'm a huge fan of Bill Gates," reported Ed Secretary Arne Duncan, whose department has filled key posts with officials having strong ties to Gates.

"For decades, critics old and new in the education reform industry have known and rightly warned Americans that our public schools are failing the nation. Well-meaning ed reformers have bravely and unselfishly pushed reform after reform. And it's like we've been sort of looking around for the silver bullet and it turns out the answer has been right under our noses the whole time!"

However, until such time as all the teachers in the nation's 3.7 million K-12 classrooms are top-quartile teachers, Gates opines that we are left with "what to do" with the nation's corp of tired, old, less visionary teachers.

While it's certainly no panacea, we do know that great teachers are on their feet constantly for hours every day, engaging and re-directing the most challenging students. In conjunction with the U.S. Department of Education, the Gates Foundation will fund a high-performing footwear initiative in the nation's traditional public schools. Teachers who choose to take advantage of the offer will receive vouchers to visit to a podiatrist of their choice to be fitted for custom orthotics. Teachers already wearing orthotics may want their doctor to see if they're wearing the right type of orthopedic shoes. No pun intended, but we really do want to give teachers fair and balanced support in their efforts to improve.

"I'm a huge fan of orthopedic shoes," raved Duncan. "When I played pro-basketball, the quality and comfort of my shoes made a huge difference."


--news spoof brought to you by staff at This Little Blog

Tom Vander Ark's List of Race to the Top Edu-Entrepreneurial Opportunities

Tom Vander Ark was the first Executive Director for the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. He is now partner in Vander Ark/Ratcliff, an eduction public affairs firm, and a partner in a private equity fund focused on "innovative" learning tools.  

Drooling for Data-Driven Dollars might have been a better title for this post. And for children? Much, much more of the same, where they are viewed as commodities to be standardized and developed for corporate harvesting and consumption.  

Below find Mr. Vander Ark's list of 10 edu-entrepreneurial opportunities to be fueled by Race-to-the-Top.

Race-to-the-Top for who?

With the Race to the Top language out, it’s time to refine the list of opportunities for education entrepreneurs (both .org & .com). From largest to niche size they include:

1. School improvement: between RTT, Inovation, and School Improvement, there will be a couple billion spent on attempts to improve struggling schools. America’s Choice should be well positioned as will a new services group at Pearson. Groups like AdvancePath that target under-credited students as a school-within-a-school should also do well.

2. CMO/EMO: with grant money and air cover from Obama and Duncan, the demand for high quality charters has never been stronger. If CMOs like Green Dot can figure out a reliable conversion strategy, several will finally achieve scale. A for-profit operator, National Heritage is now twice as big as Green Dot and bigger than the KIPP network. It will help if RTT helps improves access to public facilities.

4. Assessment: the big guys will continue to own state contracts, but there’s a new opening for formative and periodic assessment. Groups like Wireless Generation are well positioned to take advantage of the push for quick tests that improve instruction.

5. Adaptive content & learning games: Over the next five years, we’ll see a third of the $8B textbook business shift to digital with a third of that going to the new field of adaptive content and games.

6. Training: It has been a tough year in the professional development business, but that should change as federal funding flows. Where data is linked to evaluation, we’ll see strong demand for targeted training.

7. Consulting: lots of states, districts and schools need lots of services including data integration, policy development, program design and implementation (i.e., evaluation), grant writing, program management, and communications.

8. Advocacy: The big bucks and big demands on the system will make the next few years very dynamic. We need a ConnCAN in every state to connect communities, lawmakers, and policy experts. We need to mobilize underserved communities to steer school improvement and new school opportunities.

9. Evaluation: evaluating $5B of spending will yield $250M of evaluation contracts—it’s a good time to be MDRC.

10. Web 2.0: with dozens of new entrants in the social learning space and content management and student information systems incorporating web 2.0 functionality, we’re bound to see a couple of these gain widespread adoption in the next four school years.

Ed Secretary Duncan Gets Head Stuck

For Immediate Release
Washington, D.C.

According to unnamed officials at the Department of Education, Ed Secretary Arne Duncan got his head trapped inside the two metal bars of the extendable handle on his rolling attache case. He was able to insert his head fully through the handle without it getting stuck but was subsequently unable to pull his head back out.

Leading ed reform spokesmen Al Sharpton and Newt Gingrich discovered the Secretary in his office muttering expletives and feverishly trying to pull his head out. The pair had arrived on schedule to meet with Duncan to brainstorm stratagems for dealing with an absence of any credible evidence to support the administration's education reform proposals.

Once freed from the device by Sharpton and Gingrich, Duncan brushed the mishap off as a teachable moment about not sticking your head in places where it doesn't belong.

Department employees have graciously refrained from asking Duncan why he stuck his head through the bars in the first place.

Diane Ravitch Comments on Race to the Top (And A Teacher's Proposal for Obama and Duncan to Submit to Nationally Televised Debates)

Great comments from Diane Ravitch:

Dear DOE,

I wish to register a strong objection to these regulations. As a former
federal official (I was Assistant Secretary of Education in 1991-92), I
object to the coercive nature in which the federal government is dictating
education policy to the states. But of great importance, the policies you are
dictating are not based on evidence.

You want states to tie teacher evaluations to test scores, but you present
no evidence that doing so improves achievement; instead you rely on economists
who project that it might do so. To achieve this goal, you tell states that they
must roll back laws they have passed. This oversteps the bounds of federal
authority in education.

Similarly your pressure to open charter schools goes beyond any evidence
that charter schools are superior to regular public schools. The recent Stanford
study by Margaret Raymond found that only 17% of charter schools were better
than nearby public schools. Why then should schools eliminate their caps on
charters?

I think the DOE should respect the requirements of federalism and look to
states to offer their best ideas rather than mandating policies that the current
administration likes, even though there is no evidence to support them.

Humility is sometimes the best policy, especially when you are not on firm
ground with your remedies.

Diane Ravitch

Thank you, Diane.

On a related note, I believe we should be joining forces and publicly challenging Obama and Duncan to submit to nationally televised debates about the merits of their recipe for education reform. Since it is highly unlikely that they would concede to participating in debates where they could not control and frame the debate, I think we should present the challenge to them under the condition that they submit to fair and DEMOCRATIC debates in which neither side is allowed to control or frame the debate. If they refuse, that alone would say a lot.

I proposed this challenge on a listserv to which I belong (arn-the assessment reform network). Jerry Bracey responded that to "publicly" challenge Obama/Duncan would present a daunting challenge, mainly getting the media's attention and "getting it in a big way." He's right, but he offered that he's open to ideas.

So I submitted another idea. As some of you already know, the Standing Committee of the National Conference of State Legislatures recently issued statements about its position on lifting charter school caps and the imposition of national standards. It seems they oppose both. Here's the link (if you visit the link you have to scroll down a bit to get to the statements about lifting state charter school caps and national standards):

http://www.ncsl.org/Default.aspx?TabID=773&tabs=855,22,634#Public_Charter

I suggested that perhaps we try appealing to and through the NCSL to call for national debates. I notice that Jerry then sent our discourse on the matter to Arne Duncan and other officials at ed.gov, as well as to various journalists, including Sam Dillon of the NY Times and Jay Mathews of the Washington Post.

Don't know if this idea will go anywhere but would appreciate any ideas out there to add to the discussion.