Group items tagged

"Systems like the APPR system in NY mistakenly place an emphasis on human capital rather than social capital and thus are doomed to failure. Rooted in what Michael Fullan categorized as "wrong drivers of change," systems that emphasize individual human capital over social capital and that emphasize the use of accountability data in a punitive way are simply doomed to failure. To replace old systems with similar systems, repeatedly, gets us to the insanity that some other than Einstein, Franklin, or Twain described."

We use several data sets to consider the effect of teaching practices on student beliefs, as well as on organization of firms and institutions. In cross-country data, we show that teaching practices (such as copying from the board versus working on projects together) are strongly related to various dimensions of social capital, from beliefs in cooperation to institutional outcomes. We then use micro-data to investigate the influence of teaching practices on student beliefs about cooperation both with each other and with teachers, and students' involvement in civic life. A two-stage least square strategy provides evidence that teaching practices have an independent sizeable effect on student social capital. The relationship between teaching practices and student test performance is nonlinear. The evidence supports the idea that progressive education promotes social capital.

"School quality is heavily dependent on social capital. When families flee their neighborhood schools for charters, magnets, private schools, or other "choice" schools, they are essentially seeking out a greater concentration of social capital. Shifting it from a "failing" neighborhood school to a charter or other choice school only exacerbates the problems that a lack of social capital can cause."

In public policy circles, crises are called "focusing events" - bringing to light a particular failing in government policy.  They require government agencies to switch rapidly into crisis mode to implement solutions. Creating the crisis itself is more novel. The right-wing, free market vision of University of Chicago economist Milton Friedman informed the blueprint for the rapid privatization of municipal services throughout the world due in no small part to what author Naomi Klein calls "Disaster Capitalism." Friedman wrote in his 1982 treatise Capitalism and Freedom, "When [a] crisis occurs, the actions that are taken depend on the ideas that are lying around" In Klein's book The Shock Doctrine, she explains how immediately after Hurricane Katrina, Friedman used the decimation of New Orleans' infrastructure to push for charter schools, a market-based policy preference of Friedman acolytes. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan was the CEO of Chicago Public Schools at the time, and later described Hurricane Katrina as "the best thing that happened to the education system in New Orleans." Duncan is of the liberal wing of the free market project and a major supporter of charter schools. There aren't any hurricanes in the Midwest, so how can proponents of privatization like Mayor Rahm Emanuel sell off schools to the highest bidder? They create a crisis.

In any case, among these five interventions (tutoring, extended time, improving human capital, interim assessments and "high expectations"), only one of them - "improving human capital" through more selective hiring and performance bonuses - focuses directly on improving teacher quality, the primary tool advocated by market-based reformers. Frankly, the human capital component is really the only one that could be called "market-based" by any reasonable definition (though the regular analysis of interim assessment data might be loosely classified as such). In other words, the teacher-focused, market-based philosophy that dominates our public debate is not very well represented in the "no excuses" model, even though the latter is frequently held up as evidence supporting the former.

"The problem with this fight is that it drains the system of energy - energy that should be spent on the teaching and learning process. This very visible fight, often fought through the media, is a significant distraction from the work that needs to occur in schools. What's worse, however, is that the battle is over the wrong things. The problem is that the battle lines are all over a misplaced emphasis on human capital over social capital."

"KIPP, TFA, and other programs may well have started out as well-intentioned attempts to make things better for underserved students, schools, and neighborhoods despite poverty. But they have morphed over time into fiscal and social conservative models for how to create miracles without needing to address critical social and economic issues. Whether that transformation reflects the political views of those running these programs or simply represents mission slip combined with the influx of capital from those who saw an opportunity to promote panaceas meant to convince politicians and the general public that obviously most public schools were horrible (and please note, this analysis slyly shifts tactics by starting with the neediest, most disadvantaged schools and communities but then creating policies like NCLB that are guaranteed to make the vast majority of public schools appear to be "failing" because of doubtful criteria and truly crazy mathematics). Once the notion that "US public schools are failing" becomes accepted common wisdom, the financial vultures move in with a host of projects that are almost entirely about making a profit from a crisis. This is the way disaster capitalism operates."

The flow of venture capital into the K-12 education market has exploded over the past year, reaching its highest transaction values in a decade in 2011, industry observers say. They attribute that rise to such factors as a heightened interest in educational technology; the decreasing cost of electronic devices such as tablet computers, laptops, netbooks, and mobile devices; and the movement toward standardization of curriculum through the Common Core State Standards.

what better way to capture the Bizarro world of education reform than with a serious work of journalism, disguised as a comic? Our three-part series - published over the next three months - is not intended to be funny, but rather, to pull back the progressive propaganda disguising the neoliberal, corporate nature of education reform. Our goal is to expose the free-market policies that really make up "education reform"; how these policies threaten our public education; who supports these policies; and, ultimately, what we might be able to do about the "Disaster Capitalism Curriculum."

"For the past few months, we have been insisting, through this blog series, on the idea that education reform has a social dimension or level that often is overlooked in mainstream debate and policy. Under this broad theme, we've covered diverse issues ranging from how teachers' social capital can increase their human capital to how personnel churn can undermine reform efforts, or how too much individual talent can impede a team's overall performance. This collection of issues may prompt a number of important questions: What exactly is the "social side?" What are its key ideas? I would like to offer a few initial thoughts and share some resources that I've compiled."

Archer and Adam Bessie offer part II of "The Disaster Capitalism Curriculum: The High Price of Education Reform."

This paper notes how the theory of disruptive innovation, which arose at Harvard Business School in the late 1990s, and the Tools of Cooperation and Change, a supporting theory that arrived in 2006, together represent the epitome of neoliberal dispossession-based marketization paradigms. The language they bring to debates on policy reform is concise and revealing, the tools practical and effective. Yet in the dozen or so years since their arrival they too have become, to use their own vocabulary, an entrenched interest that serves to perpetuate the status quo of male-dominated capitalism. Education policy makers who understand that "public education is central to the construction of a cosmopolitan moral democracy" (Reid, 2007:292) can at the very least benefit from understanding the language and recognizing the tools. Perhaps they can even turn them to a socially responsible purpose, employing them to help "move the public/private debate past its current impasse" (ibid, 293).

In trying to improve American public schools, educators, policymakers, and philanthropists are overselling the role of the highly skilled individual teacher and undervaluing the benefits that come from teacher collaborations that strengthen skills, competence, and a school's overall social capital

In this article, Kristen L. Buras examines educational policy formation in New Orleans and the racial, economic, and spatial dynamics shaping the city's reconstruction since 2005. More specifically, Buras draws on the critical theories of whiteness as property, accumulation by dispossession, and urban space economy to describe the strategic assault on black communities by education entrepreneurs. Based on data collected from an array of stakeholders on the ground, she argues that policy actors at the federal, state, and local levels have contributed to a process of privatization and an inequitable racial-spatial redistribution of resources while acting under the banner of "conscious capitalism." She challenges the market-based reforms currently offered as a panacea for education in New Orleans, particularly charter schools, and instead offers principles of educational reform rooted in a more democratic and critically conscious tradition.

"The democratic mission of public education is under assault by a conservative right-wing reform culture in which students are viewed as human capital in schools that are to be administered by market-driven forces."

I'm currently deep into Education and Capitalism: Struggles for Learning and Liberation, a highly recommended read for those committed to learning about struggles for social justice in public education. An excerpt captured from the book's introduction serves as a catalyst for thought and questioning. In the foreword teacher activist Adam Sanchez interviews Bill Bigelow, the curriculum editor of Rethinking Schools.

For the past few weeks, I have been corresponding with some film producers who-encouraged perhaps by the commercial success of "Waiting for Superman"-have an inkling that some very important things are happening with public education in America...some things like crony capitalism, and an economy shifting to public risk and private profit. Recently they asked me whether the virtual schools trend was important. I offered the reply copied below.

I may not be able to prove that my literature class makes a difference in my students' test results, but there is a positive correlation between how much time students spend reading and higher scores. The problem is that low-income students, who begin school with a less-developed vocabulary and are less able to comprehend complex sentences than their more privileged peers, are also less likely to read at home. Many will read only during class time, with a teacher supporting their effort. But those are the same students who are more likely to lose out on literary reading in class in favor of extra test prep. By "using data to inform instruction," as the Department of Education insists we do, we are sorting lower-achieving students into classes that provide less cultural capital than their already more successful peers receive in their more literary classes and depriving students who viscerally understand the violence and despair in Steinbeck's novels of the opportunity to read them. It is ironic, then, that English Language Arts exams are designed for "cultural neutrality." This is supposed to give students a level playing field on the exams, but what it does is bleed our English classes dry. We are trying to teach students to read increasingly complex texts, but they are complex only on the sentence level - not because the ideas they present are complex, not because they are symbolic, allusive or ambiguous. These are literary qualities, and they are more or less absent from testing materials.

Statistical models, such as linear or logistic regression or survival analysis, are frequently used as a means to answer scientific questions in psychosomatic research. Many who use these techniques, however, apparently fail to appreciate fully the problem of overfitting, ie, capitalizing on the idiosyncrasies of the sample at hand. Overfitted models will fail to replicate in future samples, thus creating considerable uncertainty about the scientific merit of the finding. The present article is a nontechnical discussion of the concept of overfitting and is intended to be accessible to readers with varying levels of statistical expertise. The notion of overfitting is presented in terms of asking too much from the available data. Given a certain number of observations in a data set, there is an upper limit to the complexity of the model that can be derived with any acceptable degree of uncertainty. Complexity arises as a function of the number of degrees of freedom expended (the number of predictors including complex terms such as interactions and nonlinear terms) against the same data set during any stage of the data analysis. Theoretical and empirical evidence-with a special focus on the results of computer simulation studies-is presented to demonstrate the practical consequences of overfitting with respect to scientific inference. Three common practices-automated variable selection, pretesting of candidate predictors, and dichotomization of continuous variables-are shown to pose a considerable risk for spurious findings in models. The dilemma between overfitting and exploring candidate confounders is also discussed. Alternative means of guarding against overfitting are discussed, including variable aggregation and the fixing of coefficients a priori. Techniques that account and correct for complexity, including shrinkage and penalization, also are introduced.

The NewSchools Venture Fund (NSVF) is a nonprofit organization with ten years of experience in K-12 education. NSVF is an interesting organization for the following reasons: * NSVF invested in a number of management organizations before management organizations were well-known * NSVF is an excellent example of venture philanthropy, or the application of venture capitalism to philanthropic giving * NSVF is an influential organization The purpose of this post is to provide some descriptive information about NSVF grants and changes in spending over time. I am using data pulled from NSVF's IRS 990s between the years 2002 and 2010. I then compiled that information to create a dataset of all NSVF grants