Education Links

The Beaver County-based Pennsylvania Cyber Charter School, which was searched by federal agents Thursday, pays tens of millions of dollars a year to a network of nonprofit and for-profit companies run by former executives of the state's largest online public school. The relationships between the school and those businesses were a concern to former Gov. Ed Rendell's administration, which late in its tenure asked PA Cyber for better accounting of its payments to spin-off entities. Gov. Tom Corbett's Department of Education, though, opted early on to let the relationships continue without heightened accountability. The amount of public money that flows to PA Cyber, and then out through its spinoffs, has grown dramatically as the school's enrollment has surged to around 11,300 students statewide.

This is the story of Benjamin Rayer, and how he got approval for not one, but TWO charter schools from the NJDOE.  It's an unlikely story, since our protagonist isn't even a resident of our fair state!!  But that didn't deter Benjamin from applying as the lead founder for both charters, no siree!  After all, he knew he had the right reformy qualifications to get ahead in New Jersey!

But the most common misuse of mathematics is simpler, more pervasive, and (alas) more insidious: mathematics employed as a rhetorical weapon-an intellectual credential to convince the public that an idea or a process is "objective" and hence better than other competing ideas or processes. This is mathematical intimidation. It is especially persuasive because so many people are awed by mathematics and yet do not understand it-a dangerous combination. The latest instance of the phenomenon is valued-added modeling (VAM), used to interpret test data. Value-added modeling pops up everywhere today, from newspapers to television to political campaigns. VAM is heavily promoted with unbridled and uncritical enthusiasm by the press, by politicians, and even by (some) educational experts, and it is touted as the modern, "scientific" way to measure educational success in everything from charter schools to individual teachers.

"What is the purpose of education? This question agitates scholars, teachers, statesmen, every group, in fact, of thoughtful men and women," Eleanor Roosevelt wrote in the 1930 article, "Good Citizenship: The Purpose of Education," in Pictorial Review. If you were to ask even a relatively small group of teachers, administrators, students, parents, community members, business leaders, and policymakers to address the question of purpose, how difficult do you think it would be to reach a consensus?

What the articles fail to document, however, are the contributions made by members of K12's board of directors. K12's chairman until very recently was Andrew Tisch, of the famous New York Tisch family. Reports are that Tisch just stepped down as chairman just a few weeks ago, but still appears to still serve on the board. He also appears to have been very well-compensated for his position, receiving both stock and options grants from the company. Why does this matter? Because Andrew Tisch and his family are Newark Mayor Cory Booker's biggest financial supporters.

Some intended learning sticks with us, some slips away into oblivion and most hovers somewhere in between. The determinants are nuanced and complex. In all of the current enthusiasm for so-called flipped classrooms and the wonders of the Khan Academy's online lectures these distinction are often overlooked.

Many of us have not heard of of the Education Cost Sharing (ECS) Formula, Connecticut's system for allocating money to our public schools. As one father admitted at the ECS Task Force Meeting on Thursday in Bridgeport, he never gave it any thought until his child started kindergarten. Roughly, this is how the formula works. It starts with a foundation amount, which is supposed to represent how much money it takes to educate one child with no special needs. Then the amount is adjusted based on the number and needs of students in a particular district. Students living in poverty, students learning English and students with disabilities all need more resources to learn, and those resources cost money - up to four times the cost of educating a child with no needs. The formula is also supposed to consider a municipality's ability to pay. If one of these components is inaccurate, then the state is not giving the proper amount of money to a municipality for its schools. In Connecticut, all of these components are grossly inadequate.

A recent article in The Chronicle of Higher Education suggests that students cheat more in online than in face-to-face classes. The article tells the story of Bob Smith (not his real name, obviously), who was a student in an online science course.  Bob logged in once a week for half an hour in order to take a quiz. He didn't read a word of his textbook, didn't participate in discussions, and still he got an A. Bob pulled this off, he explained, with the help of a collaborative cheating effort. Interestingly, Bob is enrolled at a public university in the U.S., and claims to work diligently in all his other (classroom) courses. He doesn't cheat in those courses, he explains, but with a busy work and school schedule, the easy A is too tempting to pass up. Bob's online cheating methods deserve some attention. He is representative of a population of students that have striven to keep up with their instructor's efforts to prevent cheating online. The tests were designed in a way that made cheating more difficult, including limited time to take the test, and randomized questions from a large test bank (so that no two students took the exact same test). But the design of the test had two potential flaws

A recent Economist article on charter schools, though slightly more nuanced than most mainstream media treatments of the charter evidence, contains a very common, somewhat misleading argument that I'd like to address quickly. It's about the findings of the so-called "CREDO study," the important (albeit over-cited) 2009 national comparison of student achievement in charter and regular public schools in 16 states.

When Shania started third grade at P.S. 148 last fall, she was thrilled to be back at the Queens public school. An outgoing eight-year-old, she said she was happy to be among her friends again, and she had loved her class the previous year. Her second-grade teacher would take the time to explain tricky topics like addition and subtraction one-on-one. She had even been named "student of the month." But since 2007, as the economy has tanked and expenses for public schools have risen, New York City has made principals cut budgets by 13.7 percent. When budgets are cut, teachers are fired and others aren't replaced -- including at P.S. 148, which has lost at least $600,000 and eight teachers since 2010. When teachers are lost, class sizes balloon. Shania had 31 classmates this past school year, compared to 20 the year before.

The Boston Consulting Group has identified up to 60 Philadelphia school buildings as potential candidates for closure and helped line up private vendors willing to replace the school district's unionized blue-collar workforce at a $50 million discount. These steps are just part of the blue-chip consulting firm's far-ranging behind-the-scenes effort to help the beleaguered city school system rethink how it does business.

Change.org's decision marks an important point in our fight for public education, and for America's best interests more generally. When astroturf groups undermine schools and workers, they are not acting in the best interests of children, parents, teachers or the community. This action, and others like it, show that clever names and rhetoric are no longer enough to hide corporate interests from communities determined to protect the common good.

Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg and the schools chancellor, Dennis M. Walcott, often boast that student performance is improving in New York City, as evidenced by the percentage of students passing state exams and graduating from high school. But a new analysis finds that most city students are holding steady, getting very similar test scores between third and sixth grades.

To understand how and why teachers' opinions may be changing, Education Sector worked with the Farkas Duffett Research Group to conduct four focus groups and a nationally representative survey  of K-12 public school teachers. The survey, which gathered responses from 1,101 teachers, repeated questions from a 2007 Education Sector survey and a 2003 Public Agenda survey about a variety of teacher-centered reforms, including new approaches  to evaluation, pay, and tenure, and the role of unions in pushing for or against these reforms. Accordingly, this report examines changes in teacher opinion from 2007 to 2011 and, as with the 2007 report, looks closely at differences between new teachers (less than five years) and veterans (more than 20 years).

One thing that becomes clear is BCG's interest in cutting costs. Another is in opening the path to for-profit corporations. Not much about any interest in education or learning or curriculum or teacher morale or such. These guys should not be flying under the radar. Let them be known by what they advocate and what they do to our community schools.

One big idea animates virtually all of today's earnest education reformers: the conviction that great schools can spur social mobility. Voucher supporters, charter advocates, standards nuts, teacher-effectiveness fanatics-we all fundamentally believe that fantastic schools staffed by dedicated educators can help poor kids climb out of poverty and compete with their affluent peers. And then Charles Murray comes along and throws cold water all over the idea.

The Boston Consulting Group has identified up to 60 Philadelphia school buildings as potential candidates for closure and helped line up private vendors willing to replace the School District's unionized blue-collar workforce at a $50 million discount. These steps are just part of the blue-chip consulting firm's far-ranging behind-the-scenes effort to help the beleaguered city school system rethink how it does business. The broad scope of BCG's efforts this spring are detailed in previously unreleased "statements of work" obtained by the Notebook/NewsWorks under Pennsylvania's Right to Know law.

According to Wikipedia, cost-benefit analysis "is a systematic process for calculating and comparing benefits and costs of a project, decision or government policy (hereafter, 'project'). CBA has two purposes: 1.To determine if it is a sound investment/decision (justification/feasibility), 2.To provide a basis for comparing projects. It involves comparing the total expected cost of each option against the total expected benefits, to see whether the benefits outweigh the costs, and by how much." I believe that it would be prudent to apply this process to the current accountability movement now being administered in public education, primarily in the form of testing mandates such as No Child Left Behind and Race To The Top.

As the DFER veneer for right-wing "parent trigger" laws wears off, and more and more people see the privatization agenda for what it is, charlatans like Gloria Romero and Ben Austin have been scrambling to hide or minimize their ties to right wing extremists. The good news is that it isn't working, and that aside from shills like Andi Rotherham and Alex Russo even mainstream media journalists are starting to see through what the distinguished Professor Diane Ravitch refers to as the "Parent Tricker." Josh Eidelson's "Parent trigger": The latest tactic for fighting teachers' unions is a good example.

I'm a more than a little late to the punch on GAO's recent report on special education and charter schools, but I wanted to comment briefly because I continue to be totally flummoxed by some folks in the charter community's reaction to what was, essentially, a very even handed reporting of data on special education enrollment in charter schools. As my colleague Andy Rotherham noted last week, this report was hardly the "slam" on charter schools that some folks are characterizing it as, and the GAO went out of its way to describe the number of factors that might contribute to lowered rates of special education enrollment in some charter schools, even if no one is doing anything wrong. I'm particularly troubled, though, by an argument I've seen some folks in the charter movement take up lately that it's somehow unfair or unreasonable to compare charter special education enrollments to district special ed enrollments because, while school districts or systems are required to serve all students, individual public schools are not required to serve every child with special needs. This argument is problematic for a host of reasons